The More You Have to Remind Others How Great You Are, the Less Great You Are
OPINION / ANALYSIS —And the more you have to explain that you’re a writing site, the less of a writing site you are.
(Listen to this article: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/an-abundance-of-lepers/id1588493808?i=1000537335601 )
I could have sworn that I was referenced recently on the SCP main-site forums in a comment on the discussion mirror for an O5 proposal:
“At the risk of relitigating the manifesto of someone who created a leaderboard of .au usage, I do implore people to consider the particular kind of brainrot internet clout has on people. Anyone who’s been here for long enough knows about Upvote Brain. It’s not particularly unique to SCP; if you build any kind of community with a crunchy system of social capital, you should be prepared for a bunch of overdeveloped herd animals to bang their heads on it until the dopamine flows.” — UraniumEmpire [source]
Upvote Brain/internet-clout-brainrot are very nice ways of putting it. Wish I had thought of that. And it’s true that it isn’t specific to the SCP Wiki.
But the real salient point re-emerges like a revelation in the process of attempting to casually group SCP in with the other Upvote Brain platforms for a group photo; it sticks out like a sore thumb. There is something in and about SCP that should resist the dissolution in with the homogeneous sludge secreted from the larger and more expected edifices; things erected explicitly to silo this brainrot (things like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc). Why, exactly, should the SCP Wiki be among them? Why should a creepypasta-extension platform about writing suffer from the same issue, have the same build, and have so much in common with these Silicon Valley nodes of exploited narcissism?
One individual identifies this quality, the one that should resist grouping SCP in successfully with social media platforms;
“… gaining validation from creative writing is significantly healthier and more stimulating than shitposting memes on reddit or selfies on Instagram… as a creative outlet it’s a lot better than many alternatives”
— [source]
I agree. But if true, then why does the brainrot exist and behave on SCP just as it does on Reddit or Instagram? Why do site efforts — whether explicitly, or implicit in around 20% of new articles* — continue to adopt the unmistakable vibe and sensibility of kids shitposting memes?
* From new articles in the last week of September; 4 of 19 in total, all net positive, some more than others:
Brings back to mind…
LordStoneFish: “There’s definitely less of an emphasis on clinical language… at the cost of precision. I often feel like, some authors aside, people don’t really do much specific research much any more, stuff feels based on stereotypes and can be quite generic… In the time since I’ve been writing I’ve seen a lot of that shift towards more the conventions of regular fiction, and even of fanfiction, which unfortunately can invite mediocrity.”
pH: “Q: Has mediocrity been invited?”
LordStoneFish: “When people are more interested in writing about the meaningless miniutae of internet culture than anything else, because it “reflects their own experience,” I gotta say yes.”
[source]
If the act of writing for SCP is a point of distinction and more stimulating than producing the typical, casual, bite-sized, pop-culture-soaked content of a social media platform, then why is the appropriateness of the -J designation for inordinately zany content continually ignored? Why does SCP — a project once defined by its attempt to be convincing, and in the capable hands of authors who wrote above the tastes of their immediate age range — now bend itself so persistently towards a more thorough and unapologeticly adolescent portrayal?
The long story short is that the site is more of a social media platform than ever; a shame that it should feel but doesn’t. (Simply look at the top left of the menu bar and compare that to years ago for a vivid picture that says 1,000 words.) The lamentable & increasing interest in reflecting one’s individual experiences of cultural minutiae on the site is also the reflection of the site itself as a cultural minutia; the site’s experience is more and more that of a social media platform, and it’s being treated as such.
But there is more at work here than just the ongoing surrender of the site’s character to LolFoundation-levels of sheer dopiness.
The separation and elevation granted by the cultured and noble practice of writing is certainly something that might be a governor on a community’s descent into the rabid debauchery of a typical social media platform. And to be fair, maybe it has. Nowadays though, what should be a headwind to degeneracy seems to dovetail with it, extending the surface area for elitism and bragging. The self-identification as writers, and not mere meme or selfie-posters (again, arguable), has itself been unable to escape the gravity of the ego here and moves the sentiment in the opposite direction, to the same extent that it should in the right one. Far from a retreat into humility and salvage, the act of writing has here been treated in the greater manufacture of personal brand so as to make the difference in validation from creative writing between penning an SCP and a Twitter post character limit.
So. Has the potential uniqueness and higher calling of SCP instead been dragged down by a burdensome mentality and slummed itself in a bath of filth that its nature and potential should never have found it in? Is there something more egregious about throwing a diamond into the mud than rotten food? The invocation of the more-wholesome act of writing as something that differentiates SCP from social media platforms immediately defeats the attempt to differentiate it as anything but another social media platform. That more-wholesome act is more reason why it should never have gotten into the state that it’s in, it’s not something that excuses it from what it has instead chosen to behave like!
In reading more in this thread and the O5 equivalent, I am distracted from the topic (to be covered elsewhere and at a later time) and a persistent observation upstages the intense subject matter in a way I wasn’t expecting: there’s simultaneously more high-level praise, grandiose self-flattery, but also and frankly a disturbing amount of humility, clairvoyance, and honesty too regarding the SCP Wiki here than there usually is. It’s all over the place actually. The mix and juxtaposition of the modesty with the excruciatingly severe body odor of self-fawning is incredibly discordant. Sure, this is all in a thread discussing the consequences of ignoring the hushed actions of sexual predators harbored in the heights of staff far too long for ignorance or inaction to be excuses, as well as the unintended consequences of reacting too quickly and out of panic and culling of the potential PR repercussions of that; but still, the amount of ratio’d ego-retreat and self-reassurance here is just jolting:
“One other thing I do want to point out is the consideration of the purpose of this community, and its ultimate function being as a collaborative writing site.”
“…And it is not conducive to this site’s actual purpose. We are not a social media platform. We are a collaborative writing site that has a forum.”
“There is only so much we can do, and there’s only so much we should even be expected to do. We are not a site that sells a product or subscription or makes any kind of money; we essentially have zero actual “full-time” staff on this site because we can’t pay anyone to do that.”
“We have a large, and mainstream impact and viewership, frankly we are an internet phenomenon. We cannot be fanfiction.net, or other creative writing areas…”
“We don’t have a small and comfy community where we can sorta shrug and stick an arbitrary age limit with minimal consideration for the minutiae. We’re a phenomenon…”
“…the problem has historically been so pervasive that I honestly don’t think our community ([specifically] the side chats/discord servers, not the main site or the heavily regulated #site19) is a safe place for minors to frequent.”
“[I] do not believe that we should allow a minor onto a website where they have a very real chance of being pursued by an abuser just so we can squeeze a few good articles out of them. there are plenty of other sites and forums where they can create art that doesn’t expose them to people like that; the wiki should not be the end-all-be-all of the scp fandom.”
“SCP as a cultural touchstone is too ingrained to dislodge.”
“It’s no secret that the SCPs most famous in the mainstream are all Series 1 things, stuff like 055, 173, 106, 96, and 682. That’s the stuff that won’t fade from the popular consciousness.”
“It would probably also be a good idea to put it somewhere in the rules or guides or something that “FOR YOUR SAFETY AND OTHERS’, DO NOT DIVULGE YOUR AGE, NO MATTER WHAT IT IS, TO OTHER USERS, AND DO NOT REQUEST THIS INFORMATION FROM ANOTHER USER”. … Newbies need to know that this place isn’t necessarily any safer than any other online space, despite efforts to the contrary.”
“We’re not just an obscure forum in the back corners of the internet anymore. We can’t get away with doing whatever we want — staff should already know as much!”
“Surely you folks must see the absurdity in going to such lengths to remain legally spotless in our handling of intellectual property while simultaneously neglecting to extend the same consideration to our handling of minors?”
“Isolating our audience and missing out on talent are definitely regrettable, but are those really our greatest concerns?”
“The cat is already out of the box.”
It seems as though SCP is having to somewhat question itself, in the frame of one of its worst possible angles, of the surety of its own worth. This I think is the first time I’ve seen at least a holistic group-effort of actually auditing the moral and reputational stock after one of their disasters. Odd that SCP as a composite can only reach backwards this far to connect with its initial meekness and its most modest definitions when faced with such a horrible, hideous timeline; and repeatedly does so by way of referencing how great they nonetheless are. Why does it take such an ugly setting for SCP to find value in those foundational aspects of itself that are otherwise trodden daily in the stampede towards similarly degenerative and prerequisite lusts, like the luxuriate and unabashed idolization of .au stats, upvote milestones, SCPPER placements, and now historically gratuitous author visibility?
The above quote can be replayed, now set into a wider context: “Surely you folks must see the absurdity” in the community’s ability and willingness to so vividly articulate and discuss the absence of structural architecture meant to discourage and dissuade such horrible outcomes from happening, and yet remain in a relative and collective denial about how a similar structural failure facilitates their antecedent hedonism for their own veneration. How such a lack of structural disincentivization might inspire and shape the attitudes, expectations, and characters of the continually-incoming generations under the influence of others who revel in and exploit that lack, and how that might create and foster the sort of culture that encourages sexually inappropriate interactions. The alternation is astounding and apparently too honest for their aggregate willingness to better themselves, despite it being just a few more steps to carry the logic to.
These quoted moments of clarity come, like the initial increase of the age limit, quickly once ultimately out of necessity. Like the atheist who scrambles to pick up their dusty prayers to God in a moment of pressing mortality, SCP desperately reconnects with the larger-lens and more meek picture of what they are; and yet just as obviously, what they are no longer. (The religious man doesn’t have to barter with God for salvation at the time of most need of it; and the extent to which a man does this is a metric of his relative disconnect.) There are warnings in the O5 thread about not reacting too quickly here, and that doing so is what got them in this pickle to begin with. The deeper observation is that the reaction was too slow, and is only as rushed as is necessary, once it has become too little too late.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it many more times; SCP is sadly not a collaborative writing site at heart anymore. The writing and collaboration are decoration. It’s not “a writing site with a forum”, but the inverse; a social media platform with a writing site affixed, to the side and displaced by a sun-soaked tumor that now constitutes the majority of its mass. It is a stray to that territory, a wayward individual with all the right genetics, but who has forgotten their upbringing. It has preferred to lobotomize its representative self into an ape-like stupor until writing words — that dignifying spiritual conduit that once yielded such uniqueness, and towards which the congeries stretch to grasp and be saved by the ethical buoyancy of — by now exists in a painful admission to be the stuffed-heavy and sinking vehicle for an inexhaustible dopamine supply & demand. In the terror of what might potentially ruin them, the dopamine is hurriedly flushed out so that it might move the collective consciousness up towards the surface, as it once did. It is as a very smart representative of the site writes; “The creative vitality of our little website won’t really amount to much if we get sued and/or shut down.” But this can unfortunately only be appreciated with respect to a literal, physical shut-down, one announced loudly and obviously in the post-trauma figure of a legal battle.
The inauspicious and subtextual truth of the “necessity of the age raise” (this quoted over and over, but that necessity curiously never quite spelled out), and now this moral panic in potentially reversing it, is the uncomfortable recognition of the Wiki as a intervention-worthy junkie culture, given over to junkie benefices, scared straight by junkie rock-bottoms, and this observation delayed entirely too long by junkie euphoria. The high has gotten too potent, the trip too bad, but the chemical agents still exist, coursing in the blood vessels. You cannot turn off a drug like a switch; half-lives cannot be accelerated with remorse. The wealth of potential and austerity that made the SCP Wiki special and stand apart has been squandered like an allowance to an addict, and made into the means for a degenerative high... which it turns out is not endless. The debts come due, eventually and surely. The road that the can is kicked down has a terminus; it’s a straight-down drop-off.
The damage and disgrace from the abjection of SCP into a social media platform is therefore more. The brainrot social media platforms, vile as they are, aren’t equipped to feel shame for what they are, for what they have become, because that’s all they ever intended to be in the first place. It takes a special kind of impoverishment to start out as a collaborative writing site, and end up being a social media platform anyway.
But the unnerving and acrophobic unzoom goes higher and wider in scope than to include just dopamine-diluted, and drug-addled minds splattered upon the crude asphalt of a social media platform. The extravagance seen in the SCP Wiki over time is the same unrestrained colonization of an ideal that has turned the whole Internet into a click-bait wasteland (certainly not everywhere but more recognizable as such on the whole over the decades). An invasive advertising has been contorted and corrupted in this new Internet 2.0. The product is no longer primarily an item or an object, but the user. Similarly, the primary product of the SCP has become individuals and writing-as-brand, not the writing itself; not the writer more separated from it by an ideal, as it was in the beginning. (Ironic that those who didn’t pine for such recognition became the most famous, no?)
When the winner of a K-contest is decided, is it more the author who experiences a celebratory “0–to-1” moment, or the article that is written? At some loci, the answer is “both equally”. However, the answer becomes more one way or the other the further out or in you move to the site’s community; whether in the satellite spaces where historically the name of authors hasn’t carried well to; or the interacting community, who are so aware of the authors, they may have in part voted based on author brand recognition to award the victory in the first place. Even so, now we see the demand for invasion of author recognition into those satellite spaces as well — disguised cleverly, subconsciously, duplicitously — under a facade of proper attribution. In reality, it is the refusal to accept an insult to the ego of authors who, unique in the history of SCP’s attention, desire for their names to auto-travel as far as the works do, in places more than just the immediate community.
This is the serialized, radiographic impression of a cancerous invasion and metastasis.
Complicating the subtlety of this, and similar to the ignorance of social media participants as their primary roles as products and their technological services as repurposed wiretaps, there is an analogous, larger participating audience that is equally unaware to how the SCP Wiki has been repurposed over years as a tool for the gratification and self-satisfaction of a relative few. But more so than these few nodes of unwavering shamelessness — for they are not as powerful as they like to think — is the way an impressionable demographic of 15–19 year olds observe the success these relative few have, which convinces them to emulate individuals who have the wherewithal to know better than to position themselves and such behavior as model. These youngsters grow up in the environment not knowing any better; to them, the narcissistic behavior is as natural as rain.
The structural allowance of unchecked, incentivized power discrepancies are to blame for the descent of SCP into an unrepresentative reputation of subclinical pedophilia. Where does the worship of the veteran author who then abuses their status come from? It comes from an unmitigated culture of celebrity, one no one objects to in hope of participation in, itself resulting from too much popularity for the maturity of the individual recipients to wield responsibly; a culture of habilitation that the architects and leaders of SCP have had ample foresight and opportunity to manage appropriately, but who haven’t; authorizing others as they do themselves to participate in the pleasance. Thus, the behaviors and actions of a relative few artificially-selected and corrupt have diffused, like concentrated tar in a jar of water, into the potentially neutral pool of users, who now are well past the limit necessary in order to remain protected from the temptation that they too can share in that false image of name-brand success and “happiness”.
In the same way that staff didn’t want to recognize that the cost for the 2021 Death of the Author was a high but invisible price tag, something softened to the acuity of the eye by its optimistic (or foolish) postponement in to the future on the behalf of immediately-available jingling and sparkly things, the primary actors of the SCP Wiki also haven’t recognized the high price tag for recklessly turning the Wiki into a similar click-bait competition for article metrics and vote accumulation, and the sort of Hollywood-grade mentality for recognition it facilitates. They still haven’t recognized it, even after this. The cost of this is incredibly real.
Even the dramatic analogy to the wrecking of the planet seems extremely coherent here; it is not unlike the slowly bubbling environmental damage that exorbitant and myopic hedonism in energy consumption has quietly, but irrevocably and suddenly, meant for the globe; the aberrations a confluence of a microscopic tapestry, seen progressed and macro enough in major weather systems. The sad result is a de-beautification of the community and culture, the stripping of creative fertility from the land, the replacement of flowers by insatiable weeds, and the beyond-threshold conversion of what sustains the entire structure into something pointedly self-serving.
Just as it has destroyed its own nature, SCP has at the same time domesticated that wild animality of containment fiction too, made it to sit quietly while it is pruned for a staged prancing that it will either be rewarded or admonished for; by the same outstretched hand that gives it treat or leash, and to the degree that the neutered beast reflects positively on that hand during their unconsentual and evolutionarily-embarrassing procession.
The sources of the major woes here are not as concentrated and convenient as the poor decisions of one or two prominent and now-banned, behind-them perverts. The mechanics are more insidious and buried than that; than even these skeletons that are being addressed in the age limit discussion. What drives this fall from grace in our premiere containment fiction community is less an unchecked appetite of desire, but the much more insidious lure of a self-consciousness cowering under the shade of this egotistical paradise. The desire to have the sort of control and recognition demanded at SCP is not the lust of a tyrant, though it does its best impression of it, but the armored plea of something that might have zero control, and that is terrified by that possibility.
For all its indelible influence produced by the Series 1 articles, the cultural moments that SCP generates now are simple (despite trying to be more complex) and fleeting appearances that quickly disappear into the surface of things; for so too are the motives of those who make them, their impulses, inspirations, their impetuses, their philosophies (or lack thereof)… not that the prototypical SCP author doesn’t have high hopes for their works, but that an impatient madness hastily pushes them, drenches them in anticipation of positive reception and praise, forward to publish. It is as if watching prodded cattle deluded into the belief that their ascent into the slaughterhouse — this remarkable shelter unafforded by the mediocrity of the rest in the herd who, vicarious, onlook in awe and in a secret envy — is in fact a heavenly appointment.
Now being not what it purports to be at all, SCP defaults, indolently and with a smug mockery of the better parts of itself until the very last moment, into a racket that extorts writing by a false mutual respect with the contributor in order to extract more self-idolization; a product so inexorably fusing both the Wiki’s brand and that of the individual that one can become above the law, and too big to fail. (Thus creating a tailored space for shadow administration to set and thrive in.) Through its staff and those at the height of this racket that hides itself even from those who enact it, SCP maintains as scantly as possible a front of legitimacy by which to deflect accusations, and manhandle anyone who recognizes and addresses it for what it is. The mechanics of incentive there scare participants into consensus of a community-specific definition for such honest assessments as immoral madness; the members conditioned by an eligibility for a prize-to-be (namely efame; that requiring networking; that requiring inclusion; that requiring good behavior; that requiring obedience; that requiring a pseudo-religion) which has crushed any semblance of what should have made the experience above the mundane partisanship of social media platform echo chambers. (The “mad” here experience the same treatments as they have historically anywhere else, especially by religious constructs.) It is a fraud that has been organized by a self-multiplication of faux-significance into an exact inversion of what it should be, and at an enormous scale; not an image of artists pouring forth their expression, but one of consumers pouring into the negative spaces where that expression should be.
The consequences of this are then more significant and more damaging, the repercussions more serious, the conspiracy more systematic; those entering into it are less informed and less guarded about what they are walking into than they would be in, say, a porn community. It’s the reprehensibility of the family member performing the abduction; one who should have been more trustworthy. As with any racket, the longer it perpetuates itself successfully, the harder and harder it is to prosecute as fraud. All that are left are individual cases scattered like peepholes in the barrier of a status quo; the sustained impressions and intractable questions that result from careful, attentive analysis; the likes of which are shortened to “conspiracy theory” and discarded as pointless opinion by those unwilling to be as honest with themselves and SCP’s effects on them.
The history of SCP then is the history of how a potentially revolutionary writing subgenre has been mutated into a brute expression of authority, power, and manipulation under false pretenses. It is no wonder, in retrospect and with this understanding, that widespread abuse would be a result. It now finds itself domineering over a collateral of individuals less and less convinced of its necessity, and more wary of its pitfalls. And that brings us to today, where the staff, those charged with fixing this and more because they didn’t prevent any of it, have not ever had as haphazard, granular, and frequent of policy proposals spilling from their babbling endangerment. It’s as if they’re demanding from themselves proof that they are essential.
When we sweep our eyes over the comparatively arid kingdom of SCP and try not to compare it to the shimmering radiance that it still could be, and we find that sodden plot of desert that used to be the central oasis fountfully repleting the land with vibrancy, can we still conclude that it is in any respectable way set apart from the social media giants that entomb the mummified remains of the the Internet 1.0, what it once was and the ideals it once represented? Is SCP today really that measure better; or is it instead, like the scrambling for a lack of appropriate policy regarding their underage users, the negative space of how much better it should have been?
© Lack of Lepers
