By Brett Yates
posted
Sep 13, 2012
In case you don't know, "xkcd" is the greatest webcomic of all
time. Equal parts hard science, pop culture, and whimsy, it's drawn
by a guy named Randall Munroe, who worked as a roboticist for NASA
before "xkcd" became profitable enough, via merchandise sales, to
allow him to be a professional cartoonist. Billed as "a webcomic of
romance, sarcasm, math, and language," Munroe's clever creation
has, since its beginning in 2005, presented fresh insights into
life in the digital age and remains the funniest, truest aesthetic
rendering of our Internet culture. It's a work of art that could
only exist online - not only because it's way too esoteric to print
next to "The Family Circus," but because its fans never leave the
computer.
It's such a great comic that it took me years to realize I can't
stand it.
It's not just that I don't know anything about math or computer
programming and so can't understand about a quarter of the jokes.
It's not just that, although Munroe has been drawing these stick
figures for seven years now, he still doesn't know how to draw a
stick figure correctly (his don't have necks). It's the way the
comic's intellect, which it's always worn on its sleeve, has
gradually morphed into a shallow, exclusionary smugness: "xkcd" has
become a kind of smart-alecky bubble of nerdy superiority, in which
countless geeks take refuge and sneer at everyone else.
If you visit a few random "xkcd" strips, the first thing you'll
notice, if they're not centered around goofy throwaway gags, will
probably be the perspicacity of their observations: how they emerge
from an intelligence that seems to grasp intuitively how most
things in our society - highway engineering, tech support hotlines,
pop lyrics - just don't make sense. Which is cool, and often the
points Munroe makes are kind of hilarious and even cathartic -
though, ultimately, there's an element of Jon Stewart glibness to
them.
Then, after a while, you'll begin to notice how rarely an "xkcd"
comic exists for some purpose other than to show how much smarter
its author is than some other group of people - specifically, in
most cases, some group of people generally disliked by tech geeks:
philosophy majors, mainstream journalists, people who don't know
stuff about computers. It doesn't have real characters, just these
stick figures - one of whom nearly always functions as the author's
mouthpiece, the other as a straw man of non-geek stupidity. It's in
this way most of all, perhaps, that "xkcd" differs from its obvious
inspiration, "Calvin and Hobbes," in which the author filtered his
essays through the perspective of a human boy, whose viewpoints
appeared to grow out of a personality shaped by the people and
things around him, and who had to live with the consequences of his
perceptions: Calvin's monologues were not stand-alone screeds. In
short, Bill Watterson was an artist; Munroe is just a snarky pundit
with a gift for the absurd - though you can hear a distorted echo
of Watterson's voice every single time Munroe attempts
unsuccessfully to inject into his own work some of the human warmth
for which "Calvin and Hobbes" was rightly celebrated.
The other purposes "xkcd" serves are to make allegedly comical
references to recondite mathematical concepts or obscure Web memes
like Zombo.com (in order to congratulate readers who understand
them), and to construct large, visually impressive graphs produced
by intense analysis of some totally trivial subject (like "The Lord
of the Rings"), ostensibly because it's somehow very amusing to
apply scientific rigor to trivialities but probably mostly because
Randall doesn't have a real job anymore to occupy his time.
It's seductive, this witty-nerd culture of "xkcd" - as long as
you're smart enough to qualify, or think you are. It invites
Internet-intellectuals - redditors, especially - to participate in
a fantasy in which a lone, unemployed non-expert can, by roving
message boards and Wikipedia, outsmart the world's politicians,
marketers, academics, and pretty much everyone else, all by writing
a couple sarcastic sentences on the Web. After all, "xkcd" is the
creation of a guy who earned a bachelor's degree in physics and
then, after brief office stint, became, improbably, a full-time
webcomic artist at age 22; it retains a distinctly undergraduate
sensibility - comedy and commentary for people who know just enough
to think that they know everything.
Actually, it's when "xkcd" goes non-sarcastic that it gets
really bad - when it becomes earnest, joyful, celebratory of the
all wonders of the universe, like distant planets and previously
unknown aspects of dinosaurs, that scientists are on the verge of
discovering but whose marvelousness will, alas, remain forever
unknown to those of us who are too dumb and uncurious to care.
Sometimes, the comic comes across as a kind of Bill Nye-esque
propaganda on behalf of the viewpoint that the world is awesome and
fascinating and that science is super-cool: it's like those "I
****ing love science" memes that my friends keep sharing on
Facebook. The only thing they love more than science is themselves
for loving it - for being one of those brilliant few existing
clear-headedly in the present and looking fearlessly toward the
future, refusing to remain stuck in some muddled ignorant past.
None of my share-happy Facebook friends are actual scientists.
Neither, currently, is Randall Munroe.
Anyway, as I see it, sometimes the world is awesome, and
sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it's boring. Or maybe I'm the one
who's boring, and only "xkcd" - and its fans - are awesome enough
to see the truth. Either way, this comic isn't going to help them
or me very much, except with the occasional laugh: it's just
another product of our increasingly interconnected and yet
increasingly insular online culture, in which, every day, there's
more superficial, pleasing content designed to bolster every
worldview out there, and it becomes easier and easier to live in a
digital universe consisting of nothing but funny pictures that
agree with us.
Tagged:
xkcd, generation y
