Filth-Feed Forward
On Skibidi Toilet
Jeff S. Nagy
As a child and even well into young adulthood, I suffered an unusual superstition. It worked like this: if you were not out of the bathroom by the time the toilet stopped flushing, a monster (unspecified) would rise up out of the bowl and rip you to shreds, beginning by peeling your face off chin-first. You could try to game the system, for instance, by washing your hands before flushing the toilet, leaving that task until the absolute last minute to maximize your window of escape. The automatically flushing units that began to pop up in public bathrooms later in my childhood, especially those overeager urinals and stools in airports, were a paradigm shift. Now one had almost no control, aside from leaning as far back as possible in front of the urinal in an attempt to avoid triggering the mechanism. The flush and its potential ruin were henceforth delivered over to the capricious god of an infrared detector.
I observed the rules of this superstition even when I no longer “believed” in the consequences; it’s undoubtedly for this reason that for more years than I want to admit, I avoided washing my hands in public bathrooms with automatic toilets whose flush lengths were a mystery—long or short, I couldn’t risk sparing the time! This ritualistic behavior was connected, obscurely, to a weekly recurring nightmare. In the dream, I’d get up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom to pee, but when I turned out the light to head back to bed, I saw, off to my left, two glowing red eyes just beyond the toilet, in the dark drape of the shower curtain, whose plastic volutes now coalesced into a figure, and I woke.
Toilets have long been the stuff of nightmares. In Japanese folklore, for instance, those who dare to do their business might be visited by any number of unsettling spirits, from Hanako-san of the Toilet (the ghost of a Japanese schoolgirl who some say was killed in a WWII air raid), to Aka Manto (a demon who offers you a choice between two colors of toilet paper only to then dismember or asphyxiate you), to Akaname (lizardlike creatures who lick the scum from your grout). Closer to home for Parapraxis readers, Herbert Graf’s (Freud’s Little Hans) childhood equinophobia bled into a dread of the public toilets at Lainz station in west Vienna, where the loud pull-flushes remind him of the clatter of falling carthorses—and metonymically: feces, urination, giving birth, intercourse, castration, dirty knickers, sausages, modular penises, and his little sister.
“Toilets have long been the stuff of nightmares.”
However much they’re a prime site for the uncanny, toilets today are having a public moment. They fill our screens and feeds, from Wim Wenders’ ode to the simple, surprisingly fulfilling life of a Tokyo bathroom cleaner (2023’s Perfect Days), to the viral social media account rating, mapping, and ranking NYC’s porcelain thrones (@got2gonyc). On the news and in op-eds, parents, administrators, and politicians clutch pearls at the thought of trans kids using school bathrooms, with 13 states passing laws restricting access. Two years ago, right-wing troll accounts spread a hoax that schools were placing litter boxes in bathrooms to accommodate students who identified as cats, while the kids themselves sometimes seemed more interested in competitive TikTok delinquency, boosting their clout and follower counts as they’re filmed vandalizing stalls. Minutes into this year’s Vice Presidential Debate, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to dub the Democratic candidate “Tampon Tim,” referring to Governor Walz’s own foray into lavatory politics: a state policy that provided menstrual products in all public school bathrooms.
Toilets are on our screens, but they’re also increasingly a media ecosystem node in their own right. Screens like those embedded in the seatbacks of yellow cabs pop up in bathroom mirrors and above urinals, all while everyone lined up between the privacy walls or seated in cubicles is already glued to their own, personal portal. As we use our faces to unlock our phones, “smart” toilets might now identify us by the unique creases in our anuses, sniffing our excretions for clues about our health, surveilling the gut like an opposition researcher might dig through a politician’s bin bags. As the contested and increasingly technological place where what you eat ends up, the excremental interface connecting your insides to infrastructure, toilets tie together metabolism, media, the “feed,” and filth.
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The video is 11 seconds long. The 2000s’ game engine equivalent of a handheld camera travels around a corner past a minuscule, suited man dancing while holding a briefcase, and into a tile-floored bathroom, where it glimpses a poster featuring an obscure photo of Kate Bush before looming over the toilet’s bowl. That’s when a man’s head emerges, presumably from somewhere in the S-trap, stares directly into the camera, and begins to sing gibberish syllables, “skibidi dom dom dom yes yes,” the head thrusting and spinning in time to the music. At the video’s end, the head, polygons flaring, crashes aggressively directly into the lens—cut.
The video is 14 seconds long. The same handheld camera travels past the same minuscule, suited man now joined by a diminutive version of the protagonist of Valve’s 1998 first-person shooter, Half-Life, dancing in an anonymous, carpeted hallway, then turns a corner as the double-door of an elevator retracts to reveal an improbably placed trio of urinals next to, again, an obscure but different photo of Kate Bush. The camera comes to a halt with the urinals on center frame as two doppelgängers of the head from the first episode emerge at either end. You’ve seen this before, but you’ve also never quite seen anything like it. As they sing and thrust and spin in tandem, the camera adds little pops and zooms in time to the beat, until a head in a lime green wig emerges from the central toilet and joins with a different, higher melody, and the two flanking heads crane their necks in, chanting the central motif of the refrain, their cheeks pressed against hers, grimacing in ways that break the game engine’s now ancient, tenuous grasp on realism, until suddenly her face disappears and is replaced with a grinning skull—cut.
These two short clips—created by a Georgian animator named Alexey Gerasimov (DaFuq?!Boom! on You- Tube) and published in February of 2023—have over 350 million views combined. You’ve either never heard of Skibidi Toilet, of which these are the initial episodes, or it’s a central and inescapable feature of your life online. The series of mostly short, always bizarre YouTube videos, in which the titular malicious toilets engage in an escalating war against suited men with speakers, monitors, or surveillance cameras for heads, traces a gener - ation gap in digital culture that is curiously total: if you’re ignorant of Skibidi Toilet, I promise you that your ten-year-old is knee-deep in its lore, developed over 76 episodes and counting.
“In most US cities, you’re more likely to find a unicorn than a functional, accessible public privy. Here, with a kind of inverted wish-fulfillment dream logic, the toilets come to you, for you.”
In most U.S. cities, you’re more likely to find a unicorn than a functional, accessible public privy. Here, with a kind of inverted wish-fulfillment dream logic, the toilets come to you, for you. Seemingly disconnected from plumbing or wastewater infrastructure as they move about, sing, pursue, attack, these toilet-men simply live in their ceramic shells, like hermit crabs. The community that has sprung up around them includes explainers, parodies, fan remakes, Roblox games, endless YouTube comment threads, merch, and exhaustive wikis that scrutinize episodes shot-by-shot, picking out recurrent iconography and characters and puzzling through the fragmentary plot to speculate a world in which it might take place. And at the moment I write this, Skibidi Toilet may be about to jump the firewall from your phone to the big screen, with Adam Goodman, one-time president of Paramount Pictures, and Michael Bay, director of The Rock, Pearl Harbor, and the Transformers movies, in talks to spin the series into a film and TV franchise.
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If “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” writing about Skibidi Toilet is . . . plowing about thermodynamics? Canoeing about pediatric oncology? Whatever it is, it’s hard, and, as you’ve probably noticed, inevitably cringe. For one, it involves gritting your teeth at the number of times you’ll have to type the word “toilet,” along with a dozen or so synonyms. But the series is a window onto the feed of the future. I mean that demographically, in terms of its audience; the Generation Alpha of four to fourteen- year-olds, for whom it is “like Slenderman for the chaotic and overstimulating post-internet era,” offers a foretaste of the internet aesthetics on the horizon. And I mean it also, perhaps, in terms of production. Despite the existence of a named, human creator who works with Source Filmmaker, a Valve video game production tool leaked in 2007, the series sometimes feels to the uninitiated adult like it’s being algorithmically deepdreamed by an unhinged AI whose mind is in the gutter—a @horse_ ebooks for our time. Like the Amazon Mechanical Turkers who train seemingly autonomous AI systems, like the Mechanical Turk for which those pieceworkers are named, it obscures human labor to envision a future of fully automated culture. Projects like the much-discussed Nothing Forever, a 24/7 pixelated reboot of Seinfeld created by AI, point, too, towards a future that might be nearer than we think when more than six months ago the director of Apple TV+’s Slow Horses testified to parliament that soaps might be entirely written, acted, and directed by generative AI within three to five years.
But instead of revealing the weirdness inside generative AI’s black box, Skibidi Toilet chews up and spits out decades of pop, internet, video game, and meme culture, from Kate Bush and Half-Life character assets to Fortnite emotes. Take the song the skibidi toilets sing, and also use to communicate, delivering orders or orations, sometimes sped up or tuned down but always with the same few bars. It’s a map in miniature of the rhizomatic, paranoid, palimpsestic cross-platform linkages characteristic of the culture the series buds from. It began as a Tik-Tok mash-up of Timbaland and Nelly Furtado’s 2007 then-ubiquitous hit “Give It To Me” and a 2022 turbo-folk song by Biser King called “Dom Dom Yes Yes,” whose video features the Bulgarian singer flexing in front of a herd of goats, flanked by two women in Daisy Dukes and crop tops. Furtado’s “so give it to me, give it to me, give it to me” in the former’s chorus forms a sonic bridge to the latter’s nonsense refrain of “skibidi dom dom yes yes,” a refrain that had already gone viral as the backdrop to a series of videos of a Turkish man shaking his belly to the beat. The mash-up itself then went viral, in part as the soundtrack to swole e-girl videos by @paryssbryanne that shift abruptly from anime pandering to Paryss flexing her guns when the drop hits. The frantic panning and popping cinematography of these videos informed Skibidi Toilet’s own, the effect of which sometimes makes me think of what might happen if Re’Search Wait’S-era Ryan Trecartin ghost-directed a first-person shooter.
As media consumed mostly by children, it also sits alongside a slightly earlier generation of youth-targeted YouTube weirdness, like the late ’10s rash of human-generated faux-franchise content; the suicidal Paw Patrol and ratchet Nick Jr., reported on in The New York Times, or the live-action, often wordless, obscurely sexual Elsa and Spiderman videos come to mind as examples that elicited the kind of moral panic that now targets Skibidi Toilet. Meanwhile, the fully automated culture that might come for daytime TV in 2027 is already streaming on your kids’ iPads. While Skibidi Toilet is still made, at least in part, by human hands, freaky Cocomelon knock-offs like “Pig Finger Family Song Baby Nursery Rhymes Colorful Cars Colors for Kids 45 Mins Collection Video” and the more tersely titled “Poo Poo Song” appear to be stitched together from ChatGPT-generated scripts, synthesized voices, and algorithmic animation.
If peering into the drain of Skibidi Toilet gives us a vision of the future, it also pipes us back to the past, subsuming 30 years of machinima (i.e. machine cinema, or films made in graphics engines) and video games that the majority of its viewers weren’t yet alive to experience firsthand. Source Filmmaker, the software tool that is its medium and a popular palette for machinima, is a product of the mid ’00s and carries the aesthetic and computational limits of its time. There’s a glitched rubberiness to the features of the human, humanoid, and toiletbased characters it creates. This—in combination with their blocky motion intermixed with sudden, grotesque stasis—calls to mind Jim Carrey’s mid-’90s physical comedy, the contorted tableaux vivants and rictus grins of Liar, Liar and The Mask. The aesthetic summons up years of childhood lost to EverQuest and Counter-Strike, the age of Surge and Jolt-fueled LAN parties; also the age of George W. Bush, the Twin Towers (which appear intact later in the series), the second Persian Gulf War, and TheFacebookdot- com. The tone, especially in the earlier videos, returns a viewer to the late ’00s and early ’10s, to the abyssal, sublime stupidity of @dril’s weird Twitter, to the “Internet Ugly” of MS Paint rage comics and Bazinga templates.
Although Skibidi Toilet is usually addressed as weird internet shit for children and incels and not as a work of art, it also hearkens back beyond the 2000s to the early 20th century avant-garde, perhaps most obviously to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a urinal laid on its side and inscribed “R. Mutt 1917,” rejected from the salon of the Society of Independent Artists, either on the grounds that it was vulgar to rub the audience’s nose in piss, or because it was simple plagiarism, ripping off the bathroom showroom. Duchamp’s “readymade” sculpture was a watershed moment for art historical modernity, shifting the paradigm from creation to selection; it was perhaps, too, one origin point for contemporary meme culture, with Skibidi Toilet’s weaponized WCs as feral descendants of Fountain, and critiqued, like its ancestor, as either childishly vulgar or inanely derivative.
“Although Skibidi Toilet is usually addressed as weird internet shit for children and incels and not as a work of art, it also hearkens back beyond the 2000s to the early 20th century avant-garde.”
The total effect of these layers of reference is complexly nostalgic for an era in which the seams of our digital assets showed, when there were lags and gaps in the feed. It’s nostalgic, but, again, there’s something odd about literal children consuming content that references an era they either had not yet been born for or had lived through as blissfully unaware infants. Yearning for the thing or home you never actually had is typical of nostalgia, but one wants to insist there must be some kind of minimum age before the pining begins. For his part, Goodman, the ex-Paramount exec, posits the series as the source of a paradoxically original nostalgia that escapes the event horizon of intergenerational franchises: “They’re not inheriting [Skibidi Toilet] from their grandparents, or being told, ‘Oh you’re going to love Twister because I saw it back in the ‘90s when I was in high school.’ They discovered it—it’s theirs.” On the other hand, meme culture might transform nostalgia more generally, fragmenting the zone of cultural objects it fixes upon and accelerating its cycles: you can feel nostalgic about a meme template that made its insular rounds barely a few weeks ago. And the sheer proliferating targeted chaos of the feed teaches you to relate without always recognizing, abstracting nostalgia as a structure of feeling from the dross of actual social life.
So why is a singing toilet apocalypse one of the most popular Gen- Alpha media franchises? Why did these fragmentary nightmares, rendered in cartoon physics, go so viral that they might even jump from your iPhone to IMAX? Some have pointed to the increasingly all-purpose explanation: “a shift in the algorithm.” In this theory, YouTube pivoted towards prioritizing series where viewers watch multiple subsequent episodes. While the shift had perhaps been meant to reward sustained engagement and not ultra-short-form content, suddenly, kids watching thirty fifteen-second toilet clips sent a stronger signal than some workaday millennial snoring through two episodes of Suits. These explanations reduce Skibidi Toilet’s success to a canny exploit at the intersection of an algorithmic readjustment and legions of pandemic-addled, unsupervised, iPad-wielding children. Is this virality then a mask for more nefarious forces at work? Hannah Zeavin argues that a previous generation was shaped by Sesame Street’s efforts to harness the wasteland of television to produce well-socialized, middle-class liberal workers. Does the capitalism of the future depend on habituating children to shorter surreal bursts of attention than those offered by Paw Patrol, Peppa Pig, even Cocomelon—prepping them for a lifetime of Reels and Shorts to come?
Maybe, sure. Who cares? Skibidi Toilet deserves better questions, ones that don’t reduce its popularity to its ability to capture a market. After all, it’s a little priggish to watch clips of a toilet deejaying a toilet nightclub, or a giant Stalinesque toilet shooting lasers out of his eyes, or a hydra-headed toilet filling the frame before being flushed to the tune of Tears for Fears’s “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and then start shouting about technocapitalism.
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It’s tempting to read Skibidi Toilet allegorically, especially as the series progresses. The episodes get substantially longer, from a dozen seconds to many minutes; the toilets and their camera-, TV-, and speaker-headed enemies are supplemented by mechatron- style technological titans who fight at the head of their armies; the special effects become more intricate, and continuous, character-driven narratives begin to emerge. Increasingly, the episodes shift from CGI Cronenbergian body horror for tweens to something like trailers for an alternate universe Marvel movie. Skibidi Toilet can be read as a reflection on a shifting media landscape, where avatars of traditional media (film, music, television) battle with an emerging, webbased meme cesspool. An excellent explainer pushing this kind of reading, by YouTube’s The Film Theorists, points out that these later toilets repurpose technologies scraped from their fallen enemies, a version of the kinds of remix that characterize digital culture. But they also argue that the allegory is even more specific, with the toilets hearkening back to “YouTube poop,” a genre of user-generated content that predated the social internet, circulating on sites like NewGrounds, Something Awful, and eBaum’s World.
Before content creators chasing platform ad dollars recast internet aesthetics in a more professional, seamless direction, YouTube poops mashed together pop culture to amateurish, frenetic, grotesque, and willfully stupid ends. The arc of the series—from absurd, janky shorts to MCU-style cutscenes— recapitulates this decade of shifts in digital content. But as a whole, in this reading, Skibidi Toilet is the return of a pre-platform repressed, one where the seams in cultural production still show, but one that, The Film Theorists argue, simultaneously presages a synthesis between platform memes and traditional media, in which the studios swallow YouTube poop whole, or vice versa, transforming both.
That’s one kind of shitty media allegory. Another might involve treating Skibidi Toilet as an invitation to rethink the body in relation to media, metabolism, interfaces, and computation—to rethink that relation from the inside out, in terms of the feed and what it means to live in it, where, as they say, the shit hits the fan. “Windows, screens, keyboard, kiosks, channels, sockets, and holes.” Alex R. Galloway invokes all of these as paradigmatic interfaces, as “thresholds, those mysterious zones of interaction that mediate between different realities.” What about bowels, sphincters, drains, ballcocks, S-traps, Ptraps? (If the motto of modern computer interfaces is WYSIWYG—What You See Is What You Get—toilet theory might give us, in its place, WYSIWYS.) The toilet is one kind of purpose-built user interface, a passage point between polite society and the subaltern world of sewage it conceals. It operates a kind of negative alchemy, transforming the bodily matter that passes beyond its event horizon into waste. It has its own temporal logic, immortalized in idioms like “shit or get off the pot,” and its own potential for détournement, in the form of cruising, getting high, crying it out, malingering for half an hour on a workday. But barring plumbing disaster, we think of a toilet as a one-way interface. Shit goes in; shit goes away. Part of the horror Skibidi Toilet imagines is not only that what goes down might come back up, but that what returns might just be . . . us.
I have a persistent critical fantasy about the 2009 Tom Six exploitation film, The Human Centipede. It goes like this: the centipede is actually a computer, and more specifically, a partial Turing machine. If you’ve managed to forget, the villain-protagonist of The Human Centipede sutures three poor souls together mouth-to-asshole, with the idea of unifying the centipede’s digestive system: each is the toilet for the prior link in the chain. If you’ve never known, a Turing machine is a theoretical model of a computer consisting of an endless strip of tape, like an infinite CVS receipt, divided into cells, and an operator that can read symbols on that tape then makes its own marks on it in response and shifts the tape forward or backward. This toy system is capable of modeling any program. The centipede might be a piece of a Turing machine turned inside out: the individual bowels form the cells in the tape; reading and writing are carried out by gut enzymes on food and shit, which then incarnate a different aspect of the tape; and advancing the tape in either direction might be accomplished through shitting or (more difficult, given the sphincter) forceful vomiting.
“That’s one kind of shitty media allegory. Another might involve treating Skibidi Toilet as an invitation to rethink the body in relation to media, metabolism, interfaces, and computation.”
It’s not a perfect analogy. In fact, it’s stupid. There’s more than one bolus being operated on in the various segments of the centipede at any given time, and the actions of gut enzymes are more multifarious than the read/write operations Turing imagined. And those enzymes, instead of a unitary operator, presumably vary from gut to gut. And even if the centipede grew to include every person on the planet, Tom Six’s villain at last triumphantly adding himself at the front or the end, it wouldn’t approach Turing’s infinite scroll. But the crux of this fantasy is an idea that human biology might model computation—that this late-’00s exploitation film posits the gut as CPU, shit as data, assholes and mouths as ports and gates. You could spell “compute,” “eat shit.”
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The video is 19 seconds long. The camera pans across a restaurant where pairs of people sit on toilets at two-tops and consume what looks (if you swipe through frame-by-frame, shouting “Enhance! Enhance!”) like plates of emoji-style human shit, when a singing toilet bursts through the door and the camera tracks it back across the restaurant, revealing, in the background, that the human diners have now themselves been transformed, until the camera jerks back as an even larger, basso toilet makes its own grand entrance, accompanied by an honor guard of miniature toilets, and the first toilet’s head levitates into the frame on its extensible neck, skin flapping back from a rictus grin—cut.
The transformation is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kind of thing—you may have to watch and rewatch to catch a glimpse of this plot point that seems crucial to whatever passes here for narrative. Skibidi toilets are made, not born, and through contagion: sitting on a toilet and eating shit turns you into a chimerical toilet-being yourself, a plumbed cyborg, a hybrid of person and porcelain. The flaring polygons of the face in the final shot reveal the composite, readymade nature of Skibidi- world and our own via a fantasy of disintegration. It’s “assets” all the way down: the face decomposed into a skull asset, a skin asset, a teeth asset, all of which can be modularly reassembled, made to sing, dance, speak, threaten, bite. In Stan Brakhage’s notorious 1971 documentary, The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes, a forensic pathologist carefully peels off a cadaver’s face like a mask, revealing the unseen stuff behind it, the flesh the face is meant to hide. In this machinima version, the face, loosely molded around a central void, fractures and splays, showing us the way it’s been slapped together from ragtag parts. As I am a billion bits of data exhaust slapped together, displayed on demand, sliced, diced, and sold for scrap. This is a dire, dehumanizing fate, but the generosity of Skibidi Toilet’s glitchiness is to show it to us directly, instead of concealing it behind the flow of seamless, airbrushed pixels.
The first written record of the feed comes from the memoirs of the turn-of-the-century German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber. During a psychotic break, he comes to believe that all of the people around him, from his caretakers to his fellow patients to his wife, are what he terms flüchtig hingemachte Männer: fleetingly improvised people. These apparitions are divinely summoned into being for Schreber’s sole benefit. Like the figures that populate Skibidi Toilet, they’re NPCs made up of interchangeable bits and pieces that pad out an empty world, so hastily made that their heads might swap around as you watch. They’re barely worth talking to. As Schreber writes, “I did not pay any particular attention to them, because even then I was tired of all miracles.” And whenever they’re no longer needed for whatever miraculous power they serve, they simply dissolve with a dry rattle or fade into the beds they lie on.
I often ask my psychotherapist if he couldn’t, just once, drive me a little mad, a demand he laughs off as if I don’t mean it. I do, though. I want a taste of one of the compensations of psychosis: a world with me at its center, however intolerably. Schreber put it bluntly: “Everything that happens is in reference to me.” A mind shifted slightly into this paranoid, parallax view, with every vector pointing in, might be a better mirror for or armor against the world of #FYPs.
The fleetingly improvised men demonstrate to Schreber that humankind has perished, that the social world has gone down the drain. Who doesn’t now know the feeling of being tired of all miracles? Late at night, alone in my apartment, I open my phone to visit my friends, or people who look like my friends, or products disguised as people who might be my friends. This palm-sized world is reassembled on the fly, presented to me, just for me, as I scroll: fleeting, improvised, complete, and new every time. Late at night, I open my phone and know: Schreber was right. Yes, yes.