Introduction
Skibidi Toilet began as an animated YouTube Web series early in 2023 that quickly spiralled into a wildly popular cultural phenomenon sprouting fandoms, wikis, threads, merchandise, and its very own moral panic (McKinnon and Harmon). It has recently grabbed the attention of Hollywood, and there are rumours that it is on its way to TV and a possible film treatment by Michael Bay (Wallenstein and Steiner). The episodes are short, surreal videos featuring bizarre, monstrous characters embroiled in violent clashes—to the non-stop repetition of “skibidi dom dom dom yes yes.” Kids love it, and some parents want it banned (10Play). This article will think about how we might read Skibidi’s playfulness with ‘humanoid surveillance robots’ and other tropes and strange creatures, as the Skibidi fandom is flirting with fairly dense social and political issues, such as the global surveillance apparatus and the potential corporate annihilation of the ‘natural’ world.
The series follows an increasingly epic war between two factions: the antagonists who take the form of human-headed singing toilets, led by G-man—or G-Toilet—and a group of mechanical humanoids with cameras, TVs, and speakers for heads, called The Alliance (or informally, Cameraheads). The bulk of the early action takes place in a generic cityscape littered with grey office buildings, called Metropolis (Skibidi Toilet Wiki), which conjures dystopian visions of a world stripped of vibrancy and plant life (except for what looks like an artificial lawn). An unlicensed mashup of the songs ‘Give It to Me’ by Timbaland and ‘Dom Dom Yes Yes’ by Bulgarian artist Biser King created by TikTok user @doombreaker03 appears in each episode as the theme of the Skibidi Toilets, further remixed with other familiar themes in various episodes, like "The Imperial March (Darth Vader’s Theme)" from Star Wars. The actual word ‘Skibidi’ seems to be taken from the viral hit of the same name from the band Little Big, ostensibly, meaning absolutely nothing. The first episodes were released through YouTube shorts, with multiple episodes clustered as one-minute “seasons” in vertical format. As the popularity of Skibidi Toilet grew, the story has become increasingly elaborate, and the individual episodes have transitioned to wide-screen format with longer run times. The total run time (as of September 2024) for all 76 episodes is 1 hour and 55 minutes.
The creator is Georgian Youtuber and animator Alexey Gerasimov, who has been sharing videos on social media under the moniker DaFuq?!Boom! since 2017. His absurdist creations are typically made using the Source Filmmaker (SFM) tool (considered a fairly basic computer graphics software tool available for free), with crude animations featuring non-playable characters (NPCs) from the Half-Life 2 video game. Source Filmmaker content can be seen as an evolution of the machinima creations of the noughties and 2010s. The word ‘machinima’ is a portmanteau of ‘machine’ and ‘cinema’ and refers to fans using game engines or gaming platforms to create their own stories in real-time (Harwood).
Skibidi Toilet has grown out of a context of infinitely converging technologies and subcultures. It is also born from the themes, software, content, and media that are most popular in gamer/maker communities, a high proportion of which are populated by younger people with a strong uptake in collaborative gaming trends (Schomer; Crowe and Bradford). This younger demographic is popularly referred to as Gen Alpha, representing those born after the year 2000—the first cohort to live entirely within the twenty-first century’s digital environment (Boczkowski and Mitchelstein). Machinima writer Katie Salen calls this the “generation of kids born into games” (38). As such, it is appropriate to read Skibidi as an epicentre of Gen Alpha sensibility. In an article revealing that Skibidi may be in development for a TV and film treatment by Michael Bay, Variety reporters Andrew Wallenstein and Robert Steiner remark that Skibidi is “explosive, violent and free of any discernible dialogue” and it is these qualities that have “won it a worldwide audience, not to mention the distinction of being a cultural icon Generation Alpha can truly call its own” (Wallenstein and Steiner).
Gen Alpha may be "born into video games", but they have also been born into a disintegrating climate system, post-9/11 politics (such as the global austerity crisis, perpetual war, and the rise of right-wing populism), surveillance capitalism, and pandemic risk—much of which can be read in the landscapes and metaphors of Skibidi Toilet, serving to problematise notions of the ‘natural’ and the limits of the human in the context of climate catastrophe and technological transformation. It is therefore our contention that Skibidi Toilet functions as an artefact that both produces and reflects cultural anxieties and troubles experienced by the Gen Alpha zeitgeist. Finally, due to the entangled nature of participatory culture—and the ways in which Skibidi takes co-created media to the extreme by way of circulating and re-circulated fan-generated content—we are reading both the actors of these networks (as audiences as much as producers) and the texts as conjoined digital artefacts (Mayer).
Artificiality and the Monstrous Digital
Skibidi Toilet features a banquet of monstrosities that distort a sense of the ‘natural’ world in some way. Skibidi Toilet not only features nightmarish hybrids that confuse boundaries between the organic, mechanical, and digital, but as a media artefact, it also takes place on and in the digital space. As such, we characterise this phenomenon within the scope of what we call the ‘monstrous digital’ in that Skibidi Toilet is relational to, and dependent on, the digital space in content, format, and sensibility. While the monstrous digital could be applied to an endless list of examples and subject matter in the story world of Skibidi Toilet, we apply it specifically to analyse the threat suggested by humanity’s tenuous relationship to the artificial humanoids and simulated landscapes that imply the potential of a world stripped of coherent ‘natural’ forms.
In the Skibidi universe, the lines between humanity and technology are blurred, and the monstrous digital always has a hint of human quality. This theme is exemplified by the faction known as The Alliance which consists of mechanical humanoids with cameras, TVs, and speakers for heads. In the lore, many fans agree that The Alliance (Cameraheads) are not fully human but artificially produced human constructs made by people to fight the Toilets (ostensibly) on behalf of humans (Skibidi Toilet Wiki). In this reading, they are mutant offspring of the human world, in that humans have borne these hybrid creatures in the ‘image of the human’. They function as spectral abominations, perhaps future echoes of ‘us’ that reflect our human body types and our way of thinking about war and media, which, when taken to the extreme, descends into Baudrillardian nightmare in which the violence of war has no objective “but to prove its very existence” (Baudrillard 32). This is to say that the Cameraheads are not recording a war ‘that happens’ but producing a war so that it can be recorded, in order to prove that war exists in the way that serves the human agenda.
The anxieties about becoming—or producing—a warped chimeric aberration of our own media technology is emphasised when we consider that The Alliance is donned with specific technologies of surveillance and archive—namely CCTV. The digital becomes monstrous in the sense of their uncanny capacity to record and store everything we do with them, and people in turn record and document their entire lives in media—while we are simultaneously fretting about the impact of widespread surveillance and the loss of privacy involved (Deuze Life in Media). The discomfort is that The Alliance is not a separate artefact from the human world but its evolution. Perhaps we have poured so much of ourselves into the digital archiving and surveilling of ourselves—and that so much of the digital permeates our lives—that the next evolutionary step is a merging with those very technologies of surveillance and archive, or at the very least not knowing what would constitute meaningful boundaries between the two any longer. Perhaps we have already passed that point of no return, and all that is left to us is coming to terms with the monstrous digital, that is us. The Cameraheads represent a potential that humans have become so merged with their media technology—especially surveillance technology—that they have evolved into that technology and are not only living through it but become it, embody it.
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