A subreddit I’m really fond of is /r/LibraryofBabel, and the idea behind it is inspired by the Jorge Luis Borges short story of the same name where you have a virtually infinitely large library with every combination of letter possible. In the library, you will find random gibberish, recipes for broccoli pizza, your entire biography, and any other specifics or combinations or descriptions possible.
In the subreddit, the idea is trying to replicate the library, and users do this by typing whatever they want, and more often than not it ends up being really rough poetry or random strings of letters and words.
Examples:
“17 different zones applied for the recent print of the pre-monthly-cognition. there’s a lot of political drama around this ill bet!”
Started new job. It was kinda fun, but looks like a lot paperwork. [sic] Same type of criminals, but on a federal level. All women in the office except Chief Carl <redacted>, Joe <redacted>, & I. They are Carol <redacted>
????? Nature’s potenssse illudes Meaning’s wordless. Yah! Commandddddd uhhh thoughtful through it indistingishing void. Fashion. Style. !!!! Gamma Radiation.
This subreddit has just just above 5,100 followers, and most of the users that I see post things semi-exclusively to just that subreddit. I am one of those.
I love the subreddit. I find it hilarious and thought provoking and interesting. Sounding out the sentences and seeing what people come up with is fascinating to me, and it seems like the users of the sub agree with me.
The interesting thing is how small the community is, however. My girlfriend knows my reddit username and she probably checks it out every once and a while. Before I tried to do these thought provoking advice posts, and she complimented them when I brought it up. Now I wonder what she must think when she sees the random, sometimes disturbing things I put on there.
It’s weird.
And I don’t think the 5,000ish followers is mistake. If reddit were to put this subreddit in the front page, I don’t think the participation would increase by that much. A case study is /r/philosophy. The subreddit has 15 million followers because it was one of the default subreddits for new users. Despite that gargantuan amount, only 7 posts were put in the last 24 hours. 7! Meanwhile, /r/LibraryofBabel has 3.
I think this really shows something significant. With 222 million Reddit users, /r/LibraryofBabel is 0.000022% of all users. This means that access is not an issue, anyone can choose to participate in this community, they just choose not to. This shows that people with similar preferences to me are incredibly rare.
And that’s something that the internet allows for. Tiny micro-communities where for all previous human history never existed. This weird behavior was delegated to private diaries or even just private thoughts. Individuals with these preferences had these thoughts maybe for an hour or two every 6 months, never allowed for it to be expressed with like minded individuals. Most probably had their weirdness reinforced or punished out of them. The weirdness was beaten out of them by the environment either out of prejudice or out of necessity.
The internet allows these people to communicate and grow their faculties with others like them. And that’s a really special thing. The exceedingly rare and weird now has a home and it is found on the internet. Your interests most likely have captured the imaginations of others, and you can now have a huge exposure to that interest.
Postscript/more theory: Maybe the access to each person’s personal weirdness and peculiarities is what explains the increased individualism we see in our culture. People take pride in themselves and with the fact that they’re different in a particular way. Before, this weirdness was stamped out, but now that people have models and exposure to that weirdness through others online, they are more willing to bear the cost of disapproval by “real” people, because they know they can get approval elsewhere. At the same time, this raises the costs for prejudice by these “real” people, because if they are prejudiced, they will have less social interaction with people in general. Thus, a general individualism and tolerance and “you do you” is adapted by society.
No doubt the anonymity online helps. Non-anonymous websites like Facebook generally act as hyperactive forms of everyday social life where orthodoxy and the search for approval by the “normies” is basically the only point of the website. Thankfully, the good of privacy + self expression is still a good that can be found on Facebook through private groups.
This brings up the general question of “Are normies even real?”. When we call someone weird, what does that even mean? I took for granted earlier the idea that everyone is privately weird and has an interest in something that most would see as “off”, but maybe that is not true.
