The Year The Internet Stopped Laughing

On the sombre symbolism of the internet's favourite joker retiring to die

I thought I’d make a slight change from my planned post in order to offer some brief commentary on what has perhaps been a rather ominous and symbolic beginning to 2023. Namely, that ‘‘Mr Metokur’’ perhaps the internet’s most famous joker, announced on New Year’s Eve, in what will probably be his last ever stream, that he was retiring and will in all likelihood die in the not-too-distant future.

Mr Metokur was a veteran of an older age of the internet, of ‘‘Gamer-gate’’ and wars on SJW’s, an anarchic and carefree internet age when censorship was still years off in the future and content was all about shits n giggles, lolcows and simply enjoying the spectacle of societal decay as presented online. I maintain that the funniest content I have ever seen in the video format was Mr Metokur’s epic series on the shambolic Kraut and Tea debacle in 2017. I did not watch all of his content, and I was not entirely tuned in to the lore either, but I intuitively understood where he was coming from.

In his final stream, Mr Metokur or ‘‘Jim’’ as he was more fondly known, offered a rundown of the worst offenders in internet drama and cringe of 2022. The very fact of being an anon E-Cleb who goes rogue and creates content lampooning other E-Clebs and their egos and shortcomings, drama arcs, and general weirdness is itself something uniquely of the internet age. Metokur was the laughing guide walking us through the warped and bizarre, ridiculous, and twisted nature of the digital landscape. Even as somebody somewhat distant from the Mr Metokur scene, I was aware for some years of rumours that he was not in sound health. Though the nature of the internet of course means that you never really know anything for sure.

There’s something unnerving about somebody whose face and name you don’t know announcing on a light-hearted live stream that they’re retiring and will soon be dead. It is the end of the line of the impersonal and disconnected nature of the web. There’s an avatar, a fake name, but behind there’s flesh and blood, and often they’re in pain or suffering and sometimes, dying. Here once more we’re greeted with the uncertainty of knowing what is real and what isn’t. Was Metokur going to pop up again in six months with a new brand? Was it all a joke?

Tragically, Mr Metokur explained in gruesome detail what the plethora of illnesses and diseases he'd been enduring actually were and entailed, he explained while answering a superchat, of course. We don’t know his real name, and we’ll never see his face, but we do know what’s going to kill him, he then moved on to the next superchat and joke.

Mr Metokur’s humour was quintessentially Generation X in tone and style. He was a lingerer from a 90s postmodernism in which nothing could be said in earnest or from the heart, the more serious somebody was the more fun it was to laugh at them. The more self-righteous and pompous, the more gratifying it was to deflate their balloon while snickering and giggling at their indignation and embarrassment. Social Media provided an immensely target-rich environment for Mr Metokur, and he relished every potshot he took. The logical conclusion to this somewhat nihilistic outlook is to turn your own mortality and life itself into amusing content, albeit with a large but not unduly sentimental dose of pathos.

It was easy to lampoon the normative values in society during the 90s when the institutions and power structure facilitated it. Fast-forward to the 2020s and the age of social media and well, those institutions are somewhat less agreeable when having their values mocked. No matter how often the SJW’s were owned, they just continued to advance, and their intolerance for subversion with it. Algorithmic strangulation and the ability to cut funding trumped the SJW-owned content and the writing was on the digital wall for the older, freer internet as represented by Mr Metokur.

Corporate and ideological control has smothered the internet like shrink-wrap on the face of a murder victim. Freedom, anarchism, and fun have been purged out of it with ruthless efficiency. At the same time, running parallel has been the real-world reflection of the same ghastly methods of control and utilitarian logic.

It isn’t a fun time.

It’s the age of Pat Garrett, not Billy the Kid. The land has all been bought, the fences are going up, and all that remains is to clear out and expunge the spirit of those who wish to roam free and take pleasure in the joy of living.

What, in the end, was the mass appeal of an internet clown who joked about trivialities? It is perhaps that the dark clouds and the desert of the real world could be held at bay, just for a while, just a little bit longer, one more joke until normalcy returned.

But the normative state of society, and the digital world, didn’t return, and the clown died on stage. It is an ominous start to a new year. Yet at the same time, perhaps it’s time to stop viewing life and people as mere entertainment to be consumed for amusement.

Godspeed Mr Metokur, and thanks for the laughs.