The year was 2016. The month, February. And against all rhyme or reason, a poll released by Public Policy Polling confirmed the worst: 38 percent of Floridians genuinely believed Ted Cruz could be the Zodiac Killer-a serial killer who operated in northern California in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
It was a loss for Ted Cruz, and perhaps the collective intelligence of Florida, but it was a win for the part of the internet that focuses on churning out inexplicable, hilarious, US election memes. They ruthlessly mocked up so many ‘Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer’ images that, despite the fact that Cruz wasn’t even born when the Zodiac Killer first killed, people actually, really, genuinely believed them.
This is not the only reason the US election is shaping up to be a truly wonderful clusterfuck of shitty screenshots, poor photoshops, and iconic Tweets, but it’s one of the funniest. And it certainly confirms one powerful truth: internet culture is changing the nature of political discourse. Millenials have developed a new language - a new way to undermine or support political candidates. This language is ‘memes’. And it delights me.
As everyone is aware, I’m sure, we live in a digital age. Communication has transcended actually having to physically avoid the people you don’t like and into the realm of simply leaving their messages unread for days at a time. If you see something cool you can share it to all five of your top-used social networks with strategic hashtags, rather than needing to send your mate from Nelson a detailed description via carrier pigeon. And if you harass a politician enough on Twitter, they’ll end up responding.
In our modern, internet saturated era, the barriers between the proletariat and the elite have been broken down, allowing two-way communication and genuine debate. Most importantly, the use of humour to ruthlessly critique aspects of policy and target factually incorrect notions has resulted in the widespread proliferation of digitally altered images amongst the millennial generation. Memes.
I think everyone knows what a meme is - according to urban dictionary, memes are “popular quotes, images, and real people, which are copied, imitated, and spread all over the internet”. But to understand why memes have developed into a such a savage form of political critique, let’s briefly trace the way meme culture has developed in recent years.
In the first Great Rising of the Meme, there were two cornerstones upon which the majority of ‘internet speak’ and 9gag content rested: rage comics and image macros. The former refers the few-frame stick-figure based comics used to demonstrate ‘teh lolworthy’ ~random~ things that happened in a person’s day-to-day life.
Rage comics are objectively terrible; the kind of terrible that makes you feel secondhand embarrassment for whoever thought that their awful, fake story was witty enough to be shared with the greater public. But in 2008 the faces of rage comics were beloved, and people would unironically say ‘me gusta’ and ‘le’ instead of ‘the’. Some even got them tattooed on their actual, real, human bodies. Permanently.
The second cornerstone, image macros, are a bit less terrible and are still in use today (although mostly incorrectly, and mostly by boomers who didn’t think to check with anyone who actually uses the internet before they printed off their shitty, incorrect meme and hung it in the office kitchen). They are a collection of recognisable images and their recognisable text structures used to quickly and succinctly tell a funny anecdote.
If we go by the chronology established by website ‘Know Your Meme’, image macros began with ‘demotivational posters’, developed into ‘LOLcats’, and eventuated into ‘Advice Animals’ and the like. Classic examples include Foul Bachelor Frog, Socially Awkward Penguin, and Bad Luck Brian.
Like many things on the internet, the popularity of these memes started on Reddit or Tumblr, trickled into 9gag, and eventually found their final resting place on Facebook, where they died - because what happens once memes become exploited on Facebook? They instantly become uncool.
Eventually, the distribution of memes on Facebook reached critical mass, weighted too heavily on the side of ‘uncool’. Thus, as a new decade begun, the First Great Memepire perished in the hellfire of gut-wrenching, overpowering embarrassment.
But memes were to have a second wind, one that took into account the deep shame associated with the aforementioned style of memes. Thus, modern memes, instead of focusing on earnest, sincere humour, are a satire of the traditional meme: deliberately unfunny, deliberately shit, and deliberately churned out at the speed of light.
A recent but perfectly apt example of a modern meme is ‘dat boi’ - an image of a frog on a unicycle, accompanied by the phrase “here come dat boi!!!!!! o shit waddup!” There is absolutely no reason for it to be funny, but it is; and the various iterations of his character only intensify the absurd hilarity. I’ve had a few people tell me they “don’t get it” - and that’s the point. No one gets it. It’s not funny. It’s so unfunny that it’s funny. The appropriate way to describe such a meme is ‘dank’.
Why the hell are you giving me the history of memes, I can hear you asking, I seriously don’t want to be reminded of the horror that is FFFUUUUUUUU. And I understand. But I promise you, it’s important - and the most important part is the relationship between Meme Phase I and Meme Phase II. The way memes died and rose again, similar to Jesus, is what allows us to understand the way memes have developed in US politics.
In endeavouring to explain why, exactly, the backlash against the first great meme rising resulted in the meme culture we see today, there are two theories that I find particularly useful.
The first theory (which is mine, because who in the hell else has thought about memes this much and then actually wanted to put pen to paper) is that this development is, in part, a defense mechanism. If we think about two of the great fears of humanity (aside from death and all that existential shit) - not being funny, and being embarrassed - it makes considerable sense. We look back at rage comics and cringe; we feel an ache deep in our chests when someone types out ‘*le me, looking at batman comics*’ on Facebook. It’s primal; it’s instinctual - we will do anything not to be the subject of that embarrassment, and the easiest way to do that is to make fun of it.
In short, as aptly put by Coldplay, when you try your best and you don’t succeed, the internet will ruthlessly mock you for it. With the fear of that looming over you, your best choice is to not really try at all.
The second, perhaps more useful theory (which actually isn’t really mine; it’s based on a textpost meme I saw on Tumblr once) is based on the idea of collective humour. Think about your friend group - it’s a mess of in-jokes, weird things you find funny, and that cute but ultimately misguided belief that your group’s brand of humour is original or even ‘the best’, right? The same thing is happening with internet meme culture. The further the internet collectively goes down the rabbit hole of unfunny images, the more people feel included. They understand the subculture; they’re part of the clique. An aspect of this culture is the snowballing of memes until the layers are near-impenetrable to the average person; if you do understand the meme, you feel special.
While memes have gotten shittier and shittier, and therefore funnier and funnier, they’ve also gotten harder and harder to interpret; so, like any clique, if someone tries to interfere with your clique and join in without understanding the context or niche brand of humour that underpins it, you’re going to be less than impressed.
If you want your meme to be truly dank, there are a lot of levels to consider. Chances are many of them are aspects you’ve intuitively absorbed while browsing the internet; but some people, like US presidential candidates, have had no such exposure. What a shame for them.
At some point along the democratic candidacy race, a meme emerged that used a comparison chart template to juxtapose Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. By taking a simple catch phrase or pop culture tidbit and explaining how each candidate would respond, the internet collectively painted Bernie as cool and hip, and Hillary as lame and try-hard.
This meme is indicative of the way the internet meme culture perceives Hillary and Bernie; and the simple reason why is that Hillary actually did try too hard. At the beginning of her race, she started trying to use memes and catchphrases to appear cool to millennials; and at first, it worked. Then her ‘cool mom’ became condescending, her memes came too close to the burning fire started by a thousand rage comics, and it seems that all at once the internet started making fun of her.
A particularly illustrative example comes in the form of a Hillary snapchat that went viral for no reason other than it was embarrassing. A simple two-frame snap, it started with a close up of a cringey ‘Chillary Clinton’ beer cooler and ended with a too-close selfie shot of Hillary saying “I’m just chilling in Cedar Rapids”. Once it was posted on Vine, it exploded into meme-fodder for young internet users, who dominate the Vine platform, and left Hillary little more than the subject of a really funny joke.
In comparison, Bernie has not tried to use memes to get to Da Youth; he speaks of issues that young people care about instead of focusing on how to communicate these issues. There was That One Time a bird flew over to his lectern, but short of releasing a simple illustration in response, it was never something he tried to capitalise on. By not bothering to create his own meme content, he managed to avoid the vicious mockery that the candidates that did try experienced. Today, his irreverence is immortalised by the Facebook group, Bernie Sanders’ Dank Meme Stash.
As for the Republican candidates, well, the content writes itself. Jeb Bush saying “please clap” to his audience; Donald Trump being the walking personification of a piece of old chewing gum; Ben Carson trying to rap; Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz being unable to hold hands and instead flailing awkwardly as they confirmed their running partnership just a day before Cruz pulled out. In all of their awful, sickening attempts to appeal to the Youth of Today, they managed to alienate an entire generation of photoshop-happy meme-loving fucks, when what they really needed to do was speak some sense about student loan debt and reclaiming the memes of production.
I can tell that you have at least two points to raise about this assessment: first, well, actual politics matter, right? Second, who gives a flying fuck about what happens on the depths of Tumblr? Well, you can thank the online media for helping me to answer both of these points.
Modern online media is pretty heavily user-driven. Due to a culling of public-media resources and an ever-growing focus on churning out as much clickbait as humanly possible, longform journalism is often hidden from sight or simply not resourced - that’s why Buzzfeed only posts clickbait articles on its Facebook page despite employing a fair few investigative journalists and personal essay-ists. Journalists, under pressure and under paid, rely on the internet to help them get content quickly and easily.
Think about it - Stuff writes articles based on old Reddit threads; Buzzfeed makes lists comprising nothing but Tumblr posts; the Dom Post regularly nabs its ideas from Facebook page Vic Deals. The internet is where the media finds its content.
But, if we nuance this and tease it out further, the internet is why it writes certain content. All the media ever wants is salience in the eyes of its user-base; and modern internet culture, with its lightening-fast, explosive manner of creating “viral” memes, is the perfect way for media to jump on the bandwagon. They don’t write about in-depth policy nearly as much as they write about what’s #hot and #now, because that doesn’t generate them the views that their ad-based revenue model survives on.
Thus, when memes like the Bernie v Hillary explode, the online media machine writes about it, thereby increasing the reach of its core assumption: that Bernie is cool and Hillary is not. Irrespective of political views, there’s no way you can deny that online platforms consider Bernie the cool dude, even if they embark in no analysis that will substantiate it. These articles are then posted back on sites like Reddit and Tumblr, memed because they either a) back up the internet’s opinion, or b) completely misinterpret a heavily satirical post/meme. It’s a never ending, circle jerking, reinforcing meme wheel.
The question I have now is how this evolution will play out in real election terms. A lot of the internet users who create this content are under 18, and therefore not actually able to vote; but as they age, I wonder how it will affect political campaigns and election outcomes.
Finally, there’s a place for the teen or the disenfranchised Young Adult. While political candidates have long treated us like an untappable demographic, too consumed with our mobile phones to pay attention to the real important stuff, like detailed policy documents, 2016 is the year it’s finally coming back to bite them. Because it’s in these phones and amongst this demographic that the content that’s spiraling out of control on our screens is created - it’s Vine, and Snapchat, and Tumblr, and Instagram, and whatever other platform you can think of.
When you think about it, satire and irony have always, always been part of politics; the only thing that’s changing is the way that they’re created and interpreted. Move over political cartoons, make way for the political meme. The political party (here or otherwise) that truly manages to grasp the culture that surrounds memes will be the one that finally taps into the nebulous ~youth vote~.
But the party that tries and fails will be well and truly fucked, and all we’ll be thanking them for is the memeries.