Here’s another poorly thought-out thinky-piece from John Doe of Welcome to the Deep Estate. Check it out if you want a giggle.
I joke a lot. Probably more than I should.
Maybe it’s an ADHD thing. I’ll catch myself half-listening to someone talk while another part of my brain is scanning for an opportunity for me to make people think I’m witty.
It’s also probably a coping mechanism. Humor is a strange form of rationalization that lets you walk around the edges of something awful without staring directly into it. The problem is, like most coping mechanisms, it doesn’t come with an off switch. And that can get… complicated when the world starts to feel like a grab bag of death, despair, and headlines you wish were satire.
A few days ago, I cracked a joke on Threads that, admittedly, may have been a bit crass. I’d like to think I have good taste in poor taste, and before posting it, I personally rated it as a solid “Oof.”
Apparently, the joke landed closer to: “You’re a piece of shit for downplaying CHILD RAPE.” The reaction was intense enough that I deleted the post and quietly exited stage left.
The joke itself is not important. It was lazy. Forgettable. The kind of thing you would hear halfway through a Bill Maher monologue while checking your phone.
Basically, I found out Stephen Hawking went to Epstein Island, and you could charitably say I was using humor to rationalize one of the century’s greatest minds having such a base perversion. The revelation hurt because it said just as much about humanity as a whole as it does about Hawking. The man was the pinnacle of intellectual achievement. Now, his legacy lives in horny jail, and I’m half convinced Earth’s entry in the Hitchhiker’s Guide is going to focus entirely on how much we masturbate.
Look, this isn’t a mea culpa.
Show me a hill, and I will die on it, defending my belief that cracking a joke isn’t the same as giving Epstein and friends a molest-one-get-one-free pass on sex trafficking. That’s Pam Bondi. You’re thinking of Pam Bondi.
Instead, this is about a single comment I got:
“Jesus fucking Christ. THIS is the statement you’re willing to make on social media.”
It stuck with me. Not because the guy is the human equivalent of stepping on a wet mystery towel and feeling it squelch between your toes. But because it perfectly encapsulates why the Internet now feels about as fun as doing deep lunges with a thorny buttplug.
What I said wasn’t a joke. It was a statement. The same way Lenny Bruce’s routine, read aloud in the Supreme Court, was a statement. The same way Biggie Small’s lyrics make him a confessed mass murderer. You can no longer shit post. You can only shit statements.
I don’t know when everything I said online started being logged as a permanent declaration of belief, but goddamnit, I want to opt out. What button do I click to opt out?
And then someone else replied with this little Chipotle-Orwellian nugget:
“It’s not too late to delete this.”
The idea that you should self-censor before something happens is disturbing. And the worst part is… eventually it worked. After enough screeching, I broke. I deleted the post.
And that didn’t feel great.
Y SO SRS?
From the moment I got my hands on a keyboard, I naturally gravitated towards the global circle-jerk that was unfiltered pre-algorithm internet. It was a place where everyone was venting, nothing was taken seriously, and anything could be chalked up to “for the Lulz.” It was a ridiculous place, full of shit posters, obscure pop culture, edgelords, racists, pedos, ‘can I have cheeseburger memes’, truly viral videos, mystery links that either led to a rickroll, 2 Girls 1 Cup, or traumatizing gore, and trolls.
So many goddamn trolls.
And Trolls were a vital part of the ecosystem. You know how the current deluge of AI has eroded our sense of what is true and what is real to the point that we’re all trapped in a low-grade delirium that threatens to consume us all? Yeah, old school trolls were like that, except for taking the piss out of anything or anyone trying to be taken seriously. They made sure nobody felt too safe pretending they were the main character.
Then something changed
A major part of it was our changing relationship with the web itself.
When the Internet lived on a chonky desktop PC, it was a destination. You had to go online. You sat down, opened a browser, and entered the digital world. When you closed the browser and stood up, you were offline again.
Now, with the World Wide Web in your pocket, you are always online. You are never not online. Even if you go outside and ‘touch grass,’ there’s always going to be a push notification waiting to goose you into another dopamine spiral.
This separation mattered in more ways than one.
Pseudo-anonymity was the norm back then. Who you were online and who you were offline were two completely different things. You weren’t actually interacting with real people online. You were interacting with usernames and pop culture avatars.
For many people, that made the Internet a pressure valve. A place to vent. A place to purge the worst parts of yourself so you could go back into the real world and function like a civilized human. Our screens could act as a rod-iron fence, allowing the chihuahua to snarl like the pit bull they wanted to be, and for the jokester to joke without fear of getting hit with rotten produce.
Then Mark Zuckerberg came around and turned the Internet’s mask into a face tattoo.
When social media evolved into something bigger than an emo kid’s Xanga page blasting Dashboard Confessional, it offered what would become the internet equivalent of the American Dream: with enough likes, even you could become somebody.
Offline, you might be answering emails from a middle manager who forgot why your job exists. Online, you have followers. You could be worth following. Online, we could all be knights slaying dragons. Offline, we’re not even Don Quixote attacking windmills. We’re the Senior Operator of Windmill Data Acquisition.
But to become somebody online, you had to give up anonymity. The great Algorithm demanded to be fed information, and Facebook couldn’t data-mine the anonymous nobody.
And once we became somebody, corporations and advertisers got involved. Advertisers wanted civility because electric toothbrushes don’t sell well next to slurs. Jokes stopped landing when your mom showed up in the comments. And the moment people heard that HR might be snooping on their social media, everyone started cleaning up their act, fast.
But that online vitriol people had never went away. It just stopped being cathartic once platforms figured out how to monetize it.
In their perpetual quest for engagement, social media platforms quietly installed a stadium FanCam in the public town square of the Internet and hired an algorithm to start spotlighting the zaniest characters.
This Algorithm doesn’t care if something is true, fair, or proportional. It cares if people engage with it, and nothing drives engagement like “Look at this. This is wrong. Doesn’t this piss you off?“
The more publicly and aggressively you condemn something, the more the system surfaces you. The more that people see you, the more people agree with you, and the more social credit feel-good is squirted into your veins in the form of likes and retweets.
You end up with an Internet where people don’t just react to bad behavior. They compete to have the hardest, loudest, and knee-jerkiest reaction to bad behavior. The goal shifts from “address the problem” to “be seen addressing the problem.” Where my ADHD-riddeled ass is usually half-listening to a conversation, looking for a place to crowbar in a joke, they're doing the same, just waiting for a reason to start shrieking.
Once that happens, context becomes optional, proportionality disappears completely…
…and a joke becomes a statement. One that usually carries the most outrageous interpretation available.
And you must’ve meant it that way, right? Your name is attached to it. That’s your face next to the words. It’s practically one signature away from being an affidavit.
This kind of environment is not great for a chronically unserious person like me, and it makes me deeply grateful that my nutbag father named me John Doe. Good luck trying to find me IRL.