Just shy of 100 small-format pages, On Skibidi was a pamphlet more than a book, and a worthwhile read for this geriatric millennial who somehow managed to raise a handful of generation alpha children without once resorting to Skibidi Toilet.
Walker built his meme-explainer career on Skibidi so of course he would read all sorts of things into it: any time he mentioned dialectics or some other high-falutin' sociology term my eyes rolled so far back into my head I would catch a glimpse of my own retinas. But there is an undeniable attraction to the screen-within-a-screen format; I remember being confounded, as a six-year-old, by the movie theater scene from Annie. How on Earth did they film actors watching other actors, and was anybody filming us watching those actors who watch the actors… which I guess was my first introduction to mise en abyme even though I only found out about the term from Walker. Coupled with quick cuts and catchy music, it seemed infinitely more appealing than the umpteenth ASMR unboxing video.
But of course now it is me overexplaining things. As with Joe Rogan, and Taylor Swift, and any other winner in the winner-takes-all extremistan world of content creation and consumption, the most likely reason why Skibidi Toilet became so popular was simply because it was popular. And to learn more about that, Fooled by Randomness would be a better bet than On Skibidi.