If ideas can be thought of as organisms, and the Internet a breeding ground, then what stands out about the environment is its lack of pressures. If you're a proto-giraffe in pre-Africa and you want to munch on some ur-leaves, you'd better grow a neck right-quick or you're not gonna make it.
But ideas, which typically thrive on reception, can survive - or, at least, exist, without being received. For an example, take this blog. Or, rather, don't, because by actually reading this blog, you'll considerably undermine my point, which is predicated on this blog having zero readers.
Yes, it's a philosophical minefield for those of us who construct arguments that immediately collapse under the weight of their own absurdity, but even we have a forum, whether it's here on Blogger, over there in Twitter, or far off in the artificial flamingo cloaca known as Youtube.
Often, this environment leads to the rise of ideas that, although they have the adaptive features to survive, simply wouldn't thrive in a harsher environment. The Lonely Island comedy troupe, for example, who were snatched up wholly by Saturday Night Live, are certainly funny and relatable enough to thrive in a nationally broadcast show, but they got their start, and their acclaim, on the internet. Also: furries. No, a sexual fetish for cartoon animals is not universal, but it is comprehensible and you'd be pretty behind the times if you didn't know by now what a furry was. You couldn't have, apropos of nothing, launched a Lonely Island or a Furry television program, but the internet gave them an environment without predators.
And of course, the internet provides an environment for ideas that, no matter how strong they might become, simply aren't adapted to a wider audience. And here we come to Youtube Poops, a phenomenon that deliberately rejects the notion of mainstream acceptance by virtue of its mere name. People can have serious, mainstream discussions over whether video games are art (they're not, by the way. They're experience, which is higher than art), but they can't do the same for something whose very genre contains the word "poop".
Youtube Poops are basically video and audio mash-ups, except without the concern for form and sense that the name "mash-up" implies. Poopers grab audio and video from any source they see fit(though there is a body of "canon" pooping material) and the result, on the whole, can be described as "Like Tim & Eric Awesome Show, except kind of weird."
[Translation Notes: Tim & Eric Awesome Show is already extremely weird]
Take NORMAN for example. It's a bit like... if the plot of the original episode were a person, and that person were exposed to a great deal of radiation. All the parts are still there, and relate to each other in much the same way, but the whole is altered terribly. And that one's in the top 50% of Youtube Poops as far as comprehensibility goes. Edging into the low end, there's LAST FEW POOPS MASHED ACID SHIT, by the same author, which has four previous Poops arranged in a square and running simultaneously.
And you have to ask yourself, why was this made? As entertainment, it's useless, even for people who would appreciate all four Poops on their own. The answer, partly, was that it was easy to make, but even that doesn't answer the basic question. And what of My Boy for 10 MINUTES, NO EDITS? It's based on a Youtube Poop standby, in which the King of Hyrule says "my boy" in the same ridiculous voice he says everything, but why ten minutes? Why eleven thousand views and five stars?
I posit that a Youtube Poop of this calibur represents the smallest measurable unit of human creative energy - that point where the will to create just barely results in action. And furthermore, that all future creative endeavors be measured in relation to this basic unit. "My Boy for 10 MINUTES, NO EDITS" is exactly one poop, and a larger, more labor-intensive, and bolder endeavor, like Citizen Kane, is, let's say, three mega-poops.
Well, this was a productive little piece, wasn't it? We (I) invented a way to measure human creativity. But to place us back on the original tack of this article for a moment, I'd like to point out that, although the mainstream isn't ready for Youtube Poops yet, it's almost ready. Tim and Eric or Wonder Showzen are almost as weird as some of the more sensible poops; perhaps it's just a matter of time.
Permitting ourselves to enjoy weirder and more abstract entertainment is no idle pastime; the less we demand that creative minds bow and bend to the objective truth of reality, the deeper we allow them to delve into the roiling chaos of how the mind experiences that reality. Like a Youtube Poop, our minds echo with words, flicker back and forth between moments and memories, inputs and ideas. There's something of value in that kind of expression, and Poopers are slouching towards it in a thousand different directions.
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