Introduction Critical Meme Reader III: Breaking the Meme

Written with Idil Galip

A young woman shares a photograph of herself on Instagram. She is bare faced, her hair is pulled back. Her eyebrows slope down, her gaze is vacant — the caption to the photo ends with ‘everyday the pain increases’.

A video of the same woman, crying in a car. The caption says ‘I lost my dreams, work, equipment and second home’. The video cuts from her, to a destroyed building, to scenes from a content creation hub. In the hub, a young man is at a desk editing videos while another sets up camera equipment. Here we come across the same woman, in the recent past: this time she is smiling and hugging a friend. Her smile is bright, her gaze full of joy.

This woman, Bisan, is a Gazan storyteller, filmmaker, and content creator who has found herself in the peculiar position of not only living through but also narrating an atrocity. Bisan posts everyday, she posts day and night, she posts the bombs, the dead bodies, the intermittent moments of happiness, the rubble, the pain, the suffering, and the ongoing destruction of her life.

Digital culture today is a twisted mirror reflecting a fragmented simulation of multiple realities. A scroll down Instagram is a dizzying and terrifying look into simultaneous atrocities (Palestine, Sudan, Congo), blasé meandering (GRWM, ASMR, OOTD), and maladaptive daydreaming (looksmaxxing, reality shifting, Snapewives). We live in a bizarre post-digital moment, where cultural production on platforms have become interlinked with ambivalent practices of atrocity voyeurism, platform censorship,1 and embodied content. We live and die inside the platform.

The Ukraine-Russia war was deemed the first TikTok war by some journalists; similar things have been said about the live satellite coverage of the Gulf War and the networked nature of ISIS propaganda — Sontag2 famously theorized about the staging of war photography during the Crimean War (1853-1856). Even the memefication of 9/11 within the then-burgeoning internet culture3 leads us to think about the linkages between violent imagery and changing media regimes. Today, we see TikTok filters and sounds that promise to aid Palestine if used in a video, ‘but do you condemn Hamas?’ memes, coded emoji use against platform censorship, as well as intensive mainstream media coverage of the genocide of Palestinians (or ‘a conflict’ as most Western outlets call it). However, beyond memes and emojis, what has had a deep and painful impact on everyday audiences are the videos, live streams, words, and images that make their way directly from Gazans’ smartphones onto social media platforms. These atrocities are viewed at a so-called ‘rational distance’ by Western world leaders, as electoral politics in many parts of the world slide further into violent demagoguery and enact cycles of war over and again.

The rise of right populism and the prominence of the so-called culture war have not stopped since the previous Critical Meme Reader. We still ask the same questions while expecting different answers: What will happen to the world? How can we mobilize ourselves? How can we stop obsessing over speculative futures and deal with the present?

The Netherlands — where both of us are currently based — is following in the footsteps of the United States of America when it comes to choosing political representatives. We can only speculate what the similarities are between Donald Trump and the right-wing extremist politician with platinum blond hair who won the Dutch elections in November 2023. We are neither confirming nor denying that memetic clownery has something to do with it. Extensive research has been conducted (see: Kasimov 20234, Steele 20235, Dreyfuss and Donovan 20226, King 20217, Tuters 20218) on how memes played a major role in the storming of the Capitol, and one can only assume memes also played a role in the rise of Geert Wilders. However, what was most notable were the memes that surfaced coming from the marginalized groups specifically being targeted by Wilders: mostly Muslim people, (Dutch) Turkish, and Moroccan people, people looking for refuge, and queer (and specifically trans) people. The flood of memes where humor was used as a coping mechanism and representation for a collective fear and sense of pugnacity show that the meme is definitely not dead, despite opinion pieces, magazine articles, conference presentations, and even memes themselves stating so over the years.

'Fig. 2.1:‘Marginalized groups from Wednesday evening, November 22nd at 21:00 [the moment the results of the election were revealed]: current objective: survive.'

'Fig 2.2: ‘Waiting for the Exit poll…'

'Fig 2.3: ‘That PVV’er [Wilders his party which translates to Party for Freedom] that though all the leftist bullshit would be over now. - ‘Can you imagine? Leftist killjoys that stay themselves unapologetically and keep supporting each other never giving up everywhere!'

When you want to say something about memes, it is impossible to escape having to situate them. What usually happens is that us meme researchers fall back onto two definitions: Dawkins9 (1976) and/or Shifman10 (2014). How can we define memes beyond their work, in ways that are better suited to our current time, building on this work — yes of course — but in a way that leaves space for the meme to breathe? Honoring the meme’s transgressive, everchanging nature, instead of limiting it into a static framework it never chose to be in in the first place. For meme studies to truly theoretically evolve as a field, we believe the meme needs many expanded definitions.

‘Meme’ is as pervasive a neologism as ever, used to describe a variety of digital media. Everything from bits of internet humor, image-macros, viral videos, to copy-pasta, urban legends, techno genres, dance routines, and bodily gestures, have been described as memes or at the very least, memetic in nature.

Initially a niche term, the meme — particularly the internet meme — has been adopted by the online public as a way to categorize the growing menagerie of online ephemera. The widespread acceptance of the term shows that it fulfills a role in how we understand, interpret, and talk about the eclectic media objects that we come across during our interactions with digital culture. However, the concept of the meme, and memetics as a field of study have been fraught with controversy for many decades.

In meme studies, the foundational thinking that grounds the concept of the meme has traditionally been one that seeks to understand culture through biological models of evolution: selection, replication, inheritance. It is equally important to underline that in various global digital cultures, online ephemera had not been described as ‘memes’ until recently, with local categorizations such as 表情包 (biao qing bao), caps, monte, and other context-specific neologisms taking precedence over the Dawkinsian ‘meme’. These categoriza'tions come with their own nuanced histories and specificities, and also offer us avenues to theorize digital culture beyond memes and memetics. Billions of people make and consume memes, but only a small percentage of those people critically reflect on the mechanisms behind these practices. With this theoretical deficit in mind, we ask the following questions:

• What could a transdiscipline of meme studies look like (Young-Her)?

• Are internet memes sympoietic subjects (Sophie Publig)?

• How are they a cultural remedy and a tool for Black resistance (Alexis E. Hunter and Tiera Tanksley)?

• Are memes the master’s tools that can set the working class free (Alia Leonardi and Alina Lupu)?

• Can memes be an archive for queer justice (Socrates Stamatatos)?

• Is erotic fan fiction memetic, in a similar way that poetry is memetic (Eero Talo)?

• What are the untold secrets of meme-breaking (Meija and Ardila)?

• What are the politics of publicly archiving memes (Adain Walker)?

• Can AI meme and what does that mean for humor and being human (Billuart and Koro and Bril)?

• What is the folklore of algorithms (Gabriele de Seta)?

• What would the meme think and feel, if it had a consciousness (Ray Dolitsay and Jasmin Leech)?

• Could the meme be an incarnation of someone’s grandmother (Enzo Aït Kaci)?

• What happens when a theorygrammer answers Gavfelin’s theoretical question and writes about the actual last meme in history 'nd writes about the actual last meme in history (@simulacra_and_stimulations)?

Thinkers and (meme) makers from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds contributed to this reader, answering the above questions, and more, all intending to break and reassemble the ubiquitous concept of the meme in their own way. Let us be clear: it is not our intention to replace Dawkins’ or Shifman’s definition with another one that others must then use to situate their work. That is the opposite of our intention. And, honestly, that would be quite boring. We want to break the definition open with these different visions and keep it open. As this is the last Critical Meme Reader (at least for the 'time being), we want to let the meme choose for itself what it wants to stay, be, and become.

References

Arkenbout, Chloë, and Laurence Scherz, eds. Critical Meme Reader II: Memetic Tacticality. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2022.

Arkenbout, Chloë, Jack Wilson, and Daniel de Zeeuw, eds. Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2021.

Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.'

'Donovan, Joan, Emily Dreyfuss, and Brian Friedberg. Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.

Gafvelin, Åke. “On the Prospect of Overcoming Meme-Culture, or, The Last Meme in History.” In Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image, edited by Chloë Arkenbout, Jack Wilson and Daniel de Zeeuw, 176-186. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2021.

Kasimov, Andrey, Regan Johnston, and Tej Heer. “‘Pepe the Frog, the Greedy Merchant and #stopthesteal’: A Comparative Study of Discursive and Memetic Communication on 'Twitter and 4chan/Pol during the Insurrection on the US Capitol.” New Media & Society 0, no. 0 (May 2023). https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231172963.

King, Andy. “Weapons of Mass Distraction: Far-Right Culture-Jamming Tactics in Memetic Warfare.” In Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image, edited by Chloë Arkenbout, Jack Wilson and Daniel de Zeeuw, 217-235. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2021.

Kuipers, Giselinde. “Media Culture and Internet Disaster Jokes: Bin Laden and the Attack on the World Trade Center.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 5, no. 4 (2002): 450–470. https://doi.org/10.1177/1364942002005004296.

Human Rights Watch, “Meta’s Broken Promises: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content on Instagram and Facebook.” Human Rights Watch, December 21, 2023. https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/systemic-censorship-palestine-content-instagram-and.

Shifman, Limor. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2014.

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

Steele, Ashleigh. “Free Speech Platforms and the Impact of the U.S. Insurrection: Misinformation in Memes.” Master’s 'diss., University of Bergen, 2023.

Tuters, Marc. “A Prelude to Insurrection: How a 4chan Refrain Anticipated the Capitol Riot.” Fast Capitalism 18, no. 1 (2021): 63-71. https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.202101.006'

Read the Critical Meme Reader III here: https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/critical-meme-reader-iii-breaking-the-meme/