Sarcasm Killed the Internet

Here are a few facts¹:

• Regression to the mean no longer applies. On Social Media™, the average has been displaced by the viral. Posts that have been seen by thousands of people outnumber the posts that have been seen by only a few.

• Humans have this innate urge to respond to things that are wrong.

  This is by design²: falsehoods that fester are harmful, so of course it’s beneficial for people to have an impulse for correcting each other.

This can be be weaponized by posting things that can be read as sarcasm. It doesn’t really matter which part is meant to be sarcastic, if any! What matters is that there are people who read it that way. And the best part is: none of this has to be conscious on the part of the author! Because of survivorship bias, things that go viral are by definition³ wholly divorced from the author. As a post leaves its original audience, its meaning changes with the audience it gains and that new audience’s context and biases.

The existence of sarcasm creates a fractal of in-groups and out-groups, a continuum of understanding that encompasses every possible context and every possible misunderstanding. It infects every possible message, no matter how serious, with the possibility of ambiguity.

There’s only one possible conclusion to draw from this: Sarcasm has killed the internet.

And I know what you’re thinking: Maybe I’m being sarcastic! It would be very on-brand to make a post about sarcasm, and then say something so serious that it cannot be serious! This is a ploy to make this post go viral by letting its audiences argue with each other in the comments!

But make no mistake, I am being entirely serious. (Although the arguments will still happen, but instead of being fuelled by the entire post they’ll be fuelled by the one sentence about arguing.) The internet, nay, the world would be a better place without sarcasm. This is my hill, and I will die on it⁴.

Even still, you may choose to interpret this post as a commentary on sarcasm: that I’m writing this in the hopes that it is read as sarcasm, even though I explicitly say that this is not my intention.

That’s fine! For the record, though, it is not my intention. But if you do choose to interpret it that way (and I can’t stop you!) I hope you leave just a little more conscious of sarcasm.

By preloading your bias die towards the assumption of good faith, and pushing back on (if not outright rejecting) sarcasm, you can improve your little bubble of the internet. Not by much, sure, but every improvement has got to start somewhere. I hope you think about this post in future!