The internet, capital of nonsense, is somehow getting weirder

Fifteen years ago, I remember watching the uber-viral Charlie the Unicorn. Another thing I remember: my friends’ common response to Charlie’s nightmarish trip to Candy Mountain — “LOL so random.”

The internet’s collective sense of humor has long followed that “LOL so random” vibe.

• It kinda had to; how else can you make something memorable when TikTok adds ~34m videos, YouTube adds 700k+ hours of video, and Instagram adds 1.3B images every day?

“WTF?” moments have been central to online life for decades now — yet we’ve never seen anything like today’s creators.

Weird is the new mainstream…

… and it’s being taken to new, lucrative extremes.

Skibidi Toilet, an animated series launched on YouTube earlier this year by user DaFuq!?Boom!, started with an 11-second video of a head popping out of a toilet and singing.

More head-scratching videos followed, in which toilets with heads protruding from their bowls seek world domination.

• How big is this thing? Hold on to your toilets, people — DaFuq!?Boom! videos have racked up 8.7B+ views on YouTube alone. Its subscriber count? 22m+. (For context, that outduels the NBA, Harry Styles, and every single traditional media outlet.)
• Where does this go? The cash-in extensions have already started — a “Toilets Attack” mobile game reached 1m+ downloads on Google Play in its first month, and a PC game releases soon.

The oddball channel isn’t some one-off thing…

… we warned you: It’s an all-new era of internet weirdness.

Look at NPC streaming, another viral trend with livestreamers speaking in non-sequiturs, discomfitingly staring and thrashing about, and doing things like popping individual popcorn kernels with a straightening iron.

Oh, and making $7k+ per day doing it.

“LOL so random” indeed.