With Ease, Modern SCP Authors Swiftly Annihilate Staff’s Feeble Attempt at a Good Thing
NEWS/OPINION — When you have a very sick culture, this is the inevitable sort of behavior that results.
Now that this new stage has been built, will they come? Look for a sharp uptick in the frequency of short articles; authors hoping to get a chance to be on this new, very visible list. If that happens, at least we’d get shorter articles out of it… now that’s what I call using something’s weaknesses against itself!
Recently and uncharacteristically, I said that SCP Staff had done something great; the creation of the “Shortest New Pages” collection, new to the sidebar. Part of a larger discussion about SCP’s inability to self-impose adequate containment procedures for its own genre, this was in my opinion a good and smart move; there’s a runaway selection of a fashion-industry-level irrationality towards more and more article bloat. We now have SCP authors trying to be J.R.R. Tolkien, or the literary equivalent of Wagner (minus the Nazi appropriation of course), out of an inexhaustible and expanding narcissism that defeats any reason for restraint. (A future, written post will be about how and why this narcissism is incentivized — or at least not disincentivized where able— at SCP, and potentially any other social-media-heavy containment fiction platforms to boot.)
I made that post applauding Staff because — believe it or not — I want to give credit where it’s due, when it’s due; precisely because it’s due so rarely. I am usually very critical of SCP and the Staff especially, but I would be their loudest cheerleader if they started doing things right, steering the ship in the right direction.
Nothing gold can stay however. Not in this culture.
While it was expected that there would be a Black-Friday-like rush of eager 49ers and Sooners to the new land of opportunity being offered, it turns out even I wasn’t pessimistic enough regarding how long it would remain a healthy effort. The greater SCP authorship plunged this good idea into the dirt in impressive and record time. The amount of rust and tarnish that’s now on the idea makes it unsalvageable.
“Maybe SCP will be able to provide those containment procedures for its own genre that I mentioned last post.” — My dumb ass again
Nope.
The best image as analogy here is one where a really irresponsible teenager is given a Ferrari. The kid, overwhelmed in the discrepancy between the profound dignity of the car and the immaturity of the driver that would reduce the work of art and automotive architecture into an extension of their genitalia, the teenager revs the machine, utilizing all the horsepower and pristine engineering for the sole purpose of looking cool to random onlookers. After peeling out, the car accelerates too rapidly for the skill of the driver, and careens off of a cliff 100 yards away, instead of being slowed by the brakes and steering so that it could continue down the road in controlled glory.
The trend for short articles has been so quickly and irrevocably driven into the ground, that the only value left in it is this; a meta-article on why there are so many short articles in the database suddenly (which we might add, could and maybe should be a -J, but forget all that). That is to say, it isn’t the bottom of the barrel (it has already been scraped clean), but picking the barrel up, and scraping the face of its underside.
Having exhausted the supply and demand for shorter articles as far as the primary universe of the SCP Foundation is concerned, — something that might have happened anyway given the post-6K vibes, and probably with less ephemerality— the appetite now has driven opportunity to the pataphysical level in search of minable upvotes.
A reader of SCP articles and their comments will notice and agree without any demonstration necessary that recent comments regarding the over-saturation of short articles are not unique to this one. The critique and observation has become as trite and overdone as the articles themselves.
The article itself is not worthy of harsh critique; it’s meh. Given that the “____ memetic/infohazard/cognitohazardous effect that does ____ to SCP Database documents” is a pretty reliable trope, this article represents the inevitable selection of that last, lone student from the gym class lined up to be selected for the game; only one option left for the team whose turn it is to pick. It doesn’t rise to the level of being reacted to very enthusiastically in either direction.
There are two real takeaways from this wreck. First, you can’t trust the production class of SCP to be able to resist acting like a cloud of locusts if given the opportunity, instantly voiding the land of its long-term potential in short-sighted eagerness and mimicry.
This is because the SCP is collectively defined by very short-horizon preferences. This extends from the article content to the managerial style of the Staff. The fast-food culture there is championed in actions by individuals who are not interested in writing containment fiction as a store of value — something that is good in all the right ways to be essentially timeless and that transcends the catered-to demographic of 15–19 year olds — but instead favor easy and cheap mass-production ideas that churn out whatever can be capitalized on in an effort to frack the market dry. The arrogance of their triumph from this approach is a catalyst for more of the same, only faster and with more momentum.
The opportunity for upvotes again parallels SCP nicely with severely advanced capitalism, specifically its marketing arm (itself having by that point outgrown any incentive for applying its own breaks… see my SCP article on that). The majority of contributors are politicians and social-media influencers before they are writers, and they do not see this as a blemish. What SCP authors call success is an incurable disease. The myopia and lack of long-vision from this is so bad, that it takes an comparatively ancient user to remind the current generation that this has been done before:
Second, Staff doesn’t understand the nature of their userbase, whether by ignorance or by denial… something which no one is surprised about by now because they keep demonstrating it prolifically. We all saw this coming, and now the interest and value in the “Shortest New Pages” hub is passee. The unfortunate effect of this — always an equal and opposite one — will be the acceleration of article bloat. The breaks installed on the car didn’t work. The inertia is too great. It’s like giving a stimulus check to a meth-addict who has blown all their money on meth; what do you think they’re going to do with it? Invest in rehab?
The larger and more distressing observation here is that SCP’s quality and ability to define its representative work by the discipline necessary to make great art (something the confic genre deserves) is caught in a unidirectional flow of entropy. By this point, efforts can be made to temporarily halt or slow this increase in entropy, with the remaining true artists being a decreasing and less powerful minority, but these are palliative and superficial, not truly resolving anything causing the ailment. It’s as if the SCP Wiki has crossed the event horizon and looks more doomed the more it attempts to flail in the opposite direction.
In the meantime, those responsible for driving the Wiki directly off the cliff are at least getting to feel better about the attention their egos are getting while doing a good Dr. Strangelove impression; learning to love the bomb in dramatic fashion on its way to the ground. As we are witnessing, that death will be a disgusting and painful thing to witness. But there’s too much agony in this terminally-diseased thing to not be relieved, even applaud, once it is finally ended.
Edit: The note at the end that tries to grasp at a more profound justification for the gimmick is strange because it argues against its own setting and use as a gimmick. The anomaly is left as something that the Foundation should fight against, due to their “standards” for documentation, but this misses the point because short articles aren’t necessarily bad; they’re only repped as bad right now because people, including the author, feel the need to capitalize on the flavor of the week. Write the damn long-form document instead, then; not some retro-fitted grand theory of unification and hugs. This end lands like a treacherously bumpy plane, the captain telling those getting off that everyone is closer and stronger because of the near-death experience. It namedrops the reader for crying out loud and has to escape into pataphysics to be even remotely included; and out of place then!
