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November 4, 2024 - 6:30pm
Over the weekend, what appeared to be an Iranian news agency account posted online what can only be described as a cutesy infographic for a missile. It didn’t look like the usual military imagery, more a cross between something your politically engaged little sister would post to her Instagram story and a Coachella poster. The tweet caption read (in Arabic): “Hajj Qassem missile…the missile designed to target ‘Israel’.” The post’s slick graphics and engagement-optimised formatting exemplified something increasingly true about our global political landscape: to be heard above the cacophony of distractions, politics must — and increasingly does — speak in memes.
Our current information landscape reveals this dynamic everywhere. When the war in Ukraine started in 2022, the country’s official Twitter account posted numerous memes, including one from The Simpsons, about the conflict. Just last week, the Catholic Church unveiled “Luce”, an anime girl mascot who instantly went viral and spawned an entire ecosystem of fan art. As Mary Harrington observed, the demographic shrewdness of the Vatican evoking anime aesthetics was almost irrelevant. Luce succeeded because she possessed raw memetic power, something which the Bible is lacking these days. The mascot’s ability to generate engagement and inspire derivative content was more salient than anything else.
The recent controversy about rumours of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eating dogs and cats is another example of why memes matter. The story began with a viral X post and gained momentum through high-engagement Facebook posts. The claim’s truthfulness was secondary to its shareability, which hinged in part on its “emotional truth”. Its memetic power eventually drove it from X and Facebook to the presidential debate stage, forcing responses from Ohio’s Governor and the White House. When vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance urged followers to “keep the cat memes flowing”, he acknowledged this new reality: in modern politics, memetic reach is invaluable.
In a Missouri State Journal interview, Dr Brian Ott explains just how much our media landscape has transformed in recent years. Just as television once collapsed the boundary between entertainment and news by forcing serious journalism to compete with sitcoms, social media has created what Ott calls “a giant river of stuff”— a single algorithmic feed where congressional hearings and war footage compete with mukbang for attention. It’s television, which itself created the 24-hour news cycle, on steroids.
This shift is quantifiable: Pew Research reports that 39% of adults under 30 now get their news primarily from TikTok. And while TikTok has been perhaps unfairly characterised as “brain rot”, it’s true that you need a hook to make sure people don’t keep swiping. Ott says that “memes are not an argument.” Maybe not — but they aren’t meaningless, either.
In this landscape, even seemingly apolitical viral content inevitably becomes political. When P’Nut, a squirrel with half a million Instagram followers, was euthanised by New York state authorities a few days ago, the tragedy instantly transformed into a partisan battleground. Republicans were some of P’Nut’s biggest defenders, and he became a symbol of Left-wing bureaucratic overreach.
There’s one way in which this is a meaningful change. Research suggests memes function as a new form of political organisation, creating communities that can rapidly mobilise around shared meanings and grievances. That is to say: it’s not just people up in arms over silly, ephemeral things. It’s a legitimate tool. As politics becomes increasingly memetic, meme-makers increasingly turn to politics, too.
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SubscribeI think that the author here gets one thing – people involved in politics and even war these days are putting increasing energy into memes – but I think she is exaggerating the actual importance of said memes, and missing the fact that meme-makijg is often a refuge for the impotent.
The Vatican’s “Luce” meme is, afaik, being panned by serious Christians who know full well that a religion only has strength when calls on people – especially young people – to get OUT of the memespace of the present and focus on ancient traditions and longer-lasting things in general. The P’Nut memes are a good way to wallow in rage at the administrative state, but I don’t foresee them leading to a change in whatever New York state law allowed the safety people to euthanize P-Nut the Squirrel without a proper hearing. And Iran’s missile memes are trying to cover for the fact that Iran’s actual missiles have almost all gotten shot down by Israel.
Granted, you can argue it’s a good thing that Iran is contenting itself with memes after its recent missile barges failed, and that a surfeit of meme energy is a worthwhile price to pay for a more peaceful world in real life.
For what it’s worth, I’ve argued before that the cold conflict between Iran and Israel, and also most of the other great power conflicts today, are unlikely to explode into open war because the great powers are too far apart and modern weapons systems favor the defender:
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/why-im-still-not-worried-about-world
Hard geographic realities like this, and not the meme war, are what I think will decide the outcomes of today’s geopolitical contests. But if a missile meme can help Iranians put up with the situation, then I’m not complaining.
‘Political careers increasingly begin with viral moments rather than policy expertise’
Maybe so, but that doesn’t end well.
‘Iran is now conducting foreign policy through memes’
Fundamentally this is what Geopolitics has been reduced to, globally. Twitter battles between states.
I wonder if this is why the UN doesn’t get anywhere with anything. They are just trading memes and insults across the room on their phones. It would explain why the lack of coherent, useful policy that actually works in real life I suppose.
,’ the country’s official Twitter account posted numerous memes, including one from The Simpsons, about the conflict.’
I was reading an article along these lines the other day, with the heading: Through the looking glass. It also quoted the simpsons.
‘On one level, the entire US election echoes The Simpsons: “OK, here’s what we’ve got: the Rand Corporation, in conjunction with the Saucer People, under the supervision of the reverse vampires, are forcing our parents to go to bed early in a fiendish plot to eliminate the meal of dinner. We are through the looking-glass here people.”’
Indeed we are.
‘ When P’Nut, a squirrel with half a million Instagram followers, was euthanised by New York state authorities a few days ago, the tragedy instantly transformed into a partisan battleground. Republicans were some of P’Nut’s biggest defenders, and he became a symbol of Left-wing bureaucratic overreach.’
That either of those quotes could belong in a fictional Simpsons episode, but only one does, is surreal.
‘ Research suggests memes function as a new form of political organisation, creating communities that can rapidly mobilise around shared meanings and grievances. That is to say: it’s not just people up in arms over silly, ephemeral things. It’s a legitimate tool’
Maybe we should disband all the massive global institutions, maybe our governments too, and sort everything out via memes and social media. It may even work better. It wouldn’t exactly be hard to do better than they are doing at this point surely.