On Skibidi

On Skibidi Aidan Walker

Educational Pamphlet on skibidi

Image summary: This is a surreal digital composite image. The composition features multiple distorted human faces and figures arranged in a non-linear, abstract space, including a central figure emerging from a box-like structure resting on pedestal-like forms, flanked by larger, warped facial expressions. The image conveys a sense of psychological distress or nightmare, suggesting themes of fragmentation, anxiety, and the uncanny through the repetition and distortion of human features.

Image summary: This figure is a composite digital illustration. It features a large, faded facial expression in the background with three smaller, distinct figures positioned to the right, each appearing to emerge from a toilet. The figures in the toilets exhibit various facial expressions and attire. The arrangement suggests a surreal or satirical theme, implying a repetitive or systemic degradation of the individuals depicted.

Aidan Walker

O Aidan Walker 2025

all Rights Reserved. no Part of this Book may be Reproduced in any Manner in any Media, or Transmitted by any Means Whatsoever, Electronic or Mechanical, Without Prior Written Permission of the Publisher.

all Images Under CC-by-SA Via skibidi Toilet Wiki, Courtesy: beginersuss, oofermaniacc, vieffet vie, epik Egyptian, Bapham123, Astroman K69, bluetreader, elsebadarkspeakerman, Piano1Forte2, Nuna Me00204, Trash and the Gang, Bitbyte10, Areswalchuk1, discretiongrove,

Published in the United States

First Edition, 2025

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 I first watched Skibidi Toilet at some point in 2023, around the time everyone saw it. Some will say that since then the series has "fallen off." It is a testament to the ephemerality of the internet that 2023 feels like such a long time ago, and that what was popular then already seems passé. Writing this now, in 2025, I hear a voice in my head calling me not just unc, but also chopped for still talking about Skibidi Toilet. And, as I write that previous sentence, "unc" and "chopped" are already slipping from relevance.

In August of 2023, Know Your Meme—my employer at the time—posted its entry for “Skibidi Toilet Syndrome.” Quoting from the entry's description:

“The term (Skibidi Toilet syndrome) was coined in July 2023 by Indonesian web users and spread online after several videos went viral showing young children imitating Skibidi Toilet by popping out of containers and singing the Skibidi Dop Yes song. The syndrome inspired memes and some seemingly legitimate warnings from concerned parents online...”

I watched the Skibidi Toilet Syndrome videos, not understanding the language the parents spoke but recognizing immediately the words of the little kids. Skibidi dom dom yes yes yes, gripping the rim of laundry baskets, jerking their necks from side-to-side, grimacing like the toilets in the show do, skibidi dom dom yet yet. Wide-eyed, playing at being a Skibidi Toilet in the same way I played at being a horse, or a knight riding a horse, when I was that age.

Image summary: This figure is a QR code. It consists of a square grid of black and white modules with distinct alignment patterns in the corners. The image functions as a machine-readable optical label that encodes data for quick access via scanning devices.

Using an English loanword—"sindrome"—Indonesian parents warned about the show's capacity to derange the youth, talking about Skibidi Toilet as if it were lead particles in tap water. So I first learned about Skibidi Toilet the way most of us over the age of eleven did: as a synechdoche for all the bad things our internet is doing to us. But I was interested in knowing what Skibidi Toilet really was on its own terms, beyond just being a byword for anything that is too online for you to feel comfortable around. I began to watch the show.

Some, perhaps accurately, contend Skibidi Toilet is just a show for children. They say it's brainrot (pejorative) that it's gross, annoying, and without redeeming value. But these people are fucking idiots, because everybody's culture carries something in it that can teach us to see the world more clearly, anything people love deserves to be considered with respect, and if we want to go anywhere good in this world we have to start from a place of respecting that fact.

Here is how my feelings about it progressed:

1. I recognized Skibidi Toilet as a viral hit, something so popular that it deserves at least a clinical, anthropological interest, if one seeks to understand “the culture.”

2. It dawned on me that Skibidi Toilet was a competent execution of a genre (S.F.M YouTube machinima) I didn't particularly like—and I appreciated it in the way someone who doesn't admire musicals will still say West Side Stor2 is good.

3. Then I noticed how weird it was that everything in the show is P.O.V, one-take. It struck me as uncanny and oddly moving.

4. After that, I was locked in, mind giddy with the rush of discovery you feel when a work of art really hits different—surprise at how such a secret, which has nestled in your skull so intimately, so inherently unsayable, might be said now, here, in this way, shared by millions you won't ever meet — the gulf between you and them abruptly narrowed.

5. I understood then, as a content creator, that it would make a great video. It was the same knowledge those Indonesian parents had when they filmed their kids hopping out of the laundry baskets. The leap of my heart, if translated competently, would be enough to keep the fingers of a stranger stationary. Like their astonishment at their child's odd behavior, or my righteous rage in an argument I have in the shower with a billionaire I will never meet, I identified that feeling as contagious enough to keep a person from tossing my face into the infinite dustbin of scrolled-past bullshit.

And just like the Indonesian parents, after I made my videos on Skibidi, I watched the likes and comments blow in, tens and then hundreds, thousands, millions. I pulled out my phone, waiting in line for coffee, and smiled seeing the maxxed-out 99+ notifications, a number that never changed. There I was in bedrooms, bathrooms, and living rooms, observed for a moment and then abandoned for a video of a wine bottle rolling down a staircase or someone more interesting explaining a less dumb topic.

That is ultimately what Skibidi Toilet means to me. It stimulates the manic, nibbling numbers gerbil in my chest. I strip my mind and jiggle my heart for the pleasure of an electric eye and the indifferent millions behind it. I beg it for bread and glance up nervously to find it never blinks and never cares, just swallows me like one tiny bean in its bowl and shifts me out onto a digital platform. That camera, serving and surveilling, teaches me to regard myself — just as the P.O.V of the Cameraman soldier through which we watch each episode of Skibidi Toilet teaches us to watch the Toilets.

Analyzing what an eight-year-old iPad baby might find wonderful or moving in Skibidi Toilet is a token of respect to the next generation. There is no other ship besides the one we are sailing now, alongside them; they are our crewmates, and our icebergs will be theirs too.

Image summary: This figure is a digital illustration. It depicts a man in a suit looking back with a shocked expression toward a toilet, from which a human head is emerging. A vertical text banner is positioned on the left side of the frame. The scene suggests a surreal and unsettling encounter, implying a sense of horror or absurdity as the man reacts to the unexpected presence of a head inside the plumbing fixture.

Skibidi Toilet is possibly the most popular fictional piece of media to ever exist on YouTube. DaFuq!?Boom! posted the first episode of the show in February 2023, and has shared nearly a hundred episodes since then. Skibidi Toilet has attracted millions of views, remixes, and commentaries—to which I add my own in the form of this pamphlet.

Skibidi Toilet speaks to our historical moment with a starkness, accessibility, and sincerity that you do not find in the forms of contemporary culture people are used to taking seriously. And even if Skibidi is not a great work of art, it is a symptomatic one: The show testifies to the history unfolding around it, illuminating what drives the audiences, content creators, and automated processes which enable it to be. If an extraterrestrial landed on Earth tomorrow, and demanded you show it a piece of content that would help it understand what humans are like in 2025, Skibidi Toilet would be a better pick than the Iliad or Great Expectations.

Nothing ends up this popular for no reason. As loomings of advanced artificial intelligence shadow our online spaces with constant anxiety, Skibidi presents a story of destruction told through a thinking machine with human quirks. At a time when armed conflict escalates around the world (and footage of it proliferates across handheld screens) Skibidi Toilet draws a ground-level picture of brutal, unwinnable, and inexplicable conflict. The show has captured a devoted young audience and turned into an emblem of older folk's bafflement and alienation from youth culture amid shifting cultural narratives around childhood and adolescence. If the intention of critical writing is to diagnose what's up with the world, then Skibidi is a symptom that should be taken into account.

The plot is repetitive and essentially cyclical. Chanting “Skibidi Toilets,” gyrating human heads that emerge from toilet bowls, battle the “Media Alliance,” human bodies dressed in business suits with some kind of electronic device for a head. The show's graphics—toilets, cameras, and landscapes—come from Source Filmmaker, a video editing and animation software made by the Valve Corporation, which allows creators to animate stories by appropriating assets, elements, and textures from games like Half-Life 2 and the Counter-Strike series. Skibidi's characters are assemblages of assets from these games that have been Frankensteined together.

The most prominent among the Media Alliance are the Cameramen, but there are also Speaker Men and T.Vheads. The Toilets vary according to size and what sort of head rests within the bowl. For several episodes, it might seem as if the Media Alliance have the upper hand because of some new warfighting technology they've invented or stroke of tactical genius—but then, the tables turn and the Skibidi Toilets because they have invented some kind of ray that turns Media Alliance members into zombies that do their bidding. This few-tul, all-consuming back-and-forth drags on and on and on. And we see it all from the perspective of one of the Cameraman soldiers, who films the entire spectacle through its lens.

The present study focuses on Skibidi episodes 1 to 69, which ran from February 2023 to October 2023. This first group of episodes is, for the most part, what people talk about when they talk about Skibidi Toilet: short-form, whimsically violent brainrot that went immensely viral worldwide. The episodes were posted as YouTube shorts and clustered in groups of three, which DaFuq!?Boom! (D.F.B, from now on) labelled as “seasons.”

To fit within the constraints of YouTube Shorts at the time, each episode is under a minute long. With haiku-like precision, they pack action and wit into a confined space, and from this density derive much of their charm. Typically, the shortform episodes follow a set format engineered for retention editing—since most viewers of a YouTube Short, or any vertical video, will scroll away within moments of encountering a post. Skibidi Shorts tend to start in the middle of an action sequence, carry it to a natural pausing point for a few seconds, and then begin a new sequence which finishes with either the death of the P.O.V Cameraman due to a Skibidi Toilet's attack or the opposite, the Camerman destroying a toilet and receiving a sign of approval from one of its compatriots.

Skibidi 39, the first episode of Season 13, breaks neatly into this format. The Short opens with Toilets and Cameraman infantry in an ongoing melee. At ten seconds, a T.V-headed character strides onscreen, pacifying the toilets with the purple glow of its screen and resonant thrum of its song, which finishes at thirty seconds. And for the final five seconds of the episode, the P.O.V Cameraman looks at the face of the T.Vhead, a smile now projected across its screen.

Image summary: This figure is a QR code. It consists of a grid of black and white squares containing encoded data, featuring distinct positioning patterns in three of its corners. The image functions as a machine-readable optical label that can be scanned to retrieve specific digital information or navigate to a web address.

A typical episode might be broken into three parts: a “hook” or “A” section which consists of the opening action/process of the short, a “B” section (generally the longest) which carries a plot point (often a character or technology introduction, as is the case with the T.Vheads in 39) followed by a brief “C” section, which consists of either the moments before a Skibidi Toilet plunges into the screen (ostensibly killing the narrator) in an exchange of mutual complicity between our P.O.V and another character after winning the bout in the B section). All three sections are presented as one shot, an unbroken real-time chunk of a Cameraman's life.

This structure means that each episode occurs in a different location and within a different moment, allowing the three segments of each season to involve, essentially, six different action sequences and three different locations and slices of time. The "A" sequence serves as the hook for a video, the transition to the "B" sequence (typically signaled by a loud sound or music change, and the tilt of the P.O.V Cameraman's gaze) serves as a sub-hook at a point partway into a video when a viewer's attention might wander, while the "C" sequence is a kind of cliffhanger. The form of the episodes is optimized for shortform consumption, meeting the demands of its medium.

Narratively, Skibidi falls into a steady cadence: each season introduces a new type of character or technology, like how Season 13 introduces the T.V Men and T.V Women. Each of the three episodes within a season demonstrate that character or technology in a different light, but largely repeat the same core information — meaning a viewer can miss an episode, or see one out of context or order, without getting confused about the show's overarching developments. In these early episodes, brief deviations from the character or tech in focus reveal backstory and worldbuilding through easter eggs.

Episode 39, posted on June 15th, 2023, was the first in the show to use a wide-screen format and appear as a regular YouTube video as well as as a Short. Episode 57, posted two months later on August 13th, was the first to appear in three parts, totaling a run-time of 2:44. Runtimes lengthen as the show progresses: Episode 70, from January 2024, ran for 13:41. The tight structure of the short-form episodes is replaced with a more traditional narrative format, approaching the plotting of a T.V episode. Season 13, posted in late June 2023 and consisting of episodes 39 to 41, has a total runtime of 2:01. Season 25, the most recently completed installment consisting of episodes 75 to 77, has a total runtime of 51:06.

Since 2024, Skibidi has been a longform video series rather than a shortform one. The new format marks other major shifts as well, with the introduction of dialogue, flashbacks, a new faction called the “Astro Toilets,” and much longer action sequences. Watching the more recent episodes, it is clear that D.F.B has embarked on a different artistic project—one which builds on the shortform era but is distinct from it. Simultaneously, D.F.B seems to have been in the process of negotiating a deal with a Hollywood production company involving director Michael Bay. That deal, now formalized, has led to consequences which many in the fandom (and perhaps D.F.B himself) have taken issue with, as well as the increased commercialization of the series.

Another reason I'm focusing on the shortform era of Skibidi is because it represents the series' moment of maximal viral saturation. Summer 2023 saw D.F.B's follower count rise rapidly. As of November 2025, DaFuq!?Boom! has 46.8 million subscribers on YouTube, a little less than the population of the country of Spain. But according to his bio, over half of these subscribed to his channel between the 15th of May 2023 (when he had 5 million subscribers) and 19th of September (when he had 30 million).

But the main reason I'm focusing on the shortform era of Skibidi is due to my interest in the series as a symptomatic work of art. Skibidi has set expectations of what short-form video can or can't do. It emerged from machinima, a folk art tradition born in an earlier era of the internet, and adapted the tradition to the demands of contemporary audiences and platforms. The show's short-form era can be read as telling us something about the way stories, creators, and audiences meet technologies of attention that are radically different from the ones to which we have previously been exposed.

Image summary: This is a digital illustration. The image depicts a first-person perspective of an individual facing several rows of identical figures standing in formation. Each figure wears a dark suit and has a small camera mounted on its head. In the foreground, a hand is visible giving a thumbs-up gesture toward the group. The composition suggests a theme of surveillance, conformity, and approval within a highly monitored or robotic environment.

The entirety of Skibidi Toilet is filmed from the perspective of one of the C.C.T.V Cameraman infantryman footsoldiers. Almost every episode of the series ends either with a Toilet killing the P.O.V Cameraman (and by extension you) or else with one of the other Media Alliance members giving it (and by extension, you) a thumbs-up of complicity. Both these techniques serve to involve and immerse the viewer.

The most proximate reference is the first-person shooter game. Skibidi looks like the kind of gameplay footage so ubiquitous across YouTube—walkthroughs, screen recordings of streamers and so on. People sometimes watch game footage as if it were a film, or play games in order to follow a story and feel interactively engaged—so Skibidi fits well into this particular strain of visual culture. These kinds of manufactured images certainly make up a higher proportion of all that Gen Alpha sees compared to older generations, even compared to Gen Z.

Every shot in the series is filmed from the perspective of a Cameraman, from within the world of the show. Everything we see passes through the Cameraman's eyes, or, rather, lens. And as the show demonstrates, this lens is biased, fragile, and limited. There are no cuts within an episode, meaning each one is composed of a continuous P.O.V shot—a slice of synchronous visual experience which identifies the viewer with the Cameraman spatially and temporally: our vantage point is from within his body, and our experience of duration matches his own. The Cameraman glances and turns in response to a sound, perfectly mirroring the way our attention may move, giving us the feeling that we're wearing a headset rather than looking at a screen.

However, we are constantly reminded that the Cameraman's visual apparatus does not match our own by the lack of a visual periphery demanded by the 9x16 aspect ratio of vertical video, as well as the use of the hard zooms which recur from episode to episode (and, to some extent, are a retention tactic increasing visual variation within the video). The Cameraman's vision does things our eyes don't do, but corresponds to our hardware in other ways: Skibidi is filmed from the perspective of a two-legged creature of roughly human size, occurs in a typically urban setting that isn't too far off from the places in which we live, and happens through a continuous, unbroken span of time that mirrors our experience.

This balancing act between the mimicking of our visual experience and the departure from it results in a dance between immersion and estrangement. We see as the Cameraman in a viscerally intimate way, but at the same time we are constantly reminded that the Cameraman's own subjectivity intervenes in the image we see. The visual field turns grainy when the Cameraman is hit, zooms in when the Cameraman is curious. It is never an image without a motive, nor is it an image with the authority and detachment of a third-person narrator. And the image always shows us two things: first, whatever is onscreen, and second, the Cameraman's reaction.

The P.O.V Cameraman also muddles our ability to align with on-screen action: It may seem to embody us, matching the pace and flow of our shifting gaze, but at the same time we (or rather it) are doing things we don't choose or understand. Watching Skibidi feels like a walking dream, a trance—as viewers we are akin to cyborgs, unable to choose where to place our bodies and attention even as it seems we execute the motions, and (if we are gamers) are used to controlling our trajectory across a rendered landscape like this one. This quality is most striking when the P.O.V Cameraman flushes, punches, or tortures the Toilets, moments we experience as if we are the culprit.

Image summary: This is a composite digital illustration. The image depicts a recursive scene where a figure with a camera for a head sits on a toilet, while other heads are positioned inside toilets in the background. A larger drone camera hovers above the entire scene, capturing the moment. The composition creates a mise-en-abime effect, illustrating a cycle of observation where the observer is also the observed.

In Skibidi Toilet 16—a seventeen-second reel produced early in the show's run—the complications (and narrative possibilities) of the first-person camera perspective are explored to particularly illustrative effect. The opening of the video has us looking down at a C.C.T.V Cameraman popping out of a toilet, and then P.O.V Cameraman's arm points towards a building labelled with a picture of Skibidi Toilets. The C.C.T.V Cameraman toilet—a type of drone, essentially, created by the Media Alliance for reconnaissance purposes—enters the building (end of A section) and our P.O.V Cameraman watches what seems to be a live feed playing from an iPad, captured by the C.C.T.V Toilet. The cam-ouflaged C.C.T.V toilet records Toilets milling about, but the ruse is quickly found out. Our P.O.V Cameraman watches on the iPad as the Toilets take out the C.C.T.V toilet (end of B section). Seconds later, the iPad is dropped and the toilets take out our narrator (end of C section).

Image summary: This figure is a QR code. It consists of a square grid of black and white modules, featuring three larger square positioning markers located in the corners. The image serves as a machine-readable optical label that encodes specific data for quick access via a scanning device.

In the YouTube Short, we watch a camera watch another camera, forming a matryoshka doll of images framing other images. The Cameraman's gesture, holding the iPad, mirrors the viewer's gesture. Another mirroring happens when the footage on the iPad blurs out as the C.C.T.V-toilet is destroyed, and seconds later our narrator faces the same fate. This entanglement of narrative planes is symptomatic of broader trends within digital culture.

Frequently, with vertical video content on social media, we are not really watching something so much as we are watching someone's watching of something. The framing, the reframing, and any disparity or tension between the two form the emotional core of a lot of the content we're seeing. We watch through influencers just as we watch through the C.C.T.V Cameraman in Skibidi.

Take the typical “day in the life” influencer video: a montage of footage, typically filmed through a smartphone held in hand, with a voiceover editorializing about what's seen onscreen as it is seen. The influencer explains, laments, celebrates, promotes, complains about products, situations, and places. We follow them across a filmed landscape animated by a gaze which is not documentary. but character-driven. Like the changing tone of an actor's voice or a writer's decision to put one word over another in a character's mouth, the first-person camera's shifting focus and the choices made in the edit are as dramatic as they are descriptive, outlining a character for our analysis as much as the character documents the world around them.

Lately, I've been drawn to this series {by a YouTube account called Salaryman Tokyo} which consist of an officeworker in Tokyo, wearing a GoPro, filming snippets of his commute and daily life with commentary in the subtitles about his feelings, Japanese society, and economics. All you ever see are his shoes, and sometimes his chest from the neck down. The videos are about Tokyo, but even more than that they are about showing us how he sees Tokyo—performing an interpretation through the medium of the first-person camera. The videos, filmed just like Skibidi Toilet, seem to place us literally in his shoes. As I watch, I'm cast as a confidant to a situation I have no direct experience of, but view it as if I did have direct experience of it. I see the commute to the office in Tokyo as if it were my commute.

Variants of this type of viewing experience pop up elsewhere online. There are countless videos recorded through a GoPro or another person's iPhone of an unseen narrator asking strangers on the street what kind of music they listen to, or"How much do you pay for rent in New York?" There is NathanialP.O.V, the brilliant guy who plays jazz in parking lots while filming himself. There are the GoPro videos of people showing binders full of brainrot to strangers in Walmart to elicit a response. In this type of content, we are aligned with the filmer and they serve as our proxy for an investigation of the world, asking the questions we might ask, looking at the things we want to look at—and yet, they are constantly mediating our encounter with their world. This mediation is not concealed—instead, it is emphasized. It becomes a means of characterization: through their acts of mediation

(choosing what to show or not to show, how to explain, where to cut, etcetera) we come to know the character of the person filming. These acts of mediation become the external representation of internal mental processes, like dialogue would be.

A similar process occurs in the discourse of a streamer, although the visual form differs significantly: we share the streamer's screen and watch how they respond to what happens on it, whether it's gameplay, another video, or some kind of social exchange. The screened content becomes the premise of an interaction between creator and viewer. We enjoy the experience of seeing through their screen, getting to know them, anticipating their responses.

When you watch a movie, or look at a painting in a gallery, the art is happening in front of you and what's around and beside you is the situation which allows that art to happen (the cinema you're in, the museum, etcetera). When you're watching a stream or looking at a meme, the art is happening around and beside you while in front of you is the situation that allows the art to happen. The point of the iShowSpeed stream is not the round of Fortnite he's playing, but iShowSpeed's performance—the situational frame of Fortnite gameplay is what permits that performance to emerge. Since we are primarily watching someone else's watching, the object they are watching at is significant not simply for what it is (depending on the video, that is more or less important) but for the quality of gaze it can attract, the interaction it enables.

4. The same thing might be true of critical writing about pieces of media.

Image summary: This figure is a conceptual illustration or meme. It depicts a monkey in a laboratory setting, connected to various machines and looking at a screen. Labels are added to the image to create a metaphor: the brain implants represent algorithms, the feeding mechanism represents an addictive interface, the monkey's interaction with a button represents Instagram, the screen displays someone else's life, and the monkey's seated position represents the decay of real-life social infrastructures and third places. The image suggests that social media usage, driven by algorithms and addictive design, traps individuals in a cycle of observing others' lives while contributing to the erosion of genuine social connections and community spaces.

Image summary: This is a conceptual digital image. The figure depicts a group of humanoid figures dressed in formal suits, where their heads have been replaced by television screens. The scene includes a vertical text overlay that reads Recursive Watching. The image suggests a theme of mass conformity and the cyclical nature of media consumption, implying that the subjects are both the viewers and the viewed in a repetitive, systemic loop.

There is a political valence here. A man was detained in Washington, D.C, for filming himself playing the imperial march from the Star Wars trilogy on a bluetooth speaker while walking behind the National Guard, and now he is suing. His video series, which I saw on TikTok, was a particularly effective form of political dissent precisely because it took place through the P.O.V lens. We do not see the narrator, we see as him and he becomes a kind of audience insert. The music, associated with an authoritarian army in a popular sci-fi franchise nearly all of us have seen, serves as a commentary on the slice of life he is showing us: troops marching through a civilian area. And, this authoritarian image is being framed in a way that you, as a citizen, would see it. The resulting video, filmed from a first-person camera, is more impactful than the same event filmed from a distance would be. The National Guard's occupation of Washington is experienced in the same way that the Skibidi Toilets are experienced by the Cameramen.

Media researcher Paddy Scannell describes the phenomenology of address in broadcast television as a “for-anyone-as-someone” structure. Jimmy Kimmel, Rush Limbaugh, or Walter Cronkite seem to be talking directly to me, looking straight at the camera, but they are actually talking to every me in America. Anyone could be the someone they seem to address. Implicit in my comprehension of television is an understanding of that social framing, and an acceptance of myself as an anyone. In the era of television, we walk through visual culture as we would a public park by virtue of our capacity as “citizen” (an “anyone”) rather than in our capacity as Aidan, or the girl reading this (as “someone”).

The P.O.V social media video might be interpreted as the inverse, a “by-someone-as-anyone” kind of structure. The embodied self of the person making the image stands in for the self of anyone watching it. It is the kind of image that I could record, the kind of image and perspective I see every day. And so, what makes it compelling and what makes me trust the image is my understanding of a person like me on the other end of it—a person who could be me, or at least can share certain specificities with me, and yet differs from me in interesting ways.

The “by-someone-as-anyone” structure is enacted through the media forms used to make it, but also through the tradition of posting. Like me, the person who films the National Guard in D.C likely grew up watching smartphone footage of the police doing illegal things, captured on video by citizens. They know how to play their part in that cultural script. They grew up hearing that Star Wars theme. And they stand, as they film, not just as themselves but as a representative of an amorphous anyone. But this is not an everyone. It is an associational, voluntary kind of empathy. Others stand outside of this point of view: those who are filmed, those who disagree, and those who refuse to see themselves in you. This kind of structure, and its particular relation to authority, is a key element in the political mix of our times.

The defining image of the early twenty-first century is an agent of the state pointing a gun at a person and a citizen pointing a smartphone camera back at them. Doubtless you have seen footage like this. When bombs fall overnight in Ukraine or Palestine, we see the rockets streaking across the sky, filmed by people living in apartment blocks much like the ones we may live in, with phones and apps like the ones we have in our pockets. Through the phone's eye, we see the scrum of a protest in Nepal, a cop assaulting a Black man in the street of an American city, refugees on a boat in the Mediterranean. Social media delivers these images ceaselessly.

The way of looking that these internet strangers' testimonials demand of us insists upon the equal reality of all places, the equal humanity of all people who record in them, and the vulnerability that you share with them. A famous Twitter saying goes,"Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it." Skibidi Toilet fascinates me because it takes the structure of that visual experience, that means of looking at violence, and turns it into a story for children.

Image summary: This figure consists of two circular graphic icons. The top icon depicts a stylized figure positioned between two toilets, with beams of light emanating from its eyes toward the floor. The bottom icon shows a silhouette of a security camera within a circular frame. The juxtaposition of these images suggests a commentary on surveillance and privacy, contrasting an absurd or intrusive form of monitoring in a private space with a standard security camera symbol.

“Structure” may be one the most overused and gooily-defined words in the English language. But for me—and perhaps not for Scannell—the work it performs here is to treat the abstract as if it were concrete. We are accustomed to viewing “structures” as physical. We are comfortable seeing data centers, power grids, roadways, and even less concrete things like law, financial instruments, policy, and organizations as kinds of structure—complex entities with several moving parts; products of their historical situation and also of intentional collective effort by human agents. But ideas, fantasies, and anxieties also take on a structural shape.

The cultural script of filming the world through a phone in a "by-someone-as-anyone" structure was constructed by people. Creators and users built it for many reasons, primarily because they could, but also because it furthered their ideological objectives, made money for them, offered meaning and opportunity to the people they cared about— rewards akin to those afforded by a paved road or a particular policy. Artists, critics, technologists, and other entrepreneurs of culture are the people who build these things, or refine and alter existing ones. A story like Pride and Prejudice exists as a path in the minds of its readers, leading into particular themes and histories by which they gauge who they are and what their world can be. Jane Austen laid the groundwork in the nineteenth century, Matthew Macfadyen and Keira Knightley renovated it in the twenty-first, continue to lead it somewhere new.

One might argue Percy Shelley meant something like this when he said poets were"the unacknowledged legislators of the world." The work done by brokers of imagination is formative because it sets the table across which other kinds of power serve, drawing the symbols which can mobilize a constituency and setting the terms for a debate. The authority to step into dreams and draw the world-pictures of others, altering the emotional and narrative maps by which they orient themselves in space and time, constitutes its own sort of power.

As with physical infrastructure and law, imaginative structures end up fencing us in. They become the contexts along which we must live or live against. And they remain steadfastly material. Ideas move between people by means of inscription and dissemination which are different at various points in time, for various groups, and in certain cultural contexts. The means of writing, the forms available, the lags and gaps which intervene—these are the topographies over which identities develop and ideas take form.

Media theorists like freed-rick Kittler have gone so far as to argue that “media determine our situation.” But, as the development of internet culture demonstrates, forms evolve alongside technologies. The interests of people and the creations of artists determine how media technologies enter into our lives, and how culture spreads across them. Just as engineers will dynamite through a mountain so the interstate highway can cross, so, too, do people with ideas labor to alter that underlying topography, blasting through it to go where they want to go.

The creator of Skibidi Toilet may not see himself as an infrastructural engineer charting a roadway across the brainrot frontier. But people use Skibidi—just as they use any piece of art—to get somewhere. They use it as they watch it, and they use it as they reference it. The name “Skibidi” becomes a route to signal, mean, perform something. It becomes a meeting-ground on which to exchange.

What is the means of conveyance offered by Skibidi? And where, precisely, does Skibidi Toilet take you?

Image summary: This figure is a digital illustration. It depicts several human heads emerging from toilet bowls of varying sizes, arranged along a road. The scene includes a prominent vertical text element on the left side. The composition suggests a surreal or satirical commentary on the concept of the camera gaze, implying a sense of absurdity or degradation associated with the subject matter.

Skibidi Toilet's melding of the viewer's visual experience with the camera's image-making is what allows the aforementioned "by-someone-as-anyone" structure to framework the viewer's encounter. But things are made more complicated, because there are no real-world cameras filming the show. The images are all made using software and a graphics engine that simulates the world and the simulated film camera's perception of it. The only camera present is fictional. So the camera, concretely, is not the mechanical means by which the viewer is meeting the image, but a mask worn by an entirely different kind of image-making technology.

Art made with new forms of media often copies the language and habits of older forms, in order to orient an audience. A classic example is the use of language like"file,""desktop," and"folder" to describe the interface of computers, which do not organize data in any way resembling the way we organize paper. Skibidi's use of a strictly diegetic camera to present a digitally-rendered image is the same kind of appropriation: a set of metaphors based on a previous media form to make the new form easily interpretable.

This set of metaphors calls back to the way of life through which the previous media form was threaded. In movies and television, we're used to a camera that functions a little like a third person narrator in a book. It is separated from the action, viewing everything from a perspective the characters themselves cannot hold—usually a perspective that is more entire, more detailed, and more authoritative than what an individual within a story may attain. Cuts also permit the camera view to transit across time and space to transcend human vision.

When watching a movie, we are traditionally affiliated with that third-person camera — we aren't usually thinking, "There is a machine here, at a point in space, making this thing." We're thinking, "I'm looking at X or at Y," even though it's often a kind of look that, physically, our eyes can't achieve—a crane shot or a drone shot, or even C.G.I. In Skibidi, you have a camera used in a way that is totally subjective and continually exposes its cameraness.

Laura Mulvey, who came up with the now-popular idea of the male gaze, criticized this kind of affiliation with the camera. The camera leads us to seamlessly see as it does, but the way it sees is not necessarily normal or unbiased. For Mulvey, the camera as used in twentieth century Western film corresponds to—and anticipates, even trains—the gaze of a male spectator because of how it pans, zooms, and presents the bodies of women. Taken in the broadest sense, a kind of cyborgism already exists in the typical movie viewer: your visual experience is joined to a camera's image-making. Following film theorists like Mulvey, you do not simply see a movie or see people through a camera, you learn to see as a camera.

And, we are led to think, the camera's seeing is a form of objective third-person observation, like a map or a dictionary definition, but it's not at all. Mechanical distortions of time, space, and perspective—the affiliation of a viewer's visual experience with a machine-mediated kind of visual experience that sees in ways we don't naturally see—are joined by social distortions, in which the viewer's visual experience is affiliated with tendencies tied to the exercise of power, that are taken for granted and naturalized as the way the world is rather than the way in which the world has been made by people. These types of social distortions congeal into their own kind of imaginative infrastructure, which has developed alongside the mechanical infrastructures that permit film to be what it is.

Critics like Michel de Certeau have argued this form of vision, enabled by mass media, sustains the mythology of"objectivity" that undergirds much of neoliberal governance and discourse. We come to see it as not just possible, but as normal and unquestionable, that the world be regarded in this manner, by a camera that records from some Archimedean point apart from the action, employing a set of techniques unavailable to us on our own. De Certeau memorably begins Part 3 of The Practice of Everyday with a discussion of how New York looks from the World Trade Center, talking about the mythology of towers and the imagined views from towers. We come to trust that view from the tower more than our own lived experience on the ground, seeking to align ourselves with it. The city becomes less a place we live in than a place that powerful people have marked on a map, and the survey data more compelling than the story we have heard, or lived.

Vision is not just a solitary experience, however. If you're in the 1930s watching a movie, that objective, third-person gaze of the camera is shared by the whole audience. It's not just the "normal" way of seeing, it's the way literally everybody in the theater is seeing, all together, right now.

This is also true during the days of broadcast when people were in the same moment watching something (e.g., the six o'clock news), if not in the same space. A similar version of ritualistic "shared time," structured by an entirely different technical apparatus and less strictly demarcated, may be discerned in virality, the sense of "today's discourse" or "the best days on Twitter," and so on.

Skibidi Toilet and other digital visual media turn more towards solitary viewership: the people seeing the show are not, generally, all sitting down at the same time to watch, and are certainly not sitting down in the same space. As a rule, they are alone when watching. But what they do share is what might be termed a kind of platform presence, the disembodied always-already thereness of YouTube. The maintenance of this always-already thereness is one of the key functions of any social media platform. Most of the work done to build and maintain it is performed by users, because the platforms are built from posts and audience interaction with posts.

Manuel Castells has referred to space as the “material substrate for simultaneity,” that is, the thing you need in order to experience life at the same moment as others in a social group. In some instances, “space” can be a room, or it can be “outside.” But through the artificial method of computing, we create a synthetic means by which to manufacture space. Networked machines, undersea cables, and vast banks of servers in data centers are the skeleton of this structure for enabling simultaneous interaction. Alongside these concrete components (which are, in turn the result of the burning of fossil fuels, the allocation of capital, the labor of human beings, etcetera) there are components grounded in practice. Operating systems, protocols, softwares, and interfaces allow the simultaneity to occur, offering the necessary systems for an email to ping from one continent to another, for a post to pop up in a feed and a person to see it. These are products you have bought, downloaded, and customized.

But there are also a series of imaginative infrastructures allowing this simultaneity to take place. Some of these are on the level of practice: styles of posting and terms used to delineate between different states of mind, groups, and topics. Others are essentially ritualized and cultural: ways of interacting with the screen, etiquette for dealing with others online. Many others take on a kind of institutional form: groups of users organized to some degree building "communities," "fandoms," and "discourses" that organize the firehose of content moving through the mechanical infrastructures and even drive its flows. It is this second set of imaginative infrastructures, made by people, that deserve to be taken more seriously and should be placed at the center of any discussion of the internet and its effects rather than at the periphery.

Image summary: This figure is a pyramid diagram. It depicts a social hierarchy where different groups of people are categorized into tiers, ranging from a single individual at the apex to broader groups at the base. The hierarchy places a specific internet personality at the top, followed by meme page administrators and micro-influencers, then billionaire oligarchs, institutional elites such as journalists and politicians, and finally financial market entities at the bottom. The figure suggests a satirical inversion of traditional power structures, implying that niche internet subcultures and personalities hold more influence or status than established global political and financial institutions.

Image summary: This figure is a composite graphic design. It features a portrait of a man overlaid on a background depicting a devastated urban landscape with ruined buildings and smoke, accompanied by vertical text that reads FANDOMS AND PLATFORMS. The composition suggests a thematic connection between the individual and a chaotic or apocalyptic setting, potentially serving as a cover or promotional image for a discussion on digital communities and their impact.

Conventionally, histories of the internet have centered on a set of familiar protagonists and antagonists: executives at big tech companies, regulators in governments, and engineers creating new technology. It is assumed that these players are the people who made the internet. We are able to understand their contributions because they take the form of products, paydays, policies—and come with prices attached.

In this conventional narrative, creators, communities (and other actors like hackers and brands) appear primarily as users of various kinds, who take the new technology and turn it to their ends. Users may be recognized as powerful for their entrepreneurship, influence, or creativity, but they are, before anything else, figured as a kind of customer.

But the conventional narrative is not the only way to tell the story of the internet. The roles could just as easily be reversed: the creators and communities are the ones who made this thing and the platforms are the ones that use it. The architecture which governments have enabled big tech to create is extractive and manipulative, but it is also reactive. Social media companies seek to follow signals from users, and are themselves influenced by what people say on their platforms.

Hype, ideology, and virality drive investment decisions in new markets such as A.I and robotics more than sober analyses of the economic fundamentals. Government policy towards the tech industry, meanwhile, is catalyzed by what people post: whether it's the backlash post-2016 against companies like Meta, or the various phone ban and social media regulation movements that writer Max Read has termed"platform temperance," what Washington does is often downstream of what users do. Perhaps the most prominent example of users exerting influence over their platforms lies in the saga of Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition and his subsequent stewardship of the site.

By 2022, the careers of many powerful people in finance, academia, tech, government, and the arts had grown around Twitter like a vine grows around a trellis. The platform was a place to encounter others and network, to hawk wares, to gather information, and to broker influence. The interface and algorithms shaped the kinds of conversations which took place on Twitter—but conversations on Twitter also shaped the interface, algorithms, and business strategy of the platform. Once it had hooked into the brains of powerful people, becoming the machine that determined how they felt about themselves, the Twitter discourse was more powerful than the Twitter platform. And so a man whose mind is haunted by old memes and loneliness engineered the deaths of countless people, squandered his political influence, and wrecked his home life all because he craved the approval of anonymous accounts with anime-girl profile pictures. The anime pfp accounts created that sense of platform presence, a "there" on Twitter, where people were and where important ideas lived.

The maintenance of that thereness amounts to a process of soft institutionalization: prominent accounts link together, collaborate, fight, and coordinate. There is also the soft institutionalization of online communities like T.P.O.T, crypto Twitter, finance bros, or the Republican party.

Such imaginative infrastructures built by users have frequently proven more durable than the business or technological infrastructures made by the companies. Vine culture has lived on much longer than Vine did, while Obama-era 4chan culture and 2014 Tumblr culture resonate across the web. Creators and communities hop from platform to platform. And today, any tech worker, policy wonk, or young professional under forty who has a hand in directing these infrastructures has been formed intellectually and psychologically by them. The trends, takes, and tendencies of online culture are reinscribed into the platforms themselves through the people who run them—and perhaps even more so by the A.I models trained on data generated over the last twenty years of internet culture, which have increasing authority over the shape of online spaces.

Image summary: This figure is a digital illustration in a comic strip style. It depicts a stick figure character wearing a hat and smoking a cigarette, standing in a doorway and asking a question to someone off-screen. The text indicates the character is asking their son if he is winning. The image conveys a sense of parental curiosity or a stereotypical interaction between a father and a son engaged in a gaming activity.

there is no winning and the world you prepared me for has ended already, but I am learning to be okay with that and find my own way The extreme version of this case, that everything on the internet is caused by decisions made by users, is not correct. There have been many moments when money, entrenched institutional power, or technological advances have steered events and left online publics disenfranchised. And yet, the products need users. Power does not lie exclusively with the people who have the money or control the code.

Image summary: This is a line drawing illustration. The image depicts a person wearing headphones sitting in a chair at a desk and using a computer. The illustration suggests a scenario of remote work, gaming, or studying in a digital environment.

Image summary: This is a digital composite image. The scene depicts several humanoid figures with camera-like heads wearing formal suits, seated upon toilets in an outdoor setting. A sign for a garage parts and service shop is visible in the background, and vertical text on the left side reads Skibidialectical Materialism. The juxtaposition of formal attire, sanitary fixtures, and surreal characters suggests a satirical or absurdist commentary, blending internet meme culture with philosophical terminology.

The relationship between the platform's capitalists on the one hand, and creators and online communities on the other, might be productively understood as dialectical—with the work of art (in this case Skibidi Toilet) standing as the synthesis. Adorno argues that the"truth content" in a modern work of art is the"sedimentation" of social and productive forces it has acted with or against; that the modern artwork is the tangible result of contradictions in a capitalist society's means and modes of production, outcome of a dialectical process.

“Dialectic” comes from the same root word as “dialogue.” Just as two people “dialoguing” about a topic may come to a compromise, so too does history happen: events are not caused by one thing, but are the synthesis of opposite things meeting, contradicting, and altering each other. There is the natural world and the human world, the buyer and the seller, the rule maker and the rule breaker—each of these opposite pairs mutually define each other, and by their development serve to create the energy and structure behind history. Dialectics argues that when you look at history from a systemic/structural angle, contradictions are not the things which make it confusing, but the things which make the whole thing work. In the Marxian tradition, this way of thinking is applied to all of human history.

Zooming out to the political economy context of Skibidi, the clearest dialectic relation I see is between the digital commons and surveillance capitalism. The work of art is the product of that tension and it carries "truth content" insofar as it testifies to and probes that tension.

You have the communities which circulate, produce, and consume content like Skibidi and the copyright-free, art-for-art's sake ways of making which have characterized the machinima tradition and much of internet culture from the beginning. Ruby Justice Thelot has described non-professional, communal online artmaking like this as a kind of folk production. Users exchange ideas, create stuff, and administer communities around apparently democratic and non-profit-motivated lines.

Skibidi Toilet is like the nest a songbird makes in the early spring, woven of various materials scavenged from around the internet. The show's look comes from a video game, the anthem the toilets sing which soundtracks each episode is a mash-up of Timbaland's"Give It To Me" and a song called"Dom Dom Yes Yes" by Biser King, a Bulgarian artist, which was viral before the series' creation via the TikToks of a dancing Turkish man, Yasin Cengiz, back in 2022. The original mash-up of the two songs appears to have been posted in December 2022 on TikTok, alongside a video remixing Zoolander clips—but it has since been removed and replaced with another, likely for copyright reasons.

But this cultural production takes place on and participates in the exploitative, algorithmically-enforced, surveillance-based profitseeking of YouTube (and TikTok, Instagram, Google, etcetera) which administer the infrastructure that hosts, distributes, and curates Skibidi. This structure relies on control, on surveillance, on enclosure—putting up walls and fences that might not look like the traditional walls and fences of copyright and intellectual property, but which serve to portion out and rationalize the space of communal creative production. People end up in niches, on "sides" of a platform, and encounter new work through the algorithm. It would seem as if the decentralized community that produces art like Skibidi and the centralized platforms that host it would contradict each other, but that's not the case.

Without either end of the equation, there would be no Skibidi Toilet. And in our contemporary internet, situations have evolved such that the two sides need one another: if there were no centralized, control-oriented apparatus like a social media platform, the content creators would A) have no way to share their content and gain an audience, and B) would not be able to scavenge the elements needed to create their art, which is generally characterized by pastiche and collage. Similarly, without a pool of creators and fans working for free to generate content and, more importantly, data, the surveillance apparatus would starve, since there would be nothing to watch on YouTube.

Approached from such an angle, the meaning of the text is not limited to “what D.F.B intended or understood,” but rather broadens to include the various contradicting forces which Skibidi represents. A dialectical reading supposes that the series represents these forces the way the line and blip of the heart monitor represent blood circulating in the body.

A dialectical reading also supposes another thing: that whether people are consciously aware of it or not, these forces are a big part of what they are seeking to understand when they watch Skibidi. Like any myth, there is a truth embodied in the images and symbols. Part of the beauty and effectiveness of a work of art stems from its capacity to dramatize or illuminate the contradictions inherent in its creation—which are, viewed more broadly, the modes of production for meaning in a society.

Skibidi Toilet's aesthetic lineage epitomizes the contradiction between a centralized corporate internet and the freeform whimsy of users. The show is made on the software Source Filmmaker, which scavenges borrowed assets and mechanics from video games and allows users to creatively repackage these elements into their own creations. People have been using Source Filmmaker (and its ancestor Garry's Mod) for decades to create “machinima” online. The machinima tradition is, at its heart, about remix: appropriating tools made by a corporation to do your own thing.

Like much of meme and internet culture, the machinima tradition and related genres like YouTube Poop (Y.T.P) are characterized by an anticapitalist ee-thoss familiar from Web 1.0. In communities that create this content, there is no exchange going on beyond the exchange of ideas. The childlike purity of the social world created by users who are here recreationally rather than professionally is what gives movements like machinima and Y.T.P their "juice." Taken from a rigidly materialist standpoint, the passion of posters can be read as the “unpaid labor” upon which the profits of social media companies rest, as critics like Tiziana Terranova have said.

An important element of this creative world is its disregard for intellectual property and large corporations. The creation of a several-minute YouTube video of copyrighted characters (like the Super Mario characters, who are often the central figures in Y.T.P videos), edited in an avant-garde style according to a decidedly anti-mainstream and off-putting set of aesthetic principles, is fundamentally political. Like Dadaism or Pop Art, Y.T.P finds its aesthetics in shocking the dominant bourgeois sensibilities and legibilities, reveling in fart jokes and absurd nonsensicalness. But the political project of Y.T.P and machinima YouTubers is perhaps more coherent and durable than that of the Dadaists or Pop Art, because it has involved the construction of new forms of counter-institution organized upon decentralized networks and collectively-run projects—a digital commons, a platform presence, subcultures and fandoms which have become sources of patronage, income, and power.

Skibidi Toilet has become a kind of institution. Skibidi provides a hefty income to D.F.B, but it also has nourished the careers of an ecosystem of other creators who use characters from the show. Roblox games with millions of plays involve Skibidi assets, dozens of other YouTubers use the characters to create a “multiverse” and “alternate timelines” for the show. Streamers like steak420 (3.4 million followers) post themselves reacting to and watching the series, while analysis channels like Iron Cameraman (736,000 subscribers) follow the latest updates. I, and this booklet, also participate in this universe.

Adam Goodman, the executive tasked with helping turn Skibidi Toilet into a viable movie and toy line, described his approach to the communal construction of Skibidi intellectual property to Variety magazine: "Typically we issue takedowns; we're ready to make sure that nobody is messing with something we want to control. In this case, we've taken a very different approach to this. We want creators to play with our I.P. We want to make sure that people are doing things, obviously within reason, so long as it kind of follows a certain guideline for us."

As it stands, the number of people garnering a full time income or better from the Skibidissphere is probably in the high dozens or low hundreds. Millions have gotten things other than money: involvement in discussion groups where they meet friends and learn things, hours of entertainment, something to talk about at the dinner table.

6. Andrew Wallenstein, Robert Steiner.“'Skibidi Toilet' Film and T.V Franchise in the Works From Michael Bay, Adam Goodman.” Variety 24 July, 2024. variety dot com U.R.L The real subject of Skibidi Toilet is technology and its implications. The central dynamic of the series is the arms race between the Skibidi Toilets and the Media Alliance. A rational, scientific process on both sides results in the construction of endless and increasingly powerful permutations of both Skibidi Toilets and Media Alliance fighters, notably the Titans. Technological progress produces neatly classifiable and predictable results as ever-larger and ever-more complicated super soldiers engage in progressively larger battles.

Image summary: This is a surrealist digital illustration. The composition features a figure in a long coat with a security camera for a head walking above three human heads that are placed inside toilet bowls. The background consists of a blurred urban architectural structure. The imagery suggests themes of surveillance, dehumanization, and the loss of individual dignity under a watchful, systemic authority.

This process mirrors the progress of technology more broadly. Defense contractors manufacture ever-deadlier arms as Google and Apple produce ever-more sophisticated devices for monetizing the social world.

However, it is a foregone conclusion that any new robot created in one season of Skibidi will be destroyed in the subsequent ones, and whatever happens, the gizmo remains a toilet. Its destruction happens through relentlessly graphic and inventively-choreographed violence that is not recognized as such by YouTube's content moderation because it is happening to machines rather than to flesh-and-blood beings. In Skibidi Toilet, the supposedly-rational process of technological advancement is always subordinated to the id-oriented violent whimsy of the show's chaotic machinima side.

Every cyborg is doomed. The outcome is the same whether it's an elaborate toilet bomber helicopter or a simple toilet with a flushable handle. None of the innovation matters. Why then is so much of D.F.B's effort (and the fandom's effort) committed to devising, naming, classifying, ranking, and evaluating the newest innovations in robot technology on each side, if all these robots only exist to be destroyed?

The series repetitively reinforces a single principle: there is an irrational chaotic force reigning supreme over all technical and teleological practice. The elaborateness of the Titans, flying toilets, and the show's dramatic presentation of each new variant or update makes their eventual destruction more interesting because it shows the power of chaos to overcome even the most laborious of rational constructions. The more sophisticated the technology, the bigger the explosion, that's what matters. And at the end of the day, it's still a toilet.

In this sense, Skibidi Toilet dramatizes a conflict that is key to the internet and its mode of production. Like the scientists crafting new cyborg toilets, the rationalizing forces of the platforms, algorithms, and devices are highly sophisticated but ultimately hostage to the violent whimsy of internet users. The dynamic is not one of competition, in which the devious rule-breaking of users overwhelms the best efforts of the people making the rules. Rather, the violent whimsy—jokes, porn, slop, crime, art, edgelords, violence, etcetera—is a species of entropy inherent to the platform project. Nothing you make, nothing you innovate, will master it. Every A.I will become a pornbot, every platform will become a slop vertical.

This tendency is baked in from the beginning. Technologists believe they are in charge of the situation, but are really being led by their users (and user-generated data) into a dark hole.

Skibidi Toilet will rise to the top because it is trash. Technology does not solve the problem of human nature. Instead, it strips the garments that clothed it. The traditions, institutions, and values which covered us, kept us warm, and shielded us from each other have been yanked off the body politic by tech platforms.

There is a candor to this nudity. You find no wooden language online, no bullshit—people just lie instead. Things are what they are, because the only things the computer understands are those which it can clearly identify as this, that, or the other, according to the protocols it has been built to enact. All is sincere, even if sincerely deceptive.

The platforms have whittled social life down to its barest components, binary likes and dislikes, to yeses and nos. Where friction, favoritism, nuance, and charm (or lack thereof) once reigned, we find bots and algorithms: your resume is sorted out by an A.I and your dating profile is never surfaced to the love of your life because you're simply not tall enough. What happens to you is the result of equations more than it is the result of dialogue. Social systems are antiseptic and brittle rather than tangled and grimly, machine-run rather than human-managed.

The world ceases to absorb us and our doing on an individual basis, instead it absorbs us in the aggregate. As George Oppen wrote in his poem, Of Being : “So spoke of the existence of things / An unmanageable pantheon // Absolute, but they say / Arid. // A city of the corporations // Glassed / In dreams // And images— // And the pure joy / Of the mineral fact // Tho it is impenetrable // As the world, if it is matter, // Is impenetrable.”

YouTube is a “city of the corporations, glassed in dreams and images.” In 1968, Oppen was describing New York City, but the line doubles as a description of television. And it can stand in for the phone as well. The impermeability of the screen and the “mineral fact” of its judgments were prefigured in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the transformation of the manmade world—from a pliable thing made of wood, heated by fires we could see, and carried by the muscle force of ourselves or animals we fed—into a different type of thing entirely. The world is now an older beast, built of concrete, glass, and metal, heated and networked by wires carrying currents we don't see (or else projecting them across the air) and fuelled by sources abstracted far beyond

3. Oppen,"Of Being Numerous". poetryfoundation dot org U.R.L what we can sensibly explain or justify. We are swaddled in a shroud of systems which do not really seem to know us and certainly do not answer to us.

Mark B. N. Hansen says that in the twenty-first century we've seen a shift to “environmental” media. Screens, and the things on them, envelop us as wind or sunlight, always-already surrounding, and appearing not as a result of distinct forces we can point at, look at face-to-face, and tell tidy cause-and-effect stories about, but as the result of broader systems that hug each moment and each space we live in. Hansen takes a phenomenological approach and sees this as an issue of scale: the the machines and things that run the world are either so small (like the little chips within a computer or phone) or so large (like the networked flows of global capital) that it is impossible to have the sort of encounter with them that our brains are built to have with things. It is impossible to experience them in the way we experience a building, a book, or a boss. Instead, we meet them like we meet the air.

The screen isn't a place you go to anymore, it's a place that's on you at all times. The first thing you see in the morning and the last thing you see at night. It follows you to the bathroom, you take it with you on a date, it sits at the dinner table. Many people spend the majority of their waking hours looking at some kind of screen. They meet their friends and lovers through it, develop their opinions through it, make their money through it, and when they're tired of working, they look at a different screen to be entertained by it. The neo-luddites have a point when they bemoan this situation and exhort people to touch grass, but the cat will never go back into the bag. Rather, the task is to train the cat to work for us rather than them.

Some have wondered recently whether the internet will be entirely taken over by A.I slop and avatars in the years to come, overwhelmed by a technology so sophisticated that users won't be able to tell the difference. This way of thinking is misguided for several reasons, one being that a clear distinction between human intelligence and artificial intelligence will never really exist and never has.

We are cyborgs. There is not a wall between human and machine, but a gradient. We already find ourselves on that gradient. As we constitute it, and it constitutes us, the distinctions muddle.

The questions here are not technological, but ethical and political: Who do we wish to be, and how do we make that happen? Treating the progress of A.I avatar technology as a kind of inevitable tidal wave that will sweep aside human-made media is stupid, because the technology is not a tidal wave. It is, materially speaking, a series of capital investments in labs, data centers, and energy infrastructures.

It is also a political project, tied to the needs of two autocratic regimes: China under Xi Jinping, and the United States under Donald Trump. The technology is not outcompeting humans in a real marketplace of either products or ideas, but in a set of technofeudal fiefs where the core economic dynamic is the siphoning of value from real life and into speculative projects.

It is by no means inevitable that agentic A.I emerges in a manner antagonistic to human agents. Instead, this situation is the result of political processes which are obscured by how powerful people have been telling the story of this technology and the internet more broadly for the past thirty years.

Donna Haraway's"A Cyborg Manifesto," published in 1985 at the dawn of the computer age, argues for reimagining technology as a force for liberation. She saw the emergence of computers and the internet as destructive, promising to break apart old systems, codes, and regimes. As a radical feminist socialist, this was something Haraway seems to have wanted. To some extent, she has been proven correct:

The internet has helped to expose things the world's masters (circa 1986) wanted to remain hidden. It has offered voice to people structurally silenced by the twentieth century's gatekeepers, and provided alternate routes to influence, wealth, and power. We are freer to be who we really are than our parents and grandparents were.

“The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self,” Haraway wrote, “This is the self feminists must code. Communications technologies and biotechnologies are the crucial tools recrafting our bodies. These tools embody and enforce new social relations for women worldwide.”

The issue, however, is that technology has also squeezed us from the opposite direction, entrenching the power of speculative financialized capital. Social media has been used to misinform rather than to set free. Data has been leveraged as raw material to profit from rather than collective good to share. Tech has eaten out the heart of the twentieth century social contract that wrote so many people out, but it has not imposed better terms. Rather, it has attempted to seal us up in a bubble of slop and surveillance.

Haraway understood that technology could carry a kind of counter-liberationist potential as well. The Cyborg Manifesto could be read as an attempt to advocate for radical, creative thinkers to seize the new technology—the new means of production—before the old capitalists could get at it.

But what seems to intrigue, worry, and excite Haraway most are the implications of cyborgs. What happens when the flesh-bound distinctions which underwrite so much of how people treat one another—gender, race, age—are either abolished by technological means, or transformed in ways we would not recognize? Can you think the social world without these categories, and what does it look like on the other side of that thinking?

Sam Altman, C.E.O of OpenAI, famously stated in an interview that as A.I advances,"the whole structure of society will be up for debate and reconfiguration," and will require"changes to the social contract." Haraway would likely agree with this statement, but not with the ways Altman wishes to alter the social contract. It is clear that one thing Altman does not wish to change about society is massive income inequality. But increasing cyborgization—the swapping of a natural environment, defined by the quirks and limits of our bodies, for a manmade one defined by the interplay of systems—does render all things topsy-turvy. As Haraway argues elsewhere in her “Manifesto”: “Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.”

10. Haraway, again A question we must ask ourselves about Skibidi Toilet is: Why is it that a show this odd, and featuring cyborgs so prominently, in such a clearly dystopic environment, has such appeal to kids? The technological peril the show represents is a big answer to this inquiry.

Image summary: This figure is a digital illustration. The scene depicts a medical or laboratory setting where a figure with a monitor for a head, dressed in a professional coat, stands beside a patient lying on a bed. The patient also possesses a screen-like head, and the room contains medical equipment and a large wall graphic. The image suggests a futuristic or surreal environment where cyborg entities are receiving care or undergoing maintenance, implying a world where technology and biological forms are integrated.

Kids know what's going on, even if they don't know it in the sense an adult knows it. They have concerns about surveillance, about war, about machines in their everyday lives. They know they need to figure out how to be a person in today's world. And this is one function of art and media: to help us with that task.

The heroic protagonists of stories offer models over which to scaffold a self. The emotions attested to in love songs, which you haven't yet had the experience to match, offer maps to what you hope to grow into. The adult jokes you don't get in T.V shows offer a glimpse into a world you wish to know more about. Through imagination, we rehearse the future—and we continue to do so long after our childhoods end.

So why is Skibidi Toilet useful as a tool for rehearsing the future? One reason is because it is about cyborgs. Both the Skibidi Toilets and the Media Alliance are one part machine, and one part flesh.

Skibidi raises one of the key questions that is on everybody's mind, and especially on children's minds. What does life look like when we're part machine? The increasing automation of existence—whether through algorithms, markets, or hardware—raises, in particular, questions about the place of interiority and free will. Are the relevant actors in society people choosing to do things, or bots carrying out their programming?

It's an open question in the series to what extent the Toilets or the Cameramen have thoughts, desires, and feelings. Are they individuals in a way that would be sensible to us, or do they exist kind of like the Borg in Star Trek—as a collective entity?

It is a topic of debate on wikis and fan forums whether we are to take it that we see through the same Cameraman in each episode of Skibidi Toilet or through different ones. The character entry for "P.O.V Camera" on the Skibidi Toilet wiki comes down firmly on one side of this debate, with a notice pinned to the top of the entry to ward off dissenters.

But each P.O.V Cameraman behaves more or less like every other P.O.V Cameraman. What sets members within the Media Alliance apart from one another are specs, size, and props, and the same is true of the Toilets. There is nothing assigned to any character that you might consider personality, no kind of an innate quality: Plungerman Cameraman is who he is because he carries a plunger. Everything is superficial, yet within that flatness, types proliferate: new sizes, new kinds, new weapons.

The two warring cyborg factions are inverses of each other. The Media Alliance have what seem to be human bodies (although sometimes injuries to the limbs reveal wiring) and machine heads. The Skibidi Toilets have machine bodies and human heads. The Skibidi Toilets have faces (the majority have the same face) but they only cycle through the same series of expressions, tied to the Skibidi song.

The Cameramen, however, have heads but not faces. As an organ, a face is a thing that other people look at, the part of your body which you use to make yourself understandable, make yourself you. A face's function is to be seen, but also to be distinctive. But the thing attached to the neck of the Cameraman is a face that can only see, and not be seen. It offers no interiority.

The only words in the show are the gibberish Skibidi song, which the Toilets seem to spew out regardless of situation, whenever they attack. In the early seasons, this is a world entirely without spoken language, without facial expressions. The only exception is the thumbs-up gesture which the Cameramen give one another, which is sometimes alternated with a thumbs-down, or clapping. This is the barest form of communication between characters, like the 1s and 0s of binary computer code.

It is perhaps inaccurate to even refer to them as characters. They are more like elements of landscape. Perhaps the show would not work if there were interiority: what allows the P.O.V format to function, as a narrative conceit, is the complete blankness of the Cameramen's motivations and "selves," if there are any, and the corresponding blank of the Toilets.

The reasons for the war which the two factions fight are another deep blank that paints the whole show with its strange hue. No attempt is made to explain or justify what the Media Alliance does to the Skibidi Toilets, or vice versa. Although the audience is aligned with the perspective of the Media Alliance, it is not clear that they are the "good guys," or if this is even a question that has occurred to them, or to their author.

In Skibidi 56, when the P.O.V Cameraman looks at the other Media Alliance characters torturing a variety of Skibidi Toilets in a desert landscape, we have no means of knowing the motivation of that look. Is our P.O.V Cameraman planning to join in the torture himself? Is he looking at it with a feeling of disgust, documenting it for some future Media Alliance court martial proceeding? Or is it simply another thing occurring in his environment which attracts his attention?

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There are certain moments when the Media Alliance seem to be engaged in some form of sociality, which would require awareness of a self/other distinction. These interactions are typically simple, fleeting, and childish. First, we do see acts of cruelty towards Skibidi Toilets which go beyond what would be strictly necessary for neutralizing them. These acts are frequently playful, as in Skibidi 62 when Media Alliance members toss around a captured Skibidi Toilet like a baseball. Second, there are also moments in which Media Alliance members watch actions onscreen, sometimes with popcorn to signal their leisureliness, and seem to enjoy themselves—the fact that P.O.V Cameraman appears to watch events with interest, or look at things out of curiosity, would also seem to indicate that they enjoy the act of seeing. Third, the Media Alliance members seem to develop some kind of bond with their fellows, as seen by the comforting responses given to those freed of the Skibidi Parasite, in particular Titan Speakerman who, after being in the thrall of the Skibidi Toilets from Episodes 32 to 57, is finally freed by Titan Cameraman, at which point the two warmly dap each other up.

Both the Skibidi Toilets and the Media Alliance seem to be almost all male. There are occasional appearances of a female-looking Skibidi Toilet and one female-looking Camerawoman, but no explicitly female-coded character plays a major part in the series until T.V Woman in episode 49.

Clearly, neither side reproduces by sexual means because we see the labs and factories in which both Skibidis and Media people are constructed. The Skibidi Toilets, as shown in Skibidi 27 seem to raise younger, smaller toilets—something which the Media Alliance does not do, implying that Cameramen and the like emerge fully-formed from the lab.

But it seems odd to call any of these characters male, female, or anything. Dress and the suggestion of secondary sex characteristics are the main things which seem to distinguish them as male and female, but the status of sex and gender in the Skibidiverse is fundamentally ambiguous.

Image summary: This is a composite digital illustration. The image features a montage of various mechanical and humanoid characters, including figures with heads emerging from toilets and robotic entities, set against a chaotic backdrop. The composition suggests a conflict or battle scene, implying a theme of futuristic or surreal warfare between opposing factions.

Skibidi Toilet shows a futuristic war from the vantage point of an infantryman. The show's visuals are uniformly gloomy and dark. The sky extends over your head, blank and vast, ringed by hollow skyscrapers. There is absolute silence save for the rumblings of faraway explosions and then the cataclysmic blasts of nearer ones.

No spoken language happens in the Skibidiverse: its horrors are beyond words. There is just the endless clashing of inarticulate machines, speaking in no tongue besides the lapping tongues of flame and smoke that swallow them all, endlessly.

This specific vibe was something I'd never felt from any other piece of media until I saw an ad for Palantir, Peter Thiel's defense contracting firm, which aired during the Army-Navy football game attended by J.D Vance, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Daniel Penny. Images of the new regime's principal men watching the game circulated widely across social media, as did the very clear corporate sponsorship signs by Palantir. But this ad is what stuck with me most.

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“The Future of Warfare,” as the ad is titled, is giving Skibidi. The gloomy, wordless depiction of violence carried out by machines. Shots of conflict as seen from the P.O.V of drones and automated soldiers. Humans visible only as a shadowed face, a finger reaching to push a button or—most strikingly—a conductor holding a baton to direct an orchestra of drones that swarm like birds and swoop down upon an enemy.

It is one of the ways that I find Skibidi Toilet deeply moving and prescient. It is a vision of the future marked by metallic violence, electric brutality. It is a future where surveillance and automation bring about horror and the view of the world through a first-person camera no longer amuses but accuses instead.

The Cameramen are cyborgs in two senses. First, in the chimera-like joining of a camera to a human torso, and second, through the exact melding of the spectator's human vision to in-world camera vision. This second type of cyborgization is not science fiction, but the basic condition of contemporary existence: We have intertwined our bodies and selves with machines which regulate biological rhythms, structure our work, entertain us, and mediate all social relationships. These machines are, in turn, entwined with structures of power, money, violence, and governance, and in many cases are becoming the primary driver of those structures. Haraway writes, "The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins."

Skibidi Toilet presents a world where the construction of increasingly intricate technologies leads to an endless and emotionless forever war. “Bloodbath” isn't the right word because there is no blood, only machine parts. Instead of a conflict with stakes and objectives (we never learn what these might be, after all) we have a weird symbiosis: One side destroys the other in exact proportion to how well it has already been destroyed. The purpose of each side is to eradicate the other and nothing else.

The robots are all so good at killing each other that they can never stop killing each other. This is part of what is so eerie and illustrative about the show to me, and, I'd argue, a major source of its popularity. Gen Alpha sees the signs of skibidystopia in this world.

You and I must try, in whatever ways we can, to master technologies rather than be mastered by them. There is no going backwards and no logging off. You are here with Gen Alpha, and the life you steer now is the only life we will have.

The robots we make don't have to be like the robots in Skibidi Toilet. If we're making autonomous A.I's that are conscious, even they probably don't want to end up that way. There is no law of nature mandating that a society like this one—absorbed in the development of technology that performs what would have been seen as miracles when your parents were your age—must use that technology to hurt people. It is only a law of humans that has decreed this reality and made it seem natural, inevitable, and reasonable to a lot of people who should know better. It is about time those with authority, cash, and conviction grow the fuck up.

The kids watching Skibidi Toilet know a lot better than older people do about what is coming down the road. We have to face the crises ahead, and articulate their causes and effects, not in the borrowed terms of the twentieth century, but in a language coeval with the absurdities of our moment, which is the only present on offer. The bare minimum of what we owe one another is a recognition that there will be no return to normalcy, no Mars colony, no multiverse. The only pragmatic approach is to demand radical, uncomfortable change; to call for the fundamental decencies which too many people have convinced themselves—out of cynicism, self-interest, fatigue, or whatever it might be—are just brave words and not real.

The world has never been saved and never will be. The world just goes on. But the world can be loved, and it deserves to be loved in all its weirdness.

This pamphlet wouldn't exist without my wonderful editor and friend Naomi Falk. I'd also like to thank my parents, my teachers over the years, and my friends — but most of all, the dedicated admins of the Skibidi Toilet fan wiki, whose meticulous cataloguing of the show has served as both an inspiration and a crucial aid in the making of this pamphlet.

At the end of the day, I owe it all to you. None of this would exist without the support of subscribers, followers, and friends from around the internet who have helped me develop ideas and listened to me yap. Your support and interest for this work means more to me than can be said. Thank you. You're so skibidi.

Check out Aidan Walker's other work at How To Do Things With Memes and under the handle @aidanetcetera on all platforms.

Image summary: This figure is a surreal digital composition. It features a collection of distorted human faces and figures, including a central head emerging from a box-like structure resting on pedestal-like bases, a large stretched face in the background, and a warped facial profile in the foreground. The arrangement suggests a theme of fragmentation and psychological distortion, concluding that the image is intended to evoke a sense of unease or abstraction rather than representing a realistic scene.

Image summary: This is a composite digital illustration. The image features a large, faded background portrait of a smiling man, overlaid with three smaller, distinct images of different men's heads emerging from toilets. The composition suggests a repetitive theme of mockery or degradation, as multiple figures are placed in an undignified position against the backdrop of another smiling face.

Image summary: This is a photograph. The image shows a close up view of a tablet screen displaying text, set against a backdrop of stylized, monochromatic city skyscrapers. The contrast between the modern device in the foreground and the digital cityscape in the background suggests a theme of technology integrated within an urban environment.

Analyzing what an eight-year-old iPad baby might find wonderful or moving in Skibidi Toilet is a token of respect to the next generation. There is no other ship besides the one we are sailing now, alongside them; they are our crewmates, and our icebergs will be theirs too.

Image summary: This figure is a photograph of a Quick Response code. It displays a square matrix of dark modules arranged on a light background, featuring three distinct large square alignment patterns in the corners. The presence of this specific pattern indicates that the image is designed to be scanned by an optical device to retrieve embedded digital information or a web link.

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