This is one of the most wild over-analysis pieces I’ve ever read in my life, to the point where I’m wondering if this paper itself is an elaborate prank.
Never underestimate the ability of smart people to be overconfident in their understanding of the world, even in fields they know very little about. This is how you get a lot of very articulate nonsense, news papers are filled with this and so are many small blogs.
I tend to view the world through a psychoanalytical lens. I'm always curious about the unconscious drives of individuals and the collective, and how we interpret and interact with the world we live in.
I thought the article was interesting and thoughtful. It did a marvelous job of making sense of something that, at first blush, is seemingly senseless, and I do not think for a moment the paper is a prank.
Quite the contrary. One of the main characteristics of today's world is the devaluation (or utter disregard) of meaning. Even in this thread the term "brain rot" implies that it's not only valueless, but harmful. The article is not only about finding meaning in the content, but that its ambiguous narrative can be a good thing, as it opens the mind up to multiple possibilities and perspectives.
I think in doing all this analysis it prescribes too much to the art.
One interview with the artist could essentially throw a giant wrench into the ideas presented here. If the author comes out and says “I was 12 and thought that toilets were funny” massive paragraphs of this paper become pointless.
> Gen Alpha may be "born into video games", but they have also been born into a disintegrating climate system, post-9/11 politics (such as the global austerity crisis, perpetual war, and the rise of right-wing populism), surveillance capitalism, and pandemic risk—much of which can be read in the landscapes and metaphors of Skibidi Toilet, serving to problematise notions of the ‘natural’ and the limits of the human in the context of climate catastrophe and technological transformation.
I’m sorry, this is a load of horse shit. This is someone with an advanced literature/journalism degree getting stoned and writing a paper. I don’t think any of this has to do with a series of toilet animations.
Sometimes it’s as simple as “little kids think that absurd toilet humor is funny.”
We're through the looking glass. Post-ironic paper taking random memes seriously?
I bet there's papers about Monty Python's animations too. Actually I don't need to bet, there's Google [0]:
> The animated interludes in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail demonstrate director and animator Terry Gilliam's interest in and use of images in the margins of Gothic manuscripts. [1]
