Quote from: PoFP on August 16, 2017, 05:18:11 PM
I would say that the only relation between Shitposting and anything related to Discordianism is the fact that the humor in both is generally subversive, or at least absurd. I would argue that they were born separately, and developed separately.
As far as I know, modern day shitposting is just propagation of unintelligible memes for the sake of irony. This obsession with irony among the Alt-Right shitposters creates a sense of community when one shares in the creation and distribution of these unintelligible memes, and this allows for easy displacement of responsibility for any sort of offensive content/concepts the shitposting memes might contain. One can easily blow it off as "Bro, I'm just posting this stuff ironically, the comedy comes from your butthurt. None of us actually care about this shit. " etc.
Usually, Discordian newsgroup exchanges include memes that would seem unintelligible to someone who couldn't read in between the lines, or to someone who wasn't aware of Discordianism's background. In this sense, you could say shitposting is a bit of an esoteric community for the same reasons Discordianism is considered esoteric. The difference is, Discordianism was intended to get you to question things. Whereas shitposting serves no purpose but to be ironic and esoteric for the sake of being ironic and esoteric.
Not only that, but Shitposting has the unfortunate side effect of lowering the bar for acceptable communication to the point that people are desensitized and resistant to actual communication.
That's an interesting perspective. I hadn't considered that there might simply not be any hard connection, because I see thematic parallels, at least in some form.
But yeah, there's some nested irony there when the irony shitposters claim to embrace actually makes them unironically connected to Neo-Nazis. At some point irony simply breaks.