The 2012 Surprise

The era pages for this archive stop at 2009. Most of the writing about FKN Newz stops there too, because that is the window where the show was a show — numbered episodes, transcripts, a recognisable journalistic structure. After 2009 the official archive treats the work as a long tail.

But the upload data does not agree. Counting only what is on disk: 2012 is the second-biggest year FKN ever had. The bigger surprise is what is in it.

Going by titles alone, 2012 is a return to peak newz vocabulary, except weirder. EURO NAZI DEBT REICH. WEALTHY BANKERS OWN US. VOODOO CLIMATE DENIAL. POPPY BURNING HERO OR HATE CRIME CRIMINAL. FUCKUSHIMA NUCLEAR PLANT. NEW END OF THE WORLD 2013. The all-caps slogan format that locked in around 2007 is back in force, but the targets have shifted: Greek debt, post-Fukushima nuclear policy, the looming Mayan apocalypse meme, UN internet governance treaties, drone warfare in Afghanistan. The 2008 banker-bailout framing is reused on the Eurozone crisis verbatim.

The most-frequent title words for the year are world, global, debt, conspiracy, climate, nuclear, bankers, terror, famine. Nine of the top ten are exactly what you would predict the 2008 voice to be saying about 2012 news. The tenth is shop — for the recurring SHOP FOR JESUS Christmas bits.

The simplest explanation for the spike is also the most boring one: 2012 was the Mayan apocalypse year, and the show that built its identity on annual 9/11 Conspiracy News Anniversary Specials was always going to make a meal of it. The titles bear this out — 2012 PROPHECIES, NEW END OF THE WORLD 2013, HAPPY CHRIST DELUSION. End-of-world satire is the show’s native dish.

What it suggests, structurally, is that the "catalogued window" of 2006-2009 is a curator’s convenience, not a creative endpoint. The show ran hot for at least three more years after the bow was tied.