There’s Something Under the Floorboards (at SCP)

OPINION/ANALYSIS — It’s making itself more apparent every month.

It’s a Sunday. Either defined as the beginning or the end of the week depending on who you ask; as a holy duty to rest or an invitation to laziness— the deep breath before the show; the snooze button before the wake. I try to not write on Sunday unless the opportunity presents itself with urgency. Writing, as much as I love it, is kinda like work. Instead, I use the day and its spiritual softness to do something just as important and romantic as writing — reading. And there’s always plenty to catch up on in the confic space. Sometimes, it can feel like trying to take a sip out of a fire hydrant.

First I go to RPC and read the remainder of The New Frontier entries, which I generally enjoy. Characteristically, I think the piece that won shouldn’t have, but that the most deserving was at least among the top. The pace at RPC of articles is Goldilocks; not too cold, not too hot. For newer articles since the contest, I notice that the ratings reflect the content as I would rate it, so I don’t vote and move on; people have done that job already.

Next, it’s onto SCP Commune. I do this probably once a month, because the submissions there in that time typically can be read in one sitting. There isn’t as much activity or product here. That’s not to say this is a slight, and I enjoy each entry that I read (except for the one I see that heralds the Commune as a new host for the Anomaly Classification System). CWW, say what you want about them, has gathered some real talent around themself. The Commune is easily the most inspiring of the genre I’ll read today; it’s quality over quantity there. A tale by Etoile is shockingly beautiful. At some level, I don’t care what kind of person this is; this prose is miraculous and I’m better off for reading it. The belief that there is good in knowing the author beyond what is on the page is a bad one. I read all of the tale, tales being things that I usually roll my eyes at by the second or third sentence.

Finally, it’s onto SCP. I save this one for last not because I think it’s best, but because I dread it; I’ve been trying to put it off. Increasingly, I dislike reading the SCP Wiki. There is more and more of a saturating scent there, like too much cheap cologne; the suffocating, baleful euphoria of itself as a place to see and be seen. There is usually at least one thing there that provides something new to be critical of. It’s the most reliable motivator of the hand to the face. No exception today.

The first exhibit is SCP-6000-J. I admire the ballsiness and chuckle at the addition of the in-joke “Did you know that world-renowned writer Stephen King was once hit by a car? Just something to consider,” and it confounds my instinct that I don’t like this. It’s a -J and it made me laugh, so.

The further away from the chuckle I get, the more issues I have with this. It’s like a morsel with an upfront sweetness but that turns very bitter and for much longer post-pharynx. In a world without a walkthrough guide in the comments, I would have had to read the entirety of The Great (SCP-6000-J) Gatsby to get the laugh (it’s near the end). Would it have been worth it? I mean, the novel is very well written, so maybe. But by this level of indulgence, the“ctrl+F-and-replace” of “SCP-6000-J” seems like a lazy rebranding. It’s a quick inclusion of much better writing in a much worse place; like prancing a horse through a dive bar, or putting a luxury pillow on the ground outside. Why is this “6000” except that it’s kinda around the time of the SCP-6000 contest?

In addition, I wouldn’t have gotten the joke if I didn’t know the tucked-away history of that phrase within the SCP Wiki. So this is pretty insular.

The obvious questionable legality of this is quickly resolved; the novel has been recently released into the public domain. This sort of fun is happening all over the internet, it turns out; nothing at all unique here. It’s more like a rendition of planking (that old fad). It turns out to be a sat-on mound of other people’s recycled ideas. My final conclusion; this is literary necrophilia with a machine doing all the exhumation.

In a conversation about it in the SCF Discord, an esteemed colleague of mine says that “the community is ever more willing to sacrifice basic artistic integrity and dignity for the sake of whatever insufferable meme is popular this week,” pointing to milk Jesus and SCP-309-J as supporting evidence. I can’t disagree. There is something underneath all of this, something moving slowly, almost imperceptibly; something larger than the floor itself and threatening to splinter it, open it up wide... the bottom floor of things here reduced to rock.

I continue on, catching up with the most recent pages posted successfully to the SCP, but I can’t get away from the festering. Next it’s the “joke tale” SCP Wiki Discussion Page Simulator, co-written by a disgraced Staff member who was kicked off for habitual harassment, allegedly of a sexual nature by some. I love me some memes, and this is a great drawing of a good one, but this is just disappointing. This is what r/scp or r/dankmemesatsite19 is for. The added trick of your profile picture being pointed at by the drawing if you are logged in again makes this only a joke that people inside the community can fully get, although the gist is still there when logged out. Really cripples it though. The immersion these days seems to be squarely in the sociology of site participation, not in the outward-facing prose. This is the visual equivalent of the cliched WikiDot username code insert, and it’s another moment where SCP’s insularity and in-group-dependence is unapologetically made integral.

I try to move on. I’m just trying to catch up here. But soon I come across SCP-This-Was-A-Bad-Idea-J. Why do I keep doing this to myself? Why do I keep clicking on titles designated as -J, which today seems to be a new way of tagging the lowest quality works on site? The author note on the discussion page reads: “I posted this in the shitpost channel of a Discord server, and someone was like “please post this” (to the wiki).” The rest of the comment that isn’t there reads: “So I did, because the suggestion is enough to bridge the gap between a literal shitpost channel and the SCP Wiki.” This hunch turns out to be correct, as the a̶r̶t̶i̶c̶l̶e̶ post is successful, suggesting there really isn’t much difference between that shitpost channel and the SCP Wiki, and certainly not the tastes of those deciding the direction of quality on the site.

They say insanity is a sort of fractured hope; that the repetition of the same behavior will result in a different outcome. I continue to scroll on, endorsing the justification for my being institutionalized. And I come across SCP-SQYD-J. I’m honestly not trying to post non-SCP things into the #confic-recommendations channel in the SCF Discord and only SCP things into the #facepalm channel, but that’s the way things are shaking out today. The page now loaded, the low quality font on screen makes it clear from the first millisecond of observation that this will be animated as a compressed .gif file. But it gets worse. The anomaly is a memetic textual one (the worst kind of anomaly) that replaces everything with:

くコ:彡

Ha.

Next there is an attempted joke version of a 001. By this point, the severity of the cringe and unfunny is beyond words. How is all this cluttering up SCP so easily these days?

I reiterate to myself; there has to be something underneath all of this that can be captured in words. Something just… off. In reviewing a Confic Magazine article written by a talented author that I’m reminded of, I see that Furret has already done the hard work for me:

“Nobody cared about this article except in the context of everything that isn’t writing, and that’s depressing.”

Now that’s what I call a store of value in words.

In threading this through these other entries, the stitching pattern makes itself apparent: these are the unmistakable memetic signatures of a social media platform. What’s off about them is that in each, the butt of the joke is at the expense of the site as a writing platform. SCP-6000-J is “funny” because this is a site meant for original works, these presumably of a high standard. The joke tale is 100% addressing the social side of writing here. The Japanese squid emoji sneaks by as a joke (I guess) on the pretense of documentation and its anomalies. The 001 is just a borrowed bulleted list item from SCP’s TV tropes website, replayed in-universe, barely.

With all these “layer 2” entries, the base layer of an actual writing site seems like a distant, crushed remnant. The weight straining the layer 1 is increasing thanks to an assumption so taken for granted, that it is undoing itself. The social layer is replacing the writing one as the base.

The thing under the floorboards is the crushed ideal of SCP as a respectable writing site first, and a social experience second.

It’s no surprise that we can see such things develop here, and in a feedback mechanism, they further encourage and define the environment, and prime future installments of this sort to be fit in that environment. The slow diseasing of the site into a social media platform, long-argued on this blog, is consistent with the gradual rise and nominal supremacy of a school of writing there, and a gaggle of cliquey authors behind it, that are defined by their efforts not as writers, but as salesmen. Their works are fueled by memetic as opposed to literary merit. The demographic of teenagers is leaned into now, not used as a pull-up bar for greater heights. These authors find analogy with some of the most crude advertising and philosophies of persuasion in the corporate market; AXE body spray’s hormonal pandemonium, Old Spice’s pec-flexing, women-want-me-guys-want-to-be-me style of absurdism. Suddenly, a fragrance product isn’t and almost shouldn’t be defined by what it is. Instead, it’s defined by everything it isn’t. The base layer is replaced.

This is a far cry from the humorous irreverence in SCP-____-J, which was a clever play on an in-universe stance, not the integral and explicit dependence on completely external ingredients. Currently, the backboard of the delivery that is relied upon to make the shot, at least in these -Js, is far out of universe; not an extension of the Foundation but a cessation of it, and into the popular culture that the site participants would further like to see themselves in.

A change of gears to recent the non-J articles yields similar results:

This conversion into a social media platform comes with many exploitable qualities. If we regard good writing as the goal here, none of them are in a positive direction. We won’t go into the mathematical field of Q analysis, but as a platform becomes more like a social media one, it becomes more and more predictable, anticipated and described by a sort of science that those who dominate the SCP Wiki can exploit. These relevant actors’ fluency in this exploitation is of course not mathematical or calculated, it being a skill and gift of intuition, not academics. Viruses, for example, don’t think about the science of what they are doing; they just do it, and do it well.

So that’s it then; these are Reddit posts. Experiencing the SCP Wiki and experiencing a social media site are objectively becoming more and more indistinguishable. Especially with humor. Amd with the boundaries between -J and MainList blurring more than ever, this increasingly means SCP’s standing as a reputable and legitimate writing community is retracting, and if you’ll excuse the male-centric analogy, basically a buried penis by now. Totally turtled. A group of popular authors leading this reversion are more focused on the spoils and fleeting euphoria of social media than the uniqueness of the SCP Wiki as a set-apart thing, and of the sanctity of writing itself more generally.

The bottom line is that talented writing is finding itself more at home elsewhere.