In the early 2000s, a genre of fiction called the New Weird skipped out on the grandeur and sophistication of the sibling genre of multi-volume high fantasy by wedding supernatural phenomena with the Kafka-esque banal. Unlike “hard” science fiction writers, New Weird pioneers like China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, and Haruki Murakami embraced absurdity in place of virtuosic worldbuilding and lowly creatures in place of awe-inspiring monsters. Case in point: Miéville’s King Rat spends an entire page describing the protagonist — who turns out to be a literal rat-human hybrid — eating trash.

While the New Weird formed in the nascent years of the World Wide Web, its embrace of unceremonious ugliness (“pulp”) has proven a curiously persistent face of online culture. In the RPG platform VRChat, an ex-military contractor wearing a penguin skin muses on the realities of warfare with haunting detail, flapping his polygonal wings as Winnie the Pooh listens intently. Indie games like Cruelty Squad parody the hyperstimulation of late capitalism with vomit-inducing colors, dizzyingly pixelated backgrounds, and counterintuitive controls (the engineered discomfort of these interfaces seem punishingly apt for a world where users buy and sell buy augmented organs).

In a time when we can take virtually any form online, why would we desire to make our digital avatars so grotesque? Perhaps ugliness is the last stand against the all-consuming worship of optimization and beautification. Perhaps we would rather mutate ourselves than be shaped in the unholy image of the self-as-digital-commodity. Beauty may be truth, and truth beauty — but in the age of the internet, ugliness is a rare kind of freedom.