One of the hallmarks of my generation is our cynical, sarcastic, and ironic sense of humor. Go back through the edgier comedy of the ‘80s and ‘90s and you’ll find lots of jokes rooted in the idea of removing the power from harmful language. Like jokes about racism made using the language of racism, for example. Or jokes about sexism that work on two levels; a surface one of denigrating women and an implied one of putting down the sort of terrible person who would ever make a joke like that.
Despite what a lot of posters in r/GenX think, the reason those jokes don’t work well now isn’t because “wokeness” is taking all the fun out of life. They don’t work because the context has changed. The academic discussion about taking the power away from harmful speech by adopting that speech that influenced the culture and made those jokes work then was just as “woke” as anything going on that makes them not work today. One place this idea still has currency though is in the self-referential racial slurs in hip-hop, which fully embraced the idea that you can remove the power of oppression by appropriating the language of oppression.
When 4chan launched in 2003, the internet was still GenX’s cultural playground and the site’s experience design made it a no-holds-barred marketplace for the most out-there humor. The most shocking content won every time, but no one took it seriously.
But — and this is where the Marketplace of Ideas begins to breakdown — the context shifted. Younger internet users began finding things like 4chan and, lacking the life experience and generational affinity of the people making horrible jokes, they didn’t always get that they were jokes. So, seeing people get positive response to shocking humor about the Holocaust, some of these new users thought the positive response was to the surface level joke rather than the “sub-joke” about anyone who would make a joke like that. And so they began to say those things seriously, rather than jokingly.
This has been a long aside to get back to my punk rock friends. Because, like hip-hop which shares punk's mid-‘70s genesis in the boroughs of New York and the edgy comedy of the time, punk was (maybe still is?) about being able to discuss the undiscussable by framing it in art. If you think 4chan is bad, it’s nothing compared to what we would say sitting around making each other laugh.
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