The Categorical Imperative: Stickers, Scrapers, and Sinful Diagonals

# Stickers, Scrapers, and Sinful Diagonals — why you should care (and why you secretly do)

You survived qualifying exams, the coffee stomach, and at least one tenure committee that smelled faintly of despair. And then, at 2 a.m., you found yourself doomscrolling math memes and laughing at a cartoon of a vector crying into a coffee mug. Welcome to the niche wilds where collective joy, petty capitalism, and half-baked proofs coexist in a fragile, hilarious equilibrium.

This isn’t fluff. Memes are shorthand for values and habits. How a community treats art and argument tells you as much about its intellectual hygiene as any conference lineup. Below: a cheeky field guide built for people who still care about rigour and sticker economies.

## Grothenpuhh, mascots, and the economics of sticker culture

Every online guild wants a mascot. In math spaces that mascot becomes a sticker. Someone proposes a transfeminine riff on a beloved algebraic geometer, the community sketches a dozen versions, Discord votes, someone wins a Discord Nitro — and suddenly your virtual chat window has a new permanent resident.

That reward structure is telling. These contests are less about fame than the warm glow of collaborative authorship. Artists sketch in their evenings so a tiny work of culture can live forever in a reaction menu. But such prompts can also flirt with the edgy; taste and sensitivity matter. If you enter, draw with care. If you watch, don’t monetize other people’s labor. The Kantian reading feels apt: treat creators as ends, not merely as means to your profit.

## When memes become a business model

The internet obeys a simple rule: engagement equals opportunity. Aggregators repost community-made content, slap ads or donation buttons on top, and sometimes use bots or generative models to crank out quantity. The result is the parasitic middleman who profits from your inside joke while pretending to have invented it.

Communities can fight locally, but platforms are porous. Your lever is small but meaningful: don’t feed the parasite. Downvote reposts, unfollow aggregator accounts, and for the love of all things finite, don’t click through to ad-laden mirrors without an ad blocker. Attention is currency — let the scammers starve.

## Petty fraud, proud ignorance, and the anatomy of a bad proof

Public proofs on forums have a predictable lifecycle: someone insists they disprove Cantor’s diagonalization, three people ask for the details, two point out the flaw, and five get theatrical about how “obviously wrong” it was. This is tragicomedy.

The recurring sins are boring but important: changing the domain tacitly, smuggling in assumptions, or misapplying definitions. Consider continuity arguments that hinge on tan(x). A lot turns on domain: tan(x) is not defined at odd multiples of pi/2. If you ignore where you are allowed to evaluate the function, your conclusion is garbage. Math is not a set of sound bites; it’s a careful ledger of what you allowed yourself to assume.

Different subfields have different antibodies to bad reasoning. Analysts scream about domains; topologists squint at pathological counterexamples; category theorists smell universal properties and ask if the counterexample respects naturality. Logicians break out formal systems and ask which axioms were used. Each perspective offers a diagnostic tool for the sloppy or the spectacularly wrong.

## Cross-disciplinary lenses: what fields teach us about meme hygiene

– Set theory and logic: Diagonal arguments are famous because they are structurally robust. Bad refutations often misunderstand quantifier scopes or change the ambient set. If you like memes about ‘disproving’ diagonalization, learn the quantifiers — or at least the punchline will be funnier.
– Category theory: think about morphisms of attention. When a page reposts an original meme, what structure is preserved? Is there a natural transformation between the creator’s intent and the aggregator’s feed? Treating cultural artifacts as objects and attention as arrows gives a useful, slightly silly ethic: only follow functors that preserve dignity.
– Analysis and topology: these fields are obsessed with domain and continuity. The moral for meme land is simple — check assumptions. If someone declares a classic theorem false because of a counterexample, ask what structure they changed.
– Computational complexity and algorithmic memes: when bots farm content, complexity theory gives intuition. The cost of creating meaningful memes is often low, but the cost of curating and crediting is higher. Algorithmic incentives will optimize for cheap engagement unless humans step in.

## The social contract: small actions, big effects

You don’t need to be saintly. Be just marginally less selfish than an algorithm. A short code of conduct keeps these ecosystems livable:

– Credit creators. If it came from a subreddit, say so. If it’s art, ask before monetizing it.
– Don’t amplify reposters. Downvote, unfollow, and if you moderate, ban.
– Treat flashy “proofs” with skepticism. Ask about domains, definitions, and silent rule changes.
– Support artists. Buy the sticker, tip the creator, or at least favorite the post.
– Use ad blockers on sketchy aggregator sites. You’re not making a moral spectacle; you’re denying ad revenue to a parasite.

## Why it matters beyond giggles

Memes are a cultural ledger: they record what a community values, who gets credit, and how crowd wisdom forms. When reposts run wild, you outsource creative labor to algorithms. When bad proofs go viral, you normalize sloppy reasoning. Conversely, when you buy a sticker or correct a mistake with patience, you fund joy and cultivate rigor.

There is a tension worth acknowledging. Open communities thrive on remix and riffing. Heavy-handed policing can suffocate playful creativity. The trick is to find norms that preserve both circulation and respect. A little restraint — and a lot of credit — go a long way.

## Takeaway — a graduate’s pragmatic credo

You made it through exams and adjunct paychecks; you can survive subreddit politics. Participate — design the sticker, make the joke, correct the bad proof — but do it with taste and integrity. Refuse to click the parasite. Check your domains. Buy the sticker if it’s good. And when you laugh, remember: your laugh is also data.

To close with the sort of open-ended question that keeps a seminar lively: if attention is a resource, and memes are tiny acts of cultural production, what obligations do communities of knowledge have to preserve authorship and rigor — and how would you build incentives that reward care rather than clicks?