Statement of Principles
The world is fucked. Toxic chemicals are accumulating in our water, plastic in our blood, carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Entire non-human populations are disappearing almost overnight. Capitalism is squeezing the last drop of water from the desert and pinching every last penny from every public nook and secret cranny in our lives. Fascist bastards are gradually seizing control of major governments around the world. World War Three is looking less and less like a geopolitical impossibility and more like an inevitability. Every decision made by the people in power somehow seems to make all of our problems worse for no clear reason.
And we can watch it all happen, in virtual real-time, through our ubiquitous plastic-and-steel portals. We can hear what each and every moron, lowlife, prick, scumbag, toady, dickrider, insufferable cunt and dumbass motherfucker thinks about each and every one of those unfathomably ominous, genuine existential threats, and more.
Well, the first step in un-fucking the world is understanding exactly how and why it’s so fucked in the first place. Maybe the Internet is the reason. Maybe the Internet is just a symptom of the real cause. What the Internet most definitely is, however, is a core part of the lives of billions of people. Dislike it or not, the World Wide Web is now a fundamental aspect of the human experience.
What does it mean to be able to talk to your friends 24/7, 365? Why does my boss need me to download twelve different applications, that we’ll drop within a month? Why can’t I stop doomscrolling through Twitter? Where will the next mass shooting be livestreamed from? Which pop-culture icon will they add as a playable character in Fortnite next?
All of these pressing questions remain unanswered by contemporary literature, despite some truly cringe-worthy efforts. Irony Poisoning, like those questions, arose out of the Internet. It is a condition that affects many digitally-addled people, young and old. Its victims often begin adopting internet slang as a joke, then find themselves unable to stop. It is a sure sign of the disease when they start making social media posts from an absurdly strawmanned perspective of their ideological opponents. Eventually they can wrap themselves in so many layers of rhetorical irony that they themselves lose track of what they actually believe, and spiral into virtual psychosis.
I named this website after that terrible affliction to remind myself, and you, dear reader, that the Internet is very real. It is no longer an anonymous frontier-land, but an unprecedented global public forum, a source of massive wealth, and a surveillance system. The sheriff has arrived and he brought along the rest of civilization. Pigs, politicians, terrorists, and businessmen use it to coordinate and justify their savagery just as much as normal folks like you or me (wink wink, nudge nudge) use it to share our thoughts on politics, art, and what we had for breakfast this morning.
Irony Poison is a website for exploring how this insane contraption has affected our lives. It is a space for the children of the Internet to explore how irrevocably their lives have been and will be different from our ancestors. It is a chance to understand the death of privacy, the dawn of instant messaging, and the utter chaos of true connectivity. It is a place for digital art in a digital age.
Irony Poison 