Seeking the Big Otter

One thing I've missed since I moved from Twitter to Mastodon is a certain strain of hyperintellectual shitposting. And, it's not like I could go back to Twitter and read it. Most of those people aren't posting anymore^[1]. There are plenty of very sincere Marxists on Mastodon, and many lovely anarchists, but people who were brain-poisoned in graduate school into finding critical theory hilarious seemed to be rare. I mean, they're always rare, but I could usually find them. Then one person I follow posted this incredible joke:

columbo is the lacanian Big Other which is why he is so psychically effective against criminals^[2]

And I felt like the post was speaking directly to me and my current mix of very specific special interests. It touched my heart and my brain and my funny bone. Like the best kinds of shitposts, it's both hilarious and actually completely true.

To be honest, I mostly know about the Lacanian concept of the Big Other second hand, through Zizek lectures, which I listened to obsessively in the 2010s. I also read a tiny bit of Lacan in graduate school, and I enjoyed the heady feeling of being on the brink of some great understanding, yet the understanding never came and I sometimes wonder if there really is something to understand, or just the alluring feeling. (In the Red Mars trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson at one point describes the feeling of being on the brink of brilliant insight but never getting there as a kind of symptom of organic brain breakdown in one of the characters, like some kind of extreme dementia brought on by their excessive longevity. I think about that a lot because I often think I'm about to have a brilliant insight but when I attempt to concretize it, it turns out to be trite. What if "insight" is a feeling and no more important than say, being itchy or having premenstrual anxiety?)

But I digress.

Mastodon, you may have heard, has no algorithm. That's not true, because it shows you posts in reverse chronological order, which is certainly an algorithm^[3]. What Mastodon lacks is a mechanism for programmatically suggesting posts to you based on who you follow, which, turns out, was a pretty nice feature of Twitter sometimes. If you want to find suggestions for who to follow on Mastodon, you have to ask. Mastodon stans will tell you this is awesome and the best thing, but I disagree, because sometimes you don't know what you want until you see it. For example, if someone asks me what kind of dessert I want, I might say pistachio ice cream. It would not have occurred to me to say I want gulab jamun or creme brule if I had not had them before. And it would not have, to extend this pained metaphor but also include a little slice of life, thought that I want gulab jamun this afternoon had I not walked by the Indian grocery and remembered they have it.

In this way, the beautiful joke about Columbo reminded me that I could try asking. So I posted this request:

I would like to follow more people who shitpost about critical theory and continental philosophy generally. I need more jokes and sly allusions to Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Butler, etc. But not just those. I know it’s niche, but it’s a big fediverse. Please help me find them/you!

The post got over 100 boosts and lots of people replying that they aren't that clever, or don't only post jokes, but they're into this kind of thing. Thus I found lots of new people to follow and made a list, which I have named Big Otter in honor of the legendary Tumblr Discourse on the Otter. Big Otter isn't the same vibe as my old Twitter list, and it never will be. Mediums shape the message, even if they seem similar.

No person enters the same Tumblr stream twice, as Heraclitus said.