I can finally say I've really made it—I'm currently the target of circlejerk.blog (archive). I'm touched, as I don't really think I'm worthy of being satirized, but since I have been, I'm going to annoyingly share my thoughts and kill the frog.
circlejerk.blog isn't new to the bit. An archived about page is upfront about the satire, labelling itself "an art project":
If you’re feeling a sting of recognition, perhaps it’s time to examine why your life so closely mirrors a cliché ripe for parody. And yes, this was conjured by the very AI that the white, middle-aged tech evangelists — who paved the digital road for this site — so fervently idolize. Chew on that. In its previous iteration, there were many posts like The Last Tab, a mock eulogy for browser tabs in favour of genAI agents doing your browsing for you, with a comment section of hedge-everything replies underneath speaking in 🤖 emoji. You can browse the archives for dozens more posts like this.
Circlejerking has been a hobby of the Internet for decades, and of men for millennia. r/Circlejerk was founded on Reddit on December 10, 2008, built to mock the site's hivemind of reflexive catchphrases and self-congratulatory consensus. r/Circlejerk mimics the tone of sincere Reddit to expose how much of "sincere Reddit" is just people performing agreement at each other. It spawned a taxonomy of spinoffs: r/fitnesscirclejerk, r/engineeringcirclejerk, and so on.
In 2020, playwrights Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley staged Circle Jerk, a Pulitzer-finalist livestreamed satire about online trolls and mocking a hivemind's self-image. The aesthetic and badges. Building a fake earnest website to satirize earnest websites is cataloged on the
IndieWeb wiki, alongside a deliberately unusable UI called User Inyerface. Anyways, back to circlejerk.blog, I want to praise the work done to mimic Unstory's site. It's a very convincing 1:1 mimicry, and his writing mannerisms are nailed, though not the substance of what he writes—which I'll get into.
I've been thinking about how I want to approach responding to this. The archives and previous iterations of circlejerk.blog target the stereotypical IndieWebber—what I imagine to be a Portland-esque cishet white guy hipster that's techbro adjacent; an online nerd that's remarkably placid and polite. As Ava recently pointed out, robots can easily parody this.
And I have to concede that a lot of that description does fit me, but at the same time, that isn't who I am. I'm a native boy from Winnipeg—I'm not going to get upset at someone poking fun at me. My people have always been quick to laughter and taking the piss. I love being the butt of the joke, because it means nobody else is getting hurt. I play it straight on this blog because I've been a clown my entire life, but I'm a deeply unserious person.
If anything, I am disappointed at the punches pulled by this satire. Although someone unfamiliar with Unstory might think this is accurate to his character, I can assure you it's far off. The real Unstory wrote things like how those on the Internet are full of "activists, people who think they are cats, and those who feel the need to announce their mental illness." and told me how my "mind can invent gods, fall in love with an anime character, and call that seeking." He views IndieWeb events as mere "Idiot challenge, #shitfest, stupidity festival." That is incendiary. Something with real teeth to the bite.
Before I stumbled across this satire, I was thinking about the steelman argument against my latest post. For instance, you could argue that the webmaster didn’t “die” because the web got too complex; the title got replaced by more accurate job roles. That's simply how language works, rather than some sort of tragedy. Google rebranding “Webmasters” to “Search Central” was a marketing decision by a company that never cared about the term in the first place.
Or that hosting a static HTML page on Neocities is not actually "mastering the web." A historical webmaster managed servers, security, databases, email, and user accounts. Changing the meaning of the title and claiming victory.
Or that my universalism is hollow, and trying to argue that “it doesn’t matter if you speak English,” is hypocritical when my entire essay and every single resource I listed are in English. I say it’s not about labels then spend paragraphs praising IndieWeb, web revival, and specific communities. I can’t have it both ways.
There are many flaws you could point out, and the reason I don't address all of these is because the essay is already thousands of words long and hedging just dilutes the important point I was trying to make.
Anyways, I suppose my point is I desperately want to see more satire and humour in these spaces. Lighten the fuck up, subvert expectations, say things that are a little inflammatory once in a while. This does not mean to be hurtful or malicious, and it is a real art to execute that properly.
I think of Chi-Jean and Wiisakaychaak from tales. Those who make mistakes, act foolishly, and break rules. These are tricksters who shape the world and teach humans how to live.
Gluttonous, foolish, always getting caught in their own trap, and given standing in old stories because of the foolishness, not despite it. Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor came up with the term survivance. Survival and resistance. And it describes how trickster storytelling refused the story colonization was trying to tell about them. Trickster humour is a Trojan horse. We can use shared laughter to slip past someone's defenses and land empathy where an argument would've bounced off.
The Trickster is an imperfect hero. Trickster tells us truths about ourselves and reveals sides of our nature that we might be more comfortable not to acknowledge. Through his actions all values come into being. The trickster is a paradox. As a shape shifter Trickster is all things to all people. The Trickster, by instructive example, allows us to break out of our stereotypes, whether imposed by our culture, our families or ourselves. He demonstrates the dangers that lie in wait for those with voracious appetites.
—[Métis Mythology and Folklore]