Memes : A Cultural Currency

Few things provide as fertile a fodder for the distinctly atonal Millennial humour as uncertainty. Granted, theseare unprecedented times, but memes and internet culture at large provide more than a merely reductive escapist coping mechanism for cultural disarray. The ‘inside’ humour which characterised these shared images has become positively outward looking, and outward affecting, too.

To give an expansive definition of the meme seems defunct. In a gleeful enactment of nominative determinism, the term has come unstuck from its coinage by Richard Dawkins, here summarised as a form of imitation. Put simply, a meme is an empty vector for cultural ideas. Where these ideas arise from and which survive the natural selection of the internet is another question altogether. Brian Feldman, writing for NYMag, puts it succinctly: ‘Memes are frameworks, they’re skeletons. They often contain jokes, but they are not, in and of themselves, funny’. Humour is produced through the partnership of inherited ‘memetic’ frameworks and cultural context. Ensuing laughter is not so much a form of escapism, it seems, than a wilful blindness to its parental current affairs. The external world is compressed into a surreal stream of content whose purpose is to entertain: Corona virus has been assimilated into a montage of nihilistic images and videos soundtracked to Cardi B shrieking ‘coronavirus’ and a B-plot of the 2016 US elections saw a bizarre series of events where Republican and Democrat internet fiends fought for supremacy over the political leaning of Pepe the frog. Memes are animated by the speed and flow of information - their lifespan is rapid, and their proliferation exponential. Life shapes art and art shapes life.

A level of self-awareness has pervaded online meme communities. KnowYourMeme, a database for memes and other transient internet phenomena, doubles up as a news platform, and a thread in its ‘serious topic’ forum poses the question of whether capitalism will last forever. Reality is not eclipsed by the moulding of current affairs into content, but rather informed by that very process. Stripping away the preconceived notion that memes supposedly exist within a vacuum reveals the exchange of memes as a viable communicative channel between younger generations, a channel brimming with raw and honest opinions of the everyday individual in an internet realm marked by the lack of a gatekeeper. This untapped potential is ripe for harvest and has not gone unnoticed; it is being slowly cornered by the spawning of companies like Meme 2020, a collective of Instagram heavyweights with a combined audience of 60 million. Mike Bloomberg’s campaign in the 2020 Democrat primaries paired up with none other than Meme 2020 in an attempt to appeal to younger voters. And what better way to smuggle political messages than through the unsuspecting channel of a humour distinguished by irreverence and anti-establishmentism. A modern day Trojan horse, if you will.

There is, however, something distinctly unsavoury and sleazy about a meme packaged up and sent from a corporate suit. It seems intolerantwith the very fibre of a meme as a product of individual anti-establishment thought, whose authenticity derives directly from its lack of corporate affiliation. Let’s keep one eye on the ‘natural selection’ of the all-seeing algorithm. WORDS BY CLARE MAUNDER