I attended a wedding a few years back. The vows were spoken in Klingon. A heavy metal band performed the wedding march. Taco trucks catered. I’ve also attended a Harry Potter wedding. Potter cocktails, Potter table decor, Potter photobooth. Dumbledore quote in the program. Apparently, Potter weddings are happening all the time.
This sort of thing is everywhere now. Lightsaber duels instead of a first dance. Rapped vows. At these events, you often see a grandma off to the side, wincing in shame and bewilderment, observing an alien world with strange customs that appear to be mocking anything that her world once held sacred. She wouldn’t be able to articulate it this way, but she’s wondering something to the effect of: How did everything become so Reddit?
You can’t escape it: everything is ugly and fat and dorky and trite and corny and satanic and fake and gay and soy and cringe. All mainstream culture is created by and for resentful geek losers. Everything sucks now and it’s because of Reddit.
Reddit is a geek forum, and it contains multitudes. But somehow, across all these communities, from r/knitting to /rWhoaThatsInteresting to r/ProgrammerHumor, a distinct gestalt has taken prominence, on and off the site. The richest and most powerful people in the world are Reddit. The professional managerial class is Reddit. All of Western society runs on Redditism.
The Redditor is an archetype that transcends the internet. He’s a self-loathing ex-gifted kid who indulges in childish consumption rather than face the duties and uncertainties of adulthood. He thumbs his nose at traditional authority, and makes that bratty rebelliousness his whole personality. Redditism is not just an aesthetic or a collection of fandoms, it’s an ideology, one that has been taken up and instrumentalized by the global elite against everything good. It animates a death cult that wants you dead first. It’s the end of the line.
The Redditor’s values, such as they are, invert traditional morality, in reaction to perceived authority figures (God, church, Dad, Republicans, America etc.) regardless of how much power they actually hold over him. He is terrified of adulthood and resents the demands it places upon him.
When Reddit came online in 2006, it was billed as “the front page of the internet.” It was, essentially, a way to share links and commentary, the best of which were aggregated onto the front page, often becoming viral sensations. You could “upvote” links and comments you liked, and “downvote” ones you didn’t. Reddit was an immediate hit, selling to Condé Nast for $20 million only a year after its founding.
The site crystallized around internet and geek culture. A geeky voice, a geeky mindset. A posture toward the world and eventually, a distinct political orientation. Today, the modal Redditor’s politics overlap on every conceivable issue with the American Liberal Left.
To understand Redditism, we will examine its four unofficial commandments.
Commandment #4. Thou shalt let people enjoy things
It took two generations for the hippie ethic of “Do your own thing,” which for boomers meant getting laid and going on cool LSD motorcycle road trips, to devolve into “Let people enjoy things,” i.e. rotting at home with narcotizing consumption.
Want to spend every waking minute wrapped in your goon cave vape cloud until your dopamine receptors are sparking like a downed power line? Want to blow your 30s autistically speedrunning bargain bin video games that came out when you were 11? Want to turn the Walt Disney Corporation into your entire personality? Want to dress up like a dog and go to a No Holes Refused chemsex party in an abandoned warehouse? Want to lop off your genitalia? Go for it. No gods, no masters.
Never kinkshame, fatshame, or inspire any shame ever. Shame is bad for you, and imposing shame is one of the few sins one could ever commit. We don’t shame, we normalize, we destigmatize.
Because the Redditor lacks a moral lodestar, the only impulse that motivates him is an animal’s instinct to maximize pleasure and avoid pain. The Redditor wants to consume the product, live in the pod, and eat the bugs. He’ll toss out anything in his life that stands in the way of pleasure maximization. He’ll blow up his marriage, go “no contact” with his parents. “Enjoying things” is all he can bear to do.
Commandment #3. Thou shalt be a decent human
Would it kill you to just be decent? Wouldn’t that pretty much solve the world’s problems, if you could stop being such a dumpster fire garbage person? Don’t worry about who gets to decide what decency is, or what happens when people’s views on this conflict. Just … be nice.
What we have here is the Golden Rule, plucked from its Christian context – which is meant to explain what you are supposed to want “done unto you” – until all that’s left is consent. As long as any involved parties have affirmed consent (hopefully they won’t revoke it decades later), anything goes, even if it impoverishes people and robs them of their dignity and safety (sterilizing children, polyamory, letting bums shoot up on the subway).
The Redditor seeks to be rootless, raceless, drifting frictionlessly through life, every relationship reducible to a financial transaction. He is a global citizen, he has no connection or commitment to any place or people. He’s not a Texan or a Southerner or an American – he’s as loyal to Starfleet and the Rebel Alliance as to any of these obsolete categories.
Being a decent human comes naturally to the Redditor because he has no agency. Maybe growing up he “was bullied” or “was teased” – passive voice. Life happens to the Redditor, and not the other way around. He doesn’t want to approach women – he wants to be raped.
The Redditor is like this because he hates and pities himself. This is the wellspring from which not only his sexuality but his entire politics flows. He naturally hates that he’s ugly or fat or short or socially awkward. What’s worse, he’s probably white and male, so he’s not even allowed to complain about any of this anymore. He’s got all this resentment and frustration, with nobody to point it at but himself. The only way out of this miserable situation is to rebrand himself as “one of the good ones” in hopes that someone – ideally a woman – will recognize him for it. He retargets his bile toward his own race, his sex, his country. He’s a white knight. A passive, sexless nice guy. A good liberal. An ally. Finally, a decent heckin’ human.
Commandment #2. Thou shalt read the room
The Redditor’s worst nightmare is inspiring an awkward party reaction. Of being “that guy.” Being “on the right side of history,” is his watchword. You must hold politics that align with Northrup Grumman and Exxon, and Trust the ScienceTM that emerges from huge multinational pharmaceutical interests. The ScienceTM is of course not the open study of the natural world but a set of morally-charged maxims passed down from regime institutions. It is a morality of consensus.
Conformism is baked into Reddit’s design, as the factual accuracy of a post is immaterial – the only thing that matters is upvotes and downvotes. Dissenting opinions are typically downvoted and discredited, often with inaccurate, biased, or sourceless claims, while popular opinions are upvoted all the way to the front page, gaining maximum exposure.
The Redditor doesn’t want to be downvoted. He knows from childhood what it’s like to be excluded, and his biggest fear is to once again be cast into the darkness of social opprobrium. Therefore he seeks above all to conform to the pattern of his world.
Commandment #1: Thou shalt believe in nothing
The Redditor is a materialist nihilist whose moral vacuum gives way to Current-Thingism, a fickle but fierce devotion to whatever happens to be institutionally approved right now.
He has contempt for heritage, ritual, tradition, and historical continuity. That’s stuff his mean parents made him do, and he doesn’t have to do it anymore. He can stay up all night eating candy and playing video games or whatever he wants. He can live in an eternal Panglossian present, which is always better than what came before.
You need to release your grip on anything transcendent or eternal and embrace the warm cocoon of the contingent. You need to snippily disregard basic civilizational assumptions. You should do whatever you can to undermine and denigrate anything your dad thinks is sacred.
The Redditor never met a trope he didn’t want to invert, or a tradition he didn’t want to transgress. Let the girl propose marriage. What if the Christ metaphor in Narnia was voiced by a woman? What if every fictional redhead was instead black? Let the morbidly obese woman be a billboard model – bonus points if she has a weird skin thing. Be gay, do crime!
We can understand the Redditor’s political predisposition as a response to a frustrating and confusing world that mostly wants to destroy geeky guys. Redditism is a posture of supplication in the face of a devouring liberalism: I don’t need or want a family, a connection to a place, a country or a genetic lineage. I do not need or want agency. I will give up my family, I will recite the sacred dogmas, I will live and die a perfect consumer who goes along with every new liberal demand, no matter how internally inconsistent, no matter how humiliating – just let me have my goon cave and my vape pen and I’ll do whatever you ask.
In 2025, Reddit is bigger than ever, and its worldview is dominant beyond the platform. Look at the people who run things now in government, media, and academia: pudgy middle-aged Tumblrinas with cat-eye glasses and technicolor undercuts fill the halls of bureaucracy. Barely-human dorks like Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are as gods among men. Total Reddit victory.
It is no longer acceptable for geeks to simply be geeks. They have to get with the program. No more engineering fellowships without virtue signalling. No more all-male video game studios. No more comics or movies without awkward, forced capitulations to diversity. Geek culture was eaten alive by social justice. From there, it kept eating at Big Tech, and eventually all of professional society. If you want to have a corporate job in the West, you’ve got to put on the Reddit mask and repeat the Reddit oaths.
We’ve had decades of rule by mealymouthed geeks now, and all of pop culture bends to flatter the egos of geekwads. What do we have to show for it? Unbearable ugliness and chaos. But all is not lost. Because things have gotten so miserable, we may actually have a shot at killing Redditism over the next decade or so. Enough people are recognizing that it’s a dead end. Millennials are aging out of online discourse, and younger generations seem less inclined to spend their free time debating people online. Being the guy who knows all the facts and can make the best arguments is a diminishing superpower in a world of generative AI.
Replacing the Poindexters will be men of action and will – some good, some bad. In the long term, the future will be won by people who know what they want, and really want it, and the Redditor just can’t bring himself to figure that out. They want to be comfy in their cubbyhole, and they want to fling boogers at anyone who actually cares about anything that didn’t roll in on the pre-packaged Current Thing conveyor belt. It’s not a worldview that’s built to last, and after 25 years under its fat, greasy thumb, I’ll be glad to watch it die.