(One Of) The Reasons I Hate XKCD

I think Carl made a post about this a while back, but Carl is always wrong about literally everything he ever says and I am always demonstrably correct, so I thought I'd give this a go. This one is dedicated to my fans, who complain that my posts are too long and ask if I have nothing better to do. Written early on a Saturday morning during a bout of insomnia. Started at 2:04 AM, finished at 2:58 AM, with IM conversations in the background. Hugs and kisses!

I used to like XKCD. Like, a lot. I was embarrassingly fanboyish about some of the comics. When I first found this blog (I don't remember how this happened now; it was long ago and much has changed) I was an XKCD apologist. Unlike many cuddlefish, however, I was willing to engage in intelligent, reasonable discussion, and quickly found that many of the comics were indefensible. At first it went something like "well, he's having an off week." But that off week never went away. As is so often the case with this scenario, there's no one moment or one thing that swayed me. But in the space of a few weeks, I went from apologist to hater.

The problem isn't just that Randall stopped being talented, though, and often the posts here focus on what makes an individual comic so bad. This often misses the broader picture, and is part of why I started writing these posts in the first place. There is more than simply the details we point out, and it is in some ways part of XKCD's entire corpus. It is also why I used to like it.

The problem is basically this: Randall does not write jokes, as such. He writes inside jokes.

You see, Randall is synonymous with XKCD, far more than any other webcomic is synonymous with its creators. In almost every other comic--and I am including here Overcompensating, despite its function as a journal comic--there is a break between the creator and the created. There is none with XKCD. Perhaps it is the stick figure style, the fact that it started as doodles and notes he never really intended to share with anyone. But this is why the Megan thing feels so creepy--a phenomenon that I maintain would not happen with other webcomics--and this is why XKCD is so irritating.

I first truly noticed this phenomenon with the Tautology comic. Members on the forums started coming up with their own "tautologies" based on this. This appears to be fanboyish behavior, but I was unconvinced that this alone was to blame, because I was struck with how similar this looked to your garden variety inside joke.

Any social circle has inside jokes, and most social circles have at least one person who is the constant source of them. They are generally not, strictly speaking, funny of their own right, but to the social circle, it provides amusement which is derived almost entirely from being part of the ingroup. It goes something like this:

While getting coffee with his friends, an idea strikes a central charismatic figure for something that amuses him--an observation about something fairly mundane in the world. He mentions this to his friends, who agree that this is amusing, and come up with other examples. The next several minutes of conversation consist of coming up with and discussing examples, and picking favorites. If the idea is particularly memorable, or if it strikes the fancy of the central figure--if he really fixates on it--then this will become more than just an evening of conversation. It will become an inside joke. It will be a little game they play, where they come up with examples for each other.

This explains XKCD fairly well, but it does not, at first, seem to explain the proselytizing. However, one must recall that many social circles try to include other people in their inside jokes. They make them around others, they explain the origin stories. This feels validating. It's a form of social bonding.

Except with XKCD, the ingroup is essentially the entirety of internet culture--or rather, this is what they perceive themselves to be. XKCD is an inside joke for everyone who is into the internet; its fans do not see it as a comic but as a source of inside jokes--they are part of a massive social circle with Randall as its central charismatic figure, but which, they tell themselves on the forums, is filled with very excellent and very intelligent people.

This also helps to explain the utter shock that some XKCD fans demonstrate towards someone disliking the comic. If you express dislike for a central figure in any social circle they will react with confusion--this is not only someone they personally like, but someone who is at the core of their social lives and those of several other people. To be in that social circle and yet dislike its core is nothing short of baffling.

The problem that I have with this arrangement is not the community as such--I appreciate the internet's potential for community formation--and it is not the fact that inside jokes are not actually funny--every social circle has them and they can be quite enjoyable.

No, it is that this community, this feeling of being part of an ingroup, this sense that the ingroup is the entire internet, is a ruse. The XKCD fans think that everyone is part of the group or would gladly join it if they somehow missed out. They act as if the whole internet is their community, casually drop references or links whenever something that reminds them of one of their corpus of 700 inside jokes pops up, and then act hurt or confused when you tell them you don't like XKCD. Randall Munroe is not their friend. In all likelihood he will never be.

And so they try to proselytize and seek members for a community which does not exist, never once pausing to analyze their motives here, but always congratulating themselves for being part of such a wonderful community. And Randall Munroe cheerfully continues the deception, writing things with a formula that's pretty easy to repeat, inside-joke style, and writing about an array of things such that every member of his ingroup will have an opportunity to repeat the injokes. It is built entirely on a false premise and devotion to a concept that isn't even real.