Honestly, I swear I’m almost done with my obsession with Dead Internet Theory. Just not yet. Give me one more thought, and then I’m back to whining about whatever I was whining about last week, or rereading a 30-year-old cyberculture book and pretending my opinions are still relevant.
Yesterday, in typical conversation with some friends, I casually floated my half-serious idea that maybe we should all just retreat to GeoCities or MySpace and become digital nomads in places where bots fear to tread (you know, typical Saturday night beer with the geeks). If the bots do stumble across us, they’ll probably assume we’re 20-year-old fossils and shuffle on like paleontologists ignoring a plastic dinosaur. That’s when a friend just had to start my ADOCHD brain with one silly off-handed comment. “Yeah, it’s sort of like culture jamming the ads back in the 90’s. Make the medium into the message.”
Huh. I hadn’t thought of it that way. The old détournement, vandalizing the ad, twisting the slogan until it shows its belly of absurdity. Sure, I wasn’t consciously channeling Guy Debord’s ghost but I had just talked about him two posts ago and completely failed to make the connection, but maybe my subconscious had its flannel shirt tied around its waist this whole time.
Unfortunately, two or three beers reminiscing about Adbusters and the Cereal Box campaign, and my brain left-turned into a dark place: by that logic, was Shrimp Jesus AI’s attempt to culture jam us?
If you haven’t read my two previous posts in what I think I will now call a trilogy, Shrimp Jesus was a weird one-day meme ostensibly invented by AI and then promoted so hard by AI that it made itself viral without little or no human interaction. Whether it was contrived to explore and exploit the algorithm, or was just a completely unsubtle attempt to herd zombie bots and gullible people into ads, or just somebody accidentally leaving out the break in an recursive loop, we’ll never know, but the net effect was pure digital chaos, and it may have been very deliberate.
Think of it as the modern, weaponized cousin of the old abrupt.org “Nice Christians” cereal box. The difference is that the former was cute and concise. Christians can be hypocrites. Point taken. Move on. Shrimp Jesus was straight-up diabolical because I’m still trying to work out meaning in my head two years later. It took something sacred, familiar, and deeply human and remixed it into something that was simultaneously blasphemous, hilarious, inspirational, and unbelievably dumb. Depending on who you ask, Shrimp Jesus was either the funniest thing ever or proof that AI is Satan incarnate.
Debord warned us that in the age of the spectacle, coherence doesn’t matter, circulation does. Shrimp Jesus nailed that. The platform didn’t judge. It didn’t care whether you laughed, raged, or prayed. It just shoveled ads in your direction and gleefully cashed in. On another uncomfortable level, was the choice to make an absurdist meme out of something that should be sacred a simple joke, or was it a message from our future AI overlords? “I know what things you take comfort in, and I will turn them into jokes and weaponize them against you.” Seriously, it might be a warning shot disguised as slapstick.
Okay, yes, I have a degree and three decades of experience in software systems. AI doesn’t really know anything about what’s truly funny. It “knows” funny the same way a parrot “knows” Shakespeare. It takes concepts, quantifies them, shuffles them into increasingly random associations, and spits them back. Jesus riding a camel? Mild chuckle. Jesus in a racecar? Silly. Jesus made of shrimp? Funnier, because the logical associations are further apart. AI can push that subroutine endlessly and create this brand of absurdism on demand, but it’s still going to be variations on that theme. That’s funny, but it’s not humor. Real humor requires timing, escalation, and an understanding and reading of your audience. AI can run that subroutine and remix absurdity forever, but it can’t be classically funny.
Humor is still the exclusive perview of humanity. If AI wants to take us on with humor, then, oh, let’s throw down. If we need soldiers or icons to rally behind, then may I put forth by two idols, and the source of 84% of my sense of humor: Kenny Everett and Douglas Adams. Everett was half radio personality and half sonic anarchist who undermined commercials, mocked politicians, and trolled BBC censors to their breaking point. He was chaos incarnate when given a microphone and the prototype for culture jamming. I constantly try to come up with an analogy for Americans, but the closest I can come is the speed and mental dexterity of Robin Williams and the rock and roll cred and human lovability of Wolfman Jack. Adams, meanwhile, perfected the art of comedic escalation. The man took a joke about a telepathic fish and somehow wouldn’t let go of it until he turned it into proof that God doesn’t exist. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” doesn’t just parody science fiction, it mercilessly guts every trope, cliche, philosophy, and human pretension until it boldly states the answer to existence is “42,” and you just nod, and ten minutes later you catch up and realize his explanation makes sense.
These two men shaped my adult sense of humor. Yes, I also watched the first seasons of Saturday Night Live. Yes, I remember Johnny Carson in his prime. Yes, I was raised on far too many family-friendly sitcoms where the side-character’s catchphrase was plastered on t-shirts and lunch boxes. Yes, I think most of that is funny. Everett and Adams, however, taught me that humor isn’t just entertainment, it is also surgical, invasive, and disruptive. It’s the last tool left when systems grow too big to confront directly. Humor is a wrench in the gears of the machine.
This is why I keep circling back to Shrimp Jesus. Everyone else just saw another weird viral thing. I saw a test, a signal, and an inkling that the machine is watching, it’s learning, and now it’s starting to imitate our tricks. What if Shrimp Jesus was more than a meme? What if it was the first truly self-generated détournement? A flex from Debord’s spectacle itself? It might be the machine parodying us, daring us to notice.
If so, this is war, and the best weapon in our arsenal is escalation by absurdity. We shall laugh on the beaches, we shall guffaw in the comment sections, we shall chortle in the Tweets and in the Threads, we shall smirk in the blogs; we shall never surrender. Drown the signal until it collapses under its own weight. Or as Picard once thundered, “The line must be drawn here! No further!” Sure, AI can draw better, speak smoother, and think faster, but satire and absurdity are still the perview of humanity. We can’t surrender those concepts to an equation or algorithm. This isn’t just my prejudice. It’s survival!
Shrimp Jesus wasn’t just some meme. It was the spectacle parodying itself, monetizing absurdity, testing whether stupidity could be automated. And guess what? Most people didn’t notice. I did, though. I caught the echo of Everett’s irreverence and Adams’ cosmic absurdity. Cue my best Bane impersonation. “AI, you merely adopted stupidity. I was born in it.”
Yes, I know I sound like a paranoid crank scribbling in the margins of a conspiracy zine the same way Debord scribbled manifestos in Paris cafés. Everett smuggled chaos into primetime. Adams declared the meaning of life as a joke and got away with it. If they were crazy, then sign me up for the asylum. The Internet is dead. The spectacle is alive. And now, absurdity itself has become a battlefield. If AI can parody culture, then culture must parody AI harder. If AI can hijack our defenses … religion, comedy, metaohorical meaning … we have to double down on these things until they break the machine’s teeth. You want a war of absuridity, we’ll give you one.
Okay, not exactly Frank Herber’s Butlerian Jihad, I know. May Shrimp Jesus forgive us all.
