Self-Reference

This blows my mind. Me and Björn had a discussion about Internet flame-hate-wars-things, where people dedicate a lot of time to hating and insulting each other, and came into webcomics, which are a hot potato. Encyclopedia Dramatica points out that lulz and anti-lulz complement each other, which seems to be true in the case of webcomics as each webcomic with a fanbase has a complementing anti-fanbase of approximately the same size. For everyone who loves a certain comic enough to read it often, there is someone who hates it enough to spend lots of time bashing it.

Now observe how self-referential our culture has gone. This is a truly stunning example of how impossibly convoluted Internet Culture can be.

First we have the webcomic, Dominic Deegan. Following this up, the people of the Internets have made a parody on Dominic Deegan, called Dominic Durgan., presumably due to disliking Dominic Deegan and wanting to poke fun on it. Then, this very same guy has made a review of his own comic which is done to parodize his review of Dominic Deegan. And then, finally, this.

This baffles me to no end. Our entire culture has gone ouroboros. It's like we've built up this cultural tower, slowly, during the centuries, and now are speed-building a rickety cultural skyscraper on earlier foundations. Now it's culture to bash people who bash artworks which in turn are impossible to understand outside our cultural foundation. If we finally make contact with aliens, they'll have to read, watch and play every work of fiction since the Bible to even make some sense out of us. Wow.