Another piece from my Blogspot site, this one covering a truly unique piece of new media.
When it comes to well done and groundbreaking online entertainment, you won’t find a better example than The SCP Foundation. The site is presented as the archives of an organization devoted to finding, containing, researching -and if necessary, destroying- anything deemed abnormally dangerous or harmful to humanity’s perception of reality. This can range from a homicidal lizard that will never ever ever ever (ever) stay dead to a previously unknown integer that causes math to stop working to a green goo that mostly just smells minty but if it ever comes in contact with dead bodies something so terrible happens that most people aren’t allowed to even know what that is.
Most of the website is devoted to entries cataloguing these anomalous objects, although there are also a fair amount of stories dealing with the Foundation itself, the items it contains, and various other Groups of Interest that operate just outside of everyday life. The fact that the site is a wiki means that just about anyone can submit a piece, and there is a very active community involved in editing the site and reviewing new content. And I am a huge fan of the whole thing, bordering on obsession.
I started reading the site last year, but I didn’t start binge reading until last summer, and since then I’ve eased into the habit of going to the site and just tabbing through the “random page” option whenever I’m procrastinating or just bored. So by now I’m intimately familiar with the site, but it’s taken me this long to get here because this thing is huge. You could just chalk up my love for the Foundation to the fact that I’m a weird dude, but as I read more and more of the stuff on there I realized that my fondness for the site goes beyond mere entertainment value. There are three big themes that keep coming up throughout the wiki that I find rather compelling.
- You’ve got to put in the effort (Or: This ain’t your grampa’s horror story)
The format of the SCP wiki can be rather intimidating. For starters there’s the aforementioned size, and on top of that the object descriptions that make up the bulk of the site are littered with black censor bars and phrases like [REDACTED] and [DATA EXPUNGED]. What text is legible is usually written in a very dry and academic style that describes the object in the most exacting terms possible. This means that just figuring out what the object being described actually is takes a good amount of effort and active reading. The stories the site features usually require some research on your part as they might reference characters or SCP objects that the reader should be at least partially familiar with in order to understand what’s going on.
This need for effort results in numerous rewards for those willing to pony up. For one thing it can make the interviews or experiment logs usually appended to object descriptions that much more chilling as you see the effects of the object in action. More broadly speaking, it provides a wholly unique sense of satisfaction. The level of engagement that this need to decipher the fiction can produce is at times on par with a well-written video game or a “puzzle” movie like Memento or Primer.
2. The Foundation can barely keep things together
There are three object classes assigned to SCP objects: Safe (can be dangerous but is easily contained), Euclid (Not easily contained and possibly more dangerous), and Keter (Super hard to contain, super dangerous, should be destroyed if possible and easy enough). Read the descriptions of enough Keter class objects and you’ll notice a running theme. Most of them are always just a few steps away from totally escaping and wreaking havoc on at least the Earth and at most all of reality.
The Foundation is an organization with an amount of manpower and resources to boggle the mind. They have multiple facilities throughout the world equipped with nuclear bombs as failsafes, armies at their disposal, and a steady enough supply of test subjects that they literally burn through crops of them monthly. Even with all this, one gets the sense throughout the site that the Foundation is always at most just a few days away from losing all control and that this may have happened several times already, a theme that’s also present in many of the story-canons and standalone fiction pieces.
In short, there is a worldwide conspiracy in charge of shielding humanity from the truth and committing terrible acts for the greater good, and they’re just barely keeping the lid on everything. If you study history and international politics, you’ll find that this is a recurring theme there too. And they don’t even have to deal with cognitohazards.
3. The SCP Foundation = The Internet and Current Media
Remember how I said that the description of virtually every SCP object is peppered with indicators that you’re not seeing the whole story? It goes deeper than that. Due to the sprawling nature of the site and the tons of authors that work on it, there is effectively no one true canon to explain neither the objects themselves nor the ultimate purpose and history of the Foundation. In-universe this even makes sense, considering how many reality-warping objects the Foundation has locked up. But this obfuscation of information serves more than just to increase confusion and apprehension in the reader.
The SCP Foundation is inextricably tied to the internet. It originated from creepypasta posts on 4chan and now it functions as a wiki. Like the internet, the Foundation website contains an abundance of data but relatively little useful information. If you want to get anywhere close to understanding the bigger picture you’re going to need to sift through a LOT of text. Even then you will run into chunks that don’t agree at all with a lot of the other info you’ve just spent hours (or days, or months,) familiarizing yourself with. Sometimes this will happen over the span of a single article.
Remember the Arab Spring? Remember how when it started everybody was jubilant about what looked like the flowering of democracy and how eager we were to attach the narrative of the noble and downtrodden people throwing off their chains of oppression? Then how quickly this was followed by apprehension about who exactly was backing the protesters, prompting comparisons to historical moments like the Iranian and French Revolutions? And how soon after both these trends the two countries just sort of dropped off our radar, despite continuing unrest in Egypt and a then-burgeoning extremist movement in Syria that would become the Islamic State?
We live in an age where we don’t just have access to a vast amount of information — more than we could reasonably be expected to read and digest — we have access to it instantaneously. This can be so overwhelming that it’s no surprise news channels and web sites have opted to take a hard left into shoving their biases into people’s faces from the get-go in a manner that would make Hearst proud. Why bother consuming all of that complicated and often conflicting information when you can just have a narrative spoon-fed to you which you already agree with? Never mind that this means you can end up knowing an entirely different set of facts from those who get their news from other sources. It’s just so much more comfortable than knowing the truth of what actually happened.
The SCP Foundation isn’t just jarring for the horrifying nature of its content or the coldness with which it’s related. The website rejects the imposition of an overarching narrative, otherwise known as “basically all of culture.” Politicians and their parties live and die by you buying into a narrative that they’ve spent years fostering and take great pains to maintain. The language of advertising functions by playing off of numerous subconscious symbols and social cues in consumers. Movies have three-act structures for a reason, and it’s no accident that Star Wars, one of the most popular and referenced films of all time, is basically “The Hero’s Journey: The Movie”. Sharing in these unifying stories is one of the most fundamental traits of being human, practically hardwired into our DNA. The Foundation lives in a universe where existence is random and inscrutable and dangerous and scary, and even those with more information than everyone else still don’t have enough. Thus it functions as a strikingly accurate depiction of our society and cultural landscape. Taken as a whole, the SCP Foundation presents a picture of a world that is fundamentally at odds with itself, where even the gatekeepers aren’t entirely sure why they’re holding onto the keys so tightly.
