"Storm Zone 51": RSVP to Facebook event of more than 500,000 people, for the same

Among its many faults, Facebook is good for two things: send birthday greetings to people you have not talked to for years and share hilarious and meaningless jokes. Nowhere has this been better illustrated by a public Facebook event that has become viral because of its bizarre and deliberately user-friendly principle. More than 550,000 people responded to the ambush to trap Nevada's famous Area 51 in September, a case whose pleasanter principle is so out of proportion that it has attracted serious public attention.

At the beginning of the week of July 1, anonymous administrators of the same public page "Shitposting cause in shembles" teamed up with a Twitch video game broadcaster named SmyleeKun to hold an event called "Storm Area 51," they can not not stop everything. We ". According to the description of the event, attendees are invited to fly to Lincoln Country, Nevada, and 'meet all at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry' at 3 am on September 20th. The goal is apparently to penetrate the highly secretive and secure military complex, which has often been described in fiction as a place where the US government hosts and studies foreign technologies. It is thought that if a group of people immediately go to the highly secure base, the army has no chance of stopping them.

For an additional measure, the description of the event says "If we run naruto" – a reference to a very particular subject, running style often granny long-lasting anime Naruto – "we can go faster than their balls. Let's see the aliens.

The Storm Area 51 event won online pull for its nonsense, sparking reactions on multiple social media platforms. On Twitter, for example, a message that omitted the names of the creators – which clearly shows that the event is only a conceptual gag – has prompted the unknowns of its origins to take the idea very seriously:

The answers to this tweet are full of people make fun thousands of Facebook users who have agreed to participate, assuming that they had seriously intended to visit the famous site in search of extraterrestrial beings. By accessing the event page, however, it is clear that the only thing people take seriously is to raise the joke to new heights.

The message pinned to the discussion thread of the event, for example, is a poorly drawn map of the Area 51 website that is supposed to be a "game plan". The message calls the participants to join as "Naruto Runner". a "Rock Thrower" or "Kyle" (in reference to another even more complicated meme), and ends with a call to any government official who follows him.

"Hello US government, it's a joke and I do not intend to materialize this plan. I just thought it would be funny and that I could get useful information on the Internet, "reads one. "I'm not responsible if people decide to storm Area 51."

Facebook

But some serious media have tried to report the event as something other than a gag order assembled by twenty-year-olds very much in line for the entertainment from their very online peers who like to scroll memes for hours.

I can not totally blame them. If you do not speak fluently the language of Facebook members, it is likely that you can take this event much more seriously than expected. The description of the event and the discussion messages of the page are covered with shitposting – a shortcut for sharing particularly lowbrow memes. ("Inconsistent jokes, hasty photoshopping, mashups, irrelevance, spelling or grammatical errors, such are the distinctive signs of the shitpost," as the Daily Dot explained in 2016.)

This ridiculous "event" is the biggest and best deal

The beauty of shitposts, commonly found on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, and almost everywhere else, millennials are known to waste time online – this is due to their degree of sharing. Shamelessly, these memes are fun especially because they are intentionally lazy, even absurd, making them good for blindfolded, sniffing and entertaining publications on your own page. When you browse a stream as disorganized as Facebook may be, there is sometimes nothing better than to come across an easy and fast joke.

Partly because of the intrinsic timelessness of most shitposts – which goes well with the algorithmic nature of Facebook – the platform is full of public and private groups and pages dedicated to shitposts of all types. They are most often inspired by a myriad of innumerable fantasies, ranging from public transportation to video games, to all the goods of pop culture you can think of, including Twin peaks, Pokémon, and, perhaps the most visible, The simpsons. Extraterrestrial and other jokes are all part of the genre of shitposting; the possible existence of an extraterrestrial life is as easy to make fun of as it is to quibble.

"Shitposting cause im in shambles" is dedicated to these memes, as its name clearly indicates. The cover photo of the page boasts of having hosted "high-level posts", but as a public page that does not address a specific fandom, it tends to serve as a venue for predilection for memes of more general interest than other more "focused" shitposting groups. . At this moment, the page is full of the same based on the event of Area 51, joking how ridiculous an idea is. Area 51 also followed for several hours on Twitter, which gave rise to many jokes about what an event bringing together many cartoon fans and Facebook users looking for extraterrestrials would look like.

There are two months remaining until Area 51 is indicted. Will the power of forced posting force hundreds of thousands of people to travel to a remote area of ​​the country to respond to what is happening? Is nothing but a meme? Considering how much quality shitposting is a quality that requires a lot of effort, I'm wrong on the side of "no". But I can not deny that I would be wrong.