how memes are
Transforming Ideology FEATURES / SPRING 2019 / NICO BORBOLLA When I was 16, I toured NYU. I spoke to a lot colorful and highly eccentric people that day, but the most memorable was a then-sophomore at the School of Individualized Study who proudly proclaimed his major: Memes. Then something strange happened. My friends started to make memes I didn’t quite get. They were about Hegelian dialectics, Derridean deconstruction, or other lofty topics incomprehensible to high schoolers (maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt these 16-year olds had read The Phenomenology of Spirit). My classmates eventually started ironically lionizing Marx, Lenin, and the Russian Revolution. It went so far that the winning design for our “Class of 2017” t-shirt commemorated the centennial of the 1917 Bolshevik
Revolution. Ironically, the administration made us choose the runner-up, a crown above the word “EL17E” (elite). I use the word ‘ironically’ hesitantly because many of those same friends now write very publicly and very unironically about the merits of anarcho-communism, labeling themselves ‘AnComs.’ Who can really blame them? To a 16-year old, the appeal of these memes and the corresponding ideology is clear: it’s rebellious, gives them a community, and lets them don the pretense of intellectual sophistication without doing any work. In other words, a perfect storm for teenagers without any real economic consequences to policies engendered by their beliefs. Regardless of the origin of memes, the cultural shift 23
