A MANIFESTO FOR SHIT-POSTING
DEATH IS A HARD PILL TO SWALLOW
We learn to love the things that are given to us, that become a part of us. This phenomenon also known as the endowment effect is also seen in the cultural world. People will ascribe more value to things they have seen watched, consumed.
The exact origin of the term “shitposting” is unknown, but the earliest-known instance was submitted to the Something Awful Forums[14] on April 10th, 2007, when member OhSNAP!Tray used the expression when referring to worthless threads on the site’s BYOB forum.
We define Shitposting as the act of posting simultaneously good and bad content. Bad because it is inherently unoriginal. Shitposting is always derivative, it is always a spinoff, a sequel, a franchise. Good because it achieves incremental transgressions on the very notion of “original content”, which is so important to meme culture at large.
The current franchisation of virtual universes represents a new paradigm that displaces the spectator from his consumer position toward a role of creator.
Participatory art of this nature is interesting because it generates new fields of symbols new semiotic fields from the virtual ground up.
In a sense what these are implications of the shift that begins from the Frankfurt school’s observations about the western monoliths of culture into fragmented subgroups of inner-jokes and circle jerks.
What is made salient through the perusal of these plundered cultural goods is there vacuousness
How easily they are emptied of the original meaning and filled with myriad significations.
A semi-static signifier in a relationship with a protean signified
Nothing stands in the way of the consumer-become-creator
Nothing stands in the way of your hollowing out the peach's pit and turning it into an apple
We are no longer passive
We are the new creators
There are sequels to variations
and variations on these variations
Sequels to these sequels
We have created a franchise outside of the franchise
We have created a universe outside of the copyrighted universe
There is no author
the author is dead
there is no author
only participants
there is no author
only creators
only hollow words
only hollow images
waiting to be filled
with new meaning
the franchises of the future are our franchises
This text is a partial transcript of a talk that was presented on April 6, 2018 as a part of a symposium on the serialisation of culture.
http://oic.uqam.ca/fr/communications/why-wont-people-on-the-internet-let-things-die