The parapsychological impact of Sam Hyde’s boxing match on contemporary metaphysics: the end of all death threats
or, explaining the joke
Infamous internet entertainer Sam Hyde’s recent boxing match, and post-win wrestling style “call out” of Hasan Piker, is very funny. The 10 second video of him looking directly into the camera and declaring “I am going to kill you”, the interjection by an interviewer “in the ring?”, punchline: “no in real life”, is, completely absent of all context, just really funny. Perfect timing, perfect delivery, perfect structure. But “within context” there’s even more going on, and that it happens to also be a perfectly constructed joke, only strengthens its impact.
What he is doing is publicly issuing a death threat. He’s sort of been working on this concept for several years now, and I think this moment he perfected it. Here’s the real joke:
We have since 2010 been dealing with a perpetual internet meme of “internet death threats”, a tool that has been wielded strategically and cleverly by various narcissists to manipulate viewers, by insinuating that they are in danger, which could be invoked by anyone at any time, as long as they were shameless enough to do it. Deep down in the collective subconscious, we all understand that this has always been bullshit. But we’ve never been able to “prove” it. No decisive explanation had been made that could dispel the ward of “victim-hood”, that anyone could claim to deflect criticism – until now. And it’s not an argument.
Sam’s little call out wrestling shit talk is the perfect anti-meme to the meme of “internet death threats”, because you don’t have to explain it. It is in itself, the shortest and clearest possible way of expressing the idea in question: Internet death threats are not real. It’s a wrestling show. And the people taking them “seriously” - or pretending to – are just wimps – or deliberately attempting to manipulate people - or both.
Even spelling it out like this is already a worse way of expressing the idea. The video itself is the Goldilocks zone of shortest possible way of expressing it, with the fullest possible expression of it, which is what memes are. The fullest expression of something, in the shortest amount of imagery.
In the terminology of meme-magic, Sam has created a new spell. A counter-spell, to a previous left-hand meme-magic spell. We’re all wizards now, and Sam has written a completely new incantation. It took him several years, starting with “self-defence” jokes, slowly and gradually fine tuning it, until finally putting together the material, worldly conditions of a rite: the boxing match, the build up, the entire process. Physically training himself, and setting up an elaborate rite to imbue the words with power, by enacting the ritual perfectly. And now we all have access to a new spell.
Now, instead of merely accusing someone of “playing the victim”, which has always been an empty gesture, a powerless thing against their meme-ward, you can instead simply post the little video edit of Sam screaming the joke, and mr. pikers reaction, sitting in a gamer chair drinking a sugary coffee drink, and being prissy about it. A picture says more than a thousand words. Those two pictures, together, in contrast, has literally “moved the conversation forwards”. We haven’t noticed it yet because it just happened a couple of days ago. But it will. It’s literal meme magic. Sam destroyed the concept of “internet death threats” forever.
I am of course not accusing mr hyde of doing this “on purpose”, or for these reasons. He is obviously doing them by instinct – because it’s funny. But that does also have a significance, in the everything about our “culture war”, for lack of a better term, is the slow process of collectively meditating on the re-calibration of reason and instinct. Right and left brain. Which has for 300 years been entirely lopsided in favor of reason-worship. And the reason this event is so memetically resonant is because a vehicle of instinct has moved the conversation forward. For lack of a better term. There is of course no conversation.
I think he just means that he is going to one day actually murder Hasan Piker in his own property.
when I was in high school and Barack Obama had just been voted President but had yet to take office, the Digg homepage was like three quarters Obama headlines, just one after the other, it was so obnoxious. one said something to the effect of "Sixth Death Threat Made Against President-Elect Obama", and the ridiculousness of it just floored naïve sixteen-year-old me—wasn't Obama supposed to be the hip young Internet President? did he really not know that Death Threats are just kind of part and parcel of the whole "using the Internet" experience? shocking at first but you quickly acclimate as you realize that words typed into a computer anonymously or pseudonymously obviously cannot physically affect you. I felt the need to point this out to everyone by unwittingly committing a felony under US Code Title 18 Section 871 by typing "lmao only six? I am going to kill President-Elect Barack Obama, death threat +1 lol". for some reason (times were different I guess?) nothing bad ever happened to me save for getting (temporarily!) banned from Digg, but this was basically the beginning of the cultural shift of considering "Death Threats" to be "something scary that can happen to you, a celebrity, or anyone, who uses the Internet" from "something that that happens to you as a natural consequence of using the Internet, like, basically every online game or message board, all the time, it's not a big deal". we didn't understand what was happening at the time but in hindsight it's clear that this was the beginning of forcible normie gentrification of our Internet.