Gorgias, a Grecian philosopher of some controversy, is one of the arch-annoyances of Socrates and his boy wonder Plato. A sophist, Gorgias’s philosophy can be rigorously defined as “a strict sense of logic (logos) against any other manner of conceiving the world” and more colourfully described as “annoying Platonic and Socratic philosophers by being a little shit.” I like Gorgias a lot, and I think his work represents this balanced moment where early philosophers were both pursuing their craft with precise and cruel rigour while also providing their own critics with nothing but the most maddening and unserious material with which to argue. Take for example, this set of claims by Gorgias, quoted from the august Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
i. Nothing exists
ii. Even if existence exists, it cannot be known
iii. Even if it could be known, it cannot be communicated.
Or, in other words, “by your own logic, Socrates, you aren’t even real.” People talk a lot about so and so being history’s first poster, typically a Wikipedia k-hole debate with funny historical references, but for my money the real first poster was Gorgias: an angry, distasteful, irreverent guy who was hated through most of history and who completely flummoxed Socrates on his own court. He was also larger than life and, having died at 108 (?!), more myth than man — and in this way, he’s much like our own current Gorgias, the mysterious online poster known primarily by his Twitter handle: @dril.
Dril showed up on Twitter in 2008, migrating with many of the site’s funniest posters from the infamous Something Awful forums. Associated with the absurdist movement of “weird twitter,” mostly against his own will, Dril has built a massive following by producing pithy aphorisms and hypothetical situations, eschewing the observations and banal life updates that characterized a lot of early Twitter.
Being asked at the Betsy Ross museum if you’re allowed to have sex with the flag. Trying to hold a 21 gun salute to Pizza Hut in your Quake server. Spending $3,600 on candles because you’re bad at ‘economy.’ These Dril-isms are foundational texts for a certain corner of the web. Staying in character, and often thorny with traditional media, the mystery of the man behind the Jack Nicholson mask is all part of the allure, particularly as we and he watch X, nee Twitter, crumble and fall apart.
Talking with Dril felt a bit like talking to a sophist in the most positive sense. Any question I asked was answered, but led in a direction I couldn’t really expect, and any effort to undo the poster from the person was usually met with a quick flip into irreverence or seriousness, as the case required. I’m not complaining — there’s a real skill in being the kind of clown provocateur that Dril has grown into over his years of posting, up to and including his much-spectated feud with Elon Musk. The Twitter purchaser and aspiring marginally-funny-guy-at-a-party spent one of his earliest days running the platform desperately trying to gift Dril a verified badge, which now indicates fealty to paying Musk, as opposed to actual influence. Dril kept changing his handle to spite the frustrated billionaire. Is the whole bit political? Is Dril, as the kids say, doing leftism?
“My only politics is ‘The Jungle.’ My only vote is ‘PAIN.’” he tells me. “Since I was a child, people have accused me of becoming too political with my posts. But that is a natural consequence of posting only the raw, True shit. Many are upset.”
Dril is invested in a kind of painful, Upton Sinclair-like approach to the world. His post imagining a soldier with an unfortunate nickname “hostage killer” came back with a vengeance with news out of Gaza, and it’s not particularly out of the realm of possibility that the post was meant politically when it was written in 2015. Dril’s posts have a knack of resurgence when they appear prophetic. ‘Me and a bunch of stupid assholes are going to start a community in the middle of the desert to either die or prove a very important point’ recirculates for everything from YouTubers joining a PMC for clout to the doomed Fyre Festival. From tipping over the grill when the fourth of July smacks of gender to taking off his Guy Fawkes mask to reveal Joker paint while everyone groans at his shit, Dril rides the line between political and irreverent.
But when Dril has Adult Swim and animation credits to his name as well as a fairly serious book release in the last year, it’s tempting to wonder if he’s sick of being described as a poster, or what Dril will represent as social media platforms collapse. He’s sanguine about it.
“The main appeal, I think, of my posts, is that reading them requires no investment from the reader,” says Dril. “They can be enjoyed for four seconds and promptly disposed of and the whole thing costs zero dollars. So a lot of people think it’s ‘Off Brand’ or ‘Stupid’ for me to be slaving away on long form content when I could be spending that time writing like a thousand more posts. Who cares! Shut up! People said the same thing to Jesus Christ while he was busy creating the heaven and earth. I can’t be sitting around worrying if what I’m doing is good or not. Some people think drinking their own piss is good. I don’t. Fuck the fans.”
There isn’t a difference between posts and “legitimate” art, the same way there’s no real difference between what makes the fans happy and what bores them to tears. All that’s really there is the creator, and this seems to be Dril’s whole ethos — creating isn’t really reliant on the people who consume the work at all, especially on a platform that can shear away artistry, intent and context like Twitter.
“At a certain point with AI, creative output will become as common as soil, and finding media worth consuming will be harder than finding actual gold,” says Dril. “People will beg for AI-free content like they do for water that isn’t tainted with lead. And when AI becomes synonymous with ‘Shit,’ it will die like every other Silicon Valley Clown Show and nobody will miss it. We already have a massive force that consumes media and regurgitates endless inferior versions of it, for free. They are called Teens.
”Of course, being directly antagonized by Elon Musk is not the biggest threat to his glorious output. Under Musk’s control, the platform itself faces an uncertain future. Ad dollars are down across the board, moreso on Twitter where Musk encourages the most hostile, unhinged and, most importantly, unprofitable behaviour. Barely over a year of his tenure, Musk has publicly told advertisers not to let the door hit them and suggested Twitter’s days may be numbered (Linda Yaccarino, who Musk placed as CEO in March, 2023, spends her days posting about how popular sports are on the platform).
You or I or anyone normal may not lose much sleep over it. The usefulness of Twitter was already diminishing before acquisition, but it has been in Dril’s best interest to sow some oats. In recent years he has begun releasing zines, books, hard copy anthologies of his posts as well as forays into live shows, animation and video game development. In 2019 he co-hosted Truthpoint: Darkweb Rising with comedian Derek Estevez-Olsen on Adult Swim, a riff on Alex Jones’ InfoWars where the two debate the most pressing issues of our times: War, Disease, Disney, Werewolves.
“I love making disposable content,” says Dril, “I love belonging in the trash.
“It’s important to work hard and make something that you actually think is good. For the past several years I’ve made significant progress on my own video game that will be the most powerful thing I’ve released to date. It will make Digimon look like shit. Basically, it’s good for the brand, to do this. If you never make anything good nobody will ever want to consume your low effort bad shit. You’ll get murdered out there. You’ll rot.”
And in case you were worried that the modern philosopher could be boiled down to brand identity, he adds, “Talking about the brand, I’m done kissing ass to “THE BRAND”. Just another set of rules that weigh me down… Fuck the rules. I’m nasty. I love being nasty. I’m bad. Lock me up.”
Still, it’s a big jump from words to games, perhaps even a bigger jump than from moving pictures to words; this flexibility of media doesn’t seem to bother Dril. Indeed, the whole point of his endeavour seems to be flexibility and change. If Gorgias is obsessed with the rigour of logos, Dril is fixated on the rigour of creation being the only thing worth worrying about. He tells me of a game idea called “Crisis Crab Obsidian,” where the player controls an increasingly decadent and perverse hermit crab who will at one point go to jail. Dril said gamers can expect a demo and trailer in 2024.“
Since all the money you collected is considered stolen, it becomes debt, and from that point on you need to break out of jail and get even deeper in debt to proceed,” says Dril. “I’m sure the fans will find it “Relatable”. In the game’s current version it’s fun to climb walls and jump around, and the controls feel “TIGHT”, but the final product is still pretty far off. I’m currently the only guy developing it.”
That moment after “relatable” is basically an instance of what the philosopher (and Gorgias fan!) Hegel would call the ‘resolution of the dialectic.’ Just as irreverence and grounded political critique resolve into the strangely eternal tweets of the Dril account, the branding and marketing slog resolves against the joy of creation into the assertion that putting stuff out for people to find isn’t the same slop they always get. That’s what makes life worth living. So when I concluded my conversation with Dril by asking how he planned to create after the demise of the site that had brought him his success, he answered in the same way that Gorgias might if you asked him how he’d do philosophy now that Socrates refused to answer his calls.
“I try to be good at multiple things,” says Dril. “I think if you’re only good at one thing you’re fucked. A guy can be out there painting 100 Mona Lisas a day but nobody will give a shit if he’s not doing anything funny or interesting with it.
“And I will keep on posting,” he promises me. “I will never shut the fuck up.”
Trevor Strunk is a PhD in Literature who mostly writes and podcasts about video games at No Cartridge. He is the author of Story Mode: Video Games and the Interplay Between Consoles and Culture. He is also associate editor at The Veteran and a farm raised cage free Dad.
Photography by Sophie Prettyman-Beauchamp.