A Look Back At Clickhole's First Month

The centerpiece of Clickhole's agenda has also been the source of their most satisfying content. BuzzFeed's lists are great at appealing to the widest audience while making you feel like they're just for you. This is why lists like "27 Problems Only Introverts Will Understand" (7 million views) and "31 Things Only People From a Small Town Will Understand" fill their pages. These lists remind you of how politicians like to talk about the middle class. The middle class is everyone and no one. Everyone believes they are part of the middle class because there is no concept quite so relative. Clickhole skewers this idea of saying everything and nothing at the same time, of including everyone and no one, brilliantly. Though their BuzzFeed parody lists have been quite successful overall, my favorite has to be "A Few Folks." All that ties the images together is that they contain people, because hey, "at the end of the day, they're all just folks."

So much of the advice dispensed on the Internet tacitly recommends exactly what this Clickhole piece endorses. Change yourself and rewards will follow. Business Insider and Forbes have cornered this market when it comes to business while everyone from Huffington Post to Cosmo is ready to tell you just how you'll want to change yourself if you ever hope to land an attractive mate. "A firm handshake is an effective way to make a good impression, but will also destroy your inner child a little each time you do it. You're a manipulator of people now." Interestingly enough, you could replace "A firm handshake" with "Writing for the Internet" and the advice would be equally apt.

Out of context celebrity quotes are just about the most meaningless thing on the Internet. Half the time the quote is totally made up (make that 100% of the time if the quote is attributed to Morgan Freeman). If it isn't misattributed or totally fake, then usually the quote is taken out of context. There is something deeply hilarious about "motivational quotes" pulled from the works of Kurt Vonnegut and Cormac McCarthy. Despite all the reasons that these quotes should be ignored, they still crop up in white text against a sunset on your high school classmates' Facebook walls. Because, hey, there is nothing like a platitude completely devoid of context to help you make it through the day.

Dental floss and soda can tabs can solve all your problems because all you needed to unleash your inner McGuyver was a shitty list. Elaborate meals can be made in fifteen minutes because somehow your parents and their parents and their parents were just #doingitwrong. Clickhole mocks these post-modern miracles we call life hacks by pointing out the obvious: there is no miracle there at all. Sometimes the everyday, mundane thing is actually mundane. One of the best videos Clickhole has posted so far is a three hour YouTube clip of a stick of butter doing exactly what you would imagine it would do over three hours: melt. Our ancestors imagined that there was magic hidden at the top of mountains or at the bottom of the sea. Now that we've explored all of that, we work out our mystical impulse by digging deeper and deeper into the Internet, hoping to find the secret to eternal life, or at least a super cool way to store our sandwiches on the way to work.

Sexting is corrupting our children. Radiation from cellphones and microwaves is killing our adults. But that's only if gluten doesn't get to all of us first. We've come to a point on the Internet where imaginary fears grip the nation, and local news outlets growing more desperate by the day to fan the flames until the last ember is extinguished. Remember the knock-out game? There was a national discourse around something hat was limited to a few isolated incidents that may or may not have actually been knock-out games. It is a virtual certainty that more knock-out games happened thanks to coverage about knock-out games than happened before the media attention began. Misinformation spreads like wildfire on the Internet, and where there was once a modicum of journalistic responsibility, there is the insatiable drive to be the first one there regardless of truth. Though it is unclear whether a tree that falls in the forest makes a sound, it is a guarantee that there will be a carefully curated online dialogue about why it fell, regardless of whether it actually fell or not.

Not only are so many of the "amazing" videos posted online not that amazing, but the sites running them had nothing to do with their creation. Earlier, we discussed Clickhole's mockery of Upworthy, a site that has a business model entirely based on reposting YouTube videos. Sites like these are no longer the exception, they are the rule. A cottage industry has sprung up around worthless photo essays and superficial videos that seem to have theme on the surface, but ultimately have nothing to say. We are still dealing with responses to that "First Kiss" video that racked up over 85 million views, and the satirical distance between that actual ad campaign and this joke is sadly razor thin.

Can you believe these images are photoshopped? Yes. Do we have a warped image of beauty in our society? Also yes. Are these plus-sized models attractive? Again, yes, they are professional models. Jezebel and other, more superficial feminist blogs are dead set on creating a controversy where none seems to exist. Every week brings some new outrage about the thigh-gap in a department store ad or a new stunt that demonstrates that humans are shallow, as though this was something we didn't already know. The Internet is great at taking a valuable, important point, in this case "our standards of beauty are ridiculous and often hurtful" and spinning it into GIFs, memes, and viral videos that obscure the original point so fully that it actually hurts that original point. Now that websites have realized outrage drives page views like nothing else, we've become buried under a mountain of Photoshop exposés and 40,000 word mini-memoirs by NYU students who worked as escorts once, and we are hard-pressed to remember the noble points that began whatever conversation we are supposed to be having. We've actually come to a point where it doesn't seem all that far-fetched to be asked to find a woman beautiful even if she claims that "assisted suicide is my number one turn on."

If you could make thinkpieces go away would you? Oh, that's a good idea for a thinkpiece, better pitch that next month ... The Thinkpiece Industrial Complex has gotten out of control. Salon alone is obligated to publish an essay railing against popular opinion on every topic, no matter how one-sided it may be. Look guys, is Boko Haram really that bad? Is Courtney Stodden a feminist role model? Is Patton Oswalt, Louie C.K., or anyone else who brings humor and light into this cruel world actually a terrible person? These are the questions that Salon, Jezebel, Slate, and all the rest seem to ask us on a daily basis. These sites and countless others are at the forefront of confusing provocation with thought-provoking, and they may be more damaging to our culture than all of the GIF lists combined. No one clicks through a gallery of dogs dressed like Presidents and believes that they are feeding their intellect, but some days it is all too easy to click through pieces discussing the relationship between Transformers: Age of Exstinction and the Tea Party and feel like you're participating in meaningful intellectual discourse.

Ads on the Internet are painfully aggressive. It often takes so much effort to wade through pop-up ads and e-mail list sign ups that by the time you actually get to the list you came for, you could care less what Ninja Turtle you are or just what Ninja Turtle quizzes tell us about rape culture. Clickhole has made their website layout an elaborate joke. Ads pop up under photos; ads dominate the right third of the screen; they even reserve a huge space on their homepage for content they pretend is curated by a corporation. My favorite part of the site's mirror image mockery of clickbait sites is their recommended lists at the bottom of the page. These suggestions, whether on Clickhole or any other site, have no relationship to whatever you just read. These ads for other lists are essentially saying "you were stupid enough to click on that, now click this." In what world does anyone, let alone the average Clickhole reader, want to read "The Pros and Cons of Vinyl Fencing?" Don't worry, it's right there at the bottom of the page if you change your mind.

Though the Internet has opened the media playing field up to everyone, that doesn't mean that corporations are going to go quietly into the night. Huffington Post presents what looks like a thoughtfully curated op-ed section, but you can dig out a corporate shill or two in short order. Sites like Buzzfeed only distinguish branded content from site generated content by a small icon or a slight discoloration (Full Disclosure: I write branded content for this website). Despite these clever attempts at camouflage, no matter how many times Mitt Romney speaks to the contrary, corporations are not people, and that means their voice is going to be generally awful. You can call it Partner Content, you can call it Sponsored, but pieces written on behalf of our corporate overlords are going to be exactly what they are, something we all have to do to keep the lights on.