On Memes

From 2021

My generation is the most online yet, most of us having very little memory of the world before the dominance of smartphones. I personally was born the same year as the Iphone was released, but still have faint memories of life before the product was common. I think there is a legitimate debate to be had about whether smartphones have been a net good or ill for society, a debate on which I don’t know what side to fall. My point is that in fact, for good or ill, there is an extremely large portion of Gen Z that is online almost constantly.

And among that extremely online group has arisen a culture that, though well known to most people, is almost indescribable to anyone foreign to it. All we really have is a name: Meme Culture. Wikipedia has good a page on memes, defining them as using A) “creative reproduction of materials” and B) “intertextuality”. If, like me, you were unaware of the existence of the word “intertextuality”, it’s apparently the relationship between different texts, or as another wikipedia page puts it,an audience's interpretation of the text”. So a meme is a mashup of different preexisting creative materials with various cultural references that turns out to be funny (in theory).

But the culture around memes is much harder to pin down, and not only explains a lot about Gen Z but shows how to rally its masses, or rather, crudely inform.

The reason I write this largely comes out of an incident that occurred a few days ago as I walked to a classroom. A cross country teammate stopped me and held out an imaginary microphone, of the sort used in news interviews, and asked me this question:

“Is Taiwan a country?”

I responded, quite seriously, in the affirmative. He shook his head slowly. I don’t know of any large American political cohorts that believes Taiwan should belong to China, with the possible exception of Fortune 500 CEOs and movie stars, but I worried that he belonged to such a cohort I wasn't aware of. But then he said “minus 10,000 social credits”. It’s a joke. This is the second definition of “Meme.” A corny and tired observation about middle class life with a still image of Spongebob making a semi-relevant face is a meme. But so is, apparently, China’s social credit system. The word meme refers not only to a singular meme as defined earlier, but a large group of those making variations on the same joke. Familiarity with major memes, in the latter sense, is what makes memes not just a form of joke but the basis for a culture.

Back to China. I obviously am no expert, but it seems to me that the biggest problem in the world right now is China. I just don’t see anywhere else anything akin to their crimes anywhere else by anyone as powerful. I don’t see any other nation I think might be willing to start a war with another super power. And on top of all that, our economic mutualism has made it ridiculously difficult to get people at the top of society to condemn them. For better or worse, most certainly the latter, I think, but that's beside the point, the political views of many people are informed by those at the top of society, i.e., celebrities. So while there are plenty people my age extremely informed about the supposed evils of, say, a slight difference in tax policy that doesn't matter much in reality to anybody, most are whistling past the graveyard when it comes to the gun China is holding to Taiwan’s head, or the fate of China’s Uighurs.

The worst example yet of celebrity adherence to the Chinese government’s dictates came a few months ago with John Cena’s self-humiliating apology in Mandarin for... referring to Taiwan as a country. It is from here I believe the meme referenced earlier started. Many iterations of the meme make fun of John Cena. How and when it gained traction I don't know, but I first heard of it when Pewdiepie rated it as highly as possible in a “Meme Review” video. I understand that Pewdiepie perhaps isn't the most influential Youtuber anymore, but he chases what is relevant, and the video as of this writing has 3.6 million views. How many of those viewers came knowing crap about China? Not a relatively high amount, I’d venture to guess. How many viewers came out without a lower view of China? Similarly low, I believe. What are the chances that kid from cross country had heard of Taiwan before the meme?

Now, am I saying memes on the net are a positive thing? No, that would be preposterous. They are as easily if not more easily put to use in the service of ill causes. And of course, viewers even of memes I like, such as the social credit meme, don’t necessarily come out with a well-informed, balanced, and nuanced view (not that there is too much room for nuance over genocide). Would I rather more of gen z take a harder line against China than to mock it in memes? Yes, just like I’d take a billion dollars over a hundred million. My point is that the way to get the support of gen z is through the meme and its culture, like it or not.

Just look at Ben Shapiro. Regardless of what you think of him, he is an interesting case study. You will be surprised by the number of kids at public schools, who aren't necessarily from conservative families, that know who he is. He does have a number of things working for him, being so talented at what he does. But I believe a lot of his success among people my age has to do with his, or the people who work for hims’, fluency in meme culture. He is on all social media platforms, including TikTok, and makes use of functions that allow him to post short clips that don’t stretch the attention span of younger viewers. His youtube videos contain memes spliced in between segments of him talking. He dedicates some entire videos to memes, though not many. He’s been turned into a meme himself. “Thug Life” memes show him saying a particularly memorable line, then pause the screen, turn it black and white, and superimpose a pair of sunglasses and cigar over his face. A year old video of him preparing a turkey for thanksgiving is entitled “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS a Turkey with Facts and Logic”. These are not all memes, per se, but they are meme adjacent. It is meme culture. If he is not necessarily making conservatives out of teenagers right and left, he is positioning his ideas so that some of them begin to be viewed as reasonable by youth. Because he does not appear to them as entirely from a different world, as would, say, a cable news host.

Shapiro understands the culture of the youth, at least to an extent, and that explains his relative success with them. Likewise, the rise of social credit memes have raised a kind of awareness among some parts of teenage culture as to the CCP. My point is not complicated. Inroads with my generation by groups and causes now apparently alien to it can be made, through master of the meme.