LOL Interwebz: Orange Is the New Jesus-Juke

Every Thursday in LOL Interwebz, Luke T. Harrington explores the quirks and foibles of Internet culture from a Gospel perspective.

It’s my job to tell you about the Internet, and I know that there’s one question that’s been on your mind for years now:

What color is the Internet, Luke?

I was wondering about that, too, so it’s lucky that Jim Bumgardner, an employee at Disney Interactive by day and a puzzle geek by night, stepped up to the plate and solved it for everyone:

It’s orange.

Kind of a burnt orange, really. Almost a brown in its full saturation. But its hue is unmistakably, unambiguously orange. “Emergent orange,” he calls it, which will no doubt please Brian McLaren and friends.

Bumgardner discovered the color of the Internet when he started mixing the jpegs on the Web together and averaging their hues. Out of the chaos emerged order, and the order was an orangey one. It’s like the whole Internet is haunted by the ghost of Snooki.

And the weird part is, nobody knows why.

There are some who have suggested that it’s all the white-people skin in photographs, but Bumgardner got the same result from a collection of graffiti still-lifes; others have said maybe it’s incandescent lighting or sunsets, but even a collection of synthetic images produces the same result. In fact, the only way to avoid everything coming out all orangey is using randomly generated artwork. Everything else turns out looking like John Boehner dressed as an Oompa-Loompa.

Y’know what’s really weird about this, though? You care.

I mean, I assume you do, since you’ve actually read this far. Obviously, I do, since I could be writing about KentStateSweatshirtGate, and I’m not. This is a compelling fact to me because, in its own weird way, it’s proof that the universe is ordered.

To acknowledge a “gap” is to acknowledge that the universe is ordered, understandable, and worth knowing.It’s strange how order consistently emerges from apparent chaos. Life springs from even the most inhospitable environments on earth. All positive integers add up to minus one-twelfth. And every image on earth, mixed together, looks like Donald Trump at an Oklahoma State game.

(Two more tired jokes about celebrities with bad fake tans, and my sixth one’s free!)

There are people out there who like to criticize religion as “God of the gaps” thinking—the idea being that people invented God to fill holes in scientific knowledge—but I have yet to meet any religious people who genuinely think that way. Most serious readers of the Bible understand it as a narrative of how mankind is being reconciled to God, not as a textbook in pseudoscience. (Further, when confronted with a deeply troubling reality, is “God did it” really of much comfort?)

It’s hard not to be impressed, though, when you come across a genuine “gap”—an actual hole in our knowledge that seemingly disrupts the order of the universe—not because of the gap itself, but because we’re able to recognize it as such. To acknowledge a “gap” is to acknowledge that the universe as a whole is ordered, understandable, and worth knowing. A gap in causal knowledge can’t exist outside of a universe governed by law.

In some convoluted sense, gaps in our knowledge can be taken as evidence of God, because their existence is proof that we live in a structured universe. The fact that we can identify a gap at all, coupled with our instinct to fill it (an instinct that keeps us awake at night until we solve it), is evidence that we live in an organized universe that we’re designed to understand.

So no, I don’t know why the Internet is the color of Kim Kardashian’s armpit stains. But I do know that almost no one is likely to take “God did it” as an explanation. And perhaps, in it’s own way, that’s pretty good evidence of God.