The XKCD Canon

If you were born before 2010, give this post to a child instead.

Just kidding, you can read it! But know that I wrote it for Generation Alpha. It was meant to be a bit cringe but funny; I’m not sure it wound up being funny.

Hey, kids!

Have your parents or teachers ever shared a stick figure comic like this one?

This is XKCD, a webcomic that helped define online culture from 2005-2015.

The author, Randall Munroe, is one of his generation’s great communicators. He wrote the best memes about multiple social phenomena. He invented nerd sniping and ten hundred words. And some of his work reveals important truths about human existence.

The other day, I met a teenager who hadn’t heard of XKCD and had one of these moments:

I wanted to say “go read it!” But then I remembered that most of the comics riff on culture and technology from the late Aughts, and might not appeal to modern teens.

So I used this post to create a canon: the comics people reference most often, and the ones I’d consider “essential” for someone willing to spend 15 minutes on XKCD.¹

Someone is wrong on the internet

When the Internet first emerged, people rarely argued with strangers who lived thousands of miles away.² If they won an argument, they got to rub it in someone’s face right up close, and that would’ve been their only argument that week.

The Internet exposed us to an infinite supply of arguments, and made it harder to end them. When they don’t have to show their face, or hear the crowd’s laughter, one person can argue forever. And even if you forced them into retreat, you’d get bogged down debating other people with the same dumb idea. (Meanwhile, they’d be losing sleep over your dumb ideas.)

To cite an even older nerd meme, the trick to winning that game is not to play. So you might hear us use “someone is wrong on the Internet!” to make a friend abandon a hopeless conversation, or as a reminder to ourselves not to crash out because our opps were giving delulu.

Standards

Many smart people see chaos and assume that no one has tried to organize it. They yearn to create a single, perfect system that everyone will use.

This usually doesn’t work. It’s not impossible — one of Munroe’s examples, charging ports, is close to solved already — but it’s harder than it looks. This goes for standards, databases, rulesets, and any other attempt to systematize how things are done.

Signs someone is about to encounter this:

“Let’s put everything into a Wiki!”
“We’ll use this tagging system to organize all of our content.”
“These five categories will cover all possible examples.”

If a new standard involves our social lives, see “Drama”:

Password Strength

Most Gen X-to-Z-ers who use multi-word passwords are probably thinking about this comic. The advice is good.

Just don’t use it the way my wife and I did — setting our wifi password to “HorseBattery” because we’d already memorized it.

Dependencies

This comes out whenever a single company’s service outage collapses the Internet for a day. Now that AI systems are becoming elite hackers, you might see it a lot more often.

Extrapolating

Useful whenever you see someone use current growth rates to reach absurd conclusions.

After all, if past growth really predicted future growth:

A single Bitcoin would sell for $73,000.
COVID would have been a pandemic.
We’d be marching toward an AI singularity.

(Just playing with you, Randall — it’s a great comic, no cap.)

Ten Thousand

Everything you know came from somewhere. There was a day you went from ignorance to knowledge. Those days should be celebrated, not mocked.³

When you go the opposite way and give people too much credit for knowing things, you get “Average Familiarity”:

Sheeple

When you care a lot about issues that most people ignore, those people may seem broadly ill-informed. But it doesn’t mean they aren’t thoughtful or complex. Everyone has their own collection of cares and worries; we’re all conscious of something.⁴

If you find yourself thinking of average people as “sheeple” or “NPCs” or whatever label your generation uses, you’re probably underestimating them. Reading Working or watching Life in a Day makes it harder to fall into this mindset.

Free speech

This is correct, but the devil is in the details. Sometimes:

Most people agree with you, but enough people think you’re an asshole to make your life miserable.
Someone you like disappears through that door.
The door you show the assholes opens into an equally crowded room, where they discover a gigantic audience you weren’t aware of.
The other room’s audience is big enough to let the assholes take over the government, claim that their opponents are the real assholes, and start arresting them for what they say.
- But the comic says they can’t do that!
- The comic is right. But if people get used to showing other people the door, it’s easy to lose the distinction between “the government tacitly supports it” and “the government actively participates”.

But this isn’t Munroe’s fault. At the time, this was a good contribution to an exhausting debate; you can only do so much with a six-panel webcomic.

The rest of the canon

These aren’t quite as influential, but everyone in certain parts of Twitter has seen them at least once:

Meanwhile, Time and Money are brilliant comics that are too big to share.

I’ve included reflections on what the comics mean to me; feel free to skip those!
Or even friends! You had to make what we called a “long-distance phone call”, and they were expensive.
You’re probably too young to know about Diet Coke and Mentos. In an age when trends moved slower, this amused us for a solid month.
There are exceptions, but those are more “new babies and people with late-stage dementia” than “people on your train”.

Alpha Gamma

Who is this doin' this synthetic type of alpha beta psychedelic blogging?