	It would be nice to say the internet is all carnival, no censors, but the internet is a strange beast. It is the proverbial giant green rage monster, hawk-like archer, ex-Soviet spy, recent thawed out symbol of the world’s only remaining superpower, god of thunder, and Robert Downey Jr. all in one. Sometimes it is a cruel mimicry of the real world, in which people speak with their own names, only more banally. Sometimes it is very short messages with low quality picture links appended. Sometimes it is the preferred blogging platform of 14 year olds the world over, guaranteed to have more bugs than features. It is, in academic speak:
And that was in 1999. Is this carnival? The internet asserts its own rules, not always more ludicrous than the ones of the real world. Sometimes hierarchies are reversed, but then Justin Bieber still has the most followers on Twitter. Grotesque bodily imagery isn’t what it used to be, except on 4chan. Ambivalence isn’t what it used to be. The grotesque, to the extent that it is passed around8, is received with joy and horror and indifference in a communal experience. It is not the individual experience of the grotesque that Bakhtin saw as so inadequate, but neither is it a celebration of the cycle of life.9 The grotesque is mostly a curiosity, detached from the individual but not reattached to the social. All we know is that it used to be important.
	The internet is not necessarily ambivalent. It feels very strongly, at times. Medieval carnivals enforced an atmosphere of freedom, and the internet is different here. The internet makes freedom possible, and strongly suggests it be taken away. The resulting play with hierarchies and boundaries and grotesquerie owes much to the tradition of carnivalesque folk humor, but it is unsurprisingly more bitter. The people on the internet, after all, have grown up in a “real life” of binaries. They cannot take their laughter seriously. They have been taught that laughter is not serious. They cannot take their laughter both seriously and unseriously simultaneously. Sam Lipsyte writes out of the new carnivalesque tradition of the internet, which makes ambivalent jokes and expects readers to interpret them without ambivalence. The ambivalence is only for the narrator to keep within himself, like a block of ice, or like a Tesseract. Ambivalence makes the narrator something special, but also something doomed.
	It’s obvious to say that the internet is a very different medium for freedom than carnival because we are not physically involved in it beyond movements of our fingers, tapping on things. Less obviously, it reverses past prioritizations of content. 
Carnival is primarily visual, enacted; literature inspired by it is to some degree distant from it, thus all the misreadings of Rabelais that Bakhtin seeks to correct. The internet is likewise a visual medium, as recognized by Theall in the dark ages of 1999, prophesying a time when a single high quality jpeg image would not take hours to load. Like carnival, it propagates images and videos along with literature and shorter written pieces. 
