skibidi toilet and dialectic analysis

the internet is in an argument with itself

It’s easy to overlook the cultural implications of Skibidi Toilet.

The YouTube Shorts series—about a race of fictional toilets at war with camera-headed androids—is often dismissed by outside observers as just another example of “brainrot,” contributing little aesthetic value beyond entertaining iPad kids and the chronically online.

And yet the first episode of the series has been viewed more times than the Apollo moon landing; the meme is being produced into a feature-length film by Paramount Pictures; and the word “skibidi” is repeated daily by millions of middle schoolers. To ignore the internet sensation would be like ignoring the Beatles during the 1960s.

The subject matter itself is also an important reflection of contemporary social concerns. The underlying narrative warns of the dangers of technological progress, while the second-person camera footage doubles as a commentary on the act of bearing witness in the digital age.

Meme researcher Aidan Walker¹ does a fantastic reading of the series through a dialectal approach. In his analysis, the underlying symbols of Skibidi Toilet are a direct reaction to the cultural and technological advances of the twenty-first century. The conflict between camera and toilet reflects the conflict between the digital commons and the rise of algorithmic surveillance capitalism, meaning that the series speaks to something real and salient on the internet today.²

Walker’s angle approaches internet media in the Marxist tradition, where a cultural force in society (the thesis) is confronted by a countercultural force (the antithesis). Over time, these result in a new form of media (the synthesis), which eventually becomes a new thesis in and of itself. Thus the cycle repeats:

Personally, I find Walker’s take fascinating, because it can easily be applied to so much of our new media, including language. Take “brainrot” as an example. Once the initial “brainrot words” emerged in response to social media algorithms, they were immediately met with a wave of backlash. Those who were not entertained, or did not understand the meta-commentary, popularized new reactionary phrases like “touch grass,” “chronically online,” and the term “brainrot” itself.

This, of course, only served to make brainrot funnier. It’s a well-known fact in linguistics that young people always drive language change, because they seek to contrastively distinguish themselves from older generations. As a result, they build their linguistic identities through controversial slang words.

Since “brainrot” was upsetting the adults, then, it was ripe for the youth to embrace—which they wholeheartedly did, creating not only a single aesthetic but entire categories of “microbrainrot” that each contain their own vocabularies.

I’m hardly the first to apply dialectics to language, but it doesn’t seem like anyone’s been using it to explain online slang, which is a shame. It can help contextualize so much, including the emergence of the “algospeak” I analyze in my upcoming book. Consider a word like “unalive,” which was popularized on TikTok in response to their censorship of the word “kill”:

Eventually, “unalive” came to be censored as well (the new antithesis), but people still needed to talk about death (the new thesis), so they continued coming up with new euphemisms or turned to creative respellings like “un@l!ve” (the new synthesis).

In linguistics, the degree of linguistic creativity is known as productivity, and it’s not a coincidence that historical materialists draw their main dialectal contradiction between productive forces and the organization of production.

The people (a productive force) oppose the algorithm (the way production is organized). This synthesizes new language, and the cycle will continue to repeat unless our technological situation also reaches a new synthesis.

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Big news: the TEDx talk I did last March is finally up on YouTube! If you want a sneak preview of my book, this video covers a lot of the same themes:

1. One of the few other people to treat Skibidi Toilet seriously, and an account I highly recommend.

2. I strongly believe that this is why the show became so popular, and if you think I’m bullshitting, it might be because you’ve already mentally written off “skibidi” as “brainrot” due to your preconceived notions of high and low art.