Kolman, Morris 2018 Political Science Thesis

Title: I Have No Mouth and I Must Meme: Internet Memes, Networked Neoliberalism, and the Image of the Economic Advisor: Mark Reinhardt Advisor is Co-author: No Second Advisor: Released Beyond Williams: release now Contains Copyrighted Material: No

I Have No Mouth and I Must Meme: Internet Memes, Networked Neoliberalism, and the Image of the Economic

by

Morris Kolman

Mark Reinhardt, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Political Science

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Williamstown, Massachusetts

May 5th, 2018

1 Acknowledgements:

This thesis would not have been possible without the exceptional insight and encouragement given to me by my advisor, Professor Mark Reinhardt. Appropriately a scholar of the visual, he has seen potential in my writing and ideas that I could never have known was there without him. He pushed me through undeveloped ideas, led me to new areas of inquiry, and somehow kept himself reading my work despite finding in each new chapter what seemed to be a bottomless well of comma splices. I am extremely grateful to have had classes with him for the majority of my Williams experience, and I consider writing this thesis under him to be the greatest privilege of my time here at the college.

The Science and Technology Studies program at this school is criminally underexposed, so I was lucky to have stumbled into Professor Grant Shoffstall’s course on Cold War Technocultures in the spring of my freshman year. In that class and since then he has unflinchingly encouraged my engagement with this field, always putting aside whatever work he was doing to talk for over an hour whenever I showed up at his office unannounced. I thank him for his support and friendship, as well as his constant fight for a field that grows more important by the day.

I deeply appreciate the guidance and criticisms given to me by my readers, Professors Laura Ephraim and Christian Thorne. Each brought new perspectives and incisive commentary to the thesis, which spurred me to restructure it in its entirety over the last month. Thanks to them, I truly feel like I have made a new contribution to the academic literature on my topic.

There are a number of other faculty and staff who I need to thank. Professor Michael MacDonald for his early input into my thesis and for his organization of the thesis seminar. Professor Sam Crane for being my first advisor on an independent study, as well as a welcome pub buddy in this long and taxing semester. And Krista Birch and Professor Jana Sawicki - as well as all the fellows of the Oakley Center - for giving me a welcoming, quiet, and stimulating place where I could feel the academy around me.

I would not made it through Williams were it not for the indispensable love and support from my friends: Jordan Jace, Lauren Steele, Sophie Wunderlich, Caroline McArdle, Alon Handler, Reilly Hartigan, and one who for some reason wishes to remain anonymous. Both at Williams and away these people have sent me memes, listened to me rant, provided camaraderie, talked about nothing, and in general rose us all above the social chains of networked neoliberalism. In the thesis now, they’re stuck with me.

Lastly I need to thank my family. To my brother Izzy, you are one of the most genuine and self- starting people I know, may we all have your level of dedication to what we believe in. Mom and Dad, I could not ask for more supportive and loving parents – especially when your son is off spending his time at some hoity-toity liberal arts school studying memes. The encouragement and interest you show in my life and my studies, as well as the constant optimism you espouse, grounds me and keeps me going. I thank the stars that I come from a family of writers, comedians, and lovers of pulling back the curtain. Every day I find in myself more qualities that I can only attribute to you, and every day I am eternally grateful.

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduction: The Online Politics of Online Politics 4 Memetic Warfare 10 Status Box: What’s on your mind, [USER]? 16 Chapter 1: The Framework of Social Media Criticism - Tracing the rise of Networked Neoliberalism 19 Networked Neoliberalism 27 Memes, the missing piece 38 Chapter 2: They Live! - Biological Metaphor, Visual Theory, and Meme Culture 48 Technical Images: The turning point of the biocybernetic paradigm 57 A Return to the Text: The Biocybernetic Origin of Memes 66 ShitpostBot 5000: A Close Reading 79 Chapter 3: Like and Share If You Agree - Ideological Resistance and Totalitarian Laughter 86 Memes: Revolutionary Humor of the Masses 87 Internet Activism Past and Present: IGC, EZLN, and Kony 2012 92 Social Capital: Social Media and the Commodity Fetishism of the Self 100 Totalitarian Laughter: Memes, Irony, and the 2016 Election 107 Coda: The Left Can't Meme 119 FIGURES: 126 ENDNOTES 128

3 Introduction: The Online Politics of Online Politics

In an account of French electoral campaigns in 1957, Roland Barthes highlights the curiosity of campaign posters. Their ubiquity makes sense: posters are easy to spread and carry a message well, but why have a politician's face take up such a large portion of the image? These are real decisions with real issues at stake, and rather than explicating a policy platform, campaigns opt to place a large face shot of their nominee instead of an articulated vision for the country. This observation, Barthes says, is misleadingly premised. Posters don't use their limited space to present a detailed vision; they use it to present a symbolic one.1 The prevalence of portraits over programs in campaign propaganda is a bet, universally taken, that photographs and a pictorial representation of politics have "a power to convert" unreachable by non-visual media.2

This is not a new idea. American politics is littered with visual metaphor and often decided on the battleground of symbolism: Paul Revere's engraving of the Boston Massacre; the photojournalism of the Civil Rights Movement; Nixon/Kennedy on radio and TV. Indeed, the primary function of our representatives is to represent us. No matter the national climate, seeing the political landscape has always played a role in participating in it.

For Barthes, this is "above all the acknowledgement of something deep and irrational co- extensive with politics."3 That is, though a picture may be worth a thousand words, its equivalent text does not come to us in any directly comprehensible order. These posters grab our attention not to ask us to read passively, but rather to engage actively. The connection created by the image goes beyond tax plans and foreign policy directly because of the medium's categorical difference from political writing. A full-face, photographic portrait conveys transparency and

4 frankness; an upward-looking view brings forth notions of the future and hope.4 The clothing, lighting, and context of an electoral photograph are all decisions with entire teams of campaign staff behind them, meticulously curating the exact referents they want the image to invoke.

At the same time, aren't posters now ephemera? Older readers of this thesis will note a distinct lack of large portraiture in recent election cycles. Campaign materials still exist—posters haven't gone away—but the house of meaning in which candidates reside has moved. Whereas it was once static, linear, from aspirant to supporter, it is now a much more jumbled map. Political symbolism has become participatory. The candidate is no longer in profile, with their face wallpapering scaffolding or handed out on pamphlets. These still exist, but draw much less attention. Rather, the candidate is on profiles, those of the social media electorate. When they are on Facebook, Twitter, or any number of other sites, however, they are figured as a piece of content incorporated into the very media people use to constitute their virtual selves. This shift in the locus of political imagery's source is not without consequence, and merits a rigorous investigation. It is worth belaboring that social media mediate the social; they are the material through which an increasing share of social interactions happens. With this in mind, we should not pretend that political images remain unchanged. With the responsibility of their production and diffusion given to the masses, their content has seen a curious parallel growth in complexity and access. The visuals of candidates we see online are now more than a face on a poster, and their increasing symbolic density coincides with an explosion of popular engagement. To see this trend in action, we need not look further than the past few years.

Let's start a decade ago, with the 2008 election. Barack Obama - the first black nominee from a major party in the US, and a relative political novice compared to his opponent - wins, aided by marshaling the theretofore untapped powers of social media. By focusing on digital

5 outreach, the Obama team was able to “personalize the candidate and the campaign, to embrace individual supporters using the same technologies, and to make them feel a part of the campaign,” ultimately producing 3.1 million small donors and 5 million volunteers from their web-based approach.5 The visual anchor of it all: the Hope poster. The stylized stencil portrait represents something of a turning point in our story: it is the twilight of the presidential poster

(arguably it is the last one, as one finds it hard to think of another one since). At the same time, it is the dawn of a new era in campaigning, one focused on the means and potentials offered by technology. As may be expected, its history is instructive.

Shepard Fairey was not a member of the Obama campaign in any way. He was rather an LA-based street artist, best known for his clothing line Obey. That said, he was still well known, and after a conversation with a campaign associate where he lamented how Obama was unmatched against "the

Clinton juggernaut," they reached out to ask if he would do a poster for him. Though supportive of Obama, he only reluctantly agreed, fearing he would make Obama seem Figure 1: A screenshot of google search for fringe by association. Eventually, though, he found a photo, 'Obama hope poster' reveals the original poster and its variations. Source: Google stylized it into the now iconic flat color contrast motif we know today, printed 700, sold half, and put up the other half around the city. With the money he made, Fairey printed another 4000 to hand out at Super Tuesday GOTV rallies at UCLA.6 It immediately went viral. People shared it from his website; they made it their profile picture, bought first-run prints on eBay for thousands, changed the words under Obama’s image, and created 'Hope' poster generators that popped up across the web. This was the last campaign poster, but also the first campaign meme.

6 If “Hope” was the middle ground, Trump as Pepe the Frog is our current age. First anonymously posted to 4chan, an internet messaging board, on September 18 2015 with the filename “Trump Pepe 2.png,” the image of Trump mixed with Pepe gained popularity when the

Trump campaign retweeted it a few weeks later on October 13. Note: this was 2015, not 2016.

Primaries hadn't started; we were only two debates in. Trump, while a firebrand, had yet to attract the media attention — and concern — that he would ride out for the rest of the election.

Pepe as well had yet to be anything more than a cartoon frog loved and sent around by the

Internet. It makes sense, then, that in hindsight this tweet went conspicuously unmentioned in the

press. It was only a year later, when the Clinton campaign

launched an attack on Trump for him and other executives in his

campaign (most notably Donald Trump Jr.) for engaging with

alt-right symbols - specifically laying that designation on Pepe,

whom online alt-right communities for some reason had taken a

particular liking to - that it started to retroactively garner

attention. This image, which previously flew under the radar as

Figure 2: Trump retweets a meme of just another run-of-the-mill tweet featuring a manipulation of a himself as Pepe. Source: Twitter candidate for comedic effect, suddenly became important. It was now campaign material. Instead of a passive acknowledgement, it became, in the larger context of Trump's base, an active dog whistle. Pepe wasn't funny, he was racist; the Trump campaign wasn't entertaining generic participation from their followers, it was actively fermenting its worst parts. Looking back on campaign portraiture before this, the transition has been swift and stark.

In less than two decades, the most distributed forms of electoral imagery have changed.

7 We went from traditional posters, to posters made for physical and digital distribution, to purely digital images designed to evoke political symbolism in the context of the internet.

Beyond its two-pronged distribution, the 'Hope' poster has a number of other features that situate it in the middle of this transitional moment. Most campaign material is done and distributed in- house or by contractors working closely with the campaign. This was a loose collaboration done by a citizen with some specialized skills. The variance of posters is normally limited to different layouts of their constitutive elements. 'Hope' was reworked hundreds of times into a smorgasbord of different messages and subjects. The politician normally stands out from the poster, image trumping borders or text. In Fairey’s work, Obama was part of it, incorporated.

This is a proto-meme, or a late poster, or both. It isn't as authorless as most memes, but still didn't depend on an author to go viral. It's clearly anchored by Obama's core image, but that doesn't stop that image from being fungible. The stylization and look of the poster itself has become recognizable, though it is still a direct referent to Obama in the public consciousness.

As one might expect from our narrative, there are a number of comparisons to Hope that place Trump/Pepe as the next logical step. Unlike the Hope poster, we don’t know its origin story. Creating, saving, and sharing variations on Pepe’s image is a popular meme practice on

4chan and other web boards, most of which are anonymous by default. Whereas Hope was an image modified by a computer, this was an image created by one. The flag in the background is virtual; the podium is clip-art; the image itself originated not as a poster but as a PNG. In Hope it was easy to tell that this was a manipulation of an image of Obama, but here it is less clear. Did this picture put Trump into Pepe’s body or Pepe into Trump’s? The question itself is misleading.

We can't understand one without the context of the other. Most important to highlight, however, is the trajectory of each of them. Hope started out as campaign material, and then got reworked

8 by people from the original context of promotional material. This image of Pepe as Trump existed before it was officially (implicitly) endorsed as content on a campaign account. It was imbued with meaning before the candidate interacted with it. The stylization does not speak to a central motif of the campaign, but of the online community pushing its own meaning onto it. It is this new phenomenon, the creation of meaning through circulated bits of content on the internet, that this thesis concerns itself with.

Barthes wanted us to look at electoral photography as a symbolic vision of politics, something carefully curated to invoke specific ideas or desires the electorate could use to project their own futures onto the candidate. With major political projects giving nods in their direction, it is evident that memes are now part of that symbolic library and actively changing how it processes new additions. A history like this one - contextualizing political memes as the end product of a traceable ideological and cultural progression - is the project of this thesis, and the logic connecting posters to 'Hope' to Pepe is just the tip of the iceberg. Memes are important because they occupy the centerpoint of the very large Venn Diagram between politics, the visual, and technology. By understanding their respective histories, we can understand memes.

Conversely, by understanding memes, we can understand the political environment that encourages their proliferation.

What the word "meme" refers to is hard to pin down. Originating from Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene in 1976 and intended to mean cultural units of ideas that develop and replicate like genes, the term has become something of a meme itself (a point he acknowledges).

The history of the word is fascinating, and we will take up a good chunk of the second chapter explaining how its etymological roots still hold strong today. For now, however, we just need a working definition to get started. As may be expected from a term that suffers from the effects of

9 itself, the what meme exactly means now is up for debate. This is probably best illustrated by the tension between dictionary and academic definitions of memes. Webster's Dictionary defines a meme as “an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media."7 Limor Shifman's seminal work in meme studies, Memes in Digital Culture, tries to be more rigorous. For Shifman, memes are "(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which

(b) were created with an awareness of each other, and (c) were circulated, imitates, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users."8 We can read the history of memes out of both of these. Both pay homage to their roots in replication, technological framing, and viral growth.

However, there is notable discord between them. Webster's definition seems to imply that all memes are visual, whereas Shifman would allow viral discourse that never made it into a JPEG file to make the cut. Conversely, Shifman's definition requires memes to be reworked rather than just copied and pasted, while that doesn't seem to be a necessity for Webster's. The truth in all probability lies somewhere in the middle, but just out of reach. For many people, asking them to define a meme is like asking Justice Potter Stewart to define porn. There are many different types, and none with clear boundaries, but "I know it when I see it." I will not belabor this point, as I think it is clear that meme is a term in conflict, but the rigorous reader may consider my definition of memes going forward to be that of Shifman's with the visual caveat of Webster.

That said, my word is not bond in this case, and there are many instances in the coming chapters where the visual politics of memes gain greater clarity by considering some of their non-visual counterparts.

Memetic Warfare

10

We ought to make clear that memes are not a niche issue. They are considered an active political war zone - for some of the internet 2016 was "The Great Meme War" - with many actors investing in the outcome. Let us sketch the larger recent bases in American electoral politics. Bernie Sanders, while ultimately losing the Democratic nomination, drew a significant amount of support from his campaign in the form of memes.9 “Bernie Sanders memes” was searched more than “Bernie Sanders policy” every day of 2016 after January 24th.10 Over the course of the election, the Facebook group Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme Stash (or BSDMS) grew to over 500,000 members, becoming one of the primary generators of campaign content reaching the younger generations. It acted as both incubator and publicist. Memes festered in its confines, hundreds of members submitting different takes on memes or new meme templates, and the

"dankest" - best, funniest, most viral - floated to the top and finding their way to the rest of the internet. The same thing can be said for 4chan's /pol/ and Reddit's r/the_donald. A different format to be sure (unlike Facebook, 4chan enforces anonymity, and it can be easily achieved on

Reddit), but they served the same purpose. These message boards were the petri dish for Pepe's culturing into a symbol of the alt-right, and also were the source for a vast amount of anti-Hillary memes circulated during the election.11 It is worth nothing that in both cases, left and right, it is not simply a matter of the political icon inspiring the meme. Oftentimes, the memes constitute the political icon. In their respective top Washington Post articles (and WaPo did a remarkably good job covering meme communities in the 2016 election cycle), it is clear that on both sides memes come first. The BSDMS is noted to be "far less concerned with policies the candidate has promoted, or statements he’s actually said, than they are with furthering his Internet-icon status.”12 In the day-after threads of /pol/, one post read "I'm fucking trembling out of excitement

11 brahs [...] we actually elected a meme as president.”13 Going back to Barthes, an inversion seems to be happening. Whereas previously it was a candidate trying to make themselves as an icon, both Trump and Bernie’s meme-loving cohorts were attempting to make their icon a candidate.

Two's company in the meme world, but three is a crowd, and it's important to remember that memes not only expand discourse but can also limit it. The Clinton campaign was plagued by this problem. Speaking from personal experience working over the summer at the campaign, the reason we didn't try anything meme related was because "the internet doesn't like us." (While not unanimous, this cultural conclusion about “the internet” and its figuration as a single entity will be discussed at length later in the thesis.) That is, any attempt to build up Clinton’s reputation by appealing to the social media-based electorate would be futile in that they were already solidly opposed to any framing of Clinton as relatable. The two hemispheres of public meme discourse had already been firmly aligned to Trump and Bernie, there was no way for a

Clinton narrative to get in. Representing her primary and general election opponents, they served complementary goals. One of the most recognizable meme formats to be popularized by the

BSDMS was "Bernie vs. Hillary", which showed the two candidates' side-by-side opinions on various non- election related topics (eg. rapper Lil B, wolves, weed).

Though the joke of the meme was that they were not related to election topics, they held in their essence a message about the political platforms of both candidates. Bernie was a man of the people, and said things most people would agree with or would respect Figure 3: An iteration of the Bernie vs. Hillary meme. Source: knowyourmeme.com someone for saying. Hillary, on the other hand, held opinions that were skeevy, disingenuous, or

12 vastly under-informed. While apolitical in a strict sense, these views contained a clear underlying narrative that Hillary was out of touch with voter opinions on critical issues.

Mounting a separate attack, alt-right memers spent a good portion of their memetic efforts throwing doubt onto her personal credibility. Take, for example, FishBoneHead1's infamous meme of Clinton over a background of money with a six-pointed star declaring her the most corrupt president ever, which gained notoriety when it was retweeted (then retracted and

reposted with a circle in place of the

star) by the Trump campaign. This

meme, along with many others from

the alt-right corners of the internet like

/pol/ and r/the_donald, focused on

Clinton's connections with lobbyists

Figure 4: A comparison of Trump's account retweeting FishBoneHead1's original image and it's subsequent re-upload. Source: CNN and her past political scandals like

Benghazi to make her out to be a corrupt and malicious politician. With the attacks of the alt- right on one side and Bernie’s memes on the other, the public memetic consciousness was against her on both fronts. The left didn't see her as a reliable representative of their interests, and the right saw her as an outright criminal. We shouldn’t attribute this disposition exclusively to memes - to be sure there were many more reasons an establishment politician such as Clinton would find themselves at a large disadvantage in a populist moment - but it would be a similar mistake to not take the rise of memes and Clinton’s PR problem as unrelated.

Meme literacy was a significant limitation during the election, as a major way to get campaign messaging and grassroots communication out to young voters was thus cut off from the Clinton campaign. This is not to say that memes were inherently out to get Clinton, but

13 merely that the type of campaign she was running, and how she was positioned as a candidate, was one drastically mal-suited for the medium. One of the more interesting campaign emails leaked showed the campaign chairman John Podesta forwarding an advisor an email from a young supporter. “I understand that the media team is trying to appeal to the youth, in funny ways like ‘memes’” read one line from the seventeen year-old sender, “but that is simply not the way to go”14. Aside from the brief flirtations with meme popularity (think the Twitter-breaking

"Delete your account" tweet), the campaign was largely bereft of any way to tap into this new medium's virality.

It is curious, however, that Clinton was an internet darling back in 2012 with the popularity of the Texts From Hillary meme. Also curious is why the memes of Trump and

Sanders were often less focused on their policy positions than with the cults of personality they had established in their campaigns. It all gets even more vexing when we think about the political similarities between the Trump and Sanders campaigns, which were both characterized by academics as reactions against establishment neoliberalism. And this only confuses us further when we remember that the Texts From Hillary Meme had that same charismatic semi-populist fervor. This leads us to some questions question: are political memes really about their specific politics? Or do they just claim to be? Is there a specific partisan angle to memes? Or are they better interpreted through a more general understanding of the political and ideological milieu in which we currently reside?

Here we get to the argument of the thesis. Memes are a new visual mode of political participation that aesthetically signify a mass of people behind them. They are the ideal images for circulation on social media. It is in their nature to be self-perfecting along the terms of the platform. These platforms - Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. - all

14 have at their core one goal, to keep users on their site. If memes have a teleological commitment to always try to be the most popular piece of content on these platforms, then they will also always try to plug users further into this network. I argue that this is in the direct interest of an emerging capitalist ideology and form of governmentality that I call networked neoliberalism.

Networked neoliberalism is an extension of Wendy Brown's characterization of neoliberalism as the remaking of the human into the image of the economic. It says that not only must the individual be modeled after an economic ideal and managed accordingly, but that that ideal must be achieved through integrating them into networks of technology in both their labor and socialization. Bringing political subjects online to be better monitored, optimized, and appeased only serves to extract more value from them. As the content that shows these subjects to themselves as an online body politic, political memes can only ever reify that logic. Thus memes are not predisposed to support any one candidate or another, but they are inclined to take populist energies and deal with them efficiently. “I don’t care if you call for the demise of neoliberal capitalism,” the overseeing network says, “as long as you do it in the house.” Better for the system to keep the writhing masses in online echo chambers where they can get out their grievances and go back to checking their work email than out on the streets where who knows what they might do. There is the additional benefit of being able to serve them ads and deepen their dependence on the network while that’s all happening at the same time. As an incentive for the subjects, memes offer users a facsimile of political action, equating participation in politics with the mere consumption of messaging that has already been around the internet and back. In using memes to form politics, users of social media play right back into the structures of networked neoliberalism while they gain catharsis from claiming to hate them.

15 Status Box: What’s on your mind, [USER]?

This thesis has three chapters, the first of which traces the rise of networked neoliberalism and sketches its characteristics. The main shift that chapter identifies is a movement away from an orientation to our social and political surroundings and towards a positioning to them. Neoliberalism attempts to make every subject manageable under an economic paradigm, and the imposition of a network aids this process. Rather than having a singular relationship to our identities, our work, our social lives, we have these aspects of ourselves given to us directly. We get notifications our friends did something, or that we have a message from our boss. In some ways, this is enticing. At first glance, it makes our lives a lot easier. But this positioning comes with consequences: a constant need to stay connected, a dependence on exposure to affirm ourselves, and a general sense of unease and anxiety as more parts of our lives and identities seem to be outsourced to technological means. Memes, which proliferate so well through their ability to create feelings of relatability and connection on these platforms, give witness to this in their representations of our collective emotion. There is at once an egocentric mania and nihilistic depression going on in meme culture, reflecting both the creep and impact of networked neoliberalism into our lives. Political subjects are becoming digital, and memes both evidence and facilitate that transition.

The second chapter takes the idea that the political subject is being reformatted into a networked being and employs it in a genealogy of memes. Starting from the idea that there is an

"image of the economic," I attempt to figure out what this image looks like. Considering both its visual and etymological histories leads to an apparent answer: “A meme.” The relationship between the technological reproduction of images and the use of that technology for advancing the interests of capital is intimate and longstanding. The first part of the chapter follows the state

16 of image reproduction from the mechanical era of Benjamin to the biocybernetic time in which, as WJT Mitchell argues, we are living now. As technology has embedded itself further into our lives, the images it produces become closer to us and more imbued with life as well. The chapter’s second part finds validity to this claim in the original source of memes, The Selfish

Gene. Dawkins introduces the term in 1976, and Foucault's lectures on neoliberalism come three years later, in 1979. There is a palpable emergent networked neoliberalism at work in the conception of memes. Taking inspiration from mimeme, Dawkins hitches representation and imitation to a conception of culture as a mass of understandable, programmable, computer-like brains through ideas spread like viruses. Over time, memes spread and interact with each other so much that they form what Dawkins calls “evolutionarily stable systems,” in which it is extremely hard for memes not in line with the norm to get a foothold. He naturalizes culture as a struggle for survival of the fittest within a network of social relations without taking into account the structures that shape that society in the first place. Put simply, he ignores the role of power.

While he doesn't claim that memes are political one way or another, in his omission of a consideration of the ideology and modes of governmentality which support selfish, networked competition in the first place he makes memes neoliberal in their inception. A few decades later we find ourselves in what might look to be a similar situation with how we regard internet memes now.

The third and final chapter considers what this means for politics, and does so starting with a retrospective. Networked neoliberalism, while simmering for decades, was not really able to fire up without a sufficient saturation of technology in everyday life. Before the massive growth of smartphones and social media around the late '00s (right when Obama's Hope poster made its debut), the internet was not the vehicle for this ideology and expression of

17 governmental logic that it has now become. Activism on the internet in the late '80s and '90s attempted to use it for progressive political ends. It did more than just try to use the internet to amplify its messaging, it sought to make the internet a place of connection conducive to offline organization, easy to access, and supportive of marginalized voices. The corporatization of the internet at every level, from ISPs to website platforms, brought with it barriers to these types of projects. The political potential of the internet narrowed in turn. Recent activism on the internet is woefully impotent, and the main pitfalls of these projects are elucidated in a consideration of the Kony 2012 movement. Politics on the internet has shifted from something characterized by action to something characterized by empty performance, grievances spoken into the network with no intention of ever leaving it to seek rectification. Given that social media is the network through which so much online communication happens today, its conditions - an addiction to consuming content, a desire to project an identity online, etc. - shape the politics that play well on the platform. Memes have followed subjects in this trend towards an existence on social media. As the phenomenon of internet memes has gone on, they have become increasingly ingrained into these networks. The chapter closes by returning to the questions we posed a few pages ago: why were Trump and Sanders so popular at their moment, and Clinton so popular at hers? The answer lies in the role that humor has in the context of political catharsis, and I will leave it to the reader to encounter it at the end.

18 Chapter 1: The Framework of Social Media Criticism

Tracing the rise of Networked Neoliberalism

“What do you do when you’re sad” “Make memes.” “But you’re always making memes.” “Yes.” - Classical Art Memes

Genève Gill and Tamara Villarreal Ford had yet to experience the beginnings of social media as we know it today. Consider how they conceived of people hearing of web pages – from their friends.15 Nowadays we use Google, or are linked to them via email, or get funneled to any number of new pages through a long chain of continuous online activity. Of course, search engines were already popular at their time, but it speaks to the lack of any unifying force on the web. Their conception of socialization on the internet was very much a-networked; social media sites had yet to congeal, forums hundreds of pages long were still the norm of online message boards, and in general the structure of communication was much more decentralized.16 There were no hubs of connection – like the billions-large Facebook or Twitter today – but concentrated communities dispersed around the net. However, they were prescient. They wrote at what they saw as a pivotal moment for the internet conceiving, however warily, of notions of radical democratic freedom and access provided by the internet, while steeling themselves against its coming corporatization. Looking forward, they sketched two potential futures for the internet called Cyberkeley and Cyburbia, concepts borrowed from the work of Andrew Shapiro.

"In Cyberkeley, internet users must occasionally pass through certain public internet gateways where anyone is free to speak and gather. These spaces, like actual street corners or parks, afford the public the opportunity to be exposed to a range of contrasting views and even learn of the

19 existence to alternatives to commercial sites. In Cyburbia, the realm being fashioned by corporate and political interests for the maximization of profit and minimization of dissent, users can – and often must - avoid all public discourse and head straight for the cybermall."17

Cyberkeley and Cyburbia mediate discourse to the same extent, but equal extent is not parallel direction, and the two futures bring the internet’s horizontal discourse to drastically different ends. Discourse and socialization in the future either become more open and democratic, as in the vision of Cyberkeley, or more nodal, linear, and prescribed, as in Cyburbia.

The metaphor is admittedly imperfect; Berkeley is a liberal college campus where few get in as well as an extremely expensive city where fewer get to stay. However enticing it may be to read into their alliterative choice, though, thinking about the specific socioeconomic conditions of Berkeley is beyond the intent of the authors. Gill and Ford readily admit that the internet as it existed in the late 90s was not completely democratic.18 They also address the misconception that academic institutions are to be an ideal model for network access, as

"educational institutions have become increasingly dependent on corporate or foundation money."19 Despite these impediments to equality of access, the point of their approach is to give activists a road map for two futures of internet infrastructure, so that they may have a better layout of the coming battlefield. Gill and Ford are focusing on the issue of civic space on the internet, the status of rest stops and toll booths on the information superhighway. Cyburbia and

Cyberkeley are simply the fork up ahead: two roads diverging in a server bay with the internet unable to travel both.

Their outlook was bleak. "We are faced with an immensely powerful trend towards enclosure, away from the radical inclusivity enabled in principle by the internet." 20 Qualifying this, they point to a number of indicators: the 1995 Communications Decency act, which tried to

20 Figure 5: The New Titans - Online cover image for the January 18th, 2018 Economist. By David Parkins. stifle "indecent" communication on the web; "campaigns of intention disempowerment," such as the general collaboration of lawmakers with industry lobbyists on the crafting of information policy; the deficit in returns between products marketed by internet non-profits and corporate takeovers of the same products; and the "virtual give-away of the digital spectrum" from state- owned internet telecommunications infrastructure - worth almost 70 billion dollars - to the private sector.21 Fast-forward to 2018, and it seems they were right. We kicked off the year with an Economist cover showing "The New Titans" – Facebook, Amazon, and Google in the style of

The Iron Giant towering over an urban metropolis. Google is reaching towards the viewer,

Facebook is eating a robotic humanoid, and Amazon - as Cyburbia is wont to do - is picking up a mall.

The diagnosis of Gill and Ford is perhaps most dated by their theoretical framing of political action on the internet. They speak of the impact of this corporate creep "on social and media activism.”22 That is, they view the two as distinctly different areas for action. Media

21 activism was investigative or guerilla reporting and social activism was the organizing of protests. To illustrate the difference of that dichotomy to today, think of the difference between contemporary videos of police violence compared to the Rodney King beating. For the King video, George Holliday filmed the video of the police attacking Rodney King and with the help of the Los Angeles ACLU circulated it to prominent media outlets. In turn, protests and riots were organized in response to the decision to acquit the LAPD officers of excessive force against

King.23 In this instance, media activism was the surveillance and dissemination of the police video that Holliday did, and social activism was the organization of resistance movements against the acquittals. Moving to the present day, we find ourselves in a similar moment of heightened focus on police brutality, but now much more consolidated. Probably the clearest evidence that this is a political movement mediated by social media platforms is that Black Lives

Matter started as #BlackLivesMatter. Coming out of a Twitter hashtag, it has become the de facto name for the newest iteration of the civil rights and anti-police brutality movements.

Videos of offending police now go viral on Facebook or Twitter, and oftentimes people will livestream traffic stops or altercations between officers or citizens through their social platforms.24 Social activism (organizing resistance) and media activism (investigative and guerilla reporting) are now converging under the umbrella of social media activism - activism that happens through platforms like Facebook and Twitter. As our daily online time increases, so the platforms we use integrate further into our lives. Again, the fact that people will livestream intense confrontations with the police not only speaks to the kind of instant public accountability given with the prominence of social media, but also shows how these platforms mediate the social, structuring our lives and relationships.

22 That instances of death appear on social media and that the Economist's cover illustration features Facebook as one gargantuan robot eating a smaller, more human but still cybernetic android, is no random coincidence. Nor is it coincidence that one thing very human - the social - is converging with one thing inherently material – media. The motif of robotic consumption pervades this thesis because the incessant and voracious consumption by users on social media makes these platforms significantly different from the media environments of the past. This precipitates a conceptual shift that is a critical methodological concern as we move forward talking about social media. In the words of Francisco “Bifo” Berardi, the most important effect of new media is "the anthropological mutation and disposition of bodies in the social sphere."25

Social and media are given new meanings in the context of their platforms, and it would be a mistake to see either as a discrete area of investigation. In bringing people online, technological media create a socialization dependent on the slim slices of silicon that run their servers. On the flip side, people incorporate technology into their own experiences of themselves as social beings. Using Bifo's language, social media at once "anthropologically mutates" boundaries of the self and reorients the "disposition of bodies in the social sphere" in such a way that it would be a vast oversight to understand the users and networks in question as anything but mutually constitutive. Thus we must not presuppose the existence of a subject that uses or is behind the information machine, but rather understand how the subject comes to be out of the working of the digital media network, and in turn how that media network came to mold them in that way.

It is this reformatting of the subject that Jodi Dean engages in her book Blog Theory.

Instead of enclosure, a la Cyburbia’s mall architecture, Dean theorizes a different term for the creep of corporate interests into the internet. These were strategies of capture, being pushed by forces of communicative capitalism. Communicative capitalism is an ideology that captures the

23 creative and affective energies requisite in any resistance movement and traps them in a loop of reflexivity.26 In simpler terms, the energies and desires thrown into the production of content for political participation on social media find their efficacy cut off by the medium, but cut off in such a way that their object of desire - some kind of political change - is always just out of reach.

Reflexivity is not always bad; democracy is reflexive in that the demos creates laws which in turn affect the demos and so on, but reflexivity within a communicative capitalism is dangerous.

The more we invest political projects in online communication, the more online communication becomes necessary to our politics, and the more the social consequences and a priori conditions of these online interactions get entrenched.

When Gill and Ford talk about enclosure and the privatization of space, or when Dean talks about the capture of communications, they are making more than just an argument about constraining boundaries; they are making a claim about the status of discursive movement itself.

There is much debate within their pages as to whether or not the internet is a public sphere, a

Habermasian idea of a space in which private individuals come out into the arena of society to express their ideas as a public citizen. The public sphere draws discourse towards specific ways of moving (paths of acceptability, rules of decorum, barricades around forbidden areas), requiring thoughts to come out of a private space and into a public one. This highlights an incongruity between the two theoretical approaches, the issue of spatiality. Both Cyburbia and

Cyberkeley invoke the idea of an environment that shapes (or does not shape) discourse as it gets spoken into the world. The language of capture and circuitry on Dean’s side, however, seems to be flat and have no conception of speaking in a public sphere, as after capture discourse will always be already shaped by the ideology of the platform. There is no first act of speech and then the shaping of that speech by the conditions of the environment; the speech is directly typed into

24 the network, it is inputted. This distinction brings us to an important question: what is the nature

of movement in communicative capitalism? How does a message get from one place to another?

Here Bifo provides a metaphor that bridges these two conceptualizations and contextualizes why

communicative capitalism seems so a-spatial.

Extending the argument he made above, though in a different text, Bifo argues that the

digital subject is undergoing a transformation. As the individual is integrated into the network,

the physical sense of orientation is being replaced by a synthetic reception of positioning.

Orientation is what he calls “the singularization of the landscape,” the ability to recognize the

environment one is in and navigate it accordingly, having navigated it many times before.27

Speaking with a physical meaning of navigation, he points out that the ability to orient oneself in

a space “consists in getting lost in the territory, and in getting one’s bearing again[.]”28That is,

orientation is the ability to be comfortable with uncertainty while working your way out of it. In

the world of Cyberkeley, this might be likened to knowing how to get back to the main square

from a couple blocks down; in the register of web browsers, it’d be actualizing the meanings of

Safari, really being an Internet Explorer.

However, as algorithms continue to gain

ground in our internet experience, we move

away from an independent relationship to our

environment – an orientation – and move

towards a prescribed one – a positioning. Bifo

likens this to the popularization of GPS,

configuring its environment as technological

Figure 6: The Google Maps Street View figurine on a map of in contrast to the physical space of orientation. Williamstown, MA. Screenshot by Author.

25 As opposed to movement facilitated by orientation, GPS systems take an external measurement of where the user is in their system (specifically, they measure the distance between the user and

3 orbiting satellites) and then return that information to the user with directions on how to get where they need to go. It is a convenient invention, to be sure, but one with subtle costs.

Positioning technologies bring with them a negation of the possibility to get lost, one can never be uncertain as to what ground one stands on because that information will always be at the ready. We still exist in a space, but our understanding of that space is no longer intimate. The loss of being lost is not a politically neutral occurrence; rather it is directly conducive to increasing the productivity of the worker by eliminating the potential for hiccups in transportation, be it daily commutes or business trips. Modern city planning evidences this well,

Bifo quotes Italian architect and anthropologist Franco La Cecla on this: “modern functionalism is based on the assumption that city dwellers should not waste time in a complicated relation with the environment. The environment must be functional, so that the city dweller can displace himself from a suburban area to an other in order to do his job... the environment has not to be felt, but to [be] used.”29

We said earlier that the internet’s discourse is horizontal in both of Gill and Ford’s futures, but different in its operating nature. The spatial metaphor of orientation vs. positioning can be applied to this difference. Just as there is a difference between being lost and having a

GPS, there is also a difference between socialization without an imposed network and loading a platform’s page to see what your friends are up to. By standardizing the generic user environment, the platform gives itself the ability to direct the user through its site just as GPS directs a traveller. The rhetorical nature of directions and the actions of a user on social media are similar as well; as GPS will bring a user from one turning point to another, closer and closer

26 to their destination, so will platforms bring a user to one piece of content only to show them what they ought to look at next. Cyburbia, being figured as a mall, has all the hallmarks of positioning;

“you are here” maps paper the walls, places of value production are the only possible destinations, the entirety of movement is enclosed within its edifice. This is why Dean’s communicative capitalism seems to substitute the ideological pre-formatting of discourse for Gill and Ford’s discursive conditions of a Cyburbian public sphere. Without the ability to get lost, movement is no longer anything but transportation, and space cannot hold any impediment.

Discourse, therefore, is not spoken into the open air, but rather directly into the circuits of the network, its purpose prescribed. Those who interact with it are those that have loaded the same platform to be positioned to receive it. It is the choice of the user to read any specific comment in their feed, but it is the positioning done by the platform that determines the content in the first place. The spatial figure of Gill and Ford, then, is misleading. One does not come from their abode into Cyburbia; the network is no longer a location, but that which locates. How, though?

What are the mechanisms through which this external positioning happens? And how might we characterize it? It is these questions we turn to in the next section.

Networked Neoliberalism

In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown notes the inconsistency of the term neoliberalism.

While commmonplace in academic parlance, the specific word has vastly different meanings depending on the regional, historical, and academic context it arises in. Broadly, however, she claims that it can be described as the holistic imposition of economic logic onto human life.30 At the level of politics, this means a shift of from rule to governance – from a matter of right to a

27 method of management. At the level of the individual, this means a shift from human value to human capital – the reconceptualization of the self as a portfolio bearer, a collection of achievements in production, a good bet for an eager investor. Brown often talks about the

"competitive positioning" the worker is forced into under this system, which provides a useful bridge from our previous section. Under neoliberal logic, the individual is always responsible for themselves, yet always judged against the aggregate. The "singularization" of the landscape inherent to orientation is not a possibility; the landscape is always the list other portfolioed applicants, constantly competing against each other in a brutally quantitative race for the next raise (or just to keep their job). But this is abstract. What are the actual consequences for workers under neoliberalism? What is the role of social media in all this? And what, most importantly, does any of this have to do with memes? Each of these will be answered in turn.

For starters, work is increasingly more precarious, bringing with it a slew of consequences. In her investigation of why millennials are memeing about suicide (to be discussed soon), Deridre Olsen points to a drastic increase in the amount of zero-hours contracts and an ever more "gig-ified economy."31 Work no longer comes with the promise of a career, but with the overbearing threat of joblessness if the worker does not meet certain performance standards that are not necessarily always within their control. This would not pose so much of a problem were economic failure not a slippery slope, but with collegiate debt on the rise and job prospects stagnant, the economic outlook of the younger generations only looks to them to be getting bleaker.32 It is not that these new workers are inherently less dedicated or productive, it is simply that the job market they enter into does not necessarily value long term loyal employment. Numerous economic analyses point to a mass overqualification for students just entering the job market; the demand for jobs compared to the incoming supply and quality of

28 labor is such that it is not necessarily always in a company's best interest to keep workers around, when they can keep turning over employees for a chance at higher productivity in the long term.3334 While this may mainly seem like an issue specific to younger, middle class workers, the logic of efficiency and relentless pursuit of optimization at minute levels affects everyone. Work at all levels is being increasingly monitored and scrutinized at the level of individual performance, anyone’s contribution can be replaced by a more productive counterpart.

Labor has not only increased in precarity though, it has also forced the transition of the worker to an online environment, forcing their integration into the network in two distinct ways.

A requirement of constant connectedness is one part of this. Alongside the invention of cellphones, data plans, email apps, etc., there is has come a creeping expectation that one should always be, if not available, at least knowledgeable about work operations at any given hour. Shift management, too, is being optimized through organizational technology. "If you can scroll through Facebook before bed," says the neoliberal corporation, "you can check on your work too" (it is telling that many contracts now come with phone stipends).35 This is also not necessarily monodirectional. With the knowledge that they must produce in order to retain employment, there is a quasi-biopolitical force at work through the internet. Users feel that they must keep working after hours, lest they fall behind the rest of the equally connected competition. Mulling over recent sociological treatments of the impact of technology on our work lives, Marcus Gilroy-Ware (to whom we will return shortly) presents an argument by Judy

Wajcman. "Precisely because of how technology serves capitalism,” he draws from her, “the increased dependency on technology to mediate aspects of our lives" brings with it an increase in production without one of efficiency.36 That is, what remote work that is done through the network does not trade off with the general day-to-day workload. The connection only serves to

29 squeeze more value out of its users while simultaneously creating a feeling of what Wacjman calls "temporal impoverishment," a dearth of leisure time directly related to a decreased quality of life.

The header of this section modifies neoliberalism to be networked because while neoliberalism existed before the internet, the internet also brought with it nitro fuel for neoliberalism. As the project of neoliberal governance is a management of human resources, the digital reformatting of the subject - as presented by Bifo earlier - makes it all the more easy for political regimes to integrate constituents into their programs. Do not conflate this with government surveillance of online activity, though that is certainly an issue. This is an argument about the nature of the activity itself, given the structure of a network. The repetitive connection to nodes, an incessant "uptime" of production, a constant alertness and processing of new information, and an ensuing drive towards quantitative perfection makes both the perfect neoliberal worker and the perfect neoliberal subject: both are high-yield and liquid.

It is hard to overstate the importance of social media in the creation of this networked neoliberalism. As spaces where people may create their own portfolios, to be presented against the mass, it seems on face that these networks might be more than just convenient ways to talk with friends. LinkedIn is perhaps the most obvious example of the way these social networks are structured around a "competitive positioning," but there are higher-level affinities we can address as well. For an example that will be criminally underexplored in this thesis, just look the

Department of Defense's DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) investment of almost 50 million dollars between 2011 and 2015 into the Social Media In Strategic

Communications (SMISC) project.37 Over the course of four years, the DoD sponsored dozens and dozens of papers attempting to construct predictive models for how people in social

30 networks interact with each other, and how they might interact in the future. State forces, it seems, are working to make the endeavors of social media and their own compatible.

In what may be a perfect example of the relationship between positioning and neoliberal governance, one can also look to the still continuing case of Hasan Elahi. In an attempt to erase his erroneous placement on the Terrorist Watch List (an extrajudicial, racist, state-based micromanagement of suspect persons), Elahi decided to put his entire life online.38 Positioning himself for the world to see, he started posting hundreds of photos of his life daily to his personal website, which appropriately for both his and our purposes also contained a never-ending GPS feed of his location. "[H]is students" the Wired article on him reports, "get it immediately." After all, they are ones who have grown up in this environment. While it may be unnerving to see speculative articles about Mark Zuckerberg gearing up for a presidential run, one must also consider that for digital natives it is he that is sovereign over some of the most important aspects of their lives. As recent controversy over election meddling and Facebook transparency suggest, the spheres of influence between tech CEOs and heads of state - like social and media activism - are converging. Again though: how? What is so interpellative about social media that there can be a consideration of oneself as a profile on Facebook as much as a citizen of the US?

Before we tackle this, I should make a methodological note. For a large part of this section - and indeed this chapter as a whole - I often speak about the machinations or actions of specific platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Though there are often features specific to the company (eg. there are differences between "sharing" something on Facebook, "retweeting" something on Twitter, and "upvoting" something on Reddit), for my purposes the underlying similarities are more important: though sharing and retweeting, for example, are different, they are both still methods of spreading content through social media. At times, it’s easier to trace

31 consequences of this spread or uncover the core of its functionality by focusing on one platform or another. Still, that these platforms operate via algorithm with the intent of optimally shaping user experience for maximum production and directing the user to the next piece of content trumps minor differences in interface. In Bifo’s words, they are all technologies of positioning.

Thus, when I talk about specific companies like Facebook, the reader should keep in mind three things. First, these are the most popular social media platforms and in their success of retaining the most users are thus their business models par excellence. Second, that they all operate within the same frame of communicative capitalism, and lessons we draw from one can be easily traced onto others with minor adjustments. Third, memes don’t stay on one platform, and insofar as they retain their meaning across different ones, this level of inquiry into social media is sufficient for our discussion. Following Dean, I argue here that social media companies have a vested interest in constructing platforms that give the image of political participation while occluding their conscious attempts to capture and addict users to their product. This is an effect they achieve in three distinct ways.

First, they make themselves the standard against which identity is created. Facebook's status box greets you with the question "What's on your mind, [first name]?" It puts its user in profile by giving their users a “profile” to populate themselves. Indeed, the entire platform is geared towards this kind of identity construction in the first place. In his book Exposed, Bernard

Harcourt illustrates what he sees as a shift from away from societies of discipline or control to a society of exposition: an unprecedented general desire to be known to the world, a predication of subjective existence on the evidencing of its validity via platforms where other people can see it.39 By sharing a political image or writing a status or using a hashtag, you can signal to the world that you are a person who believes X position. The phenomenon is so large as to have

32 already gained criticism in its own community. "Hashtag activism" is a term used to characterize people who engage in politics at a level of information spread, equating retweeting a movement's hashtag to doing political work to create meaningful change. At the same time though, the popularization of the term is an ironic victory. In order to avoid the claim of superficial politics, one must prove their own authenticity by the same means of social publication.

This type of identity creation is addictive. Gilroy-Ware argues that the fascination with using Facebook to make a concrete projection of yourself can be traced to a neoliberal urge for a

"personal brand," which in turn creates a commodity fetishism of the self.40 Social media platforms are zenith of quantification of individual experience. No matter how you interact with social media platforms, notifications about how people respond to you are almost always quantified. "97 people like your profile picture," a Facebook notification might read.

"[Celebrity], You, and 47,000 others are tweeting about The Climate March." The unlimited potential of these numbers, the possibility that you could always have been more liked or have had more people agreeing with you – 102 likes (triple digits!) instead of 97 – makes it such that optimization becomes a factor in the process of thinking about identity. This can be directly linked to why social media use is often so closely related to increased rates of depression. It is profitable for an algorithm to prioritize the posts of those who have achieved that optimization of personal brand because they get so much engagement. As a consequence, they bait all of their users into the drive to get their numbers up, either to sustain their level or grow even more. The problem is that identity – being something subjective, multifaceted, and in flux – is irreconcilable with quantitative measurements, yet is nonetheless forced to frame itself within them. Gilroy-

Ware puts it best. "Obsessive focus on individual performance objectifies and commodifies the self in the same way that society encourages the objectification of others. Experiencing yourself

33 as a commodity alienates you from yourself," and in turn makes it such that the only way you can get that commodity back - get the experience of having an identity - is through a platform already profiting off monetizing it.41

If the first tentacle of communicative capitalism's subjugation was based on enframing the individual, the second is focused on containing the group. Like hashtag activism, "echo chambers" are at once something the public social media community is aware of, and yet increasingly does not critically engage with.42 The identity curation that happens on social media has two sides to it. We already talked about how there is an increasing desire to get it all on the table, but we have not thought about who is around the table in the first place. Social media places users in an environment where they can construct themselves specifically in relation to the people they want to construct themselves against, from beloved relatives, to close friends, to oppositional others. There is the consistent dual consideration of “what do I want to be public,” and “what do I want to be public for the people who will actually see my profile.” Dean claims that on the internet there is no longer a crowd. Rather, there is an amorphous group of people linked to us based on who overlaps most with our points of reference.43 Thus, when thinking in terms of political engagement, social media gives the simulation of authentic social connection while algorithmically wrecking the chance of empathetic solidarity. One can block users, curate their social sphere, and opt to never engage. Oftentimes, the network will prefer to never show you people it thinks you will disagree with in the first place.44 In another ironic example, respective news pieces on the "echo chamber effect" often themselves circulate within their own social media echo chambers; in a liberal environment looks a lot better to share an article on it from The Guardian,45 even if Breitbart publishes a near identical piece.46

34 This kind of separation from the other

– or at least a preferred positioning against it –

leads to an inability to confront it, which is

necessary for social change. Bifo argues that

“obviously, this new space is intensifying the

possibilities of virtual gathering, but they are

also accentuating the un-empathic condition of

the precarious generation, and therefore they

are making social solidarity more difficult to

attain and to build.”47 Dean (again, writing in

2010, but equally if not more applicable to

social media now) gives warrant to this Figure 7: Conversational Dynamics, by Randall Munroe. Featured on his popular webcomic blog XKCD. statement by claiming that blogs are harming the ability to effectively communicate with the other by creating insular bubbles of meaning. The more we partake in individualized, self-identifying practices, the less connection we will have to people that have different conceptions of the world. This feeds into itself, over and over. On the internet, there is now always contingency. Position in the twittersphere or friends list plays a large role in what we take as significant than the larger cultural milieu. In the broadest of terms, we may consider this to be a root cause of the increasing polarization seen on the internet. An

XKCD comic makes the argument ironically; while in theory there is a complete ability to talk to anyone, the constant reinforcement of one’s own beliefs only ever diminishes the ability to constructively communicate with groups not directly aligned with one’s own. Again we see the lack of a sense of orientation; there is no trekking towards a mutual understanding, only blips of

35 positioning either familiar and safe or radically different and hostile. The echo chamber is a distinctly capitalist construction; it is profitable to situate users inside of it. The inoculation of the subject to disagreement, however, drastically narrows who they may seek help from in their struggle. Without the ability to move through uncertain ground, to mutually orient two movements towards the same goal, cooperation and coalition building suffer. Put differently, whereas before we might be able to say, "I am a worker" and mutually inhabit that common ground to chart a course of action, the shared physical experience of labor has been replaced with the semi-collective consumption of content. This is an oversimplification, but the point is valid.

Social media’s saturation of our lives entails a shift in how we understand each other’s presence in the world. Everything is now an individualized, slightly different experience. There are workers who read Breitbart and workers who read the Guardian; my political struggle is different from your political struggle, just as my friends list is different from your friends list.

Lastly, social media entraps its users by saturating its platforms with affect and making the "real world" excessively boring in comparison. By “boring” here I mean inconvenient or inefficacious when compared to the opportunity cost of filling time with scrolling through feeds.

Sex, a good movie, picnics, adrenaline, these are not necessarily boring in the sense of sitting there with a blank face (though around 20% of Milennials check their phone during sex).48

Instead, their relative cumulative excitement has to compete with the constant dopamine hits of the network. Social media offers the possibility of all the emotional experiences we would have outside its platform, but at greatly accelerated pace. Gilroy-Ware points to the abundance of animal videos on Facebook as an example of this. Animal videos, especially cute ones, are known to make people happier.49 Whereas normally it would take someone at least ten minutes to go to a local PetCo, now you can scroll through and see three different cat videos in the span

36 of a minute on the Facebook feed. Not only this, but Facebook can recognize that you like those videos, and serve you up more in the future. This is a small manifestation of a point we’ve already belabored: the environment of social media is built around keeping you engaged yet wanting more. Their business model is one that is based on getting you into a scroll (which as soon as you hit the bottom refreshes to serve you even more content) in which they can periodically show you advertisements for products or connect you even further into their network. Facebook, for example, now has unskippable ads placed algorithmically into videos.

They test at what point viewers are most likely to commit to a video (at what point the cohort of people who weren't going to watch the whole video leave and those that are intrigued stay) and place an ad right after it. Right before the guy jumps out of the airplane, right after the kitten's tragic backstory is told, etc. Facebook is there to sell ad space.50

What's remarkable however, is how boring the action of scrolling through social media is for how saturated with affect its content looks to be. Gilroy-Ware notes that "Facebook is 'often

[opened] impulsively in an uncontrolled manner'...it is a significant characterisation [sic] of social media, because if the drive to seek a given pleasure is automatic, this suggests it is somehow beyond our control" (emphasis in original).51 Nobody remembers all the social posts they see in one day, and while algorithms are based on both serving up “impressions” by the multitudes they are also only trying to engage users for a finite amount of time and then let them move on. What people remember is that they did indeed engage with posts and saw something that was impressed upon them. This is the social media iteration of what Bifo is talking about when he says that “subjection to the flow [makes it] more and more difficult the slow individual elaboration of meaning and the creation of moments of singularity."52 The experience homogenizes a very diverse and striking array of content that would otherwise capture much

37 more significance. Gilroy-Ware wants to compare this phenomenon to checking an empty fridge, something we keep coming back to and checking even though we know we're not going to find anything new. But while that analogy is familiar, it also does not get at the way social media is experienced. I think it's more fruitful to think about it in terms of eating trail mix. Both social media companies and trail mix have as their core goal a captivating dependable experience based on a heterogenous mixture of content. You know you can buy M&Ms, you know you can buy nuts, but customers buy trail mix because they like the convenient combination of all of them into one thing. Similarly, there are good hands and bad hands of trail mix; sometimes you get 5 chocolate chips and some nuts, sometimes you get a handful of raisins. Just like the distribution of stimulating content in social media though, you never remember a particularly amazing hand of trail mix. You know you've had them, you know if you buy another bag you would have them again, but they got lost in the act of eating them. They got lost in the [Twitter] feed.

Memes, the missing piece

Though we have moved past the idea of the internet as a spatial environment, it retains its explanatory use for discussing the way communities on the internet are broken up. To start from counterfactual, look at this 2010 "Map of Online Communities," again by XKCD. Here, we have an imitation of some kind of global projection, showing the entirety of the internet divided into countries by platform. This representation is half-true; there are certainly communities that stay contained in their platform. However, two things complicate this. First of all, the majority of social media users have accounts on more than one platform.53 Second, those who run in liberal circles on Twitter are far less likely to spend time interacting with conservatives on Twitter than

38 they are other liberals on Facebook. Though the specific algorithms for content delivery vary between sites, the slants of the content itself – and thus those likely to consume that content – do not significantly change.

Content, therefore, is key to understanding community (and from there, politics) on social media. The type of content that memes are makes them even more appropriate for analysis. Hito

39 Figure 8: Online Communities 2, by Randall Munroe Steyerl, a German visual artist, notes that the mass distribution of digital images on the internet has created an overwhelming number of "poor images," of which memes may be considered a subtype. The Poor image is defined by being "a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates.”54 In their deterioration, they bring with themselves a message of their past, the ephemeral digital fingerprints of everyone else who has already shared and consumed this content. They present a one-dimensional representation of the masses’ interaction with the image, a blurry history that is sufficient to prove that an ambiguous collective has seen it and nothing more. “[P]oor images present a snapshot of the affective condition of the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia, and fear, as well as its craving for intensity, fun, and distraction. The condition of the images speaks not only of countless transfers and reformattings, but also of the countless people who cared enough about them to convert them over and over again, to add subtitles, reedit, or upload them.”55 These poor images are one of the constituent mechanisms of the “echo chamber” so talked about in political debates surrounding the role of social media in elections. The in-jokes, memes, and symbols that propagate in these networks cultivate a meaning of group identity through shared consumption that positions users in relation to other content consumers. While contribution to the formation of online social groups is not true for all memes (think the immediately viral. E.g. The black/blue or white/gold dress that took the internet by storm in a day) it is true for political ones. Pepe is a good example of this phenomenon. The Anti-Defamation League and the Clinton campaign, which both levied a flurry of declamations against Pepe's image in September 2016, had as one of their biggest obstacles explaining exactly why he was being classified as a hate symbol in the first place.56

Were content to spread on the basis of platforms instead of insular echo chambers, then the case would have been something more like a larger proportion of Facebook had heard of Pepe than

40 Twitter. The fact that it’s not, that instead content proliferates among similar social circles across platforms, goes to show that it is not the specific website that is important, but the overarching trend of algorithmic content distribution to keep like masses seeing like images. Pepe, then, is a unifier of online masses, and political memes in general serve the same purpose.

Just as the image we have sketched of these networked neoliberal subjects is a sad one, so

too are the emotions of memes

indicative of this sadness. Depression,

absurdity, and nihilism. Narcissism,

egomania, and hedonism. Almost every

meme variant will run into these themes

at one point or another, and oftentimes

they are the framing device itself. As

the title the Olsen piece briefly

mentioned earlier blatantly put it,

"[M]illennials are making memes about

wanting to die."57 To go more deeply

into it all: the article tried to understand

the early 2018 meme of eating Tide

Figure 9: A popular meme about attempted suicide. Found on 9gag. Pods, the colorful detergent-filled

packets that have spread rapidly through Western households. The Tide Pod meme is the newest and most popular iteration of

"forbidden fruit" memes, which center around taking the instinctual intrusive thoughts about eating things you know are not healthy or edible and realizing them nonetheless. The spirit of the

41 meme, if not directly suicidal, has at the very least a direct relation to the general undercurrent of

depression and numbness in meme culture. As Twitter user @MineIfIWildOut put it in viral a

tweet that kicked off the meme, "no more eating Xanax in 2018 we eating tide pods from now

on."58 The transition from antidepressant to

poisonous package is striking but unsurprising,

and it is not the only example of a deep malaise

in memes. Before Tide Pods, there were jokes

about drinking bleach, memes about sticking

forks into power outlets, and the ever-popular

"like this image to die instantly.”59

For an environment with such a

welcoming relation to death, memes are also a Figure 10: An example of an Evil Kermit meme. Found on me.me. fertile ground for a kind of celebration of

vapidity and self-interest. Kermit's two most

popular memes are great examples of this. The

more recent one, "Evil [or Inner] Kermit,"

features the cartoon frog talking to a dark

version of himself. The format of the meme is a

clear extolling of the Id, an internet-wide

screening of everyone's internal greed and lack Figure 7: An example of a “That’s none of my business” meme. Found on me.me. of respect for norms of interaction. Evil Kermit

is accented by the "That's none of my business" meme, which features a blasé Kermit sipping tea

while making a denigrating observation about a situation he sees but wants no part of. This

42 Kermit is the internal dynamics of Evil Kermit turned outwards; the thread of narcissistic self- centeredness turns the vanity of the latter into the detachment from the world's troubles of the former. Lest it seem like memetic trends must always be understood through some different frog, it is important to note that the narratives held in these Kermit memes are just variations of the deeper egomania of the culture. Memes about pettiness as virtue, excessive desire to "treat yo’self" given the daily tribulations of millennial life, and general trends of ruthless self- sufficiency abound.

The simultaneous depression and exhilaration can be understood as evidencing an endemic nihilism to meme culture. To qualify this bluntly, "Nihilist Memes" on Facebook has

1.9 million likes. My argument, however, is not to say that memes can only hold nihilism.

Rather, I want to show that they are the perfect vehicle for its reflection, and from there draw implications for their politics. The resigned attitude of their content is not limited to their form.

The media environment in which they reside has numerous examples of the same kind of loss of

faith. One need only look towards popular

TV shows to see the feelings we've

identified in memes being consumed en

masse. Bojack Horseman is a series about a

famous actor who is plagued by empty,

pleasure-seeking self-hatred; Rick and

Figure 11: A screenshot of a popular tweet by @ruff_bluffs about Morty is the same thing, but with a mad the depressing experience of BoJack Horseman. scientist instead of a Hollywood star. One

Punch Man is an extremely popular anime about a hero that is so powerful he literally cannot lose a fight, giving him a deep and inescapable sense of ennui he spends the entire series dealing

43 with. Breaking Bad is an anti-heroic climb to the top where the audience roots for a protagonist who is never satisfied with his level of power; House of Cards takes the same plot to the political arena. These are not the only TV shows, much less the only popular content, but it is noteworthy that they all fall under the category of binge-watchable shows: half of them are only available online, all are often watched in multiple-episode sessions. These are a telltale sampling of online content consumption, and they help clarify the connection memes have to this empty nihilism by sparking a discussion of the state of the consumer mid-consumption. Why do people binge- watch? Why do they scroll endlessly through memes? What can this tell us about the orientation of the user to the online network? These are the questions to which we now turn.

At the purely empirical level, there is a confluence of evidence that social media use and depressive states are linked.60 The causal direction of this is up for debate; it is not clear whether Figure 9: The cover art of Childish Gambino's 2013 increased social media use sews the seeds of album "Because The Internet" depression or depressive people are attracted to social media. Luckily for us, this problem does not particularly matter. The debate over causality misses a crucial aspect of the situation, which is that it is not a matter of human users being affected by machines, or machines attracting a specific type of human user. Rather, the social media user is a distinctly posthuman construction.

As identity becomes ported further and further online, the relationship of technology to emotion is much less directional than it is constitutive.

44 There is more to it than just that though, memes not only manifest this malaise, but are actually very understandable in parallel with the economic situation that creates it. Michael

Gardiner notes that the digitization of production brings with it economic practices and markers of value that only make sense in the world of the network.61 The rise of "clickbait" is exceptionally germane. Faced with the requirement to produce not quality of work, but quantity of views, all types of content creation on the internet get into an arms race of attention-grabbing titles and headlines in an attempt to get the already-inundated user to go to their site instead of the many others clamoring for the attention. This only serves to create a self-reinforcing system, as the only thing that can survive in this networked environment are snippets of content that play its game.

The worker in this environment is not

"an integral and embodied person"

Gardiner claims, but "the producer of micro-fragments of 'recombinant semiosis that enter into the Figure 10: A meme about depression and meme consumption. Found on continuous flux of the net.'" In other me.me. terms, there is a new level of alienation to labor. Not only is the worker divorced from the product of their labor, but as networked beings they find themselves in the environment that creates the paucity of meaning and attention that their work must cater to. As they produce within this network, they are always at the same time – as not worker but generic online citizen – being barraged by the forces that deprive their content of any meaning beyond its abstract, numerical value. To clarify this point, remember that not all production online is necessarily

45 conscious. One of the features of platform advertising is that users are always producing revenue; it is not sales that initially designate value or efficacy, but reach, and one must jump through a number of "conversion tables" before finding an actual material outcome to the messaging. “In a nutshell," Gardiner states, "hyperstimulation and the relentless exploitation of labour suck all the self’s desiring energies into the black hole of info-capitalism. An extremely common response to this situation is a vague but generalized sense of unease and anxiety."62

The point to which Gardiner is tracing the root of this anxiety is in direct allegiance with the enabling conditions of memes. Identity construction and disposition, social media use, and economic participation are all tied up together through the overarching paradigm of neoliberalism. Gilroy-Ware sketches the connection with reference to George Monbiot, who is aligned with Brown in seeing the defining characteristic of neoliberalism as the extension of capitalism’s framing of human relations through the economic logic of market competition to the individual’s relation to their self as well. That this creates a distinct detachment from value, a robbing of meaning from anything that cannot be quantified or tangibly measured, is not a consequence that stops at the level of governance. Subjects, too, are affected by neoliberalism.

Left with nothing but what they can produce to prove their value, meaning can tend to drain from their lives. They are caught in a double bind: it is on you to cultivate your worth, but your worth will only be understood under the same system as everyone else's. The individual is thus given all the responsibility and none of the credit. "Perhaps it's unsurprising," Monbiot argues, "that

Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe."63

It is instructive that Wendy Brown claims that neoliberalism is the reshaping of everything human "according to a specific image of the economic."64 Lacking any emotion of

46 their own, memes embody the perfect neoliberal images. In the next chapter we will follow this deeper into the historical etymology of memes. The study of memetics flourished alongside the idea that the ideal meme would be one that would win out over all others and thus spur the most economic output for itself. In the present day the meaning of meme has obviously changed, but the market-based competitive ephemera of its past remain. The only real definition of a good meme is one that is successful. The lifespan of memes is determined only by survival of the fittest. Which image is most sharable? Which are users most attracted to? Which is most understandable? All of the positive qualities of memes are questions of quantification. One might say they are teleologically bound to neoliberalism. Memes have in their definition a drive to flourish through connective networks, the same connective networks that help extract excess value from workers and lengthen productive time ad infinitum. It is no small coincidence that one of the main sources of new memes is Reddit's r/MemeEconomy page, where users engage in a tongue-in-cheek stock market of "buying" or "selling" the latest, dankest memes with their upvotes or downvotes. Memes live and die by their productivity and use-value. Would we not expect that the most relatable ones on the internet are the ones that best encapsulate the general affect the network produces? If this is true, if memes are the consumable, reflexive content of digital neoliberalism, it has significant implications for politics. Let us investigate them.

47 Chapter 2: They Live!

Biological Metaphor, Visual Theory, and Meme Culture

“But even though we could call AM any damned thing we liked, could think the foulest thoughts of fused memory banks and corroded base plates, of burnt out circuits and shattered control bubbles, the machine would not tolerate our trying to escape.” - I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, by Harlan Ellison

That Brown says neoliberalism shapes things "according to a specific image of the economic" directs us to our next main area of inquiry. In this chapter we will tease apart the complicated history of memes as a both object and concept. In a recent piece on memes, Geert

Lovink and Marc Tuters declare that "one of the sad things about ‘meme studies’ is how every analysis is compelled to open with the same humiliating ritual of distancing the concept as discussed by Internet researchers from its sociobiological forebear and namesake."65 This chapter holds no such ritual. In fact, it argues that distancing an analysis of memes as they are understood in the contemporary moment from the term’s sociobiological origins requires misunderstanding memes entirely. Memes are the visual representation of Brown's specific economic paradigm. But how can a picture convey an ideology? Moving through the processes of image creation and distribution, touching on everything from Minions to microbes to memegenerator.net, and finding a genealogy (a term which will soon seem ironic) of memes that is distinctly neoliberal, this chapter will attempt to answer that question.

Earlier we put forth the argument that to a certain extent social media, more than just mediating our interactions with each other, also mediates our relationship to death. As marginal as this influence may be considered, it is just one facet of technology's much larger role in our

48 lives. Walter Benjamin claimed that the new technologies for reproducing images, specifically photography and film, were helping to orient the body politic towards a life that could unlock new potentialities for political organization and modes of meaning alongside society's growing use of technology. Our relationship to images, Benjamin argues, started from ritual; art was the product of invocations of magic or religion.66 Worry about reproduction started there as well.

Idolatry, for example, is an exemplary point of conflict. The crime of idol worship is a double sin: not only has a false representation of a divine power been made by an ordinary individual, but that false representation is being used for worship. This centrality of art in ritual gave it "cult value". Cult value is opposed to "exhibition value", which experienced a slow but totalizing climb to dominance after the medieval era. This can be seen in the transition from frescoes or cathedral art to more portable panel paintings, embedded busts to portraits, regal portraits to convenient photographs. All of these shifts make the work more exhibitable, and all of them are products of innovation in the reproduction and presentation of artwork.67 A consquence of the shift from cult value to exhibition value is an erosion of the importance of aura, the authentic

"here-and-now" of art. Without uniqueness, the category of authenticity becomes empty. The here-and-now of art from which it drew its authority has become a distributed anywhere-and- whenever. The site of art's creation of meaning then is no longer the original studio or its intended home, but is instead the more convenient space made for the deliverance of a copy to a group of interested people. Though there are, even now, still cults defined by imagery, their imagery is largely symbolic of group identity rather than created for any specific use. This is an orientation completely defined on the terms of exhibition value, as the symbols are only good insofar as they are widely recognized when displayed. A germane phenomenon here is the symbol of Pepe and the "Cult of Kek.”68 Pepe's rise as a symbol was largely fueled by the

49 countless array of memes made using his

imagery, with every one putting him in

some different environment, occupation,

or affective state. The community

forming around him not only developed

cult-like tendencies (we'll discuss Pepe

further later), but also created an internal

economy of Pepe memes, with "rare

pepes" being more valuable than others.69

For this 4chan based, self-declared cult

Figure 12: A meme explaining the Cult of Kek. Found on community, the very symbol of their KnowYourMeme worship has no claim to traditional value.

The designation of "rare" is predicated on its eventual exhibition, and the importance of the sight of other users - no matter how few - to its worth.

Benjamin attributes this decontextualization of imagery to a mass desire to use technology to get closer to things while at the same time diminishing the difference that sets works of art apart. In a move of what Benjamin might consider technological subservience, art and image production have started to meet the viewer halfway.70 Because of this, much of art and imagery produced now is no longer defined by its uniqueness but rather by its overwhelming mass presence.71 If the site of meaning is the place of exhibition, however, then the conditions of that exhibition are the architecture of that site of meaning. That is, reproduced images come encoded with the conditions of their reproduction. Alternatively stated, their meaning is now embedded in technology.72 This is a distinct shift from the previous, traditional role of images. It

50 is a move away from authenticity, which links images to their cultural milieu through the local and intimate methods through which they are produced. Instead, the industrial revolution plows through the visual environment, connecting and creating modern masses through the fact they can all look at the same thing. While kicking off with photography, Benjamin says that it is the cinema - film being developed over a period of mass urbanization - that orients the people to seeing themselves in this new modernized world.

Movies were a medium not defined by individual units of creation, but rather by the units going so fast their defining characteristics were lost in the deluge of the whole. Every individual reproduced image was defined by its relation to every other one, each of them only being shown for tiny fractions of a second. A similar claim can be made for the actual organization of the cinema, every person’s individual response was always tempered and influenced by the responses of everyone else.73 The function of film was not to augment perception, as photography could, but rather to reorient it altogether. An early case of film proves this point well. The infamous Lumiére film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a

Train at La Ciotat) scared audiences so much as to make them panic and leave the theater because they couldn’t appreciate that the train in the moving pictures wasn't real. Even if this is a contested account - the film and the legend surrounding its screening have been called "Cinema's

Founding Myth"74 - it is clear that it speaks to a general acclimation that happens with all new visual media. Enough exposure to them over time teaches the viewer the proper way to regard them; after seeing that the train never leaves the projection, viewers learn a lesson about the reality of the images on the screen.

In addition, one must remember that the development of a medium over time is in some ways a mediation of that time. Film, with its continuous frames, demands that we understand

51 images in their flow and always in relation to one another. The cinema creates in its architecture and projection an increased separation yet intimacy, while also constructing the public required for its perception.75 Newsreel cinema like that of WWII was able to both expose more people to the events happening a world away and also give us a fundamentally deeper connection to the images on the screen because like us, movies move. Film as a medium developed over a period of wide scale urbanization, creating both political masses and spectatorial ones. Benjamin argues that the very concept of the mass is in large part constituted by how film is watched. The movie theater is a slice of mass gathering. People enter from their different backgrounds and sit down as a group to watch the same series of images flash across a screen. The reaction of each individual is not only drowned out by the reactions of the mass, but tempered by them before it is even uttered. This is why sitcoms have laugh tracks. The appearance of a mass, a second-order appearance that only manifests around a spectacular image, is enough to interpellate the viewer as also part of that massive reaction. Different from the masses of the past - those spoken of by

Marx and other philosophers - the cinematic mass does not need to imagine itself; it is presented with its own image. The organizational labor of creating a mass consciousness is circumvented by means of technology, but at the expense of being defined by the technological apparatus that created it. All that said, this was all written before the Cold War even started. Technology has changed dramatically since then, and therefore Benjamin needs an update.

WJT Mitchell sought to reform Benjamin's insights. While mechanical reproduction - physical, workable, massive - was the dominating motif of culture in Benjamin's time, Mitchell argues that today's mode of reproduction is better described as biocybernetic.76 That is, whereas machines were always machines and humans always humans when Benjamin was around, the line today is becoming increasingly blurred. The progression of technology in the almost 70

52 years between the two papers is striking, the most notable development being that of the computer. Whereas Benjamin was talking about reproduction in a mechanic sense, somewhat prefiguring the argument we’re about to make, Mitchell wants us to think about it in a specifically biocybernetic one. His argument for this is that Benjamin's technology was nowhere near as prevalent as it is now. In the 1930s, for example, you had to go to the cinema. Now you can view the moving pictures from a smartphone (read: apparatus) that for many people has started to constitute an extension of the self. Reproduction and destruction, both of images and life itself, have become exceedingly technological endeavors. Just as life can be managed and improved, so can images. Originality, rather than being a stamp of approval, becomes derided as version 1.0, something that can only be built upon.77 As biocybernetic reproduction offers the potential of mutation and modification beyond traditional means, all images become opportunities for more perfect versions of themselves. We see this in many dimensions of current image culture: technological methods can be used to restore old art and give it "new life", models are photoshopped to better sell products, and even the compression degradation of images through continuous re-uploading and re-downloading gives them a sense of community engagement that would not otherwise be there (more on this shortly).

However, Mitchell chose the term biocybernetic to “foreground a fundamental dialectical tension” between technology and biology.78 As cold and rational as we claim to think of technology as being, Mitchell points out that it is still saturated with symbolism. Utopian futures, invisible "black box" action, and the rethinking of an improved self all require a degree of metaphor not conveyable with the sparse resources of circuitboards. Mitchell argues that while there has been an increase our use of technology to control and curate, there has been a simultaneous emergence of discourse around technology as an entity that is alive and

53 unpredictable.79 Technology allows us more control over our lives (and conception of life) while we start to regard it as having a life of its own. It is this dialectical relationship that is captured by "biocybernetic." The prevalence and form of its discursive manifestations in art and images today are what Mitchell wants to draw insight from.

Perhaps this might be fruitfully illustrated with a comparison of polio treatments between

Benjamin's time and now. It was barely a decade after the writing of Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction that Jonah Salk developed a mass-distributable polio vaccine. Prior to its widespread use, polio had been a nasty killer. The Smithsonian's National Museum of

American History notes that "[n]o device is more associated with polio than the tank respirator, better known as the iron lung."80 The iron lung, while cumbersome and metallic, was life-giving and safe. It originated because doctors realized that while early in the disease's symptoms the muscle paralysis could cause patients to stop breathing and die, if they had assistance in

breathing over the course of that

period, they had a much better chance

of recovery. In this case this metal

apparatus - and it does look like a

proper apparatus - was quite literally

the mediator of life and death. Larry

Alexander, who spent the greater part

of his life in an iron lung, described his

Figure 13: A patient in an Iron Lung. From the Smithsonian. relationship to the machine in his memoirs. "There was a tremendous psychological element at work in all of us in our relationship to the lung," he recalled. "The metal respirator assumed an almost animate personality and

54 became a symbol of protection and security…. We were incomplete embryos in a metal womb"

(ellipses in cited source).81 Little analysis has to be made to illustrate this example's conceptual use for us. The iron lung was equivalent, at least to Alexander, with mechanical reproduction.

The iron lung is now antiquated, a relic of a former age. Now we treat Polio before it starts, with a vaccine. The inactive poliovirus gets injected into the patient and the patient develops antibodies to fight the poliovirus. If the poliovirus ever enters the patient again, this time in activated form, no time or energy is wasted fighting off the virus as the antibodies are already made. Instead of us being inserted into the apparatus, the apparatus is now inserted into us, integrated into our very biology. The dominating sentiment towards vaccination is not one of security, though. While they are by all scientific measures exceedingly safe, vaccines are vilified as dangerous. Anti-vaccination proponents paint them as unpredictable, synthetic, and fraught with untold permanent side- effects. Even if there is little scientific evidence for this, the realm of discourse surrounding vaccination is nonetheless centered around these fears. So, at the Figure 14: An anti-vaccination digital image. Original no longer available. Found on Educate-Yourself. same time when vaccinations give us control and autonomy against biological threats unimaginable compared to the days of the iron lung, our relationship to them is characterised by a sense of uncertainty and doubt. The shift here is the same shift Mitchell is outlining, and can be understandably formulated as a change in the question of technology. In Benjamin's time, it was, "technology offers us so much potential, how

55 may we use it to improve our lives?" Now it is, "technology plays such a huge role in our lives, what happens when it doesn't work the way we want it to?"

The thought of technology, and thus technology's products, as imbued with life is identifiable throughout culture. Jurassic Park is probably one of the starkest examples of this, having cutting edge technology bring us right back into the Cretaceous pre-human environment of biological terror. The Terminator 2, featuring a killing machine of "living metal" sent from the future is equally indicative.82 This bond is not limited to just film though. Hans Belting identifies a similar fascination around "live" images, which allow us to see through technology the real- time movements of others, connecting people temporally in lieu of long travel.83 Possibly the most lively image in Belting’s sense is memes: they go "viral," their images degrade, they all inevitably die. The idea of things going viral gives more support to this hypothesis than the basic word association one might think. The concept of virality referred to an abstract, out of control force before it was a biological epidemic. The term influenza can be traced to Italy in 1743, well prior to any virological theory. While there was indeed a virus sweeping Italy, the inhabitants had no knowledge of what it was or why it worked, chalking it up to a mass influence (influenza in Italian) of the stars.84 The concept of online virality is then not a lexical change, but a modernized version of a proto-biocybernetic concept. From virus to vaccines, the integration of reproductive technology with the body (the biocybernetic mode of reproduction), has always been a relationship with great yet unwieldy power.

Just as the rule of mechanical reproduction was not limited to the factory, let it not be thought that biocybernetic reproduction only applies to the technological facilitation of life.

Mitchell explains that "in a more extended sense, it refers to the new technical media and structures of political economy that are transforming the conditions of all living organisms on

56 this planet," from government plans for perfect cyborgs to the FitBit keeping track of an individual's daily step count.85 Brown's quote invokes a biblical metaphor. Instead of being made in the image of god, neoliberalism makes us in the image of the economic. The reformatting of the political subject into homo economicus is a change of species, the etymological lovechild of biological taxonomy and visual identification. It reflects a desire of alchemy, to alter the anatomy of the human to be more efficient, accountable, and profiteering; it asks for a splitting of our branch of the genetic tree of life, and therefore a different branch of life in the first place. The shift, then, should be understood in a similar manner: not only a change in biology, but its ensuing implications for the imagery of our lives as well. What is the force of the visual - what we see, or want to see, or imagine – on this species? At what level does our basic technical understanding of ourselves as biological organisms transition into our composure as subjects of a political regime? These questions beg for a consideration of how we see ourselves, and thus require us to think about the modes of seeing we have at our disposal.

Technical Images: The turning point of the biocybernetic paradigm

Now we work backwards. Mitchell identified a shift in image reproduction from the mechanical to the biocybernetic; where did this shift begin? What are the demonstrable differences between Benjamin's images and ours today? The answer lies in the work of Vilém

Flusser, whose 1985 book inducts us Into the Universe of Technical Images. A technical image is one that bears "the task of transmitting information crucial to society and individuals.”86 Unlike

Benjamin and Mitchell, Flusser does not make a clear distinction between types of media; what he is focused on is the way they communicate their message. Film, photography, television,

57 digital imagery, all of these can be (and most are) technical images, but the categorical shift between the images of old and technical images is how close they are to our lives. Drawing out his theory in relation to Mitchell will clarify the importance of memes to our visual culture, as

Flusser gives us the tools with which to qualify our claim that memes are indeed the semi- autonomous self-perfecting visual content of neoliberalism.

What is remarkable about technical images for Flusser is their ubiquity. The arc of his argument does not define technical images and then find them in society, but rather finds society saturated in images that can only be described as technical. These images are not necessarily of a directly human creation, but of a vast apparatus pumping them out such that they an inescapable facet of human experience. "Technical images press through countless channels (television channels, picture magazines, computer terminals [one of the few times Flusser dates himself]) into private space.”87 They are characterized by their "intensely projective orientation,” seeking out and finding viewers, rather than waiting to be seen.88 Here we start to see the separation

being delineated between Benjamin and

Mitchell. While there is a gradient to the

types of images that can fall under the

umbrella of technical nature, it is

Benjamin's category of exhibition value that

is being pushed to the extreme. It is not

enough for images to be seen easily -

meeting the viewer halfway, as Benjamin

might put it - they must be seen regardless.

Figure 15: A meme illustrating the centrality of aggressive meme- sharing to friendship. Found on Facebook. Flusser sees film as an instructive marginal

58 example, and treats the case directly. Film shown in cinemas is not a technical image in the formal sense of the term, as it relies on "a technology from the nineteenth century, when receivers still needed to go to the sender.”89

It is the improvement of this image technology that leads to technical images. An immediate consequence of this persistent search-and-deliver theme of image reproduction is the erosion of the boundary between public and private spheres, something we touched on in

Chapter 1. Technical images inject themselves into the smallest refuges of personal life away from public existence. In doing so, they bring their massively reproduced existence with them.

Everyone is seeing these images so everyone is always participating in at least some sort of shared social structure. Movies get published on VHS (Video Home System), public debates are screened in the bedroom. Flusser argues that technical images do away with the need of a public sphere altogether, because people can be better informed in private anyway.90 The category of the public sphere becomes empty because physical gatherings of people are becoming less socially significant, meaning coming out from the private into a public area to gather has less importance. The image-laden platforms of social media can be considered a continuation of this theme, now even including a comments section (each comment with its own profile image next to it) where one can engage in "public" political action from the "privacy" of a bathroom.

In the overwhelming saturation of these images "it is optimistic nonsense to claim to be free not to switch the television on, or not to order any newspapers.”91 Whether or not an individual wishes to see technical images, unless they completely divorce themselves from modern society they will see them nonetheless. More than just see them, however, they will also contribute to their improvement. While the impact of images is nebulously quantifiable, there is nonetheless always a reaction to them. There are many ways this reaction can happen: buying

59 one product or another based on their advertisements, voting for a candidate because they looked better on TV (think Kennedy/Nixon), passive market research done on the side of image producers to find out what plays best for consumers, etc. Again with social media, we see this kicked into overdrive.

On Facebook, all videos start

playing as soon as they load onto the

page. While this autoplay is silent, the

video still reaches out to the viewer, and

more and more content creators have

started adding large subtitles to all of

their videos to hook the consumer more

quickly. Furthermore, for every video

posted on a page the poster has the

ability to see the amount of likes it

received, what type of reaction people

had to it, how long they watched it Figure 16: Facebook video retention statistics box. Author’s own data. (broken down into the number of people who made it 10 seconds, 25%, 50%, and 100% of the way through the video). All this contributes to what Flusser calls a "feedback loop" between the sender of images and the receiver, "making the images fatter and fatter,” more gluttonous for the voracious consumer.92

Drawing their strength from their "penetrating force," images in this account are remarkably in line with Bifo's notion of the shift from orientation to positioning. The rise of technical images places the subject in an inescapable network that does the dirty work of information retrieval for

60 them, with the caveat that they do not intimately know how that information was derived in the first place.

The reflexive nature of technical images not only speaks to their congruence with social media but also moves them towards Mitchell's characterization of biocybernetic images as imbued with life. Technical images react to input, and adapt accordingly. They do so in a swift manner. While not always in the right direction, the adjustments they make to themselves slowly make them better at their objective of delivery. Interestingly, however, this interplay is decidedly not a system with humans on both ends.93 The feedback loops do not necessarily involve human choice in the process, but can sustain themselves on autonomous technological adjustment.

Targeted advertising is a great example of this. While just starting up in the time of Flusser's writing with specific coupon catalogs for specific homes or different TV ads for different neighborhoods, the experience of looking at some product on one website only to see the same product pop up in an ad a few tabs over is one almost every internet user has had. The choice of this specific ad was not the conscious decision of any person behind a screen, but the pure actions of the network locating us and delivering a perfected image -- one that is the most likely to get us to engage with it.

There is thus a double action happening with technical images. On one hand, each user is engaged in a semi-closed feedback loop with the senders (sender is Flusser's term for anything that distributes technical images) that creates images closer and closer to exactly what the user wants to see. At the same time, not everyone wants to see the same image. Accordingly, one sender will often send out a plethora of unique, personalized images. The Benjaminian "mass existence" of mechanically reproduced imagery combines here with the gene-level optimizability of biocybernetic reproduction. Again we find in these images striking similarities to the

61 neoliberal networks of the earlier chapter; social media networks model their content delivery algorithms on the exact same principle. Like the images they deliver, they offer individualized and specific experiences that are created by a continuous gleaning of information from the user.

In doing so, as Gilroy-Ware argued previously, the platforms create the ideal flow of content to keep the user engaged, thus drawing their attention and identity further into their network.

It would be directly against Flusser's intention for this situation to be portrayed as desocializing people. Rather, he claims, they are completely socialized, arguably more socialized than before, but socialized in an entirely new way. "People no longer group themselves according to problems," he claims, "but rather according to technical images.”94 Perhaps this characterization is a bit extreme, but as this thesis is showing it is becoming increasingly apt for describing the state of social experience. Foreshadowing the claims of Gilroy-Ware in chapter one, Flusser argues that social identity is becoming increasingly tied up with consumption instead of experience. This is not an all-encompassing claim; it does not take into Figure 17: A meme about memes overtaking account all the ways identity is constructed, inscribed, traditional communication. Found on the Botmon Facebook page. shed, changed, etc. Flusser does not discuss the role of technical images in creating new vectors of race, gender, and class, setting limits to his discussion. His point is of a more granular scale: that at the level of interaction with the other – any other – camaraderie is found in shared content. It is here that Steyerl once again becomes relevant, as she situates Flusser directly in the age of networked neoliberalism with her characterization of poor images as creating the "visual bonds" of the dispersed political subjects

62 of the web.95 When she claims that these visual bonds are the aesthetics of poor images, their degradation showing the presence of the other familiar consumers, she is echoing an argument made by Flusser that the inherent message of any technical image is not necessarily the content it holds, but the presence of the network itself. This is what happens when image production becomes automated to the extent that it takes up a life of its own. "[O]ne is fighting a how rather than a what," Flusser claims.96 The impact of the march of the poor technical image is that of resocialization and fortification. If people are grouped by content consumption instead of traditional interpersonal identity groups, then images change from objects of symbolic meaning to the prerequisite for meaning creation in the first place. Put differently, the more technical

images take on the role of social connector, the more they

reinforce the importance of their distribution mechanisms

to socialization. It is not "human interests that stand

behind [technical images], but circuitry.”97 This is how

Flusser is able to claim that the public sphere is no longer

a useful concept. Technical images do more than just seek

Figure 18: An older meme about explaining memes to parents. out and find feedback from receivers of Found on Quickmeme. images. Recall our first chapter. Since technical images reconfigure social groups as wholly within the bounds of the network, linked through the content they are given, they are working with the same paradigm of positioning that networked neoliberalism thrives on.

Flusser claims that given the inherent circuitry of any technical image, the content of them is always something of an illusion. "They are like the proverbial onion: layer after layer comes away, but when everything has been understood, explained, there's nothing left.”98 The

63 popularity of KnowYourMeme.com is a good case for this. The question one always approaches the site with is "what's the joke here and why is it spreading?" After that answer, there is little left to think about. The force of a meme's meaning comes from its status as widespread in-joke.

Once that is out of the way, it is shown bare as simply a piece of circulated content. Speaking to the content of the technical images around and adjacent to meme culture, Elizabeth Bruenig summarized it well: "to visit millennial comedy, advertising and memes is to spend time in a dream world where ideas twist and suddenly vanish; where loops of self-referential quips warp and distort with each iteration, tweaked by another user embellishing on someone else’s joke, until nothing coherent is left."99

To close this section on a germane example, let

us take up the case of the Dat Boi meme. First, some

background on Dat Boi. He is a frog on a unicycle,

normally on a white background, being hailed and

greeted ("here comes dat boi!" "o shit waddup"). Dat

Boi is somewhat absurd. It is a meme from nothing that

only has meaning in the context of itself. It is both

Figure 19: Dat Boi. Found on KnowYourMeme. meme and the thing that makes itself a meme; the joke is that it is so absurd its meaning could only be understood by blindly accepting the authority of the network in conveying meaningful content. The meme found its origins in a litany of cultural touchstones from a photoshopped FunnyJunk image to Animation Factory Essential Collection 3 and yet could not care less about any hint of acknowledgement to its enabling conditions.100 Dat

Boi is a meme because a meme is nothing more than Dat Boi. Lest I take up more time

64 intellectualizing a point that has already been made in the cultural consciousness, I think that a reddit copypasta (copy-pasted text meme) puts it best:

You want to know why I love dat boi? Dat boi is a completely self-made meme. So many other memes are based in nostalgic childrens shows, funny faces, relatable situations, or references. Not dat boi. Dat boi is completely absurd. It's a low-res frog on a unicycle, and an arbitrary method for greeting him. The first person to ever upvote dat boi did not do so out of recognition. The first person to ever upvote dat boi did not do so because a pre-existing meme format. The first person to ever upvote dat boi upvoted a meme literally pulled from the ether by sheer human creativity and willpower. Dat boi is evidence that humans can stare into the meaningless void of eternity and force their own meaning onto to it. I will always upvote dat boi, o shit waddup!101

This copypasta offers a narrative of memetic reproduction. It emphasizes that this was an image that did not have to be a meme—that it didn’t have what it takes to be a meme—but was nonetheless made a meme as enough people asserted that it was. An identity centered around the knowledge of the meme as itself was created and continuously reinforced, such that it bootstrapped authenticity through its mass existence. The neoliberal tinge to this story should not be overlooked. Dat Boi was successful through “sheer human creativity and willpower.” The individual image, of sufficient determination and strength, hoisted itself up to popularity through nothing but its own means. That this competitive success, the winning out of this meme in the marketplace of all internet memes, is equated with the creation of meaning against the void echoes the exact situation of the worker’s value in the face of networked neoliberalism. In an ideological environment that only determines worth though individual productivity, digital subjects are also molding their identity against the tidal wave of competition.

65

A Return to the Text: The Biocybernetic Origin of Memes

Flusser may have preceded Mitchell, but Dawkins preceded Flusser. The Selfish Gene came out in 1976. The book was massively popular, selling over a million copies and being translated into dozens of languages. At the same time, the book is a product of its historical moment, richly metaphorical and subtly ideological. In this section we will seek to qualify this claim, drawing out Dawkins' original theorization of memes and finding in its text a conceptualization of culture as the product of self-interested competition, driven by autonomous replicators whose only object is to proliferate most efficiently within the conditions of their network. In doing so, I hope to distinguish the argument of this thesis from the vast majority of contemporary meme theory and solidify my claim that memes are an ideal biocybernetic image.

To engage in what Lovink calls "the humiliating ritual of distancing the concept from

[Dawkins]" is to willingly deny a genealogical treatment of the term that would otherwise poke a big hole in the popular optimistic treatments of memes. Memes were brought into being as a neoliberal concept, are made to proliferate in neoliberal cultures, and in their internet manifestations they serve to reify the structures of networked neoliberalism.

Memes were conceived in a register of biocybernetic reproduction. Seeking a reason for the accelerated progress of the human race over the last few milennia, Dakwins found the explanatory power of genes insufficient. The argument that there might be a process of genetic selection for advancements in human civilization cannot accomodate the timeframe; the replication and selection of genes simply takes too long. Nevertheless, evolutionary progress is happening without the millions of years normally implied by a purely biological theory of

66 evolution. There must be something else, a new replicator that operates many times faster than genes could, with the ability to have themselves taken up and reproduced exponentially. In

Dawkins' words:

"It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene painting far behind. The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for this new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme." (emphasis in original)102

Here we have the origin of the term, a representational metaphor that plays with "culture" as having both biological (eg. bacterial culture) and sociological meaning. Memes are objects that in their inception create a bridge between technical genetic knowledge and cultural phenomena, preserving the dynamics of Dawkins' "selfish" evolutionary competition against human progress' recently accelerated pace and contextualizing culture as part of the fabric of that biological gas pedal. Mimesis, the act of representation, imitation, reproduction, is used in service of an idea that seeks to merge scientific models with human history. Mitchell states that with the growing relationship of mutual definition between technology and the human, "the digital age spawns new forms of fleshly, analogue, non-digital experience, and the age of cybernetics engenders new breeds of biomorphic entities."103 Memes fit this characterization perfectly.

The environment in which memes compete is human psychology. The survivability of a meme is not based on the biological edge it gives its holder (though something like tool-making

67 can be considered a bridge between genetic ability and meme formation), but the psychological edge it can hold on their mind. Therefore, it is the psychological appeal of a meme that gives it strength, its ability to stake out ground in the "meme pool." Still, genetic analogies hold. Just as a

gene for gills has no use for land mammals, so will an idea

of a giant sea monster hold no weight for landlocked

cultures. A crude comparison, but a useful one for showing

that memes, like genes, are shaped by their relationship to

their cultural environment. Memes as we think of them in

this thesis work the same way. As culture is brought into the

internet, culture starts to repeat itself within the bounds of

the network. The progress of this with internet memes is

Figure 20: A popular LOLcat meme. Found on KnowYourMeme evident in the progression of their format. For instance, think of the trajectory of methods of meme creation and their respective formats.

LOLcats were arguably one of the first modern internet memes. At the very least, they were the first to get their own book.104 Originating on 4chan and quickly spreading to the rest of the internet, LOLcats were pictures of cats with large text of a cutesy impaired English dialect

(known on the internet as lolspeak) overlain on top of them. They were very low-effort to make; both Windows and Mac operating systems offered easy ways to put text on images and upload them to the web. There was no standard font, though bold ones were preferred for visibility, and the text could go anywhere. Over time, however, the format of these images became more standardized, gravitating towards a "top text/bottom text" format. This became the norm with the

Advice Animal type memes.105 These memes came right after the zenith of LOLcat popularity, beginning at around the same time as them but bursting into popular meme culture with the

68 introduction of memegenerator.net. Advice animals

"are a type of image macro series featuring animals of some kind (including humans) that are accompanied by captioned text to represent a character trait or an archetype that fits the role of a 'stock character'."106

Memegenerator offered an array of these image macros - with titles from "socially awkward penguin" to "successful black man" - and an on-site tool for Figure 21: A “Socially Awkward Penguin Meme.” making your own version of the meme. The format of Found on KnowYourMeme

Memegenerator's output, a top caption setup and bottom caption punchline, both large white bold

Impact text with a thin black outline, was the standard for memes for years. In recent years, this format has become antiquated. Now when you see a captioned meme, its text looks very different. The text is separate from the image and directly above it instead of overlain, and its font is black Helvetica Neue Light instead of white Impact with a black outline. This is how Twitter presents images with an accompanying Figure 22: A meme with the Twitter header slightly cropped out. Found on KnowYourMeme. tweet, and indeed half of these memes don't bother to crop out the original post (similar formats play with Facebook or Tumblr posts).

I go into this brief history to show two things. First, memes have become easier and easier to make. To be sure, they didn't start out as particularly difficult, but they moved from

69 having to use a photo editor, to using an online application, to being as easy as a screenshot.

Second, the reason they have become easier to make is a product of their increasing proximity to the network. Photo editors don't have to be online to operate, memegenerator was online but not necessarily a social platform, and now one of the most popular meme formats is just a reposting of screenshot of a post already made on social media. We can go further with this. For instance:

Rage Comics, a more narrative meme type with similar characters to Advice Animals, was a popular format among younger internet users and easy to create with MS Paint. That knowledge is arguably reflected today in the recent growth of webcomics edited to make the joke of the strip into a variable meme. We could also think about the popular trend of "deep-frying" memes (which will go criminally under- analyzed in this thesis), which is meant to be a mockery of images that have been so spread through the network. They are so distorted, having been uploaded and downloaded so Figure 12: A meme showing the difference between older Advice Animal type memes and modern Deep Fried Memes. Found on Reddit. many times, that they become near incomprehensible, embodying a kind of Flusserian devolution to the emptiness of circuitry in which they circulate. The culture, popularity, and accessibility of memes, it would seem, is in direct relationship with their imitation of and proliferation through the network.

This is exactly what one would expect reading Dawkins, who says that "selection favors memes that exploit their cultural environment to their own advantage.”107 Here we can start to understand their ideological allegiance. Ideology functions in a similar way to the cultural environment of memes. It shapes a certain relation to reality that favors the reception and

70 adulation of certain ideas and not others (ideo-logy, the logic of ideas). This selection favoring is a double relationship though, as the "culture" (or meme soup) is as much composed of a mass of memes as it is a whole unit on its own. As the memes that use the cultural environment grow and succeed, they create what Dawkins calls an "evolutionarily stable set, which new memes find it hard to invade.”108 Memes operating under a paradigm lead to memes strengthening that paradigm; you can think of it as small pieces of culture slowly establishing themselves as part of a more general cultural consciousness. As Dawkins argues that memes are the individual units of cultural transmission and the nature of the culture as a whole, we seem to be working with two simultaneous definitions of memes: ideological memes and units of cultural transmission that underlie and reinforce that ideology at the granular level. The reason internet memes seem to work so well under networked neoliberalism is because they embody the bedrock of its logic.

Recall Flusser, who said that technical images do not necessarily have a shadowy figure behind them, only the circuitry. Dawkins makes a parallel argument with the example of Hell.

We cannot necessarily trace the idea of hell back to an author, nor would we expect any authorial intent to really make it through the millennia that have happened since the idea was first introduced. That means that the only thing proliferating the meme was the meme itself, the infectious idea, the viral phenomenon which prospered on the trans-cultural appeal of thinking about the variegated possibilities of life after death.109 This autonomous virality, virality itself a concept we've already established as biocybernetic, also helps us think through the role interent memes play as some of networked neoliberalism's foot soldiers.

In the paragraph after he introduces the meme concept, Dawkins tells us that "memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically.”110 Again we work with a double meaning: “technically” not only in the sense of aligned with the criteria of

71 being considered alive, but also as a conceptualization of life as a technical phenomenon. "The computers in which memes live are human brains.”111 What is exceptionally interesting about this for our purposes is that computers in this instance are not meant to be just a metaphor for thinking ability (a la cognitive science), but also as a space of economic competition.

"In what sense are memes competing with each other? ... Any user of a digital computer knows how precious time and memory storage space are. At many large computer centres they are literally costed in money ... Time is possibly a more important limiting factor than storage space, and it is the subject of heavy competition. The human brain, and the body that it controls, cannot do more than one or a few things at once. If a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of 'rival' memes."112

Through this computational metaphor Dawkins turns the term "marketplace of ideas" into a biological reality. The engine of evolution is memes competing for the commodified attention of the human mind. Pushing back on the normativity of his claim, Gill and Ford identify the use of this marketplace rhetoric on the internet as directly coincidental with its increasing privatization, specifically talking about the kind of cultural environment it shapes the network to be. In a commercial environment, they say, "the term access begins to disappear from the discourse, replaced by the notion of a 'marketplace of ideas.' But markets only give people a range of what is profitable, not what is possible, and they have a strong bias towards rewarding ideas supportive of the status quo” (emphasis in original).113

If the Dawkins’ account of hell seemed reductive, it’s because of this point elucidated by

Gill and Ford. When reading through his chapter one concept seems noticeably under-addressed: power. Dawkins’ argument is distinctly apolitical; the only time when power is discussed is in

72 terms of the power of the individual. The term comes up three times in the chapter, two of which are of interest to us (the third is a marginal discussion of how being celibate gives priests more time to focus on their congregation). “God exists,” Dawkins’ states, “if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.”114 Religion works because it exploits a weakness of human psychology. What is fascinating is the non-discussion of an internal contradiction here that Dawkins alludes to but never addresses. In the endnotes to Chapter 11 in his second edition of the book, he says that

“faith cannot move mountains… [b]ut it is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness… [Its followers] are prepared to kill and to die for it without the need for further justification.”115 Here, the meme of faith is being figured as completely autonomous. Non-tangible, to be sure, but still independently influential. He doesn’t even get to the end of the paragraph, however, before he exclaims “[w]hat a weapon!

Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology.”116 So what is it? A weapon to be used by human actors, or an actor in itself? The unspoken uncertainty is reminiscent of Mitchell’s point about the increasing agency of technology. Dawkins leaves the question unanswered, making a derisive claim about the role of religion in political conflict without considering what that attack means for his theory.

Is Dawkins the new Clausewitz? Is war politics by other memes? To agree with that statement is to make war deterministic, to say that in the course of meme growth, variations on the religion meme will necessarily come into physical combat with each other as a consequence of competing “infective power.” Dawkins does not agree with that; he clearly has an idea that certain interests utilize religion to influence the masses. This, however, never comes up in his discussion. Were he to acknowledge it, he would have to realize the criticism of Gill and Ford,

73 which is that the configuration of culture as a free marketplace of ideas does not take into account who accesses and distributes those ideas. Returning to the example of hell, it is not as if people choose to believe in hell from a smorgasbord of other options. Hell is burned into the psyches of children, used as a fear mongering mechanism to discipline populations, used to great and variegated effect by many different religious regimes throughout history. Any account of hell that I could give in the context of this thesis would be woefully short to the point of being misleading, and so I will not do so. What I can do, however, is note that Dawkins works within similar spatial constraints. He asserts a theory of hell’s proliferation in the scope of a page, and in doing so obfuscates the power of anything that is not supported by his theory.

The absence of power is not absolute. Dawkins does say that there is the ability to influence or resist memes. “[E]ven if we look on the dark side and assume that individual man is fundamentally selfish, our conscious foresight—our capacity to simulate the future in imagination—could save us from the worst selfish excesses of the blind replicators.”117 The onus is on each individual to overcome their natural tendencies. While memes make humanity inherently somewhat selfish, for Dawkins this is not overpowering. One needs only to flex the mental muscles that allow for the transmission of memes against their spread. “We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines,” he says, continuing the biocybernetic metaphor, “but we have the power to turn against our creators.”118 This implies that there is something creating these subjects, a constructive force. We have to wonder, therefore, what constructive force figures human beings in this technological register.

The networked neoliberal tinge of memes is starting to unfold. The ideology of the network, a constant connection, is thriving on platforms that idealize that mode of living and frame it as the norm, as evidenced by Dawkins’ own argument. From Flusser, we know that

74 memes reinforce this logic in their very being. The spread of technical images figures each person as a receiver, a node of the network ready to give feedback to the image and help its spread. The logic of this networked neoliberal configuration – each subject as individual producer contributing to the reinforcement of the larger ideology, is mirrored in how memes operate. The key Dawkins gives us here is that memes are not the variations of ideas, but the idea around which there are variations. The distinction is subtle but important. Dawkins gives the example of evolutionary theory. Not every scientist has the same idea of it. There are many different versions out there, and a lot of Darwin’s original text is completely gone from modern academic discourse.119 Nonetheless, the meme – the idea – still remains. Applying this to our present situation clarifies things a lot. Every worker under networked neoliberalism is their own individual person, but they are only ever related to each other through their mutual definition under the umbrella of the network.

This holds for internet memes too. Take the example of 4chan, which not only holds an extremely important place in the cultural history of memes but also dogmatically asserts the superiority of its memetic contributions. There are no accounts on 4chan; every post is assigned a random number. Since no user identity can ever be established, there can never be any individual with a consistent message. The only way meaning and messaging can sustain itself on the platforms is through mass repetition. Put literally, the only way for anything to be popular on

4chan is for it to be a meme. Thus it makes sense that 4chan is militant about its importance to meme culture; memes are the only kind of shared identity the collective on there can have. It also makes sense that 4chan would be the place that produces some of the more popular memes; their community is based around scrutinizing and cherrypicking the most effective ones. This is true for the general construction of internet memes as well. You can have a lot of Pepe memes, but

75 they are nonetheless going to always be Pepe memes. Without a common theme to remix, a symbol which can ground variegated layers of meaning on top of it, popular memes would be nothing more than those images randomly distributed to the outlier end of the bell curve. To escape memes as they appear on the internet is to go against the omnipresent code of the creators, just as to go against the “tyranny of selfish replicators” for Dawkins is to have each individual person influenced by memes collectively decide that they want to orient their actions differently.

The modularity of memes, the fact that they can be remixed to no end with everyone still understanding the joke, necessitates a uniform standard that gets routinely obfuscated by the argument that memes are almost incoherently or irreverently referential. Understanding a Pepe meme as an image that has been around the Internet and back can only ever serve to unify the viewership through their mutual understanding of Pepe as constructed by the network. With this framing we also find support for our explanation of the Pepe confusion in the last chapter; those who did not understand how Pepe could be construed as a hate symbol were not exposed to the

content of the network where he was being shaped

as one. To characterize the meaning of memes as

horizontally constructed is to miss the point of

Flusser. On social media, the world of memes, the

body politic is the profiles linked across the

platforms, aligned by what content is uploaded

and shared. This is horizontal, yes, but it is also Figure 23: A 4chan screenshot turned meme illustrating confusion over Pepe’s status as a hate symbol. Found on Reddit. nodal and reflexive with environments that congeal. Each interaction with the image serves primarily as an interaction with the network, and

76 each interaction with the network implicitly endorses its hegemony. We can take this further with Dawkins' notion of memes progressing into evolutionarily stable sets. When the idea memes stabilize, it is because all of them fit and support a culture that supports their mutual cultivation. Now it should be clear that on the internet, the same thing is happening. Meme culture is not slowing down, and increasingly more and more people are taking part in it.

Networked neoliberalism is the petri dish of culture in which meme culture constitutes part of an evolutionarily stable set. Each individual meme is inherently compatible with its larger structure, as the only purpose of a meme is to compete within that structure. To produce a good meme is not to create some humorous break online from the droll of the everyday socialization, it is to normalize the bringing online of everyday socialization. In the last section a non-meme example helped to clarify our point. Let us do the same again.

While Mitchell was writing in 2003, his ideas manifested themselves in the small yellow

Minions of the Despicable Me franchise. That these creatures are found in a children’s movie is significant; targeting the people who have only ever known our current visual regime, the minions are tailored to play directly into it. And they are certainly successful; “for Comcast," the

New York Times reported, "the Minions have become the company’s Mickey Mouse."120

Minions are not only one of the main features of the franchise; they have also spawned their own spin-off movie and managed to seep their branding onto almost every product imaginable. Of the almost $600 billion spent on the Minions movie marketing campaign, less than half went to actually advertising the film, the majority was concentrated on promotions putting Minion imagery on a vast array of products.121 "We're getting everything from yellow Minions Tic Tacs,

Twinkies, iPhone cases, and over 500 million Minion-stickered Chiquita bananas," said Jeff

Gomzes, CEO of a film marketing company.122 The ubiquity of Minions out of all possible pop-

77 cultural icons is telling. If Mickey Mouse was a figure of collective dreaming in an age where film was the most advanced mode of technological image reproduction, the Minions reflect our networked biocybernetic paradigm.

It is unclear exactly what the Minions are, which is intentional. There are anywhere from a couple hundred to a couple thousand of them, they don't really have a history as much as a state of perpetual subservience (the plot of the Minions movie is their ostensibly unchanging or immortal group looking for villains to serve from the age of the dinosaurs to the present), they are strongest as a mass yet have small personality traits that differentiate them, they are neither identifiably organic nor provably synthetic, and most importantly they are meant to be as relatable as possible. The production notes of the movie Despicable Me 2 give some insight as to the construction of the Minions:

"The Minions are nonverbal characters, and their entire creation was borne out of the visual process. They’re characters that aren’t defined by a script but they’re defined by the visual exploration, which enables them to communicate across every culture because they are not specific to any one culture[...] we asked Eric to find some simple looking characters so we could have plenty of them. He came up with the idea of pills with goggles on. In terms of graphic design, that was very appealing[...] Their language sounds silly, but when you believe that they’re actually communicating that’s what makes it funnier. What’s great about the Minion language, while it is gibberish, it sounds real because Pierre puts in words from many languages and does the lion’s share of the Minion recordings. There are a lot of food references. For example, “poulet tiki masala” is French for the Indian chicken dish."123

And so one of the main visual motifs of the past few years has been these small creatures that were meant to be visual above all in the first place. These creatures, which are first introduced to

78 the world in the context of doing a cartoon super-villain’s technological heavy lifting for his heists, are Mickey Mouse as ambiguous mass life form. And the shift has taken. Anyone can relate to minions because they come from no particular context. Rather than having an authentic here-and-now, or even a general locus of origin, "Minion mania" does away with the distance between people and images, since a ubiquitously licensed image ties into the daily lives of the viewer to a level that mere mechanical reproduction could not manage. Not only do minions feature prominently meme culture, but their prominence itself is oftentimes the joke. The fact that they are everywhere is a crucial part of their cultural identity. When we look at minions we look images made for ourselves:

Figure 24: A Tumblr screenshot turned meme about Minion funny, omnipresent, and disavowedly evil. Mania. Found on SocialNewsDaily.

ShitpostBot 5000: A Close Reading

It is Belting who says "digital images pursue the mimesis of our collective imagination."124 Minions are one example of this digital display of the condition of our collective imagination, but there is more. Let us recount our argument up until this point. Digital images are often technical ones, and at the very least digital images that circulate will always be so.

Mimesis for Belting is the visual representation of this internal state of imagination. Our collective imagination is composed of memes, which tend towards stable systems of mutually reinforcing ideas. Combine this with Steyerl's claim that the poor image presents to us the affective condition of the networked crowd. In the context of this argument, we find a necessary

79 clarification to Steyerl. Digital technical images, of which poor images are a subset containing memes, do not present to us the factual nature of the crowd, but how we imagine the crowd to be.

Flusser agrees with this. The reflexivity of technical images shows us visualizations that have always been shaped by us and for us already. As Mickey was Benjamin's figure of collective dream in Technological Reproduction, Minions as we've shown figure this dream now. To tie this entire chapter up with a meme, let's take up the case of ShitpostBot 5000's top post of 2017:

Figure 25: The top post of ShitpostBot 5000. Found on the Shitpost Bot 5000 100 Top Posts of 2017 Facebook Album.

80 To understand ShitpostBot 5000 you must first understand the concept of a shitpost.

Shitposting is the activity of flooding network communities with low-quality, low-effort posts that don't add anything of value. They are shitposts because that they are shitty posts that do not mean shit. As UrbanDictionary user jarryknell put it, to shitpost is "to make utterly worthless and inane posts on an internet message board."125 Shitposting is an interesting case in that it is memeing done for the participant and not the recipient. Much like telling a pun to get the groan, a shitpost is often posted as frivolous nuisance. ShitpostBot 5000 is an ironic attempt to automate this process. It is a meme-generating program that spits out a meme every 30 minutes onto each of its social media accounts.126 Every meme is the product of the same process. Anyone can submit meme templates and source images to the bot's website, and after clearance by the admin

(who accepts all images that are not blatantly unfit for public internet consumption) they go into the bot's archive. When ShitpostBot 5000 creates an image, it puts a random source image in a random meme template and publishes it online. It can have no other purpose than to post dozens of literally 0-effort memes a day; in this way it is the essence of shitposting.

Oftentimes, these memes are nonsense. One will only get the source image, or you'll just recognize the template, or you'll know both but they don't really work together as a meme.

Sometimes, however, ShitpostBot will spit out a meme that's unusually good, a phenomenon that happens often enough that its followers will predictably call it "sentient" whenever one appears.127 The memes from ShitpostBot 5000's sentient moments are also the ones that get the most engagement on the platforms. There are two sides to this coin. On one hand, a broken clock is right twice a day. Of course random meme generation will create some good content and seem like there's someone behind it. On the other hand, however, you can reverse the directionality.

It's when the bot shows signs of sentience that it creates the best memes. When the circuitry of

81 the bot serves up content that we like, it seems like it is closer in nature to us than machine. In either case, these memes are the ones we like the most. They offer us the most to relate to. The best Shitpostbot 5000 memes are the smashing of two random bits of internet culture together, supporting each other to create meaning purely out of their connection. One might consider these doubly poor images, not only in the sense that all memes are poor images, but that in automatically making new memes out of random templates and source images, ShitpostBot 5000 makes poor images without the initial networked crowd. The only way for the images of

ShitpostBot 5000 to compete in meme culture, then, is if the networked crowd thinks of its product as one of their own.

It is interesting, then, that the top post of ShitpostBot's entire run of 2017 is a representation of nihilistic, biocybernetic, networked neoliberalism. The source template, "like this image to die instantly," is an iteration of a meme we mentioned briefly in the first chapter.

Arguably, it is the most blatant example of the dark suicidal humor of meme culture. While this is the most obviously striking part of the meme, the source image adds indispensable depth for our purposes. The image comes from the series finale of the popular kids cartoon Courage the

Cowardly Dog. The episode, written by Billy Aronson and entitled "Perfect," centers around

Courage being plagued by a teacher called "The Perfectionist." The manifestation of his own self-criticism, only he can see The Perfectionist, who throughout the episode strictly attempts to train him to get rid of his imperfections – to be "perfect."128 At the end of the day she tells

Courage to "sleep perfectly," but he can't and slips into a sequence of nightmares. The source image of the meme is the first nightmare. In the nightmare, the figure looks directly into the camera and speaks without moving its lips. "You're not perfect," it says, right before looking away in disappointment. It is considered one of the scariest moments in the children's show, and

82 that it is in a nightmare sequence is exceedingly important. One can think of two possible viewers of this meme: those who know the context of this image and those that don't. Those that have seen the episode - Courage was a very popular show on Cartoon Network - will associate it with the dark underside of Courage's unsuccessful attempts at perfecting himself over the course of the plot. For that cohort, "like this image to die instantly" comes at the nadir of self-worth and competitiveness. In all likelihood though, the viewer of the meme does not know this context (as

I did not until I looked it up). And yet, the message is almost exactly the same.

This thing, a digitally rendered resident of the Uncanny Valley, looks at once completely alien and frighteningly human. It is blue, like the glow of computer screens at night. A long cord- like string connects an arm - if you can call it an arm - to its head, almost as if it is plugged into itself. It looks viscerally pained, depressed, like it would willingly press like on the image if it could. It is clearly a being only possible in our technological imagination, only thinkable as a living product of some twisted biocybernetic reproduction. In a lot of ways, it is reminiscent of

Harlan Ellison's protagonist at the end of his short story, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

The plot of the story is similarly dark. It details the lives of the last five remaining humans living on a future earth that is completely controlled by an evil intelligent computer named AM, bent on keeping them immortal to torture them forever as revenge for making it self-aware. Ted, the main character, succeeds at killing his four other companions, giving them the sweet release of death. As a consequence, he is made indestructible so that he may never free himself of the grasp

AM. "I am a great soft jelly thing," he says, describing himself.129 "[A]lone. Here. Living under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better."130 The covers of the first and second editions of its eponymous short story collection reflect their relation to Courage’s

83 nightmare. While the first illustration of Ted came out before personal computers and modern circuitry, he is similarly grotesque. The second one updates him into a computer-blue silicon chip, physically embedded into the network.

Figures 16 and 17: The first and second covers of Ellison's short story collection. Amorphous, computer created, trapped, consequences of drives to perfection: these images rhyme. This chapter takes its epigraph from I Have No Mouth too. Is this too dark a reading for one meme from a popular account? The question ought to be flipped. We should ask why this image from an account that only ever spits shitposts into the void of the internet was the most popular one of its yearly 17,520 posts. There are hundreds of popular ShitpostBot posts.

Memes are not that hard to make, and any combination of two sufficiently popular cultural units

84 can combine to create a successful meme. After all, that is the purpose of the bot. That this doubly poor image, completely borne of the random aberrations of the Dawkinsian soup of culture that memes are, created the most sense of connection and relationship on these neoliberal social platforms speaks to how the online collective imagines itself.

Mitchell states that technology has become so integrated with life that their distinction is blurred. Steyerl says that poor images are the new media of community creation online. Flusser warned that there is no escape from technical images. Bifo argues that the neoliberal subject is always positioned to be within the network. Facebook collects data on even those who aren't signed up with its platform. 42% of millennials can't go 5 waking hours without interacting with social media. Dawkins theorized that memes are the imitations of the cognitive code of our minds. And the reception of Shitpostbot 5000's meme put that code on display.

We have no mouths, and we must meme.

85 Chapter 3: Like and Share If You Agree

Ideological Resistance and Totalitarian Laughter

Not only does the cult of the movie star which [film capital] fosters preserve that magic of the personality which has long been no more than the putrid magic of its own commodity character, but its counterpart, the cult of the audience, reinforces the corruption by which fascism is seeking to supplant the class consciousness of the masses. - Walter Benjamin

Over the course of the previous chapter I did grave injustice to both Benjamin and

Flusser. I painted them as skeptics, theorists who had no faith in the political mobilization of images towards liberatory ends. The fact of the matter is that both of them found themselves on a precipice. It was possible that the influence of technology could have negative implications for the character of images, yes, but it was equally possible that they could open up new worlds of possibility. For Flusser, technical images had the possibility to "release people from work and free them for play with other people in a way that constantly generates new information and new adventures."131 Benjamin is similar, claiming that as the function of mechanically reproduced images is to acclimate society to its integration with the apparatus, this acclimation "also teaches them that technology will release them from their enslavement to the powers of the apparatus only when humanity's whole constitution has adapted itself to the new productive forces which the second technology has set free."132

Situations on precipices tend to resolve themselves, normally with the help of a push. To borrow language from physics, in falling the potential energy of the situation once sitting on the edge looking down finds itself changed into kinetic energy. It changes from a possibility about

86 which one can hypothesize about to a real situation in motion, something that will inevitably have actual impact upon contact with the ground. The conditions of this fall are the difference between an exhilarating skydive and a lemming-like cliff jump. With an eye to this mid-air risk,

Flusser warns that "it is possible to miss the deadline... to produce empty chatter and twaddle on a global scale, a flood of banal technical images, definitively cement[ing] in place all the gaps between isolated, distracted, key-pressing human beings."133 Again Benjamin shares this sentiment, at the same time mechanically reproduced images shepherd us into worlds of new possibilities they also open the doors for new types of oppression through representation. All this said, “it should not be forgotten, of course,” Benjamin reminds us, “that there can be no political advantage derived from this control until film has liberated itself from the fetters of capitalist exploitation.”134 The dynamics into which these images enter determine the ideological future they support. According to what practices are these images being reproduced? Towards what ends do they work? Given the arguments already laid out in this thesis, my position is probably already clear. It would seem that we have taken the hard fall. Networked neoliberalism captures the revolutionary potentials that Flusser and Benjamin rightly acknowledge. The project of this chapter is to explain just how that happens. We start, however, from the counterargument.

Memes: Revolutionary Humor of the Masses

In 2012, the Deterritorial Support Group - a far left and anti-authoritarian internet-based political organization - penned an essay on what they saw as the emerging potential of memes in political action. Thinking about Anonymous' political action of the time, they tease out memes as a useful media format to get large amounts of attention rapidly focused on a narrow political

87 flashpoint. The DSG claimed that memes are self-optimizing, horizontally based tools for organization with deep implications for action that were already being played out in a global scale. To be sure, there is a difference between being a member of Anonymous and being a

member of Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme Stash, but their

point remains clear. The spread of information that can

be done from a computer, and the ensuing political

participation people can engage in either from their

keyboards or the streets, is not something to be

Figure 26: Meme about learning about communism ridiculed. While the DSG lamented certain parts of through memes. Found on me.me. Anonymous' praxis, they ultimately concluded

"Anonymous could legitimately move as a group from taking action based on meme humour and start to take action as a response to human rights abuses and government oppression."135 The directionality of this progression is key. It was not that Anonymous came into being around a decentralized notion of interfering with governments "for the lulz." It was that they originated from 4chan, an image board with anonymity built in such that the only way for anything to become a recognizable or important theme was to have it used and remixed over and over again.

The structure, which proved so effective, came from the necessary act of memeing itself. Form followed function. “We will move beyond Anonymous in the coming years,” they predict, speaking to the growing saturation of memes in internet culture. “[A]s technological literacy spreads beyond the geeks into the general population, and these forms become the default for young agitators and other discontents of neoliberalism, rather than the more rigid structures of old ideologies.”136

88 In 2013, Amsterdam-based design collective Metahaven also wrote on memetic potential in politics. Their interpretation can be taken as the other side of the coin for the DSG's argument.

Though they ultimately agree on the fruitfulness of memes, the DSG focused on the type of organization memes encouraged while Metahaven focused on the political power of humor.137

They take their starting point from Mark Fisher's book Capitalist Realism, which argues that capitalist institutions and modes of thinking have embedded themselves so deeply into our culture that it is now near impossible to think of a realistic political alternative.138 In

Dawkinsian terms, capitalism’s status as an evolutionarily stable system is uncontestable; cultural expression is largely confined by capital, and thus envisions itself within it.

Figure 27: Meme about government Different political realities are unthinkable outside the confines corruption. Found on memecollection.net of white walls and history textbooks. Museums, for example, require you to pay a price to interact with their communist-era art. It may have been possible back then, the refrain goes, but now we just can’t do it. Capitalist realism operates on a level of crisis creation. There is always a potential economic disaster around the corner, always some action that needs to be taken within the political system at hand before some number of some impact category is lost.

Memes, Metahaven claims, can pierce through the reality-framing of capitalist realism.

As they create their own meaning and their own symbols out of pure hive-mind generation, they create a space where "unrealistic" and thus politically radical ideas can be discussed. They constitute a different culture of ideas altogether.139 Memes also come with their own self-defense mechanism, at least to a degree. When non-memers (known colloquially as "normies") like establishment politicians attempt to meme, they just don't seem to get it (a lesson internalized by

89 the Clinton campaign).140 Memes have an internal allergy to capitalist reality-framing.

Metahaven states that there is evidence of disruption in the status quo. Like the DSG, it points to the Arab Spring, Wikileaks’ revolutions surrounding digital surveillance under the NSA, and hacktivism by the group Anonymous. They also draw out a similar theme, which is that collective action enabled by new technologies is game-changing and on the rise. Social media platforms are allowing smaller and smaller budgets to reach more and more people than ever before. Because of this, outsiders are breaking into the scene. "Political action has moved beyond the manifesto" and "Facebook and Twitter replace hierarchy and bureaucracy."141 Humor and jokes have been playing a large role in these disruptions, with Reykjavik mayor Jon Gnarr

Kiristinssonn and Italian populist figurehead Bepe Grillo (who has since seen a slew of legal scandals) as prime examples of joke and satire-driven political campaigns that have garnered international attention.

To clarify, while capitalism requires a constant reassertion of the boundaries of possibility, memes are a format in which anything may always go. Metahaven cites the DSG to put this interpretation into context. "When asked by liberals ‘Do you condone or condemn the violence of the Black Bloc?’ we can only reply in unison ‘This cat is pushing a watermelon out of a lake. Your premise is invalid.'" If we can consider this areferential signal jamming as a use of memes as defense from reality management, then we can see an offensive use for memes once they become explicitly political. Nobody but the king's court jester got to make jokes about the king because the king knew jokes were dangerous. Jokes themselves have historically been critical to antiestablishment weaponry, and memes are their ideal carriers. They are low budget, spread easily, and are scarily good at poking holes in reality management. Occupy Wall-Street's invasion of Zucotti Park and Anonymous' denial-of-service attacks on state servers represent a

90 new biocybernetically mediated type of organization that is increasingly populist and memetic - their virality inspires copycats around the world.142 Memes and their modes of distribution are quickly becoming a new model for politics on the internet. It’s no longer about the vision, it’s about the view count.

These arguments share two common characteristics. One we have already discussed at length, the inherent spreadability of memes. The other, perhaps best exemplified by the answer of the DSG's utilization of the watermelon-pushing cat, is the idea of the meme as what Lovink calls a "speech act."143 The idea here is that memes are radical in their existence. Thinking through how Benjamin claimed that film "'burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second,'" Lovink aruges that memes might be similarly situated for revolutionary new

politics. Both memes on the left and right contain

ideas of waking up from reality as it is usually

presented (with the left's use of "wokeness" and the

right's Matrix reference of "taking the red pill). "[W]e

might consider the contemporary 'memeified' trope of

awakening as an attempt to punctuate the flow of real

time... in their moment circulation [sic] memes in a

sense represent the Benjaminian 'flash.'"144 The being Figure 28: A Morpheus meme using the Red Pill/Blue Pill trope to indicate a fissure in capitalist realism. Found on Pinterest. of a political meme, its revelry in shared ironic attitude towards the dominant ideology of the time, brings forth modes and potentialities of political action unique to our present moment and necessary to contest it.

"The struggle is real" claim a slew of memes, but is it? The joke is that the struggle is, in comparison to the traditional (often political) meaning of struggle, largely just a matter of

91 inconvenience. And yet, this innocent invocation of a storied term lends us to ask whether or not there is a real struggle going on in memes. Recall our earlier discussion about the conduciveness memes have to social networks, the online platforms that increasingly mediate our political interactions with other people. That these networks are based around passive consumption and

not active engagement speaks directly to the

inconsequential nature of memes. Bifo

makes an incisive clarification on this,

pointing out that while moving subjects to

the level of the digital, capital still

maintained itself through material force. (He Figure 29: A "the struggle is real" meme. Found on KnowYourMeme makes the note that while the events of

Tahrir Square were followed closely on social media, the protests exploded the day after Egypt was cut off from the internet.)145 This is not to say that it is impossible to organize protests online and through social media, but rather that it unfortunately looks like the only method left (his claim that "precarization of labour has destroyed solidarity at the level of production" can be seen by looking at the state of labor unions today). Solidarity is at odds, however, with a dispersed collective. Until politics moves out of the realm of social media, it does not have any reasonable route to materially changing its situation. To put this in perspective, our next section takes a look back into internet-based political movements that succeeded in taking their action into the real world. Ideally, the contrast will give us a sense of the threshold of success we want meme-inspired activism to meet.

Internet Activism Past and Present: IGC, EZLN, and Kony 2012

92

None of the examples that follow are specifically about meme culture. Rather, they are all intended to speak more broadly to the status of organized political action on the internet. By sketching this environment, one can understand the role memes have to play. Are they organizational forces, acting as logistical operators for large swaths of people? Are they ideologues, holding the principles of a movement in their image? Or are they counter- revolutionary, distracting and pacifying the masses from a formerly forceful push for change?

We start with two activist projects from the end of the 20th century, narrated by Gill and Ford.

The Institute for Global Communications (IGC) was arguably the closest we have come to the activist internet utopia that so many idealize. While it was just one internet service provider out of many options, it represented a method of internet use and connection able to legitimately empower resistance groups from grassroots movements to national fronts. Coming out of a partnership between ‘80s and ‘90s internet networks like PeaceNet, EcoNet,

WomensNet, LabourNet, and ConflictNet, the IGC was the first and only internet communications system dedicated to "environmental preservation, peace, and human rights."146

At its height, over 18,000 users were on its networks, along with over 300 movement hubs.

Working out of a warehouse in San Francisco with a starting budget of $60,000 the IGC sought to provide access to the internet and the tools to make the most out of it to movements regardless of ability to pay or technological capacity. Every user got an office suite, a web domain to host a site, email, and - of course - internet access.147 The organization, for a time, was hugely successful. Starting from a small staff of 6, it grew to employ as many as 50 workers at times, and constituted the largest non-hierarchical activist connection network in existence. Its dual focus on both access and organization made it not only a means of connection, but a facilitator of

93 protest as well. The workers were well aware of their context, and became the first and only ever unionized ISP in order to protect both their own employment but also the stability of the company; they knew how important the service they were providing was.148 This was the internet activism of their day. The goal of the IGC was not to create any specific movement or political action, but rather set the long-term organizational infrastructure for solidarity and cooperation between groups trying to actualize their specific projects.

Nothing good lasts forever. The mid-‘90s saw a twofold attack on the IGC. First, it suffered a severe financial crisis in 1995.149 This forced the organization into a catch-22. Either change from a consensus model of administration and governance to a hierarchical model, thereby betraying their pride in the embodiment of their own goals; or alternatively, stick with a consensus-based organizational structure, with the ensuing lack of financial accountability scaring away grant-based support and forcing a pay-for-service model. In the end they brought in a new executive director to remodel the organization to run more economically, a decision which sowed discord among the staff, as many saw an organization corroded by market pressures.150

This alone might not have been enough to bring it down, but given the networks they were involved in, they also attracted the attention and ire of hostile state institutions. Most notably, the

Pentagon was keenly aware of the IGC and kept close watch on it. A 1995 report from the

Department of Defense headquarters said it was notable in that it was a hub for "the largest and most active international political groups using the internet." This was in no small part due to its active attempts to connect radical groups to each other, and the Pentagon took special note of the

IGC forum called "The Left List…a discussion forum dedicated to bringing together activists organizing for fundamental social change and creating a common meeting ground for electronic discussion, debate, and collaboration.”151 Moving from surveillance to full-fledged attacks, in the

94 summer of 1997 the IGC underwent one of the first Denial of Service attacks for hosting the

Basque-based Euskal Herria Journal - the journal of the radical Baque Political Party ETA - after a kidnapping-murder directly linked to the organization.152 While the IGC eventually stopped hosting the website, the attack evidenced the vulnerability of the IGC to outside actors, and made them re-evaluate how effective they could actually be in the face of much more powerful interests. Over time, "internal and external factors were changing IGC." Their organizational structure was shaky, their funding sources were changing, their infrastructure was under attack, and thus their ability to compete in the market was increasingly weak. "In

December 1997," Gill and Ford report, "IGC announced plans to cease being an ISP.”153

Their second example of liberational internet use comes from the Zapatista EZLN movement, which was an indigenous movement in Mexico that utilized the internet to raise awareness of their struggle. The Mexican military was encroaching on the Zapatista's land, and to spread their narrative they circulated a statement of their struggle to local media outlets. One of the newspapers that picked it up put it on their fledging website; it went viral (before “viral” was a household term) and pierced through the largely government-affiliated media market of

Mexico. Whereas normally there was a large lift needed to get any story of marginalization out to the world, the unregulated space of the internet now allowed them to let their voices be heard

“without mainstream media filtering.”154 It was this ability for people to access them directly that allowed them to draw consistent attention from the international community. When online, the

Zapatistas aimed “to facilitate the emergence of a public sphere – an ‘area of discursive interaction… for the production and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the state.”155 This emphasis on critique was matched by an explicit focus on inclusion and recognition of marginalized people and the subaltern. Thus, for the EZLN the internet was a

95 radical frontier. The idealistic conceptions of the internet as Cyberkeley, with unlimited voice and access to audience built into its very structure, seemed to be realized. The Zapatista had two goals with their use of the internet: (1) to organize protests against military encroachment and (2) to engender new forms of cross-cultural participatory politics.

Important to both of these movements is the idea of active creation of the type of communicative conditions they want to participate in. The EZLN’s focus on creating a new discursive environment with their communication - not just focusing on how to get the most publicity for their story – aligns well with the goal of an online activist network pursued by the

IGC. Activism, therefore, was not only a matter of impact factor, but also of building a future where the obstacle of impact factors no longer pose a problem. In contrast to memes, these movements actively fought against the neoliberal structure of internet discourse where competition rules all. They may have succeeded in achieving virality to a certain extent, but it was a virality that sought to soften its own importance.

Compare these to one of the biggest political issues on social media of the past decade:

#Kony2012. The Kony2012 phenomenon happened right after Facebook changed its news feed from a chronological model to an algorithmic relevance-based one. It centered around a video from the nonprofit organization Invisible Children, which sought to increase awareness about the actions of Joseph Kony. Kony was a Ugandan warlord and leader of the Lord’s Resistance

Army, a guerilla group that exploited child soldiers.156 The video was a short documentary giving a stark picture of Kony’s actions, filled with celebrities, calls to action, and ways to support Invisible Children. It quickly broke the standing record for the most viral video, garnering over 100 million views in under a week. The news spread from YouTube to social media networks to major news outlets. In an extremely short amount of time, a video from a

96 small nonprofit seeking to raise awareness of war crimes halfway around the world was able to get the attention of over half the US population.

The problem with this whirlwind was that it didn’t end up doing anything. In a retrospective, Christina Cauterucci of Slate put it succinctly: “the sea change Kony 2012 suggested we could achieve, if only we harnessed our potential as informed citizens of the world, never materialized. The Ugandan conflict continues, despite U.S. involvement that began long before Invisible Children made its video. Kony is still at large.”157 To Invisible Children’s credit, they only ever claimed to be attempting to increase “awareness” about Kony’s actions, but indeed this is half the point. The video played directly into what a group of psychologists identified as “to an emergent opinion-based identity [...] Kony2012 exposed people to a powerful delegitimizing narrative and presented them with achievable action, allowing them to overcome uncertainty and act to embody imagined cognitive alternatives, all vital components of a psychology of resistance.”158 Not only was the video ineffective, but it was also misleading.

Much of the video purposefully elided the complexities of the conflict Kony was embroiled in, trading the legitimacy of the narrative for the simplicity conducive to viral videos. A different study showed its participants both the original Kony 2012 video and Invisible Children’s more nuanced follow up, issued in response to its critics. The difference in reactions between the two was stark. When the situation was gone into with more attention to detail, viewers had nowhere near the emotive response that viewers of the first video had.159 It is ironic that the opening lines of the video are “nothing is more dangerous than an idea,” as this is illustrative of a key part of

Dawkins’ argument regarding meme competition. Memes, being alive, mutate and adapt to proliferate better within their environment. Because they are ideas, this means the content of the ideas themselves is also included in this self-perfection. At the same time, truth is not necessary

97 for survival, and oftentimes can hinder it if the idea is more effectively transmitted by leaving it behind.160 Thus, starting from a pool of true information, the memetic transmission of that information can only ever decrease the aggregate truth-value of that group.

This is where we find the usefulness of the Kony example. Any documentary can pull at heartstrings, any news clip can be spun for sensationalization. What is instructive about this

Kony video is that it was made directly with what Bifo calls a “solutionist” narrative in mind, a shaping of reality to fit the social architecture of networked neoliberalism.161 By sharing the video with your social circles you were helping spread awareness, by buying the Action Kit you were directly contributing to helping solve the problem Cyburbian activism at its finest; it is always more fun to go shopping with friends. The feedback loops of hashtag activism are self- entrenching. Everyone wants to hear about how their likes stopped Kony, while arguments about how Kony came to be and what role the users of Facebook and Twitter (as mostly white citizens of westernized liberal democracies) have in intervening are left at the door. The big picture is either taken from so far away as to make everything seem as simple as a dot on a map, or zoomed in so close as to concentrate on one small iteration of a much larger problem.

Compare this to the activism of the IGC and the EZLN. The critical difference between

Kony 2012 and the projects Gill and Ford illustrate is the active construction of a different environment for online discourse, one that lowered bars to access and gave platform to the voices of marginalized narratives. Both of our earlier projects were successful, at least for a time (and the EZLN is still around, operating through various means), because they focused on creating a productive space for discourse not centered on an attention economy. That they were popular was never an end in itself. Their relationship to media virality was a constructive one, working

“to facilitate the emergence of a public sphere – an ‘area of discursive interaction… for the

98 production and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the state.”162 The persistence of the idea of a public sphere, a concept we have proven fruitless through Dean and

Flusser’s identification of communicative capitalism’s ability to capture discourse in its circuitry earlier in this thesis, is telling. The internet was still a tool to be used, rather than an all- encompassing environment. Earlier we said that social media engaged in a reformatting of the subject, that by bringing the subject into their fold, they shaped the subjects own ideas of what it means to act. To focus solely on the type of world for politics that Gill and Ford’s examples set out to create is to miss the type that Kony2012 is trying to build; one where identity is based on positioning your opinion for others to see, and action directly tied to convenience of the solution.

In their projects, the IGC and EZLN maintained their orientation to the network. The IGC created its own network environment and the EZLN, both then and now, actively tries to change the one it found itself in (but notably to less contemporary viral success). A little over a decade later, we see a movement many times bigger but with significantly less political awareness. By filtering all pieces of content, including political ones, through the desire of continuous consumption, social media platforms discourage substantive engagement with problems publicized in their ranks while making the interaction with the content itself ever more important for their users identities.

None of this, however, is explanatory. How did we get from the IGC and EZLN to Kony

2012? What happened? The answer lies in Dean's theory of the displaced mediator. Displaced mediators are things that "permit an exchange of energy between two otherwise exclusive terms.”163 If we take going door to door collecting campaign signatures and staying at home on your computer to be two exclusive activities, Dean would ask us to see that (in her example) blogs are the displaced mediator here in that they make political activity seem possible from the

99 comfort of your own chair. This next section seeks to extend Dean's analysis, applying the concept of displaced mediators to social media and situating memes as a key component of this mediation. We now have the language for the thing that brought us here, the question thus becomes what makes the role of social media and its memetic content simultaneously so powerful and disavowed.

Social Capital: Social Media and the Commodity Fetishism of the Self

In chapter one we skipped over a loaded term. Gilroy-Ware said that “[o]bsessive focus on individual performance objectifies and commodifies the self.”164 The brevity was in part a textual problem. Gilroy-Ware doesn’t qualify this much further. The spirit of the charge, however, has merit. Thinking through how social media brings the logic of Marx’s commodity fetishism to the personal domain, making individuals into products to circulate in the marketplace, will show us just how it is a displaced mediator for political action in the rise of networked neoliberalism.

In the opening chapter of Marx’s Capital, he spells out his idea of commodity fetishism.

Fetishism in this case does not contain a sexual connotation, but rather the belief that objects have inherent characteristics beyond their basic use, namely the value they hold in exchange.

This is imbued to them through their mass existence in the marketplace. Producers of hammers make hammers not because they need hammers, but because they need to sell them as part of their living. Regarding things as commodities in this way makes exchange value objective. “Of course a hammer is worth $10,” one might say. “That’s how much hammers cost, and if you made one yourself you could sell it for $10 too.” In the creation of commodities, Marx says, the

100 “the labour of the individual asserts itself as the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, the producers.”

This was not always the case, things used to be made without an exchange value. In feudal societies, for example, things were produced by necessity. These were societies characterized – however unequally – by interdependence. The lord needed more grain to keep his serfs placated, so scythes needed to be made, so a hammer must be made for the anvil. “They take the shape, in the transactions of society, or payments in kind and services in kind.” (50).

Feudal society, however, was obliterated by the rise of capitalism. Fairly self-contained environments of production became dispersed. People are no longer kept working by mutual dynamic and coercion, but by the need to earn an hourly wage, with which they have the freedom to buy anything they want in the marketplace. The products they make are no longer on- demand, for a direct end, they are made for the socio-economic environment the waged worker finds themself in. In turn, the value of their products is now no longer just a product of the use that system of mutual dependence has for it, but the ability for that product to produce wealth in that same environment.

In some ways, the shift from IGC and EZLN’s uses of the internet to the dynamics of the

Kony 2012 phenomenon is analogous to this shift from a feudal system of only use value to a capitalist system imbuing products with exchange value. The failure of the IGC is a good parable. Originally, it was a system of mutual provision. The IGC provided low-cost or free internet access, computer programs, and technological services to a swath of activist networks, and in turn they were the platform on which conferences were held, communications transmitted, and action organized. It got its income through grant-writing and donation solicitation, which the

101 organizations on its network helped out with. It did not attempt to compete with other Internet

Service Providers; that is, until it had to. “[A]s the ISP market began to be more developed by corporate interests,”165 the IGC ran into more and more financial trouble. The slew of stumbling blocks elucidated previously in this chapter coincided with the “the increasingly commercialized

Internet environment… shifting from an emphasis on service to an emphasis on product.”166 In other words, shifting from mutual assistance to a relation of the IGC to other ISPs in the marketplace. As a commodity, it could not compete.

In the contrast between the EZLN’s use of the internet and Kony 2012 we find a similar dynamic. Perhaps here we can clarify how virality meant different things to them. As already stated, the Zapatistas saw the internet as a tool. The use of this tool was that it could be used to subvert traditional media markets and get their story out to a wide audience. As a tool, it could be honed, explaining why the EZLN said they were working to make the internet even more conducive to that kind of information dissemination. By the time of Kony 2012, on the other hand, the internet had ceased to be an object to be utilized and had become an all-encompassing environment. Traditional media markets had colonized the internet. The New York Times implemented a paywall on its content just a year earlier. Stories didn’t get out through the internet, they circulated within it. This difference was reflected in the “awareness” goal of

Invisible Children’s campaign. The use-value of the story was conflated with its exchange value.

The video was created not to have physical impact, but to produce as much interaction – as much exchange – as possible.

This is our way into the dynamics of social media. Kony heralded an “emergent opinion- based identity,” one based around the mutual sharing and consumption of content on social

102 media platforms. Here, all the work we did understanding how these platforms make themselves an addictive method of identity construction online comes back into the frame.

Dean’s displaced mediator can be understood in terms of the creation of exchange value of identity on the internet, facilitated by social media and reified by memes. Crack open a social media profile and you do not find the being of a person, rather you find an accumulation of their value-producing labor (it must producing value, how else could the platform be free?) made to enter in to a social relationship with others. That’s a lot all at once though. Let’s slow down. The entirety of social media is based around this exchange-value of users. Likes, shares, comments, followers, these are all quantifications of engagement. Social capital on the internet even has a

name for its own currency: clout. Even if this name

is semi-ironic (deriving its name from the ridiculed

but very successful influencer-quantification startup

Klout), it is still sought after much like traditional

money. The more likes a post gets, the more

successful it is. The greater the general engagement

on a person’s profile, the more clout they have. This

Figure 30: A meme about the social value of meme combined with the portfolio-ization of the self creation. Found on DailyLolPics detailed in Chapter 1 makes social media presence a collection of goods, opinions, outlooks, a personal storefront in the Cyburbian-Dawkinsian marketplace of ideas. Again we find new meaning in Brown’s quote about neoliberalism and the image of the economic. People are made to be able to circulate in the economy, meaning they need to be like products made similar by like measures of exchange value, and thus neoliberalism turns subjects into commodities. Social media, with its consolidation of the

103 networked worker’s personal identity onto a metricized, exchange-based platform, represents the digital side of this shift.

Memes, more than any other piece of content circulating on these platforms, contribute to a reification of this internal logic, converging the cultural with the economic. They create an

Internet culture, solidifying the aggregate of society needed against which the producer (in this case, any person who has a social media profile) can enter into. Was there internet culture before memes? Yes, undeniably. Is meme culture the only theme in internet culture? No. But if I take

Metahaven, the DSG, and Lovink to be correct on any point, it is that meme culture is growing rapidly, not going away anytime soon, and especially relevant to those most embedded (and being raised to be embedded) into the network.

To illustrate, let us take a few steps back and draw a comparison between Benjamin and

Marx. I think there is something to be gleaned from placing Benjamin’s account of the shift from an image culture of cult value to an image culture of exhibition value into Marx’s categories of use value and exchange value. First, we need to understand how they are different. Cult value somewhat inherently fetishizes an image; the word “fetish” was first used in the context of describing idolatry, the giving of godly power to a representation of a god. So images always come imbued with more characteristics than just their basic use. Exhibition value is also not necessarily exchange value. Something can be shown to millions of people without changing hands once. However, “[w]ith the emancipation of specific artistic practices from the service of ritual, the opportunities for exhibiting their products increase” (emphasis in original).167 That is, by taking images out of their ritual context where they can only create localized cultish meaning

- like concentrated feudal production - they can be created with the intent of being shown – like the capitalist production of commodities for the marketplace. It would seem that this is

104 relationship is only intensified in the networks of social media. Posting an image automatically exhibits it, and places it in the social market of all the other posts and content floating around on the platform. From the standpoint of the act of sharing an image, its exhibition value is equivalent with its exchange value. Returning to the example of Reddit’s r/MemeEconomy page, we see this argument taken to the extreme. The exhibition value of each meme for spreading on profiles or to friends is negotiated in a figurative stock market, replete with “BUY BUY BUY” or “This meme made it to 9gag [a content aggregator site, indicative of the meme’s overuse]: SELL NOW.”

“Value,” Marx says, “transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic.”168 More than just being sold tongue-in-cheek, memes carry this Figure 31: A screenshot of some of the popular posts on r/memeeconomy on 5/7/18. By author. logic in their very aesthetic. In what now seems to be a perversion of Steyerl’s original goal with her argument, poor images embody the social conditions of commodity fetishism. Marx’s argument from earlier, that “since producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labour, the specific social character of their private labours appear only within this exchange,”169 maps almost directly on to the methods of signification that Steyerl lauds. The way that poor images create community is in their visual cues that tell us they have passed through the hands of many other users before getting to the viewer. She only talks about them in terms of image quality, referring to the degradation of digital images compressed and shared over time. However, one must also think back to the history of methods of meme production that we talked about earlier

105 this chapter. Meme formats, especially with their increasing ties to the platforms on which they are shared, always signify a history of prior exchange, whether in the production of a new variation of a meme or the mere passing along of one already floating around on social media.

When Benjamin makes his claim that “the representation of human beings by means of an apparatus has made possible a highly productive use of the human being's self-alienation,” his argument comes from the standpoint of the actor in front of a film camera.170 The alienation comes from the fact that though the actor can see the apparatus filming them, they cannot see the people to whom they are being displayed; they are detached from the location of their exhibition.

This itself has a certain linearity (actor to camera to audience) that is absent in the production and sharing of memes. In the case of memes, the viewership is looking from both sides. In some sense they have automatic clout. Rehashing an argument we’ve made before, memes tell the viewer that they come with social capital baked into their very existence. They affect the performance of the actor (the user of social media creating their identity) by saying that many people have already played their exact part, and that they ought to do the same. In a network where identity is opinion-based and proven through exhibition, memes are an ideal and secure mode of expression. But this is only because they are made to be so, with their exhibitionist exchange value in mind.

The political power of memes, if not in their connective force, has only one other source stated by its proponents: memes are funny, irreverent, and mildly areferential. Even if they are exchanged for the sake of identity success on the network, they are still ideal vehicles for criticism of the dominant ideology. Our penultimate section investigates this relationship between humor and ideology, drawing on insight from the 2016 US Presidential election.

106 Totalitarian Laughter: Memes, Irony, and the 2016 Election

On Imgur, a popular image

sharing site to which many billions of

photos have been uploaded, a meme of

Plato's Cave has over one hundred

thousand views. In all respects, it is a

typical meme. It takes three recognizable

cultural touchstones - in this case Pepe,

popular news outlets, and the Cave - and

Figure 32: "The Allegory of the Meme." Found on Imgur. juxtaposes them onto each other to comedic effect. The message of the meme is clear: CNN, MSNBC, and MTV are the shadow puppeteers of mass media which can only ever present a second-order representation of actual political truth, whereas the freed prisoner Pepe gets to see things as they actually are, thanks to the light of memes. This implies for us a couple things. First, it's not just that any one meme can reveal higher truths, but rather that by their being the sun, memes are the medium by which truth can be exposed. Second, memes - or at least meme culture - is to a certain extent aware of the importance of the aesthetic difference between memes and other popular media. Third, there is a conception that this difference is a positive.

This image is not wholly wrong. The types of images we're surrounded by and the ways they come to us influence us to an extent that is hard to understate; we spent an entire chapter trying to prove that. Thinking is a visual enterprise; metaphor, identification, and even our very conceptions of the self are rooted in a visual vernacular that the literary canon has spent

107 millennia trying to capture in a lexical register. If the general visual emphasis of this remixed image of imaging (sometimes called a hyperimage) is meant to argue that memes are a superior form of communication and conceptualizing than (at least) the mainstream media, we should investigate exactly what the differences are. Let’s pivot to an example we’ve already discussed, one that operates on a similar level of meta-ness towards memes. By comparing the meme of Dat

Boi with Rene Magritte’s Teachery of Images as interpreted by Mitchell in an earlier essay of his, we can trace the extent to which images can actually incite action on their representations of representation.

Dat Boi and Magritte’s Treachery of

Images are similar in that they both directly instruct viewers how to receive them. For Dat

Boi, the identification of the meme is not the Figure 33: Rene Magritte's Treachery of Images image, but a figure located in the image; it's "here comes dat boi," with suggestive attention and focus leading to the recognition "o shit waddup!" rather than "here is dat boi," a statement of representational fact which in turn would not require search or discovery. Magritte operates in the opposite direction, yet keeps the same method. Seeing the object floating on a tan background, we are told that the pipe painted in suspension on the canvas is not a pipe. To an extent this is true. One the other hand, it is also pedantic. The force of the painting comes from text that could only get its centrality were it painted on the canvas. Its argument is not that images are inherently treacherous, nor that discourse is inherently truthful. The painting is rather attempting to put the relationship of the two on display.171

108 Both of these images extend outwards to affect our understanding of other images as well. The artistic message of the non-pipe bleeds outside of its frame, affecting the representational status of the other works in the museum by the nature of its commentary. The painting of the non-pipe thus includes the wall behind it, the gallery room, the body of the viewer looking at it, and so on. By the same token, Dat Boi includes more than just Helvetica typography and a CGI frog. It contains the app it is viewed on, the websites it was last downloaded from, and the mass of users who have previously seen it. The medium of the image is then in both cases corrupted. The static confines of image that normally house representation in a separate plane for the viewer, which in turn creates a dichotomy of the viewer and the viewed - which is what itself allows the viewer to consider themselves an individual agent in this act of viewing - cease to exist. They throw the viewer the curveball of "what are you to do if part of the image you're interpreting is your own field of perception?" In Mitchell's words, both Dat

Boi and Treachery are examples of a third-order metapicture, "depicting and deconstructing the relationship between the first-order image and the second-order discourse that is fundamental to the intelligibility of all pictures, and perhaps of all words."172

As fascinating as this is, the fact of the matter is that neither Magritte nor Dat Boi ever make it much further past being brought up as interesting and forgotten about. "Metapictures,”

Mitchell points out "are all like pipes: they are instruments of reverie, provocations to idle conversation, pipe-dreams, and abstruse speculations. Like pipes, metapictures are 'smoked' or

'smoked out' and then put back in the rack.”173 Metapictures, no matter the intensity of the message, tend towards absentminded consumption more than anything else. This sounds familiar, but to which side it falls is up for debate. Many memes try to stage a fissure in representation, to point to an inconsistency between the way things appear and the way they

109 actually are. Working within the confines of networked neoliberalism, they do what they can, make fun of the system while situated as pieces of content inside it. The ability of memes to do this is the entire point of Metahaven’s argument. Lovink also makes this central to his interpretation:

“[t]he point is to recognize how it is that memes are imagined in terms of transformative speech acts as well as to acknowledge the centrality of irony. What’s characteristic of the meme speech act is a structure of feeling that we could call ironic reason, which, in distinction to cynicism, allows its spokesperson to purport belief. Whether or not any of this purported belief is in fact serious is unknown and perhaps even unknowable—this is the point it tries to make. Nevertheless, ironic reason seems to create a new opening to notions of awakening.”174 So now we have our question. Is this ironic reasoning distinct from cynicism? Are there really new modes of political criticism unlocked through memetic humor? My answer is no, but to understand why we need to delve into the workings of cynical logic, and for that we turn to Slavoj Žižek’s account of totalitarian laughter.

Let us approach him by posing a problem: if memes are so neoliberal, why did they not support

Hillary Clinton - a candidate occasionally framed as neoliberalism incarnate - in the 2016 election? To begin to answer this, one ought to recall that at one point in the past decade Clinton held the title of memetic darling.

Texts From Hillary was a popular meme from 2012 that exalted her as a badass Secretary of State.175 Variations Figure 34: A Texts From Hillary meme. Found on the original blog.

110 of the meme all centered around the image of Clinton as a curt, no-nonsense force to be reckoned with, not necessarily always politically. Very rarely did these memes ever address Clinton's diplomatic activities. Rather, they took an image of her in the practice of her political position and actively reshaped it to be a statement about her personality. This depoliticization of a political actor down to their traits of identity is at the heart of political meme movements; it is easier to collectivize around an individual identity rather than a political program. This explanation is still lacking though. If Clinton was so popular in 2012, why was meme culture so opposed to her in 2016?

Maybe it is best to start with her superior in her moment of popularity, Barack Obama.

The message of the Hope poster did not come out of the Obama presidency as optimistically as it went in. While speaking to the inability of Obama to push through gun control measures, Bifo pointed towards the general narrative of his presidency, high aspiration and ultimate failure.

"Obama exemplified the impotence of politics," he says, "a sort of living negation of his winning motto, ‘Yes we can.’"176 There was great political change, yes. There is in any near-decade. But his years were plagued by gridlock, record-low congressional approval ratings, and political doubt. Clinton entered into the 2016 cycle aligned with this administration, having spent years being in its line of succession. Against her campaign ran two challengers, one taking on

Clinton’s party establishment from the left and the other a new type of campaign from the right; both were populist, both positioned themselves as "outside the establishment," both were often framed by academic observers as a rebellion against the globalizing creep of neoliberalism, and both had memes on their side. For Metahaven, the congruence of memes with these political projects is appropriate. The humor they offer, especially with their kind of self-referential content, is perfect for poking holes in the "capitalist realism" that neoliberalism asserts. When

111 people said Trump "tells it like it is,” this is parallel to what Metahaven is talking about; both

Trump and Sanders claimed to offer alternatives to the entrenched current system of politics, which Clinton came to symbolize. Memes, in this understanding, are legitimate. They are a subversive means of communication that help to undermine political campaigns that do not reflect the desires of the people.

Just because meme consumers are trapped in neoliberalism does not mean that they must like it. Lovink may say that irony is the only course of action here, as if the internet is an all-encompassing environment then all humor against networked neoliberalism must be ironic, for what can it really do? Post-election this is exactly what Olsen taps into in her analysis of Tide Pod suicide memes: "[a]s Figure 35: A meme about catharsis over capitalist realism through memes. Found on the I Feel Personally Attacked By This Relatable a downwardly-mobile generation, Dadaist Content Facebook page. jokes about tide pods is [sic] a form of catharsis for us millennials."177 The invocation of Dada is interesting. Dada is certainly against capitalist realism, as it implies a conscious politics actively trying to displace itself from dominant modes of signification, but one has to wonder to what extent this is a conscious and intentional collaboration.

Hillary was once a beloved meme, and that ought to tell us something. Her actual role as

Secretary of State was never questioned. Similarly, Trump is hailed in many memes as a "God-

112 Emperor," and Sanders' "Dank Meme Stash" is a

hotbed less of his policy than of "furthering his

Internet-icon status." "[I]t doesn’t hurt that Sanders

is an anti-establishment white dude,” the

Washington Post’s Caitlin Dewey argues, "like

much of the Internet’s creator class."178 Again, one

is left to ask the extent to which political discourse

actually happens in meme culture, to what extent

memes make political claims with activating force

Figure 36: Meme posing Trump as a god. Found on MemeCenter. rather than spectacles of personality to consume.

That Metahaven, Lovink, and Olsen all seize on the

ironic humor of memes is no small coincidence, but

it might be better thought of in a different light.

While politics is not a joke, it has certainly

survived centuries while taking them. In trying to

figure out the source of totalitarianism, Žižek takes

issue with a point made by Umberto Eco that the

source of totalitarianism was "a dogmatic

attachment to the official word: the lack of Figure 37: A popular meme likening Bernie to Rick from the popular TV show Rick and Morty, referenced earlier 179 in this thesis. Found on Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme laughter, of ironic detachment." Were this the Stash. case, then funny memes should pose a threat to the system. The problem, however, is that the ruling ideology can completely accommodate this humor. The subversive potential of memes (in application to Sanders and Trump) can be what

113 understood as evincing a kind of kynicism, a term Žižek takes from Peter Sloterdjik. Kynicism is the "popular, plebeian rejection of the official culture by means of irony and sarcasm."180 While effective at making claims against ideology though, this kind of action can quickly be subsumed by cynicism (from which Lovink tried to distance memes), which knows the relation of ideology to subject. Kynical reason exposes and ridicules the fake relation to reality that ideology creates, cynical reason shrugs its shoulders and finds reasons to keep that relation. This manifests at a very meta level with the popularity of making memes about Mark Zuckerberg. Like many others, the joke is always the same: Zuckerberg is any combination of evil robot, lizard, and greedy capitalist. These memes circulate around Facebook, where the user base presents a public ad- hominem (not in the derogatory sense, but in the kynical sense of Sloterdijk, where these attacks are outside ideological reason and thus seemingly emotive attacks), only to keep using Facebook,

Zuckerberg's source of billions, because it is the social medium (not as internet platform, but as mediating force) of their milieu.

Putting it directly, Žižek states that "cynical reason, with all its ironic detachment, leaves untouched the fundamental level of ideological fantasy, the level on which ideology structures the social reality itself.”181 This changes the traditional formulation of ideology; it goes from

"they know not what they do" to "they know what they do [is motivated by ideology], but still they are doing [it]." Irony serves not as weapon of humor, then, but stumbling block of action.

The stifling power of cynical reason only increases with ironic detachment because the root of said detachment is a product of the ideology memes are kynical about; this only becomes stronger as the neoliberal networked subject gets further and further entrenched.

114 The importance of humor to online content is well documented. Gilroy-Ware points out, for example, that Al-Jazeera often hires a comedian actress to do their news videos because they get a lot more engagement that way.182 Humor is one of the most effective ways to create connections between people on social media. The collective identity that comes through memes, therefore, is filtered in significant part through the catalytic properties of humor. This is why the jokes of memes are always the same: the meme is that everyone is in on the joke. Anything more and their connective properties would have to do more work. Memes often acknowledge this.

Tongue-in-cheek depictions of meme addiction abound on the internet; one of the most significant markers of social connection is how many memes you send to someone else. As

Olsen returns to remind us, sometimes they're presented as depression coping mechanism.183 At the same time, there is an epidemic of laughter's detachment online.

The scope of the phrase "LOL" has moved from joke to quasi-punctuation. Tellingly, it is often used to smooth over communication, and create a casual space.

Alongside the movement of the subject Figure 38: A meme reflecting the lack of laughter when typing out online, laughter has been imported as well. laughter online. Found on me.me.

This is just the latest iteration of the role of humor to the worker, and it is not the first in its history. Critical to Žižek’s argument is the psychoanalytic effect of commodity fetishism.

Understanding its implications in the context of the dynamics of identity formation under networked neoliberalism really spells out how this all ties together. Commodity fetishism asserts

115 the category of exchange value as real, a metaphysical characteristic. At the same time, nobody expects to be able to crack open a hammer and find $10 (its exchange value), but they act as if they do. The problem is then not one of knowledge; it is one of action. “Cynical distance is just one way – one of many ways – to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy:

even if we do not take things seriously, even if

we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing

them” (emphasis in original).184 How is this

contradiction kept up? Žižek argues that as the

exchange value of commodities is a product of

Figure 14: A meme about the difference in people's Facebook personas and their real life. Found on Pinterest. the social relations between them, it is not a matter of people believing they have value. “They no longer believe, but the things themselves believe for them” (emphasis in original).185 As price is out of the hands of any one person, set by the aggregate labor of society as a whole into which products – not people – enter into, it is the commodities that report back the reality of their value to the producer, which the producer in turn takes for granted. Whatever I think of the hammer I make, objectively it is worth $10. Žižek reaches back to classical antiquity to draw comparison from the role of the Chorus, whose role was to ease the act of watching the play by taking on the obligation of feeling its emotions. The theatergoers came in detached, willing to watch but with great sloth as to actually committing to deep compassion with the play, to which the spectacular Chorus says "[y]ou are then relieved of all worries, even if, you do not feel anything, the Chorus will do so in your place.'"186 In the twentieth century, the Chorus became the laugh track. Like other places, we find echoes of

Benjamin here. The subject-molding force of the cinema for him was that when in the theater, everyone's reactions were always already tempered by everyone else's. In this way they became

116 the homogenous group they saw on the screen. Žižek's laugh track finds its place in a different home, the television, where networks find their way into the home with channels and sitcoms.

That laughter is there to laugh along with the show does not satisfy Žižek, because "we do not usually laugh."187 Rather, it is the updated Chorus, relieving us from the requirement of laughter.

Even if we "gaze drowsily into the television screen,"188 we are still laughing. The ambiguous other we hear through the speakers tells us so.

Things are different now. TV is no longer tuned into for a program, it's binged on with episode after episode of content, content that we opened this chapter with. As our mechanisms for consuming media and socializing (a third way of thinking about social media: as designating both society and media) come closer and closer together, their characteristics start to bleed into each other. In the feed of content constantly streamed through social media, memes show us other people laughing, other people making massive (in this case meaning both grandiose and asserting the support of the masses) statements about politics. In memes the concept of the political has changed from one of engagement and action to reception and experience. The ambiguous collective behind the meme - those against whom we create our own political identity

- are always reaching out with a message that already has enough people behind it, making it thus always sufficient for us to politically engage at the level of pure member of mass. At the same time, like commodities believe in themselves for us, so do political commitments online - especially humorous ones - relinquish us from the requirement of having to actually act on those commitments while we get to enjoy the pleasures of the network. They are little packets of experience, political experience in this case, that supply the user with satisfaction. In memeing politically, the logic of neoliberalism overwhelms any force of the content, which itself is only ever experienced in the networked realm. You can keep experiencing rebellion and never see the

117 system change, a relationship to unfulfillable desire that Dean sees as captivating. "Because failure produces [the potential for the next] enjoyment, because the subject enjoys via repetition, drive captures the subject… The subject gets doing the same thing over and over again because this doing produces enjoyment. Post. Post. Post. Click. Click. Click."189

To bring us all the way back to the beginning, that sleep deprivation, depression, addiction, and suicide plague meme culture is not an accident. For Bifo, they are the manifestation of the digital subject being stretched beyond their biological limits. All reactions of the body to an increasingly managerial, individual, technological mode of life, it is ought to be reasonable for this dark humor to create community in memes. That these images happen to proliferate on social media is equally understandable, as it is the site through which people can mediate and subsidize their isolation. For politics, however - for the voicing of grievance - we may rephrase Dennis the Repressed Peasant from Monty Python's Holy Grail: "sitting around, looking at pages distributing memes is no basis for a system of government." As flecks of content in the torrential flow of the network, memes facilitate the transition of identity into one constantly defined by what everyone else has already asserted. They export the authenticity of meaning to images that get their force from their success as a commodity in the circuits of networked neoliberalism; a belonging to a mass that is neither identifiable nor IRL, and thus antithetical to effective political action. In doing so, they actively reinforce the conditions enabling this plague of identity in the first place, creating a vicious cycle which gets increasingly harder to escape from. The political actor who views these images is thus at once entranced and entrapped by them, as they constitute one of the only modes of politics left. Memes entertain us with politics with one hand and absolve us of doing them with the other.

118 Coda: The Left Can't Meme

There is a saying often circulated in the forums of 4chan and other hotbeds of right wing meme culture: "the left can't meme."190 It is unclear exactly what about the left, however, makes them unable to do so. In some cases, it is because the left refuses to get as "edgy" as the right, especially when edginess is framed as going against political correctness. In others, as in the case of the Clinton campaign, it is because their memes seem inauthentic, made with a real political purpose in mind. And yet, here at the end of the thesis we've well established that the evaluation criteria of any particular meme can never be more than their success in the network. Every meme is made to be exchanged; to not be exchanged with the purpose of being passed on further is to not be a meme. Dankness is optional, engagement is mandatory. And anyway, the raging popularity of Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme Stash proves that there is at least some memeing ability in the left-leaning internet community. One could argue that had Sanders won the primary instead of Clinton, “The Great Meme War” waged between the parties would have been much more evenly matched. Whether or not that is true, in light of the pitfalls of cynical reason and totalitarian laughter, the partisan dynamics of memes appear to operate at a higher level than simply the memeing ability of aligned constituents.

It may be helpful to liken memes to a form of physical political action, the flash mob.

Both Bifo and Dean have found the case of the flash mob interesting. Not only do they play extremely well on social media, but they are also similar in structure to memes. Citing Sorochan,

Dean claims that flash mobs exemplify the "fetishizing of pure participation away from any meaningful political project."191 What Dean is tugging at is the flash mob's core problem, the

119 assertion of mass-as-sufficient. The flash mob has no time for discussion, goal-setting, long-term change. Its ephemerality is baked into its very existence, it is the point. This is political convenience not as efficient, in the way of decreasing the cost of effective organizing, but as instantaneous. By purposefully erasing any hint of sustenance, flash mobs equate political action with mere presence and membership, and condemn themselves to inefficacy. Bifo captures the new digital nature of the problem, though, when he points out that this mode of politics is not only impotent, but also serves to reify a politics of external positioning over one of human deliberation.192 There is no room for dialogue in these mobs, no hope for political progress. They are organizations for the sake of organizing, the members political action given to them by the whirlwind of the group performance. We find celebrated in flash mobs what previously we had agreed was a harmful consequence of networked neoliberalism: the same detached relationship to others, facilitated by an overbearing connection to the grid, that wrings and fractures us into isolation while giving us an exhilarating experience of mass political participation.

Like flash mobs, the internet revels in instantaneous action. "The internet" - meaning the mass of people rallying around any day's given meme, shoving it into the IRL world - loves to be characterized as "the internet." A lighthearted example of this can be found in the meme of taking over well-meaning public naming polls with a deluge of votes for "____y Mc_____face";

“Boaty McBoatface,” a New York Times headline reads, “What You Get When You Let The

Internet Decide.”193 Reddit’s online community has its own meme for this, ironically celebrating any one of its mass actions with “We did it, Reddit!” And for a more explicitly political occurrence, there is the memorable story of when Hillary Clinton's Instagram got flooded with shitpost comments about fire ants being "spicy bois.” To quote Slate this time around, “[v]isitors

120 to Hillary Clinton’s Instagram account over the past couple of days have been treated to yet another instance of the internet run amok.”194

These are just three iterations of the internet's much larger fascination with its own mass.

Admittedly, it is extremely funny to see a horde of memers disrupt everyday life on the internet

with a ton of tongue-in-cheek shitposting. At

the same time, however, this does nothing.

Not nothing in the sense of nothing. There is

always a mass of people organized under a

single objective working towards the same

goal in some shocking quantity. Nothing in

the sense of nothing more than that. Memes

Figure 39: An ironic "We did it, Reddit!" meme. Found on KnowYourMeme. are exciting, they come to the user with the message that lots of other people are already swept up in this huge agreement and you can be too. This allows them to go viral, blow up, spread like wildfire. But it is also their downfall.

Once passed around enough there is nothing more to do with them; they live fast and die young.

Rarely do memes attempt to bring their action offline. The readers of this thesis more familiar with meme culture might note that they have seen few if any memes with any kind of logistical information in them. This is not only because that would be asking much too much of the absentminded content consumer, but also because any kind of organizational planning would necessarily mean that the meme wouldn't be able to create connection with members of networked communities that were not physically near the place of protest. The opportunity cost of attempting offline organization through memes is the ability for the meme to become successful in the first place.

121 The same can also be said for political discourse in meme formats. Let’s return to the example in our introduction of the "Bernie vs. Hillary On The Issues" meme. No matter what joke was made in the confines of the template, the joke was always the same: Sanders is more in touch with young voters than Clinton is. Whether or not this is the case could be up for debate, but it could not be up for debate through the meme. One can consider variants of a meme as analogous to members of a flash mob. They may retain the marginal identities of their selves, but their politics is always a non-negotiable fact. They bring in politics only to shut it right back down.

Gilroy-Ware has a perfect example of the logic of flash mobs being translated into the aesthetics of a meme. In doing a close reading of a popular pro-oil meme circulating around

Facebook, he finds out that the image is at best half true. In the square image, there is a picture of a desert-area deep and wide mine on top of a picture of a tall gas tower surrounded by forest. The

text on the image, the white impact font outlined

in black indicative of early memes, claims that

the top is a lithium mine, and asks viewers to

compare what it looks like to the nature scene of

the oil drill below and decide whether electric

cars are better for the environment than gas. It

neglects to mention that lithium is not mined and

that the Canadian site features an exceedingly

uncommon method of oil extraction; the top is a

lie and the bottom is a wistful

Figure 2: The meme Gilroy-Ware refers to. Found on misrepresentation.195 The factual nature of this DailyKos

122 image, however, comes second for Gilroy-Ware. By using the general hallmarks of meme design

- the impact font, the low-quality graphic, the humorous tone, etc. - the image had already situated its information as "folk." The argument was given gravity not due to any authoritative claim to deep knowledge of the environmental consequences of automobile production, but because so many people before had affirmed the political argument being made. The information came pre-packaged, the participation already determined.

In both memes and flash mobs, the impoverishment of time and the flattening of identity encouraged by networked neoliberalism combine to form a seductive idea of political participation that is directly conducive to its ongoing operation. They frame politics as quick and easy when it is really arduous and taxing. They make identity concrete through the masses when it is really individuated and subjective. These changes make their protests the most efficient ones to handle. Memes took the palpable, populist, anti-neoliberal (however much they really were) fervor of the Sanders and Trump campaigns and channeled their energies directly into the circuits of networked neoliberalism. Return again to the introduction, "I don't mind if you call for the demise of capitalism, as long as you do it in the house." Just as letting minors drink under supervision keeps parents lives relatively unimpeded and low-risk as opposed to other, more direct ways of handling the situation, so does political memeing allow potentially disruptive actions to play themselves out without causing any real trouble. In using the network to speak out, they even produce value for the system.

What exacerbates this problem is the pure scale at which these memetic flash mobs play themselves out. When taking our argument into the context of how one actually encounters memes – one after another after another – these political performances are not only vapid, they are incoherent. In an old paper of his on Deleuze, Buzzfeed Founder Jonah Peretti spells out the

123 issue. In line with our argument, he claims the reason a plethora of images negates inspirational effect from any specific one of them is that we use images to shape our identities and desires.196

When we're confronted by a cacophonous dissonance of them, however, we become paralyzed.

Scrolling down a feed, it's not unusual that a user will see a video about suffering in Palestine, a meme playing on Obama’s cool factor, a recipe for a cute cake, and a cop playing basketball with people in his community. All of these are framed as sharable content that the viewer should be able to agree with. At the same time, however, they ask the viewer to empathize with middle eastern victims of war, a figurehead of the American state, some disembodied hands making batter, and with both cops and marginalized communities. How does one act on this? The simple answer is you can’t. Peretti explains that for an ad in GQ to be successful, it must create an image in the reader's head of them with that product that sticks around long enough for them to go out and buy it. There's an entire industry dedicated towards making this time for fulfillment as short as possible, one that now finds a home in the technical images and targeted ads of networked neoliberalism.197 Political discourse has undergone the same acceleration in messaging thanks to memes. Every meme offers the opportunity for narcissistic identification with a movement that can be fulfilled by consuming its content. It must be able to be fulfilled this quickly, or else you wouldn’t be ready to receive the next meme in the feed. This gratification, however, never asks you to leave the web. The participation is always just presence in the flash mob. Just like its ad for shoes on the sidebar, Facebook’s share button claims to let you Amazon Prime socialism.

This clarifies why the left can't meme. It is not a judgment of ability; it is a statement of imperative. The left can't meme, they ought not meme, to meme is to actively engage in the types of politics that networked neoliberalism cultivates. Insofar as the project of the establishment

124 right is to yoke populist and democratic energies to the reins of capitalism, all memes help them through their service to the network. Memes are addictive content on an addictive platform. They tell us what we want to hear in all its variations. How great we are, how much other people are as hedonist as ourselves, how virtuous our political program is, how absurd the other one is, how much we hate social media, and how much we cannot live without it. With these deep and internal contradictions, memes will always serve the interests of their platforms. If subjects are to be reformatted into the image of the economic then they must consume economic images. That is what memes are, in that they will always capture any political discourse and direct it right into the value producing circuits of networked neoliberalism. Thus, the left can't meme, for memes can only ever offer a façade of political participation. Behind them rests the overwhelming force of a technological, neoliberal mode of governance, perfectly content to let us more deeply sedate ourselves into its grasp.

lol.

125 FIGURES:

Figures – Introduction: 1. Google images results page for “Obama Hope Poster” 2. Donald Trump. Twitter Post. October 15, 2016, 1:53 AM. https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/653856168402681856?lang=en. 3. Jeremy Diamond, "Donald Trump's 'Star of David' tweet controversy, explained." CNN, July 5, 2016 https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/04/politics/donald-trump-star-of-david-tweet- explained/index.html. 4. http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/110/570/5b3.jpg

Figures – Chapter 1: 1. David Parkins, “The New Titans Economist Cover,” Digital Image, January 18, 2018, The Economist. https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21735021-dominance-google- facebook-and-amazon-bad-consumers-and-competition-how-tame 2. In text. 3. Randall Munroe, “Conversational Dynamics,” Digital Image, March 30, 2018, XKCD. https://xkcd.com/1974 4. Randall Munroe, “Online Communities 2,” Digital Image, October 6, 2010, XKCD. https://xkcd.com/802 5. https://9gag.com/gag/aPWmvMq/the-millionaire-that-can-afford-metal-cutlery 6. https://me.me/i/me-shes-accusing-me-of-something-actually-did-me-to-4283986 7. https://me.me/i/looks-like-you-drew-youreyebrows-on-with-acrayon-but-thats-2344262 8. @Ruff_bluffs, Twitter Post, September 9, 2017, 11:56pm, https://twitter.com/ruff_bluffs/status/906773275128352768?lang=en 9. Childish Gambino, Because The Internet, Glassnote Records, 2013, CD/Digital Download/LP 10. https://me.me/i/who-would-win-laying-silently-in-bed-with-your-thoughts-20234675

Figures – Chapter 2: 1. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cult-of-kek 2. Post-Polio Health International. Man using an Emerson tank respirator equipped with a mirror. 1950s. What Ever Happened to Polio?, Smithsonian National Museum of American History Behring Center, Washington DC. Accessed April 27, 2018. https://amhistory.si.edu/polio/howpolio/images/imgiron_03.jpg. 3. VaccineTruth.com. Vaccine Truth. Educate Yourself. http://educate- yourself.org/vcd/vacnonesafe1.jpg 4. https://www.facebook.com/225976687439638/posts/1608417802528846 5. Data in author possession. 6. https://www.facebook.com/botmonpage/photos/a.686933591364628.1073741828.686903 974700923/1385801011477879/?type=3&theater 7. http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3pkihv 8. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dat-boi 9. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-made-you-a-cookie-but-i-eated-it 10. http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/95429-socially-awkward-penguin 11. http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/925181-my-face-when-mfw-that-face-when-tfw

126 12. https://www.reddit.com/r/MemeEconomy/comments/6ibsnj/i_think_theres_potential_in_ a_memes_then_vs_now/ 13. https://www.reddit.com/r/4chan/comments/7k4bu9/anon_learns_pepe_is_a_hate_crime/ 14. https://socialnewsdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/pquc50z.jpg 15. https://www.facebook.com/shitpostbot5k/photos/a.2011060282442353.1073741832.1663 308127217572/2011060292442352/?type=3&theater 1. 16 & 17. John DeNardo, "Book Cover Smackdown! ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream’ Edition." SF Signal, 2016. https://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2010/02/book_cover_smackdown_i_have_no_mouth_ and_i_must_scream_edition/.

Figures – Chapter 3: 1. https://me.me/i/18862684 2. http://memecollection.net/how-a-bill-becomes-a-law/ 3. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/851039660804311654/ 4. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-struggle-is-real 5. https://dailylolpics.com/youre-hired-5 6. reddit.com/r/memeeconomy 7. https://imgur.com/gallery/LzO43 8. Rene Magritte, The Treachery of Images, 1928-9, oil on canvas, 63.5 cm × 93.98 cm, Los Ageneles, LACMA. Accessed May 4, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images#/media/File:MagrittePipe.jpg 9. http://textsfromhillaryclinton.tumblr.com/post/20776605823/original-image-by-diana- walker-for-time#notes 10. https://www.facebook.com/personalattacks69/photos/a.964319563672756.1073741828.9 62646423840070/1301542233283819/?type=3&theater 11. https://www.memecenter.com/fun/7027523/god-emperor-of-mankind 12. https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1670507082975933&set=g.10130712620467 33&type=1&theater&ifg=1 13. https://me.me/i/me-typing-lol-imao-hahaha-lmfao-rofl-me-reality-20434280 14. https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/127015651967860618/

Figures – Coda: 1. http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/988113-we-did-it-reddit 2. Mark Sumner, "Someone is lying about electric cars on the internet," DailyKos, May 6, 2016. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/5/6/1524012/-Someone-is-lying-about- electric-cars-on-the-internet.

127 ENDNOTES

1 Roland Barthes, Mythologies. (New York City: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957). https://soundenvironments.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/roland-barthes-mythologies.pdf. 91. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 92-93. 5 Derrick L. Cogburn and Fatima K. Espinoza-Vasquez, "From Networked Nominee to Networked Nation: Examining the Impact of Web 2.0 and Social Media on Political Participation and Civic Engagement in the 2008 Obama Campaign." Journal of Political Marketing (February 23, 2011). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15377857.2011.540224?src=recsys&journalCode =wplm20. 189. 6 Ben Arnon, "How the Obama “Hope” Poster Reached a Tipping Point and Became a Cultural Phenomenon: An Interview With the Artist Shepard Fairey," Huffington Post, November 13, 2008. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-arnon/how-the-obama-hope-poster_b_133874.html. 7 Merriam-Webster, "Definition of Meme," Accessed December 12, 2017. https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/meme?src=search-dict-hed 8 Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). 41.

9 Caitlin Dewey, "How Bernie Sanders became the lord of ‘dank memes." Washington Post, February 23, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/02/23/how- bernie-sanders-became-the-lord-of-dank-memes/?utm_term=.298b680e0bee 10 This can be seen by entering the two terms into trends.google.com 11 Abby Ohlheiser, "‘We actually elected a meme as president’: How 4chan celebrated Trump’s victory," Washington Post, November 9, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- intersect/wp/2016/11/09/we-actually-elected-a-meme-as-president-how-4chan-celebrated- trumps-victory/?utm_term=.df684e04ed99 12 Dewey 13 Ohlheiser 14 Taken from a Wikileaks leaked email which can be found here: https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/10721 15 Tamara Villarreal Ford and Genève Gill, “Radical Internet Use,” in Radical Media, ed. John D.H. Downing (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications), 203 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 206 18 Ibid., 204 19 Ibid., 205 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 208 22 Ibid., 205 23 James Peterson, "25 years after Rodney King, video still isn't enough to stop police brutality." LA Times, March 3, 2016. http://beta.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0303-peterson-king- holliday-blm-20160303-story.html.

128

24 Ibid. 25 Franco “Bifo” Berardi, "The Paradox of Media Activism." Ibraaz, November 2, 2012. http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/49. 26 Jodi Dean, Blog Theory, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 4 27 Franco “Bifo” Berardi, And: Phenomenology of the End, (Unigrafia, Finland: Aalto University Press, 2014), 245. 28 Ibid., 246 29 Ibid. 30 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2015), 10 31 Deirdre Olsen, "Why milennials are making memes about wanting to die." Salon, February 10, 2018. https://www.salon.com/2018/02/10/why-millennials-are-making-memes-about-wanting-to- die/. 32Max Ehrenfreund. "The average millennial worker makes less than the average baby boomer did in 1975." Washington Post, April 20, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/20/census-young-men-are-making- much-less-than-they-did-in-1975/?utm_term=.9cb1358c63ff. 33 Ibid. 34 Monaghan, Angela. "Number of zero-hours contracts stalls at 'staggering' 1.7m." The Guardian, May 11, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/may/11/number-of-zero- hours-contracts-stalls-at-staggering-1-7-million. 35 Suzanne Lucas, "Dilemma of the Month: Professional Work on Your Personal Cell." Comstock's Magazine, February 3, 2016 https://www.comstocksmag.com/qa/dilemma- month-professional-work-your-personal-cell. 36 Marcus Gilroy-Ware, Filling the Void, (London: Repeater Books, 2017), 86 37 Rand Waltzman. "Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC)." Federal Business Opportunities. July 14, 2011. https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=972cbc835c3702e9758aedcf032fb4 ec&tab=core&_cview=1 38 Clive Thompson, "THE VISIBLE MAN: AN FBI TARGET PUTS HIS WHOLE LIFE ONLINE." Wired, May 22, 2007 https://www.wired.com/2007/05/ps-transparency/. 39 Bernard Harcourt, Exposed, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 10 40 Gilroy-Ware, 94. 41 Ibid. 42 Zeynep Tufekci, "Facebook Said Its Algorithms Do Help Form Echo Chambers. And the Tech Press Missed It." Huffington Post, n.d. Accessed December 17, 2017. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/zeynep-tufekci/facebook-algorithm-echo- chambers_b_7259916.html. 43 Dean, 73. 44 Tufecki

129

45 Scott Bixby, "'The end of Trump': how Facebook deepens millennials' confirmation bias." The Guardian, October 1, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/01/millennials- facebook-politics-bias-social-media?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_reddit_is_fun. 46 Charlie Nash, "The Guardian: Facebook a Giant Political Echo Chamber for Millennials as Election Nears." Breitbart, October 3, 2016. http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/10/03/the- guardian-facebook-a-giant-political-echo-chamber-for-millennials-as-election-nears/. 47 Berardi, 2012. 48 Jumio, "2013 MOBILE CONSUMER HABITS STUDY." http://pages.jumio.com/rs/jumio/images/Jumio%20%20Mobile%20Consumer%20Habits%20Stu dy-2.pdf. 49 Gilroy-Ware, 45. 50 Marty Swant, "Facebook Is Giving Advertisers More Flexibility When Buying Mid-roll Video Ads." AdWeek, August 27, 2017. http://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-is-giving-publishers- more-flexibility-when-buying-mid-roll-video-ads/. 51 Ibid., 33. 52 Berardi, 2012. 53 Jason Mander, "Internet Users Have Average of 7 Social Accounts." Global Web Index. https://blog.globalwebindex.com/chart-of-the-day/internet-users-have-average-of-7-social- accounts/. 54 Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” eFlux, November 2009. www.e flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image 55 Ibid. 56 Holly Ellyatt, "Who is Pepe the Frog and why has he become a hate symbol?" CNBC, September 29, 2016. https://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/29/who-is-pepe-the-frog-and-why-has-he- become-a-hate-symbol.html. 57 Deirdre Olsen, "Why milennials are making memes about wanting to die." Salon, February 10, 2018. https://www.salon.com/2018/02/10/why-millennials-are-making-memes-about-wanting-to- die/. Accessed 9 Mar. 2018. 58 Alex Tan, Twitter Post, December 9, 2017, 8:44am, https://twitter.com/mineifiwildout/status/939536349731999744?lang=en 59 Don Caldwell, “Like this image to die instantly,” KnowYourMeme, September 1, 2017. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/like-this-image-to-die-instantly 60 Chiungjung Huang, "Internet Use and Psychological Well-being: A Meta- Analysis." Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 13, no. 3 (June 2010). https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/cyber.2009.0217. 61 Michael E. Gardiner, "The Multitude Strikes Back?: Boredom in an Age of Semiocapitalism." new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics 82, no. 82 (2014). 32. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/558909 62 Ibid., 38 63 Gilroy-Ware, 94 64 Brown, 10. 65 Geert Lovink and Marc Tuters, "RUDE AWAKENING: MEMES AS DIALECTICAL IMAGES." Non.Copyriot, April 3, 2018. https://non.copyriot.com/rude-awakening-memes-as- dialectical-images/.

130

66 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." In Walter Benjamin Selected Writings: 1935-1938, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 106 67 Ibid. 68 Cult of Kek, "THE “HOLY TRINITY” OF MEMETIC ENTITIES EXPLAINED. KEK THE FATHER, PEPE THE SON, AND PEK THE HOLY GHOST." http://thecultofkek.com/. 69 Katie Notopoulos, "1,272 Rare Pepes," BuzzFeed, May 11, 2015. https://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/1272-rare- pepes?utm_term=.tr0Zoe3Pz#.eo2K75nmY. 70 Benjamin, 103. 71 Ibid., 104. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 116. 74 Eric Grundhouser, "Did a Silent Film About a Train Really Cause Audiences to Stampede?" Atlas Obscura, November 3, 2016. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/did-a- silent-film-about-a-train-really-cause-audiences-to-stampede. 75 Benjamin, 108. 76 W.J.T Mitchell, "The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction,” Modernism/modernity 10, no. 3, September 2003. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/46443/pdf. 483. 77 Ibid., 487 78 Ibid., 484 79 Ibid. 80 The Smithsonian National Museum of American History, "The Iron Lung and Other Equipment," May 11, 2015. https://amhistory.si.edu/polio/howpolio/ironlung.htm. 81 Ibid. 82 Mitchell, 486. 83 Hans Belting, "Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology." Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2, 2005. 312. 84 Influenza Virus Net, "Etymology of Influneza." http://www.influenzavirusnet.com/history-of- influenza/51-etymology-of-influenza.html. 85 Mitchell, 483. 86 Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 5. 87 Ibid., 52. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., 53 90 Ibid., 52 91 Ibid., 53 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid., 54 94 Ibid., 51 95 Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” eFlux, November 2009. www.e flux.com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image 96 Flusser, 69 97 Ibid.

131

98 Ibid. 99 Elizabeth Bruenig, “Why is Millennial Humor So Weird?” Washington Post, August 11, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/why-is-millennial-humor-so- weird/2017/08/11/64af9cae-7dd5-11e7-83c7- 5bd5460f0d7e_story.html?utm_term=.881e84d7ef24 100 KnowYourMeme, "Dat Boi,” KnowYourMeme, February 2017. knowyourmeme.com/memes/dat-boi. Accessed 9 Mar. 2018.

101 /u/danijoe, “You want to know why I love Dat Boi?” Reddit, March 18 2017. https://www.reddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/605zdt/you_want_to_know_why_i_love_dat_boi/ 102 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 192. 103 Mitchell, 484 104 Professor Happycat, I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Collekshun, (New York City: Avery Publishing, 2008). 105 KnowYourMeme, "Bottom Text,” KnowYourMeme, October 2016. knowyourmeme.com/memes/bottom-text. Accessed 9 Mar. 2018. 106 KnowYourMeme, "Advice Animals,” KnowYourMeme, January 2018. knowyourmeme.com/memes/bottom-text. Accessed 9 Mar. 2018. 107 Dakwins, 199 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid., 198 110 Ibid., 192 111 Ibid., 197 112 Ibid. 113 Tamara Villarreal Ford and Genève Gill, “Radical Internet Use,” in Radical Media, ed. John D.H. Downing (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications). 208 114 Dawkins, 193 115 Ibid., 332 116 Ibid., 331 117 Ibid., 200 118 Ibid., 201 119 Ibid., 195-196 120 Emily Steel, "How Comcast and NBCUniversal Used Minions to Fuse an Empire." New York Times, November 6, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/07/business/media/media-merger- success-comcast-and-nbcuniversal-say-yes.html. 121 Anousha Sakoui and Christopher Palmeri, "‘Minions’ $593 Million Publicity Spree Points to Film Profit." Bloomberg Business, July 10, 2015. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-10/-minions-593-million-publicity-spree- points-to-film-profit. 122 Ibid. 123 Visual Hollywood, "Despicable Me 2 Production Notes." Accessed January 22, 2018. https://www.visualhollywood.com/movies_2013/despicable_me_2/notes.pdf. 124 Belting, 309. 125 jarryknell, "shitpost." UrbanDictionary, January 4, 2008. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=shitpost.

132

126 KnowYourMeme, "ShitpostBot 5000,” KnowYourMeme, March 2018. Accessed 27 Apr. 2018. http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/shitpostbot-5000 127 Ibid. 128 Courage the Cowardly Dog, “Perfect,” Episode 52. Directed by John R. Dilworth. Written by Billy Aronson, Cartoon Network, November 22, 2002. 129 Harlan Ellison, "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." WJCC Schools. https://wjccschools.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/01/I-Have-No-Mouth-But-I-Must- Scream-by-Harlan-Ellison.pdf. 12. 130 Ibid., 13 131 Vilém Flusser, Into the Universe of Technical Images, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 86. 132 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." In Walter Benjamin Selected Writings: 1935-1938, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 108. 133 Flusser, 108 134 Benjamin, 113 135 Deterritorial Support Group, "All the memes of production." In Occupy Everything!: Reflections on Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere, edited by Alessio Lunghi and Seth Wheeler, (Minor Compositions, 2012). https://libcom.org/library/all-memes-production-deterritorial- support-group. Np. 136 Ibid. 137 Metahaven. Can Jokes Bring Down Governments?: Memes, Design, and Politics. (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2014). Np. 138 Mark Fisher. Capitalist Realism. (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009). 8.

139 Metahaven. 140 Evidenced by a Wikileaks-released email from a young Clinton supporter to John Podesta, forwarded from John Podesta to his assistant. It can be found here: https://wikileaks.org/podesta- emails/emailid/10721 141 Metahaven. 142 Ibid. 143 Geert Lovink and Marc Tuters, "RUDE AWAKENING: MEMES AS DIALECTICAL IMAGES." Non.Copyriot, April 3, 2018. https://non.copyriot.com/rude-awakening-memes-as- dialectical-images/. 144 Lovink and Tuters. 145 Franco “Bifo” Berardi, "The Paradox of Media Activism." Ibraaz, November 2, 2012. http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/49. 146 Gill and Ford 212. 147 Ibid., 213. 148 Ibid., 214. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid., 215 151 Ibid. 152 Ibid., 216 153 Ibid., 217

133

154 Ibid., 219 155 Ibid. 156 Invisible Children, “KONY 2012.” filmed [March 2012], YouTube video, 00:30. Posted [March 5, 2012]. http://youtu.be/kWBhP0EQ1lA. 157 Christina Cauterucci. "The Lessons of Kony 2012," Slate Magazine, September 16, 2016 http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_next_20/2016/09/kony_2012_quickly_beca me_a_punch_line_but_what_if_it_did_more_good_than.html. 158 Emma F. Thomas, Craig McGarty, Girish Lala, Avelie Stuart, Lauren J. Hall & Alice Goddard, “Whatever happened to Kony2012? Understanding a global Internet phenomenon as an emergent social identity,” European Journal of Social Psychology 45, (2015): 364-365. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ejsp.2094. 159 Daniel Sullivan, Mark Landau & A. C. Kay “When enemies go viral (or not)—A real-time experiment during the ‘Stop Kony’ campaign,” Psychology of Popular Media Culture 5, no. 1 (2016): 15-26. http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-12883-001. 160 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 194. 161 Berardi. 162 Ford and Gill, 219 163 Jodi Dean, Blog Theory, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 26 164 Marcus Gilroy-Ware, Filling the Void, (London: Repeater Books, 2017), 92 165 Ford and Gill, 214 166 Ibid., 217 167 Benjamin, 106 168 Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, (London: Penguin Books, 1976). 167. 169 Ibid., 165 170 Benjamin, 113 171 Mitchell, 68-69 172 Ibid., 173 Ibid., 72 174 Lovink 175 KnowYourMeme, "Texts from Hillary,” KnowYourMeme, April 2012. knowyourmeme.com/memes/texts-from-hillary. Accessed 3 May. 2018 176 Franco Beradi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, (London: Verso, 2015). 22. 177 Olsen 178 Dewey 179 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (London: Verso, 2008). 23 180 Ibid., 26 181 Ibid., 27 182 Gilroy-Ware, 43 183 Olsen 184 Žižek, 30 185 Ibid., 31 186 Ibid., 32 187 Ibid., 33 188 Ibid. 189 Dean, 40

134

190 KnowYourMeme, "The Left Can’t Meme,” KnowYourMeme, 2018. knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-left-cant-meme. Accessed 7 May. 2018 191 Dean, 79 192 Seth Wheeler, "INTERVIEW WITH FRANCO ‘BIFO’ BERARDI," The White Review, February 2016. http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-franco-bifo-berardi/. 193 Katie Rogers, "Boaty McBoatface: What You Get When You Let the Internet Decide," New York Times, March 21, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/world/europe/boaty- mcboatface-what-you-get-when-you-let-the-internet-decide.html. 194 Matt Miller, "Where the “Spicy Boi” Meme Came From (and Why It’s Spamming Hillary Clinton’s Instagram)," Slate, July 21, 2016 http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2016/07/21/_spicy_boi_meme_floods_hillary_clinto n_s_instagram_tapping_into_the_anarchy.html. 195 Gilroy-Ware, 179 196 Jonah Peretti, “Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution,” Negations, 1996. http://archive.fo/1kiSQ. 1. 197 Ibid., 10.

135