The Future

Goatse is the golden ratio of the digital age

On the enduring aesthetics of the grossest image on the entire internet.
The Future

Goatse is the golden ratio of the digital age

On the enduring aesthetics of the grossest image on the entire internet.

Joe Veix Aug—13—2018 01:00AM EST

A few months ago I logged into Facebook for the first time in a while, and was stunned. At the top of a news feed, above the infinite scroll of empty content, was an official header addressing Facebook’s “Community Standards.” Its design featured two hands reaching towards a centered logo, that resembled a cop’s badge. To my internet-damaged brain, it looked unmistakably like goatse.

For those unfamiliar with goatse, please don’t google it, just let me explain. It’s a shock image, originally hosted at goatse.cx, which circulated online in the early-to-mid 2000s, mostly as a bait-and-switch prank. For example, if someone on a forum asked for help uninstalling Weatherbug spyware, someone else might reply with faux-helpfulness, offering a link that purports to answer their question.

Instead, what they got on the other side of that link was a 12-kilobyte, 480x360 image named hello.jpg, that featured the nude backside of a man. This man, apparently named Kirk Johnson (short story long), happened to be using both hands to spread his cheeks wide, invitingly, expanding his rectum to an alarming, seemingly impossible circumference. Inside, pink. Also visible, but surprisingly inoffensive when viewed next to the impressive feat of rectal gymnastics: his shaft and balls.

At first I thought the Facebook appearance was just a coincidence but then, roughly a month later, I logged in again and saw another one:

I mean really, come on, right? Was this intentional? Is Facebook, at the height of its many scandals, on a platform that is so famously prudish that it can’t handle photos of breastfeeding, secretly goatse-ing billions of people?

I emailed a representative at Facebook, asking them if the goatse references were intentional, and if the design team was familiar with the prank. As of publishing this, my emails went unanswered, though I imagine if they read the emails and hadn’t heard of goatse before, they had a fun surprise.

I explored the rest of Facebook to try to find further examples. I came up empty. The notion that it’s an inside joke is possible, but unlikely. It’s not really Facebook’s style. They don’t really seem to have much of a sense of humor. Their company culture is pretty weird and cult-like, so it seems unlikely that employees would pull something like this off, potentially damaging their company’s public image, as well as their future stock payout. Still, if someone like Oculus founder and shitpost tycoon Palmer Luckey can work there...

Maybe it’s accidental, the result of Facebook’s internal design standards. There’s a vertical on Medium called Facebook Design, in which design employees post long groveling essays about “How to feel all the feelings, and still kick ass” and about how “design is itself a meditative practice.” Though I couldn’t find anything that might potentially result in illustrations of goatse, everything they do is so intensely examined, it’s hard to believe nobody noticed potential similarities to goatse. In this Facebook post from 2009 outlining their design principles, they do mention prioritizing design that’s “universal” and “human” and really, what’s more universally human that an exposed butthole?

Interestingly, Facebook is not the only brand that has accidentally referenced the meme. Thankfully, BoingBoing has been on the sightings-of-possibly-unintentional-goatse-references beat for some time now. See its appearances (all SFW don’t worry) in: this AirAsia ad and a local news weather report and this London Underground ad and this ad for a job hunting service and this ring and this carousel and this Mickey Mouse clock and on the cover of Time and hidden in Unreal Tournament. It was somehow missed by BoingBoing, but let’s never forget this iconic Audi billboard. And just look at this patent filed by Google, which looks like, you guessed it. And my god, am I going nuts here or did Looney Tunes somehow predict goatse the same way that The Simpsons accidentally predicted 9/11?

Could there be a massive conspiracy, in which disconnected cells of designers are all choosing to make references to goatse in order to subliminally terrorize us? Is goatse just so shocking that it forever brands your brain and you begin to notice it everywhere, in the same way that you might begin to notice a new favorite song in a commercial, or suddenly start spotting dozens of people on the subway wearing the same Uniqlo shirt you recently bought, that until said purchase remained almost entirely unnoticed?

Maybe it’s not about the content of goatse, per se, but its composition. Perhaps it inadvertently references a universally appealing design trope. What I’m saying is that maybe what the Golden Ratio is for paintings, Goatse is for contemporary graphic design. Let’s call it, for lack of a better term, the Brown Ratio.

Here’s a diagram, which (don’t worry) I pixelated for your protection:

Courtesy of Joe Veix

A few things immediately notable, in this new context: There’s a pleasing symmetry to it. Everything moving towards a central “hole” — or perhaps out of it, a possibility that is suggestive of birth and renewal. Also at play is an expectation of both potential pain and pleasure. The hole demands to be filled, and we attempt to meet that need with our collective gaze.

Also, before I go further, please appreciate for a moment the fact that the vulgarity of goatse is so extreme that even with excessive pixelation (a mosaic filter in Photoshop, cell size 34) it nevertheless remains evocative. Additionally, the author (me) would like to note that almost all of this article was written in a public library, so consider (for additional appreciation) the deftness with which he was able to navigate such subject matter without getting kicked out/arrested/shunned from society, no disrespect to Mr. Ross Ulbricht.

Anyway, if all of this is true, it rewrites a number of assumptions we’ve made about goatse. Mainly, that its popularity is based not entirely on the inherent shock value of its content, but its appealing form.

I felt like I was on to something big, so I texted my friend Helen Tseng, who is an artist and designer in San Francisco, and ran my theory by her. “I think it’s maybe more about the hands than the composition,” she replied. “Hands seem like a shortcut to showing ‘humanness’ without having to navigate drawing actual humans and being representative about diversity, maybe ... like you can just make multicolored hands and call it a day.”

Helen’s hands theory seems more plausible than my nascent Brown Ratio concept. Especially since, as she explains, “hands hold things that are products.” This latter point is incredibly relevant, considering that the majority of cases of goatse references are featured in advertising. She then added: “Hope you get down to the bottom of it (lol sorry).”

Still, this doesn’t exactly disprove my theory. After all, it isn’t unprecedented for vivid symbolic imagery to manifest itself in myths and artworks across disparate times and places. For example, the “vagina dentata” is highly prevalent, appearing in several cultures, and hell, even Star Wars. Is it really an absurd, uh, stretch to imagine the same kind of thing happening with goatse?

Ultimately, none of these various theories necessarily need to be exclusive. Goatse is a societal rorschach. Or: If thou gaze long into goatse, goatse will gaze into thee.

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