An apophany is defined as a moment where someone sees a connection that doesn’t literally exist. This is a column about the connections between literality. 

The Trump admin’s Department of Labor retweets a “hol up let him cook” meme. Zohran Mamdani’s social democratic policies, in a parody of ‘everybody gets a pony’ talk, are turned by supporters into anything from “free caesar salad and dirty martinis” to “punk girls in fishnets”. NBA free agency: Josh Hart (who obviously fouled Tim Hardaway Jr and kept the Pistons-Knicks series from going 7 games and is thus a declared Apophany enemy) tweets, “It’s 6:01 pm and I haven’t seen a Shams post yet. What happened to the game I love?” so r/NBA and Knicksmuse can clap like seals. This happens after his playoff nemesis Tyrese Haliburton mimics the Reggie Miller choke in the garden after hitting a game winner. On TikTok, a jarhead who does military cadences debuts one about Chuck Norris (If you can’t see him/he’s probably right behind you, oh ho ho.) I could go on, but I won’t because the point is this: calling anything Reddit is like saying everything is made of atoms. It goes without saying. 

I just finished Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, and what we’ll find instructive to understand Reddit is the book’s idea of Jes Grew: a ‘virus’ that’s mostly connected with jazz and dancing and other outbursts of Black American culture, all of which Reed goes to pains to connect to Haitian voudon practices and some fun conspiratorial alternate history about Egypt and Moses. In other words, Jes Grew is everything earthy, funky even, and according to a book I can’t access about P-Funk, Mumbo Jumbo’s plotline is basically given a sci-fi sheen in the P-Funk mythology, with Jes Grew replaced by the Funk. If you could come up with an opposing force that isn’t one of Ishmael Reed’s Knights Templars or The Wallflower Order (great name for the villains in a book about dancing), Reddit would be a great pick. Jes Grew is an embodiment of “the new thang…your style”. Reddit is about algorithms, and the more it trains its users on its own algorithms, the more Reddit they become. The quality of Reddit, its visible up and down arrows and accumulation of “karma”, creates an economy where the more like Reddit it is, the more likely it is to get upvoted. If you’ve ever had the experience of opening a Reddit thread, you’ll see the top comment is always the most obvious joke humanly possible, then a train of people riffing on that joke with more obvious jokes. 

Reddit is less a website than a mindset. The everything internet model has made it so for everyone it’s not so much if you use Reddit but how. I check r/soccer and r/sscnapoli daily and I obviously know the trick of using Reddit like Quora. I have even gotten into an argument on r/seriouseats over a pork loin that resulted in me deleting my account. Of course, that’s not what Reddit is. If we had to define Reddit, it would be easiest to go to the home page and see what’s been upvoted recently. That’s by design: “front page of the internet” is as much a confession as it is an expression of ethos. The internet, still the last great jump in communication technology, is a compounding of all existing mediums from film to radio. In a sense, we should expect a banality not unlike the front page of our institutional papers, with a very important distinction: we are the internet. We are not the editorial board of The New York Times or The Washington Post. We are the editors, we decide what goes on the front page via the upvote. On some level, there’s something beautifully democratic about that. I’ve read Ursula K. LeGuin and Mark Fisher. I’m not immune to utopian thinking when something is novel. The novelty has long drained out of the internet, though. It’s a bad newspaper and a worse place to live. Being the “front page” is nothing to brag about. 

Usually when we talk about the internet being a bad place, what’s being referred to is its grottier places: 4chan and LiveLeaks and anonymous trolls. What is less discussed is that when you take the common denominator of who uses the sites that makes one “online”, say Twitter, Bluesky, Reddit and the odder parts of Instagram, is that the great clomping foot of Online congeals everything into a digestible paste we call “content”. Like the foot of the person stomping on grapes to make wine, it’s the pressure of the Online brain that creates content. 

An example, directly from Reddit. Hudson Mohawke was a relatively respected electronic music producer who worked on Yeezus (probably my favorite Kanye album, truthfully). But I know exactly what you’re thinking of because I am as much a part of online as I am a critic of online. You might know Hudson Mohawke instead from his song “cbat”, which was included in an anonymous Reddit story about how a man put the song on his sex playlist and could only finish to the song because it had “a good rhythm for lovemaking”. The song itself is a repetitive, abrasive piece of electronic music based around the sound of a creaking door. 

There are going to be people who read this piece and immediately know the story. Perhaps they like “cbat” but if they don’t, I would argue it’s because the internet changes the context of the song to a meme and there was never really a context where you could encounter the song and enjoy it as a piece of music. Now the weird sex song, its context is the internet’s. For a similar and even more obscure example, witness how “EAST”, an Earl Sweatshirt song based around a single loop of an accordion with some poetic lyrics about recuperating/binge drinking in New York City after a series of personal tragedies becomes a song for people to try and do overcooked Jon Hendren “your shoes look like Dracula’s fleshlight!” style burns about the beat. Abrasion can’t be a technique or have its own artistic reasons for being in a song. It is there only so that if dank memers catch wind of it, all they can do is say “This beat sounds like a fam!” The foot crushes the grapes, it ferments and we get content. And when we consider where the internet crosses over, what the user base shares in common, it is culture entirely set to the average of everyone’s interests, never the most interesting thing about anybody’s taste. Rather than use this as an elitist battering ram, this should be understood that because taste is something that we develop over time as our abilities to contextualize art change, grow, disintegrate or whatever it is nothing less than a cultural biography. 

Reddit, in its Library of Babel-esque largesse has captured forums, which had their own codes, rules, moderation standards, cultures. Because forum usage used to be kept to the provenance of the connoisseur, there was a degree of community knowledge that could occasionally track with other forms of intelligence. For instance: while not a traditional forum, I found out about a lot of obscure art and music just from reading AV Club’s comment sections, even about other things. I don’t want to overpraise the dominant nerd culture of the time, either: in its love of deferring and defusing every possible situation by blindly quoting seasons 4-8 of The Simpsons, there were the rumblings of this maddeningly blind consensus enforced by nerd prejudice. But reading a subreddit for any of your interests is to be trapped into a conga line of nerds wearing blinders and walking off of a cliff.

Charlie Parker isn’t going to start playing “Cherokee” out of nowhere on Reddit. There is always a reference to make someone will get and recognize you and smile and nod with a placidity that says, “I understood the reference.” And because you are both of Reddit, you recognize this as your country man, always playing to an easily placated crowd. Reed calls the need for domination and tidiness Atonist, in reference to the late Egyptian worship of Aten as opposed to their pantheon of Gods. I’ll not risk sounding crazy by connecting the red Reddit logo to the Aten disk, but at the very least, the logic of the “front page of the Internet”, a thing that was supposed to explode the need for “front pages” is Atonist to its core. 

Reddit is not the only thing to blame, of course. The internet has been slowly corralled into vile enclosures, sites that make the experience of logging on worse, a complete drain on soul and spirit. Ryan Broderick writes that Twitter under Musk is “Reddit moving at the speed of Tumblr”. Bluesky’s ostensible liberalism (which is of the self-serving American suburban variety, in love with civil rights until it means they might merely have to share) is equally tied to the affect of Reddit. If everything is becoming Reddit, then the only option might be to burn down the crops and hope something better jes grows. Otherwise, we may one day log on and see two vast trunkless legs of stone, and they’ll be the Reddit aliens’s dopey little feet.

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