Outjerked by the Trickster
I've been satirized by circlejerk.blog, and I reflect on the history of online circlejerking, Indigenous trickster traditions like Coyote and Chi-Jean, and the concept of survivance. A call for more humour and satire in online spaces, and how trickster storytelling can build empathy through shared laughter.
can finally say I've really made it—I'm currently the target of [circlejerk.blog](https://circlejerk.blog) ([archive](https://archive.ph/vN47q)). I'm touched, as I don't really think I'm worthy of being satirized, but since I have been, I'm going to annoyingly share my thoughts and [kill the frog](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/440683-explaining-a-joke-is-like-dissecting-a-frog-you-understand).
circlejerk.blog isn't new to the bit. An archived [about page](http://web.archive.org/web/20250710003655/https://circlejerk.blog/about) is upfront about the satire, labelling itself "an art project":
If you’re feeling a sting of recognition, perhaps it’s time to examine why your life so closely mirrors a cliché ripe for parody. And yes, this was conjured by the very AI that the white, middle-aged tech evangelists — who paved the digital road for this site — so fervently idolize. Chew on that.
In its previous iteration, there were many posts like [The Last Tab](http://web.archive.org/web/20250710003443/https://circlejerk.blog/the-last-tab), a mock eulogy for browser tabs in favour of genAI agents doing your browsing for you, with a comment section of hedge-everything replies underneath speaking in 🤖 emoji. You can browse the archives for dozens more posts like this.
Circlejerking has been a hobby of the Internet for decades, and of men for millennia. [r/Circlejerk](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/circle-jerk) was founded on Reddit on December 10, 2008, built to mock the site's hivemind of reflexive catchphrases and self-congratulatory consensus. r/Circlejerk mimics the tone of sincere Reddit to expose how much of "sincere Reddit" is just people performing agreement at each other. It spawned a taxonomy of spinoffs: r/fitnesscirclejerk, r/engineeringcirclejerk, and so on.
In 2020, playwrights Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley staged [*Circle Jerk*](https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/michael-breslin-and-patrick-foley), a Pulitzer-finalist livestreamed satire about online trolls and mocking a hivemind's self-image. The aesthetic and badges. Building a fake earnest website to satirize earnest websites is cataloged on the [IndieWeb wiki](https://indieweb.org/design-satire), alongside a deliberately unusable UI called User Inyerface.
Anyways, back to circlejerk.blog, I want to praise the work done to mimic [Unstory's site](https://unstory.eu). It's a very convincing 1:1 mimicry, and his writing mannerisms are nailed, though not the *substance* of what he writes—which I'll get into.
I've been thinking about how I want to approach responding to this. The archives and previous iterations of circlejerk.blog target the stereotypical IndieWebber—what I imagine to be a Portland-esque cishet white guy hipster that's techbro adjacent; an online nerd that's remarka
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