Shitposting is a bit like obscenity: you know it when you see it.
The classic shitpost is someone posting something deliberately but often ironically provocative or stupid to either lure people into a pointless flamewar or just to make people laugh. The undisputed king of shitposting is dril.
I think of it as a spectrum, ranging from the pure shitposts through to more elaborate videos and memes. The thing that ties them together is they’re intentionally shit and their sole purpose is to entertain and/or provoke.
It’s no surprise that few museums do shitposts. Partly because museums are meant to be trustworthy and shitposts are inherently untrustworthy, but also because it would bring senior management and trustees to palpitations, convulsions and frantic writing of emails to social media managers.
So that makes it a bit weird that the ones leading the shitposting charge are public sector accounts, often in the USA. The one that caught my eye this week is Amtrak:
I could just have easily chosen the National Park Service ermine post, or literally any post ever made by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission.
The idea is straightforward: do a Monster Truck Rally advert, but for trains.
It’s elevated by the irony (trains are not as fun as monster trucks), the riffing on monster truck elements (like naming the trains, the edge of your seat etc.) and then feeling very social media-first because of the naff animations.
In the end, this is just a classic case of people finding ways to talk about boring things in entertaining ways.
Nobody would watch a classic train advert on TikTok. But throw in some monster truck references, some jokes and a sprinkle of shitposting, and baby, you’ve got a stew going.
Social media is its own context. People don’t expect to see the same adverts they see on TV. The algorithm actively punishes you if your content doesn’t hook people in and entertain them. If you persist in creating content that sticks rigidly to a tone and style designed for other contexts, then you’ll never break out of your own niche audience.
So I expect to see a video from a UK museum that involves pushing over windows in the near future.
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