United We Stan, Divided We Drag
PART 2: When everything is a meme, our reality is a meme.
Every now and again, some politician or clammy culture war grifter makes an unprompted grand declaration: I will NEVER use pronouns. You will never catch me using a SINGLE pronoun. Then swarms of weak-bladdered, pencil-necked turbodorks scramble over each other to point out that, Actually, you just used three, with a glib smugness. A screenshot of the spat eventually winds up on a r/ToiletPaperUSA circlejerk full of vengeful chucklefucks. This ritual occurs every few news cycles or so, and nobody seems to learn much from these experiences. A few lifeless scrolls later and our rectangular vortexes spew out war crimes and mason jar salads and various affirmations, all blobbed together into one general-purpose information goo to watch and react to with our lizard brains. We remain in its brooding trance, twitching against our screens, addicted to our own boredom until the sky goes dark and we lost untold hours to an endless slideshow of barely interesting memes.
Memes are like political pamphlets, except much shorter and even less coherent. They aren’t new in politics, but they have metastasized into a culture unto itself, the lingua franca, altering the way we think about the world beyond our screens. In February 2016, the Washington Post characterized the presidential primaries as “the most-memed election in U.S. history.” Fan-fictioning and performative nerdism cosplay as civic engagement, the great convergence of politics and pop culture, fact and fantasy, citizenship and commerce, ideology and imagination.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans obtain their news from social media. These platforms have revealed themselves to be much more than repositories of inconsequential observations. In an era where elections are swayed by notions of “likability” and “electability,” memes are marshaling creators and audiences alike to build and maintain images of a politician through user-generated content. You can see it in the efforts to distill the 2020 presidential candidates into various pop culture icons or photoshopping Donald Trump’s face onto Rocky Balboa’s body or stylizing Ruth Bader Ginsburg as The Notorious R.B.G.
Political memes have long existed because they’re also cultural units—take, for example, an “I Like Ike” pin or a MAGA hat. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme,” which rhymes with a shortened version of the Greek word for imitation (mimeme), to describe an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person. Content distribution has supplanted creation in terms of effective political branding. Every policy, speech, interview, tweet, video, and photograph is now treated as a piece of content that can reach and persuade the public. For a meme to go viral, it must be rooted in an understanding of current trends or vintage touchstones. As internet culture scholar Henry Jenkins put it: “If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.”
Politics, pop culture, and personal branding have always existed in symbiosis. When John F. Kennedy squared off against Richard Nixon in the first televised presidential debate in 1960, his sunny disposition starkly contrasted with the cold, clammy, calculating persona of a crook-to-be. Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential bid spearheaded a social media machine that built a formidable network of organizers and small-money donors, and images of “Yes We Can” and “Progress” zipped across the internet, resulting in him winning AdAge’s Marketer of the Year. Before the rise of social media, politics and pop culture converged only when gatekeepers allowed them to: Frank Sinatra reworked a hit song for John F. Kennedy’s campaign; Ronald Reagan spooked jittery evangelicals with the specter of the Welfare Queen; a teenager asked Bill Clinton about his underwear at an MTV town hall; cable news blasted Howard Dean’s euphoric howl; a political cartoonist famously drew Dick Cheney as Darth Vader.
Political messaging and brand building have always been a content businesses. A successful presidential campaign captures the national mood much like a successful advertising campaign captures a relatable moment. What’s novel here is the inversion of control. Anyone can mash politics and pop culture. Political fandom no longer stems from an intensely manicured message; it’s memed in real-time from the stimulus ecstasy freaks who lurk in the internet’s fever swamps. This grassroots fan takeover of politics may make us feel like we’re hurling Molotov JPEGs at the establishment’s commanding heights, but instead, we’ve turned into millions of rogue Pravdas spreading folk propaganda for the powers that be.
A political statement is more likely to go viral if it circuits through a game of telephone, a direct and dumbed-down facsimile of the original. But if memes can tell a tantalizing tale that drifts us into a haze of LOLs and reflexive fury, then the details become irrelevant, the spin too messy and time-consuming to untangle, the substance beyond the headlines reserved for hypervigilant pedants. Tweets and posts similarly prompt pattern recognition, not deep reading; in these cognitive conditions, individuals are viewed through the most reductive criteria. As actual governance is outsourced to finance swells and corporate monoliths, political discourse remains stuck on describing the shape of who politicians are instead of addressing what they propose. Political allegiances are defined by cultural signifiers, further degrading the connection between politics and principles. We become lost in warped images of what we wish to be true, fetishizing an unreality that holds our gaze. Politics is now a libidinal pleasure, a lascivious adornment of the self: I believe this, I support this, I post this—therefore, I’m a Good Person.
Online activists are stunted by their cornball vanity, a relentless abhorrent thirst to be validated. Elected officials take office to become influencers. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez wanted to Start The Discussion with her infamous “Tax the Rich” dress at the Met Gala, and instead turned into the poster child for champagne socialism; at this moment, she has 13.4 million followers on Twitter and is among the least effective members of Congress. People vote for whoever will piss off their enemies, even if said politician believes in Jewish space lasers. Cultural products signify clashing ideologies: Jon Stewart was once the most trusted newscaster in America; feminist activists use The Handmaid’s Tale imagery for protests; furious chuds burned Nikes and smashed Keurig machines for reasons that remain perplexing.
Memes have intimately meshed with language in a way that’s dangerously similar to what corporations do when they talk about “telling the story of our brand.” Pepsi, Nike, Gillette, and the NFL distort progressive issues into inert and content-free taglines like “Stop Hate.” Nothing ever happens, and everything means too much.
Reactions and counter-reactions litter the internet in a burst of exploding hate bubbles and a rush of orchestral cheers, as if everything a brand or a politician does is a direct commentary on our existence. The frightening fan communities you find on the internet, those ensconced in “stanning,” attempt to offload the burden of building a personality onto the entertainment they enjoy or the culture they consume. In the same ways people take up Buddhism or play unbearable covers of “Wonderwall” at dive bars, they will pretend to have Tourette’s on Twitch, gush about the new Star Wars movie, buy every Funko Pop, have heated opinions about “West Elm Caleb,” fume about “Garden Coffee Lady,” lash out at Mitski, post about cottagecore or going goblin mode, compulsively gawk at the Depp-Heard trial, or lose their absolute shit over What Kanye Just Did.
Seemingly governed by a zealously anhedonic mindset, their passion for a cultural product somehow never diminishes, and their personalities are forced to grow into strange gnarled shapes around their intense devotion. As they want to live inside the universe in which what they care about is actually important and epic, they grow profoundly angry because not enough people agree with them. The boundaries of the self are obscured, muddling the delineation between what you like and what you are, between a difference in taste and a personal attack. The victimology inherent to standom is particularly seductive because it creates both divine worship and an enemy, subsuming individuals into a like-minded tribe to lash out at dissenters.
Anyone who feels deficient may whimsically or willfully undertake an exhausting and inscrutable headlong attempt at grasping at a ready-made identity. The internet insists there is never too much to squeeze out of a particular piece of pop culture or political theater. Warped by glib impulses and gripes, people take on borderline hysterical attitudes when they cling to their beliefs socially and not fundamentally. This can explain why libs on Twitter act in a way that’s uniquely psychotic to the platform; it’s the horror of constantly engaging in mind combat on premises that are only held rhizomatically with whatever real or imagined community they belong to. Their signature defects become all of our defects. This hints at a deeper incoherence and untenability, mostly because they are uninterested in anything but their dorky feuds and faddish self-flattering worldview.
Any interaction with a Swiftie is enough proof that fandoms fundamentally herald a central celebrity, not hold them to account. And the power to viscerally manipulate a politician’s image further sublimates politics into spectacle and builds cults of personalities around political idols. Hillary Clinton’s most widely shared tweet was, “Delete your account.” It wasn’t an articulation of her policy agenda and conception of power as much as it was a signal of in-group loyalty and a demonstration of moral outrage at the out-group. Posts like this trigger neural regions associated with emotions, impelling people to join in, making us forget our internal moral senses and defer to consensus. This creates powerful incentives for what philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke call a “moral arms race,” in which people “adopt extreme and implausible views, and refuse to listen to the other side.” These histrionic hall monitors trump up charges, exaggerate emotional displays, and dogpile in cases of public shaming and show trials. In our solipsistic digital realm, this behavior is systemically rewarded and amplified.
Hyperactive social media addicts, the epic memers, tend to be “more opinionated, more extreme, more engaged, more everything,” said Andrew Guess, a Princeton University social scientist. They are a breed of their own, exceptionally influential, distorting these platforms’ norms and biases, their compulsive posting shaping the world of more casual voyeurs. They’re called “superposters” and their defining tendencies and traits are mapped out in a series of psychological studies: dogmatism, narcissism, aggrandizement, and cruelty. Political arguments between these superposters are clashes of personality masquerading as something more substantive and dire. What’s left of their pudding brains is a parody of the average American media consumer: manic, hostile, bottomlessly credulous and unjustifiably certain, glued to stories that appeal to their sense of superiority and victimhood.
Social media did not invent a politics grounded in unreasoning spite and toddler defiance and relentless resentful virtue signaling. Americans did that all on their own, with the help of cable news turning us into howling anger addicts who can’t read past a headline. But social media did create an algorithm that valued this style of grievance above all others, which pulled culture warriors in to leave behind a trail of virtual and non-virtual wreckage.
In a 1969 interview with Playboy, Marshall McLuhan predicted, “as new information patterns inundate and uproot the old, mental breakdowns of varying degrees—including the collective nervous breakdowns of whole societies unable to resolve their crises of identity—will become very common.” Decades of journalistic practices have elevated dumber and more alarmist over complex and nuanced. Big headlines, cartoonish morality, scary criminals at home, foreign menaces abroad. It created powerful addictions to conflict, vitriol, fear, porn, self-righteousness, and race and gender resentment. This has metastasized all over our totalizing meme industrial complex, one that is directly corrosive to the individual psyche and to society in general. It has organically developed to torment people with floating signifiers that distort the real world, because their suffering compels them to engage with it more deeply, investing it with more meaning.
The rise of Breitbart and the alt-right has been attributed to dark-arts social media manipulation, but this shoddy blog was merely the beneficiary of algorithms ready-made to spread their hog-brained content. A Harvard study found that between May 2015 to November 2016, Breitbart had become the most popular right-wing news source, and third-most shared media outlet on Facebook; on Twitter, it became “the nexus of conservative media” and the most shared media source amongst Trump supporters. Its immigration stories were collectively shared more than twice as much as those of any other news outlet, and these discussions “gravitated more often to issues of identity threat.”
The reach and algorithm would continue to spread salacious content featuring outlandish characters and jumbo-sized threats—rape-happy Mexicans, Critical Race Theory, transgender groomers, whimpering libtards hellbent on imposing Soylent tyranny. Bummy pantloads keep clicking and posting, whipping others into the same shared frenzy, an endless feedback loop of fear and rage. Meaningless acts of stochastic terrorism, deadly race riots, and a siege on Capitol Hill are side effects of this unending pathology, as well as poorly written legislation in response to some transient fuming derangement on Twitter. Our phones are portable suicide devices, specifically misanthropic, as numbness and death eat away at us from the inside out.
People are resigned to admitting that the internet has decimated attention spans, but it’s really annihilated our ability to think. As the poison is injected into our eyeballs, the ridges in our minds wither in the cold blue light. We are now couch-bound dorks who have Wikipedia entries instead of brains. Every hour, every day, we are pulverized with memes and takes and replies and information. In theory, this should make us more reasonable and knowledgeable. Instead, we take mental shortcuts to quickly decide what to accept or reject. It’s a cognitive loophole known as the illusory truth effect: We determine what information is true based on its similarity to other claims we’ve already accepted, and this is compounded by a false sense of social consensus, which triggers our conformity instincts.
When everything becomes a meme, the value of a shared concrete reality seems diminished. We post and share to advance swelling mythologies and a maximally entertaining storyline, puffing up a “post-truth” culture that refuses to collapse under its own subjective perfidiousness—if only because trust in mainstream media is on a steady prolonged decline. If a story is told well, if its history seems consistent, then the machinations putting it into place can be temporarily overlooked. The 10,000-page Facebook Papers leak and an independent audit of the platform have both shown that, because of Mark Zuckerberg’s criminal indifference and his website’s inability to police its own sprawl, Facebook is “driving people toward self-reinforcing echo chambers of extremism.” This has permitted rampant medical misinformation and genocidal rhetoric, the sheer bulk of the damage crowded out by vehement denial. Twitter has sway in the real world because, although only 10% of all people have an account, 99% of journalists are addicted to it. We are all marks meming to create a world we want to believe in.
All of this has made The Discourse extremely moralistic and rigid, if not outright toxic. Everything is a meta-commentary meant to reflect the context of our statements and what it means to say it, a backlash to a backlash to something we just posted. Instagram and TikTok reward homogeneity and trend-hopping; one month, it’s about NyQuil Chicken, another month, it’s quiet quitting. Twitter and Reddit are very formulaic because people compulsively cover their asses to make sure they are posting the right thing. These websites have broken brains on a scale previously unimaginable in human history. Silicon Valley’s apex-predator types talk about social media in strained tones of wonder and whimsy, even as it has made the world infinitely dumber and uglier in a number of obvious and inescapable ways. Every platform almost seems intentionally designed to make everyone who uses it insufferable, irritable, and insane. Everything we post is swallowed whole into a stage-managed pseudo-reality in which our own scripted stories bleed freely into real events. Reality is quite literally a meme of itself. As a tragic fatalism yanks America down a grim slide, the blurry line between truth and untruth seems to heighten our addiction to the melodrama.
From not by…
In short, humans eat and subsist on their own feces as shat out of their algorithmic assholes every time they open their laptops or pick up their phones.