The Power of Memes

Online humor and the battleground of ideas

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The Power of Memes

The internet meme is the most powerful and accessible form of communication in the 21st century. They’re accessible, compact, and allow our ever-shortening attention span to engage with complex and confusing issues. Memes show the absurdity of human nature.

Iconoclast movements have been built on memes. Fortunes have been made on memes. They fill our group chats. They fill our camera rolls. We create them. and curate them. And we understate just how much of a cultural impact they have.

The 20th century has seen an exponential growth in media technology. Providing, with each new medium, a different lens to entertain, conceptualize, and explore our culture and its idiosyncrasies.

As different types of media formats propagate, a natural entropy occurs, selecting for our dwindling attention spans and addiction to “bites” of information.

Many of us struggle to get through a film from the 50's or 60's. The pacing is slow, the audio feels tinny and antiquated. Even with a thrilling plot or exceptional acting, we often force ourselves through the story.

In our age of shortened attention spans and decision paralysis — we have thousands of daily options to entertain ourselves — the meme has become the perfect vehicle for revealing complex truths of human nature.

Because we lack the attention span to spend hours reading or exploring those “gut” feelings through film and education, we turn to memes.

You’re Living In The Meme Economy

Any attempt to explain the joke, only causes it to lose its potency. You either get the meme or you don’t. And those who get it are part of a distinct club.

Take the Midwit IQ Bell Curve Meme. The low IQ dummy and the high IQ savant share the same basic opinion, while the average IQ midwit attempts, in vain, to justify their opinion with “facts and logic”.

This meme speaks to the innate recognition that those who attempt to overanalyze simple behaviors and actions are grating and annoying. It reflects the common opinion that few people are more irritating than the midwit who thinks they’re smarter than they are.

Because we’re flooded with hundreds of thousands of images daily, we’re forced to establish a symbolic relationship with the world. Over time, these images form a structural representation of a certain type of person, place, or scenario. Memes encapsulate these millions of inputs into a succinct, funny, and easy-to-digest format.

A good meme is a 500-page book, a graduate thesis, and a dozen films all rolled into one symbol.

And every movement needs its symbols.

In the digital age, memes have become the banner of political movements and subcultures. Ideologies engage in war with memes as the weapon.

Millions, for example, have dedicated time on Reddit and X to criticizing the opposing side’s humor and meme symbology. Browse through r/therightcantmeme and r/theleftcantmeme and you’ll see both spectrums of the collective unconscious at war. A grasping at the ideological foundation beneath the humor and “shitposting” that signifies our online discourse.

“Getting the joke” is a sign of intelligence and wit, and when you prove the other side is too stupid to understand the logic of their own memes, you win a small victory in the ideological war.

The Dissident Right is a perfect example of a political movement built through memes.

Skeptics of Democracy, proponents of a Nietzschian “will to power” and opposed to the Christian Rights moralism and religiosity, the “Frogs, as they have come to be known online, have adopted “Pepe”, a cartoon frog, as their symbol. Because of their politically incorrect views and ideology, the anonymous characters of the Dissident Right have decided that a war of imagery is how they will fold people into their cause.

And it’s working.

Like many subcultures before them, the transgressive, ironic imagery associated with the cute Pepe caricature has created an air of mystique and interest around their ideas, with mainstream journalists writing long-winded think pieces on the movement’s attachment to its imagery.

Alternatively, the chronically online Crypto community has used memes to great effect to make quick fortunes. “The coin is only as good as the meme”, is a common saying, reflecting that the humorous narrative is far more important in many crypto circles than the utility of the project itself. When Elon Musk adopted a Shibu Inu puppy, a crypto project called $SHIB launched to capitalize, running the value of the coin into the stratosphere. The viral coin was short-lived. But those who caught on quickly and rode the narrative first, capitalized, multiplying their initial investment by the thousands.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump has also made memes and humor a central part of his campaign. Whether you like his views or not, there is no denying that his use of humor as a form of political messaging has lit a fire under his supporters. His recent depictions of Joe Biden being escorted into “White House Senior Living”, are objectively funny, and mark a turning point in American political strategy.

Don’t Overlook the Power of Memes

As Philosopher Marshall McLuhan said in the mid-20th century, “The medium is the message”. And the medium of the meme is the message of the 21st century. It is how the masses grasp the lunacy, chaos, cultural trends, and neurosis of American life.

Not everyone can read a 500-page book or watch a documentary series, but we all have the time for memes.

Next time you see a meme, try and read into the layers of subject beneath the image. See its depth and understand it for what it is; an efficient, potent, and unique form of communication that allows us to wage intellectual war.

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As always, thanks for reading

-Joe