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.

This anxiety resonates with the paradigm of the contemporary ‘media life’ put forth by Mark Deuze, in that “a media life can be seen as living in the ultimate archive, a public library of (almost) everything, embodying a personalized experience of all the information of the universe. At the same time, in media life the archive is alive, in that it is subject to constant intervention by yourself and others” (Deuze Media Life xv). When read in relation to Deuze’s theoretical intervention, the Skibidi universe is a way of displacing the anxiety about our ‘life in media’ onto the figure of the Camerahead. Reading ourselves as uncanny machines of the eternal digital archive is difficult to confront, and so engaging with that possibility is undertaken through the work of the Camerahead as a monstrous digital avatar. This logic follows Piatti-Farnell and Peaty’s reminder that monsters are in fact metaphors, in that “they function both as warnings and as reminders of that which we fear … . Monsters are creatures of difference, but they are never far removed from our human worlds”. The monstrosity here is not that the figures of Skibidi are semi-artificial, but that we might be—or have the potential to become, or perhaps that we are already there—and it is exactly that ambivalence that generates uncanniness and brings forth the monster in us all. The robotic world is born from *our organic one *and thus these two worlds are always closer than we think.

Skibidi’s playfulness with ‘humanoid surveillance robots’ also brings forth Deuze’s remarks about the monstrous digital, in that “the ongoing fusion of information and organisms, of man and machine, and of media and life amplifies and accelerates a distinct notion of uncanniness in our daily perception of the world around us“ (Deuze Media Life 26). Theoretical interrogations of the uncanny can be traced back to figures such as Heidegger and Freud—who remind us of how uncanniness is at the heart of the human experience. For the sake of brevity, we use Nicholas Royle’s broad definition to read the uncanny as a “crisis of the proper”, in which the uncanny points to and reflects perturbations of the natural order, things which “commingle the familiar and unfamiliar” (1). The Camerahead—as a figure of contemporary surveillance culture—pushes the naturalisation of everyday media technologies to the extreme until it becomes strange and uncanny. When read in this way, Skibidi Toilet is not devoid of substance and meaning, but embroiled in the cutting edge of conversations about how humanity may see itself as a mimicry of these creatures—at once human but with the potential to mutate into a spectre of our own media technology.

Having media technologies in place of the human head (especially in the case of the CCTV Cameraheads) also connotes self-surveillance as well as sousveillance (as we massively monitor each other). When coupled with the grey, concrete, office-block landscape of the Skibidi universe, the world reflects a dread about the political, economic, and social dimensions of the global surveillance apparatus and the associated impending corporate annihilation of the ‘natural’ world. Surveillance capitalism is the weapon of the corporate state, and its hegemony is directly coupled with the annihilation of ecological systems in so many ways, one of which is “in the form of massive energy costs for data centres, e-waste, and the mining of rare minerals” (Silverman 147). What little green is left is, first and foremost, man-made, and secondly primarily serving as the décor of the constructed mise-en-scène of the “human zoo”, as Peter Sloterdijk describes our “anthropotechnological” context where we merge with technologies in a feeble attempt to control our human future. The degradation of natural habitats, the devastation of climate systems, and the loss of privacy grow bigger and more inevitable at what feels like a monstrous pace. Yet there is an ambivalence rooted in this global condition, in that one of the technocratic state’s greatest weapons against real and existential ‘threats’ is surveillance technology. Surveillance technology is used to counter terrorism and is also used in diverse, if sometimes problematic, ways to mitigate and control the spread of coronavirus (Glitsos). This ambivalence, or double-bind, is captured in the Skibidi narrative in that The Alliance is both the saviour of the humans in the Skibidi world—but also humanity’s greatest threat with its constant violence and single-minded destruction.

Interestingly, the need for ecological balance and a sense of privacy is something robots do not understand, and the line here between the human and the artificial is pronounced by the chaos, confusion, and destruction that characterises the Skibidi universe, especially considering that it is often unclear which faction is more problematic and dangerous to the ‘human world.’ For example, one fan theorist claims:

I personally think the camera people are the bad guys. They resemble a corrupt government that tries to control everything. The toilets are citizens trying to knock down the corrupt government with the limited resources they have.

But if someone says the camera people are fighting an evil foreign power to save their city and people, that’s also logical.

You can interpret it in both ways. I think the society you’re currently living in determines how you interpret it. (durjoy313)

The polysemy of the Skibidi text can take on many shapes and forms, and it may be exactly the randomness of the different sides and actors that allows for its popularity. It is not just good versus evil or beyond good and evil—the Skibidi Toilet story world is universally monstrous, which is not necessarily good or evil. The recurring theme in Skibidi is the sense of nihilism and cycles of inconsequential destruction (reflected in the unending gibberish of the Skibidi song itself). In the words of Lawrence May, popular media do such important work in “echoing the fears and anxieties of their social, political and cultural context” and that “the very environments we live within now evoke existential terror, and this state of ecological monstrosity has permeated popular media, including video games”. May is articulating the way that video games and new media can explore surprisingly complex and urgent political tensions, which we witness in the way that Skibidi (and its audiences) plays with notions of political economy and corruption.

The corporate domination of the natural world is manifest in the dystopian vision of the Skibidi architecture where “both the modernist city of skyscrapers and the sprawling suburban city carry the seeds of failure” (Ameel 14). The Skibidi landscape is notably devoid of plant and animal life but saturated in concrete and skyscrapers—the rooftops of which form an important point of action for many of the scenes and play a key role in manifesting the horror of a vanishing natural world. In Skibidi fandom, it is noted that the early episodes are “filled with many buildings/skyscrapers, two of which are extremely large and resemble the old Twin Towers in New York City from real life that collapsed in 2001” (Skibidi Toilet Wiki). This is a powerful totem in Gen Alpha sensibility, especially considering that Gen Alpha never knew a world with Twin Towers still standing. Instead, Gen Alpha is haunted by their absent presence, as the reverberations of the global ‘War on Terror’ are felt to this day. Young people exist in the wake of the fallen towers through the grim spectre of post-9/11 politics. This is key to Skibidi as a moment in the zeitgeist. Lieven Ameel reminds us:

the idea of secular buildings rising to the skies as spatial embodiments of linear progress had long been suspect. Since Biblical and Mesopotamian accounts of the tower of Babel, the building of iconic high-rise buildings had led to accusations of pride and presumptions that would not go unpunished. The downfall of the WTC towers on the 11th of September, 2001, is only the most spectacular of recent examples that have been read in such vein. (Ameel 14)

It is not incidental that the Skibidi war takes place in what becomes a ruined version of our ‘man[sic]-made accomplishments’ that humanity pursued at the cost of a fragile planet. Lawrence May reflects on a similar point in his consideration of games such as Breath of the Wild and *The Last of Us Part II *about which he writes that these worlds are a vital way that individuals explore the simmering “horror of an aberrant and abjected near future” and he argues that “games can critically position players in relation to discourse and wider public debate about ecological issues and climate change” (May).

Finally, what do hostile, sentient, human-headed toilets have to do with … anything? Again, Gen Alpha is unique among other generations in that it is the first to be born in the twenty-first century, but it is also the first to be born into a world where the horror of the global pandemic shaped their consciousness at such critical developmental junctures and characterised their nascent experiences of the social fabric. There is so much to expand on here, not least of all the fact that during the pandemic, Gen Alpha’s entire learning and socialisation experience shifted to the mediated space in incongruent, sometimes isolating, and discombobulating ways. However, for the sake of brevity, we focus on the symbolic function of the toilet by way of Jon Stratton’s reading of toilet-related themes (in particular, panic-buying toilet paper) during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic (Stratton). In his work, Stratton unpicks the ways in which “pedestal toilets and toilet paper are key aspects of civilisation and the fear of the loss of toilet paper is connected to anxiety about social breakdown, the loss of civilisation” (145). Although ‘modern civilisation’ is often cast through the symbolism of objects like the steam train or the clock, it is really the flushing pedestal toilet—such as those featured in Skibidi—that encapsulates the way the West ‘sees itself’ as rising above primitivism through hygiene and cleanliness. Yet in Skibidi, the monstrous human head is literally in the toilet—and often getting flushed right down into the depths of its own foul pipes. One may ask if this is the way Gen Alpha sees humanity? This question is especially pertinent in that for all our fancy conceptualisations of the posthuman and the man-machine hybrid, what ‘remediates’ all of us truly back to the ostensibly organic is the simple fact that we all defecate. Once that space is colonised by robots and artificiality, there is truly nothing left but surrender to the monstrous digital.

In all its bizarre, monstrous glory, Skibidi Toilet can be read as Gen Alpha’s creative expression of the ‘trouble’ brought about by emergent artificial life forms and our (potential) dystopian futures—and with our essay, we argue that it is fruitful to stay with that trouble, as Donna Haraway so powerfully reminds us to do. Skibidi is made in and through the very media platforms that provoke the inherent tension in the idea of the monstrous digital. If, as Jeffrey Cohen suggests, the monster is born “as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment, of a time, a feeling, and a place” (Cohen 4), then camera-headed humanoids and their foes—toilet people—speak volumes about the anxieties and both fun and fearful frames of reference plaguing Gen Alpha.

References

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Author Biographies

Laura Glitsos, Edith Cowan University

Dr Laura Glitsos is a senior lecturer in media and cultural studies at Edith Cowan University, Australia. Her first sole-authored book is titled Somatechnics and Popular Music in Digital Contexts (2019). She has also published across high-profile journals such as Continuum, Popular Music, and New, Media and Society. Dr Glitsos has particular expertise in popular music cultures, memes, and journalism. Prior to academia, Dr Glitsos worked as a health and science journalist.

Steinar Ellingsen, ECU

Dr Steinar Ellingsen is an internationally recognised expert on web series whose practice-based PhD thesis included the creation of a multi-award-winning web series, The Inland Sea: an Australian Odyssey. He is a chief investigator on the ARC Linkage project, Valuing Web Series: Economic, Industrial, Cultural and Social Value. He is a co-founder and former Director of Melbourne WebFest and has given keynotes and seminars on web series around the globe. Before relocating to Australia to pursue a career in academia, Dr Ellingsen worked as a journalist in Norway.

Mark Deuze, UvA

Mark Deuze is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Publications of his work include 14 books, most recently “Life in Media” (MIT Press, 2023). Mark has held honorary appointments around the world, including the School of Arts and Humanities of Edith Cowan University in Australia; the Faculty of Journalism at Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia; and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, the United States.