Skibidi Toilet the sleeper hit of 2023
Skibidi toilet is an example of kids will increasingly exercise more and more influence on the cultural industries as a whole.
If anyone reading this knew of Skibidi Toilet before this month, then please, reply to this email so we can understand how. Statistically that should be easy, given that the series has earned 65 billion views on YouTube this year alone. That’s right. Billions.
How? Kids, of course. Though as with all kid based culture, there’s more than kids watching the serialized animated drama now.
Created using Valve’s Source Filmmaker, the videos look a lot like a video game, and tell a story that is surreal at best, borderline incoherent most of the time. But it nonetheless provides a narrative that young and old are digging.
On the surface, it is easy to dismiss this as literal toilet humour. Yet there is a deeper trend here that is worth paying attention to.
Maddy Buxton, culture and trends manager at YouTube, said “Skibidi Toilet” is a phenomenon unlike any other the platform has seen before.
“It’s become one of the year’s biggest cultural moments,” she said. “I’ve never quite seen anything blow up like this. It started as a meme but it’s evolved into this very complex storyline with a lot of hidden meaning that people are very eager to break down and try to understand.”
“Skibidi Toilet” may seem easy to write off as an internet fad, but its ascendance reveals what the future of entertainment might look like across major social platforms. It is the first narrative series to be told entirely through short-form video (60 seconds or less), and it’s the first major mainstream meme that has arisen from Generation Alpha (kids roughly age 10 and younger).
While the history of the Internet may be accelerated and condensed, with memes rising and falling within days or weeks, there is nonetheless an accumulated culture that can be mined. The following video argues that the success of Skibidi Toilet rests in the synthesis of memes and aesthetics found in the narrative, and how it speaks to a larger battle between mainstream media and Internet culture.
In a media saturated society where attention is power, young people and the youngest in particular, have an outsized amount of power, as they have ample attention to offer up. Skibidi toilet is an example of how this power is evolving, and how kids will increasingly exercise more and more influence on the cultural industries as a whole.