Why are there so many Internet courses?

In the vast ocean of the Internet, various novel "schools" emerge in an endless stream, capturing the public's imagination in unique ways and sparking widespread discussion and imitation. From "Wanxue" to "Bingxue" to the emerging "Kexue" and "Zoxue", these online phenomena are not only a source of entertainment, they also reflect the complex attitude of contemporary society towards celebrity image, authenticity and values.

Opening your eyes every day means learning.

The long-lasting and always-new courseware includes "Wanxue" and "Bingxue", and now there are also "Kexue" and "Xiang Zuoxue".

Things like spreading wings of a roc, micro-do, resonance on the upper palate, and light milk flavor, these ridiculous things have provided a lot of material for a group of plot-imitating up-loaders to create jokes, and together formed an Internet landscape of "a hundred schools of thought contending."

Confused?

It doesn't matter, let's learn~

01 Entering the Uncanny Valley Effect of "Kexue"

Let's first take a look at the latest lesson this month - Huang Xiaoming's new girlfriend Ye Ke, who was officially announced in late September. Netizens who were curious about why she was another assembly line socialite started to pay attention to Ye Ke.

The opening and climax of the story is a live broadcast of selling cakes. Yes, starting from 0 frames, with almost no foreshadowing, Ke Xue's opening is the climax.

During the live broadcast of selling cakes, Ye Ke was sitting in the picture, and with her big round eyes, she saw a netizen asking on the public screen why she didn't eat the cake. The socialite quickly responded to the netizen's request.

She first used the bubbling sound produced by the resonance of the upper palate to confuse the other person, "Well, I will eat it, I will eat it", and then began her performance of introducing the taste of the cake.

"Its taste is very dense, mainly with a light milky aroma, and its fragrance goes straight to your palate. Some desserts are only sweet on your tongue, but its milky aroma will fill your entire mouth, including your entire nasal cavity, with this rich flavor. So I think girls can really stock up some good desserts in your refrigerator."

Stock up on some desserts? ? No wonder some people joked that this was probably a copy of the text template for the socialite class on tasting red wine.

Riding on the momentum of the romance, this piece of material directly became a key course material that Ke Xue had to study, and was quickly copied by many bloggers who imitated the jokes. For a while, she was the most popular one, surpassing her senior Wanwan.

After that, Ke Xue continued to produce and continued to make courseware in the live broadcast room - answering netizens' questions about whether she had plastic surgery (did she have it done?), probably wanting to create a relaxed and open personality, and once again answered curious netizens: "I have done a little bit, but not much. I am not a tech person from head to toe, about 40% tech."

The sharp-tongued netizens quickly arrived at the battlefield: they couldn't help laughing when they thought of the lively scene of two people removing their makeup, wigs, fake buttocks and fake breasts before going to bed at night.

However, this paragraph has just become as popular as the cake review. She talked about her school experience: she never went to the toilet at school, which was very rude (???), and said that while other students were eating, she was eating small cakes with delicate decorations. She also talked about her father, saying that he was a handsome man who looked like Andy Lau.

It also includes the "Not Retaining Value" luxury goods tasting courseware: "I choose Chanel clothes and AMS bags. Dior clothes, bags, and shoes do not retain their value." And the "I Love You" courseware: Ye Ke allegedly called Huang Xiaoming, and in just two minutes, she said "I love you, husband" eight times, and there were a lot of unpresentable noises.

The fake persona and the humble and dignified wife attitude made the onlookers feel extremely uncomfortable in today's increasingly strong subjective consciousness. The middle-aged male star and the beautiful young Internet celebrity girl are not a pair worth admiring, but these girls with the label of financial independence are still scrambling to voluntarily give up their own subjectivity and become dignified wives. This has created a huge uncanny valley effect for us, who are also women and were excited by Yang Li's words "We have to say this" just a second ago.

If 40% of the celebrities who have done micro-dos become tailor-made wives for "successful men", it is a success. Then what about the efforts of the female predecessors who have been fighting for a place to eat and have enough to eat over the past hundred years?

In fact, this is also the core reason why Wanxue has been so popular for so long. The public feels uncomfortable with Wanwan's fakeness, and the subsequent ridicule and dismantling of it also comes from this uncanny valley effect.

02 “Late learning”, have you understood it?

Wanwan, whose real name is Lei Wanying, is one of the earliest Douban Internet celebrities. She created a persona for herself that she was born in Hong Kong, grew up in Beijing, was admitted to the Central Academy of Fine Arts at the age of 16, and her husband is Lin Han, the second generation of a wealthy family. The two founded the M Woods Art Museum and are well-versed in business, politics, and literature.

However, behind her high-profile display, there are many loopholes. The luxury house is rented, and the second-generation rich husband who is suspected to be "snatched" from someone else's blind date is very untrue... So, using Wanwan's life as material, finding the flaws in her character, and mocking and ridiculing Wanwan herself - "Wanxue" was born.

Most of these keywords come from her husband Lin Han, who carefully selected them. For example, "晚奶" and "let's" all come from some inexplicable remarks made by her husband Lin Han.

The richness of the material, the many loopholes, and the confusion of the couple's operations are endless. Relevant netizens revealed that the two even wrote labels such as "Late Learning" into the business PPT to use it as a traffic argument to increase the quotation. A third-party data platform shows that the #Late Learning# topic was created in 2022, and the total number of views of the topic has reached 1.023 billion, with at least 20,700 participants.

All of this reached its peak in another round after Wanwan caught up with the last live streaming sales.

Those strong "no obligation to share" boomerangs back then hit Wanwan right between the eyebrows. People also proved her twistedness again in her live broadcast - ignoring the assistant anchor. While the anchor was trying hard to introduce the product in front of her, she played around in the live broadcast room without considering the occasion, making noises, and acting as an innocent and happy "little girl" as usual.

This condescending attitude, coupled with the fact that most of the late scholars were just there to watch the fun without spending a penny, meant that the live broadcast did not create much of a data frenzy.

New Douyin data shows that as of the end of August, Wanwan has conducted 47 live broadcasts on her Douyin account this year, 33 of which were live broadcasts with goods. The live broadcast with the highest sales was on January 30, with sales of 750,000 to 1 million yuan, and this figure has not been reached since then.

The public's attitude towards Wanwan is very subtle. KK once saw a comment in the comment section of a blogger who imitated Wanxue, saying that behind Wanxue's carnival, there was also an element of group self-mockery and regret.

Of course, there are regrets. Wanwan clearly had countless opportunities to be independent and become the heroine of her own life, but she has come to this point where she is so weak that onlookers can clearly see that she has run out of tricks. Although, that is her life, it is difficult for outsiders to comment on what is better. However, at a time when women are fighting for the right to speak, the public still hopes that girls can make money on their own.

But this kind of regret cannot ignore the moral bottom line as a human being.

In 2022, Wanwan accepted an interview with Jiang Sida. The venue for the trip did not even have a decent reception room, but was on the hillside behind their self-built house in the suburbs of Beijing. Wanwan, wearing a down jacket and a woolen hat, talked about the accidental death of a worker in the M Woods Art Museum in 2021. After a light-hearted "someone died", she began to complain, saying that she had lost the cooperation with Rolls-Royce, and the sponsor Audi also withdrew its investment, delaying Ryuichi Sakamoto's exhibition and losing millions... until Jiang Sida reminded her, "Such a sad security incident has occurred. Is this price worth paying?"

With human lives at stake, the internet's discussion of her has gone from vanity and stubbornness to indifference to life, and Wanwan's reputation has completely plummeted to the bottom.

03 What is the difference between Zuoxue and Bingxue?

After reviewing my evening studies and improving my Ke studies, it’s hard not to think of Bing studies.

This knowledge has nothing to do with Fan Bingbing, Li Bingbing, and Bai Bingbing. It is the knowledge of the wild writer Da Bing, who studies how to take pictures of his golden left face at fixed angles.

Da Bing, the former host of Shandong Satellite TV's "Sunshine Expressway", left Shandong Satellite TV in 2013 and began to write his own travel stories. Later, he switched careers and became a best-selling youth literature writer with the "Little Blue Book Series".

Just take a look at how popular his books have been - his first book, "They Are the Happiest", sold over 800,000 copies; in 2014, his new work, "Be Good, Pat on the Head", sold over one million copies, followed by "Amitabha, Muah", "Okay, Okay"... In 2016, he was listed on the 13th China Writers Rich List, ranking third with a royalty income of 15 million yuan, second only to Liu Cixin and Yu Hua.

Besides being a writer, the prefix of Da Bing's name is so long that even the koologists have to sigh and say "Grandmaster":

In fact, Bingxue is different from Wanxue and Kexue. The origin of Bingxue is the disillusionment brought about by the growth of a group. As a generation of people grow up, they find that the adventurous spirit of travel like Kerouac that they were obsessed with in their youth and the reckless rebellious spirit that flashed in their daily study life were all the dreams of the era when literary youth were popular.

In comparison, Da Bing was the one who made up "poetry and distant places" and "a mother's life is a wilderness" during that period. So, in the Internet era, Da Bing successfully attracted everyone's attention again, but this time, literature and art became strong and pretentious, and the pursuit became ridicule.

What’s interesting is that after playing with abstract art for a long time, netizens followed Da Bing’s live broadcast and suddenly found that he is actually a very sincere person. When a netizen asked about art knowledge online, he could really give some real guidance: he instructed the students who were confused about learning charcoal pencils to learn about the structure and lines of Cai Yushui.

As people watched, they suddenly discovered that Da Bing not only had clear speech and outstanding expressive ability, but also had some real abilities. The comment section was filled with exclamations: Oh no, those professions of his are not real, are they?

Having said that, you can probably feel the difference between Bingxue, Kexue and Wanxue in a concrete way.

The source of the material for this carnival in the emerging discipline of "Zoxue" is "The Treasure Land at Doorstep", directed by Xu Haofeng, costing 200 million yuan, and starring Xiang Zuo and Guo Biting.

Both the film itself and the actors’ performances are as abstract as the name of the film production company: Supporting Films.

This is a film made for Xiang Zuo to fulfill his dream. It made Xiang Zuo, who is not good at anything else, a success and perfectly explained what it means to work hard but in vain (although he didn't really work hard, just look at "Brother Who Overcomes Troubles" and you will know).

Xiang Zuo himself also came out to interact.

kk remembered the hot comments on Douyin: This is also because the times have changed, otherwise we, the emoji pack makers, would probably disappear. After all, the bloggers who imitated Xiang Tai on Halloween last year were "invited" by the real person.

Whether it is Kexue, Wanxue, Bingxue or Zuoxue, behind the phenomenal Internet landscape is also an outlet for the public to vent their emotions through entertainment. Just laugh it off and don't take it seriously, it's nothing.

Image sources: Weibo, Douban, please delete if infringed.

Author/ Zhang Zhen Editor/ Zhu Ting This article is written by the author of Operation Party [Wen Yu Talk], WeChat public account: [Wen Yu Talk], original/authorized to be published on Operation Party, and any reproduction without permission is prohibited.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.