Losing the Plot: Part 5 — Conclusion
Featuring FritzWillie/The Administrator
To celebrate SCP’s 13th birthday, WhiteGuard, a SCP member and staffer, has conducted weekly interviews — in my opinion the best thing to happen to SCP since the KaktusKast — with some of the site’s forerunners, their initial ideas revisited and re-pronounced. These include “The Administrator” Fritzwillie, Dr. Clef, Kain Pathos Krow, and Dr. Gears.
I don’t think, however, that what is revealed in the nostalgic look back is as charming and flattering as the celebrating SCPers think it is. Let’s take a close look at some of the changes these old guards speak of, and tell the other side of the story regarding how far SCP has come.
Past entries in this series:
- Part 1: As an Adolescent, SCP Has Lost the Plot — A Preface
- Part 2: Losing the Plot — SCP’s Inversions — Dr. Gears
- Part 3: Losing the Plot — Trading Immersion for Immediacy — Kain Pathos Crow
- Part 4 — SCP’s Toxic Maximalism — Dr. Clef
“I was looking for a release. I didn’t want to yell into the void, I wanted to whisper my secrets. It wasn’t for attention, it was for expression.”
“I of course wanted to keep the FritzWillie account and The Administrator account separate, so that people didn’t upvote my content on anything other than whether they actually liked it or not…”
The last thing I wanted was people to potentially up vote my material just because of the position of The Administrator. If people really liked my writing, I wanted to know it was for my ideas, not because they were brown nosing the site’s Admin.
One of the primary takeaways of this series on the 13th anniversary of SCP is hopefully that it has lost good leadership. Its role models today are politicians, bureaucrats, salespeople, and social media influencers before they are leaders. The personal gratifications gathered by these “leaders” in the clout of their positions and their standing taxes in a silent fashion the general health and well-being of the community; 99% of those who look up to them will only rise to their level or lower. The perpetuation of the values and priorities from this are a death spiral of lower and lower standards; lower and lower expectations; lower and lower respectability; and lower and lower outcomes.
The bar has dropped so low that the leadership and highly perceptive ethics displayed in the above quotes by Fritzwillie is a miracle when you look at SCP these days. You will not find anyone who is even capable — forget willing — to do something similar to what he did, which by now is simply legendary. In a place where people now attempt desperately to hoard maximum recognition and climb the staff ladder for more clout by authoring needless policy changes, Fritzwillie decided at the outset of it all that he would make The Administrator account. It was a sockpuppet —what would now be a bannable offense — so that he could separate his works and their reception that, he knew in some wisdom, would inevitably be colored by that role. It’s not that this wisdom doesn’t exist or isn’t available to those who could do similar things, make similar statements, and assume a better caliber of role model; it’s that this wisdom is ignored, snuffed really, at the prospect of more personal and instant gratification. What a hell of a table turn this is, looking back.
To circle back to our initial article in the series and quote part of the Gears’ interview we didn’t get to:
“Fritz and I got along alright, and while we sort of have different viewpoints, I suppose I was glad someone who could sort of put ego aside like that helped lead us along in those early days.”
Wouldn’t it have been easier to just have one account? Of course, but something is lost there, things that are today met at SCP with eyebrows to the back of the scalp and eyerolls: dignity and integrity. One account would prevent a surety that a work is accepted on its own merits, and not by a celebrity culture of misinterpreted, anticipated skill. The sort of thing that is perpetuated by the wisdom of Fritzwillie; something that can resist ego to build something better. To add a final inversion to the series; the current culture turns this on its head. It is not about the larger thing; only in name and as an excuse on the way to “increasing your profile”. The building of something better is now funneled into the building of ego.
While I am not against recognizing an author for their works, and think very strongly that an author should be, this demanded in a tantrum in the context of the SCP Wiki means one has not understood where they are writing and what the premise is, or at least what it was prior to such tantrums as acceptable. The lack of visible author attribution on an SCP article has not been a function of the presumption that multiple attributable hands have been a part of the creation, as suggested by qntm; it’s because the original authors didn’t regard the salivating potential of building a social profile via their contributions; it’s because the potential of Markiplier and Newsweek to reference the memetic germ of your idea (nevermind the actual literature) in a washed-out fashion wasn’t gnawing at the back of the author’s minds. The initial ideal was a governmental database that was pseudo-immersive, and in-article author signatures weren’t conducive to that effect. The author was removed a degree; behind a clickable link at the bottom of the page.
That premise, as is the point of this series, has long been dissolved into a mortifying irrelevance, and seems to be ignored, so as to not remind people of what it once was all about — even those who know better. What’s left is an otherwise natural outrage for a lack of author props… observers and especially newer generations cannot understand why it uniquely isn’t there. And one can’t blame them. Not given how far the culture has strayed towards self-referential intentions and wishful self-portraits. What’s gone is any sort of personal sacrifice in self-aggrandizement required to participate and contribute to the Wiki as a collective, and not — instead as it is today — the sheer cliquish delight that besets modern works. These are questions that will go above the head of those authors most influential to the Wiki, as they are the ones who would benefit from this, so they won’t be addressed.
Would Dr. Gears care if his name was plastered prominently over SCP-106? Would he make a fuss about not being attributed in Newsweek? Or would he, like Fritzwillie does, attribute it to the group effort, happy that the content has gotten the attention it deserves? Is SCP going to mandate that for old authors like Dr. Gears so they can rid themselves of the comparison that reminds them of their relative indulgences?
SCP has civilizational diabetes and is now habituated to its sugar fix.
Instead of moving the rating module to the space that the author attribution occupied to be more in-line with this initial ideal, the author attribution now orbits the degenerative gravity of the all-subsuming (and as qntm points out, mandatory) rating module. The Wiki is thinking and so moving in the exact wrong direction, hopelessly animated by the inspiration of the efame that has been such a blessing and such a curse. SCP is the agent of its own misfortune, perpetually pushing forward that curse, which has destroyed it.
The point stands to be made that attribution is not a problem on the SCP Wiki, attribution by other, more powerful social attentions is. In other words, there is no obvious way for someone who knows next to nothing about the SCP Wiki to know who the author is. It’s not that there is no attribution, it’s that it isn’t as visible as the ego of the authors would like it to be. In this way, the SCP is again catering to the lowest common denominator of their most far-reaching audience, explicitly for the sake of something exogenous to the Wiki. It is about the potential for greater attention. It is not about writing. It is not a writing community.
A goal here is to be an alarm bell for other confic communities that have yet to be over-corrupted and over-centralized, who have not had the attention necessary to invert the entire project into the gloating and bloated heads of the contributors; hopefully showing what went wrong where and why so they don’t make the same mistakes. I do not expect many SCP-orthodoxy people at all to get over their reflexivity and “convert”; theirs is a terminal and progressive problem that we’d do better finding primary and preemptive ways to prevent and disincentivize, rather than operate on ex post facto with the intent of saving it. Theirs is a terminal illness facing a non-survivable procedure.
There is no greater disappointment than seeing well-deserved representatives of the genre turn inward on this gravity to market themselves at the expense of the Wiki’s greater, long-lost purpose, and fall embracing the idolatry of insatiable quantities as valid and boast-able measures of literary value, self-worth, and success. That this inward turn, believed in total paradox by those affected to be a sort of apotheosis, usually happens after a very public success (whether directly personal or vicarious), or one’s promotion up the staff line, is not a coincidence, I don’t think.
Such a careful and thoughtful separation as the one made by Fritzwillie only comes about when you have someone who is more philosophically passionate about writing than their ego; the writing is to be pure and judged solely on its own merits. Someone would win a contest because the writing is that good, and not because that person is that person. (As stated way previously and elsewhere, the unwillingness at SCP to do anything but laugh at the idea of an anonymous submission and adjudication process for contests, the authors of what works being revealed after results, is diagnostic of a refusal to let it be solely about the writing; it’s about the individual writer and the social spoils of winning.) With the election to deny the ego itself pushed to the wayside in favor of easier and less utilitarian pursuits, so too is the carefulness, the passion, and the purity of the writing. We see a community that is less and less about writing, with more and more superfluous components that weigh its development down.
In contrast to Fritzwillie, who at SCP today would deny themselves in a anomalous asceticism the cheap effects insta-garnered from things like Wikidot Karma, staff positions, author-specific CSS signatures, the historically unique demand for more visible author attribution, and the increasingly in-your-face rating module? Do most intend for their post to be a whisper of expression, or a shout for attention? Sadly there is not an ounce of the leadership remaining from Fritzwillie’s spirit in SCP’s most prominent and visible “role models”:
“Oh I always had a soft spot in my heart, whenever I saw an SCP reference in a comment, fanart, or cosplay on the internet. While it made my heart soar with pride, knowing that I played a small part in its history, I never let it go to my head, because the part I had played was so small. Perhaps it’s me being a recluse, but I feel like the success of The Foundation had little to do with me and more with the talent and hard work of others. ”
vs
When I was young, the idea of a great author was one of a solitary individual, hunched over a typewriter, locked away in a room, surrounded by books and notes, alone with his ideas, and ultimately, solitary. But, now I think about the great authors of today, the writers of the SCP community. To think, the next great works of fiction are being written not by an individual, not by a hermit in solace, but are being passed around, tweaked, rewritten, killed, revived, cut, and expanded upon by person after person. A huge world of fiction, rivaling that of Tolkien, Stephen King, and others, all crafted by a community. In my mind, that is the achievement of The SCP Foundation. An achievement that we can ALL revel in, an achievement that even the smallest contributor can take part in.”
This is a wonderful statement to conclude the series with, but the idyllic setting of this still suffers from the old blinders SCP has for itself as the only child of the genre and medium. The difference of course is that Fritzwillie’s instance of it can’t be blamed; there was little else besides SCP back in this individual’s day. The greater point applies to a community, absolutely, but not one that begins and ends at SCP. It isn’t one community of containment fiction, as there are multiple; it’s now the entire space of containment fiction. That includes SCP and all of the areas around it, and places in between.
RPC and other forks have, if nothing else, re-captured the feel and honesty of the early SCP years — the good and the bad with it. The SCP-faithful will resent this and couple this fact with the lack of sensitivity in the political correctness as definitively damning. But it didn’t have to be that way; the mantle of the genre didn’t need to be placed in relatively regressive hands in order to progress further; SCP made it that way. It held the genre hostage and the relative crudeness of something like RPC is unfortunately preferable to total petrification and failure. This is made almost painfully obvious by these recent words of SCP’s icons, paragons whose words the current culture reveres as decoration, but does not take to heart; something to be nominally respected for purely historical sentiments, and not to emulate, strive for, or regain any part of.
No need, right? The trajectory of SCP is forever and always upwards, isn’t it? It’s that magical stock that only goes up and to the right; this rendered unequivocal due to percent signs and member count. There are no other measures of success, are there? Never with the hint that an increasingly representative school of writing there has very obviously lost the plot entirely, callously and numbly performing genre fouls like the addition of meaningless, animated CSS components to buff up what should be sufficient to stand more-immersively on its own; sometimes even when the quality of the work stands on its own just fine. The format isn’t less unique and more like any other form of creative writing (or worse, like self-insert fanfiction) the more it lets itself sag into other genres’ tropes and literary tools and become, to recall Dr. Gears’ analogy, washed out in the brightness of a stage’s relentless spotlight. Clams that the site isn’t what it once was, and in important ways, are always and forever reducible to just, like, someone’s opinion, man. Right?
As stated several times by now, a cadre of members of the new-gen confic sites are celebrating the space of containment fiction in spite of its flagship community’s trajectory by cataloging the genre in the Containment Fiction Wiki. (Individuals who would think that this solely a project to bash SCP should check out the entry on it before making that statement.) Curiously absent in this project, especially considering the perpeutally-outstretched colonial arm of Internet Outreach, is any official SCP recognition or participation; just official vilification. In one sense this is obvious, because many members of SCP know that those in power will ban users for associating with certain others; others who are on the project and present in the SCFD. The only official involvement by SCP in the inclusive project is yet another, characteristic example of attempted subterfuge and espionage meant to surveil and report back to SCP HQs (looking at you, asimallard).
There’s a lesson here to end the post and series with, one that RPC or another containment fiction community might get the honor to exercise better one day; don’t lose the plot, don’t abuse the genre for the sake of your own ego, or the old guard will announce it loudly and hidden in plain sight on your front page while you cheer it, while others notice and facepalm, and ex-members will catalogue your shortcomings as a long-time-coming and deserved effort, your claim to the genre and legacy reduced to an instructive parable. This is what happens when you remove your peg.
© Lack of Lepers
