The Memeing of Life
By now everyone knows what a meme is. You can't look at a Facebook feed, a twitter stream or a tumblr ….tumble without seeing them. Usually echoing your politics back to you with a witty or pithy phrase in big white letters. Sometimes with some pseudo profound snippet of wisdom over an image of Native Americans that's so inane it makes you want to swallow your mobile phone, whole. They're often funny, humour is like a delivery system for the idea encapsulated in it and they're very often effective because of the sensation, when you see them, that somebody else feels like you. Or a lot of people feel like you and someone's managed to sum you up in that amusing, looping giff. Ain't life simpler that way?
Some memes go more viral than others and so a group of wags on the Reddit and 4 Chan websites created a meme stock exchange to track the popularity of various memes online, which became a meme itself. A meta meme. This stock exchange, like many memes, began as an in-joke but has since been taken on and developed into an actual stock exchange that uses an algorithm to apply a value to memes based on their popularity, growth and user ratings. It doesn't use 'real' money but a self contained currency and the developers of it see it as a monitor of cultural, rather than economic, value. So, although the exchange has no financial value (currently) it could be said to be an abstracted measure of a meme's cultural impact or influence. And memes can certainly have that. In the political realm Momentum used memes effectively during the 2017 election campaign and, on the other side of the spectrum, the Pepe the Frog meme can be said to have helped in the rise of the Alt-Right and Donald Trump.
Of course, the thing about an in-joke is it's not so much fun when everyone else starts getting in on the joke so the originators of the 'joke' version of the stock exchange declared it dead once it became more popular and 'normies' (normal internet users) started using it. But as so often happens with the things we create they can have an awkward tendency to take on a life of their own.
The concept of the meme didn't originally have anything to do with the internet. It began as a theory of Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book the Selfish Gene. Dawkins couldn't quite square the idea of religions and other ideologies with his overarching theory that genes, via the organisms that they comprise, 'want' to self perpetuate. Religions and ideologies make organisms (us) behave in ways that do the opposite of that, they might demand celibacy or make us drink the kool aid. Why would this be if our biology drives us toward reproduction of our DNA? Enter the meme. Dawkins suggested that as well as genes there are also memes, that operate like social genes. A meme might be as simple as a gesture but could be as big as, say, the Catholic Church – a memetic structure – the power of which can supersede the supposed selfishness of the organism. Others have suggested that Gods are memetic entities. The personifications of ideas that in some way transcend our biological imperative and can make us behave in ways that otherwise seem inexplicable to Richard Dawkins.
The meme economy stock exchange - the NASDANQ – as well as mimicking the 'real' stock market in terms of a 'stock' rising and falling is similar in other ways. The stock market is not a real reflection of a things actual value. It takes a thing of real value – an operational business, a commodity - and then applies an artificial value to it. It fictionalises it and this can cause all manner of tulip bubbles and Great Depressions. This danger of the artificial value running out of control is reflected in a meme's meaning running out of control, which happens with more regularity than the originators of the memes – like the originators of the joke meme exchange – would like. When this happens the meme can turn from an amusing, ironic joke into a horrific reality in the real world.
The Slenderman, a long, spindly child abductor thing is one example. Inspired, in part, by H.P Lovecraft, the meme began on the something awful internet forum in 2009. It quickly went viral spawning variations of fan art, videos, and eventually a movie. In 2014 two girls in Wisconsin, U.S of A, stabbed another girl 19 times. Once arrested they claimed that they did it as a ritual to become proxies of the Slenderman. They'd become scared that the character was going to kill their families if they didn't do it.
There have been other incidents too. The meme was blamed when a 14 year old burned his house down with his family inside and in 2015 a suicide epidemic on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation was said to have been influenced by the meme. Interestingly the Oglala Sioux tribe that live on the reservation believe in a 'suicide spirit' they call the Tall Man, similar to the Slenderman.
Those memetic entities have a way of hanging around, I guess.
Another out of control meme has more recently been in the press after some bottled up, wanker drove a truck into a bunch of people in Toronto. Alek Minassian associated himself with an internet group known as Incel. Incel, a shortening of Involuntary Celibate, developed from an internet meme.
The loosely associated group comprise of a bunch of sad acts who can't get laid who've decided it's everyone else's fault. Especially women's fault. They say rape is 'just sex' and call men and women who can get laid Chads and Stacys. They complain about 'reverse rape'. That is, being denied sex that they want, which they say causes as much harm as rape. They laud other mass killers who often seem to share a similar hatred of women cause none of them like them and IT'S NOT FAIR! The Virginia tech shooter harrassed women on campus before he shot loads of people. Adam Laza, the Sandy Hook shooter, complained that all 'women were inherantly selfish' before he selflessly shot loads of kids. On the subreddit forum where the group used to hang out the Incel group called another shooter, Elliot Rodger, who'd whined about girls not liking him, St Elliot.
And the group isn't just a handful of chinbeards wanking into each others socks. At its height it had 40,000 'people' on the forum.
But all of this started as a joke and, ironically, by a woman. The woman, known as Alana, created the Incel meme in 1993, while at University, as a self effacing statement about her own involuntary celibacy – Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project.
She later forgot about it but while she was away the later, largely male, users also used the meme as a humourous, self parody. Good humouredly mocking themselves, their virginity and their lack of social skill.
Somewhere along the world wide web way though this morphed into the militant expression of the pathetic that has since caused misery and bloodshed. Alana, horrified by what's developed from her creation lamented “I can't uninvent this word nor restrict it to the nicer people who need it'.
It also reveals another kind of meme exchange. In a recent post I talked about the potential ramifications of the #metoo meme and how the revolution that seems to have been started by that could fall in a number of, as yet unknown, directions, not all of them good. One effect of that meme-instigated revolution though is to make a lot of men, particularly entitled, insecure, young men, feel that their privileged social status is now under threat. An obvious result of that is, in some people, a crystallisation of intense misogyny and hatred. Which isn't to say I think the #metoo movement (if it can be called that) should stop in any way. It means the Incel mob should probably just all get together and have a big group wank and fuck each other so they don't get in anyone else's way. Broadly speaking the rest of us can do without them, however good at World of Warcraft they might be.
Of course in the world of memes there's another irony in me writing this and you now knowing about it, if you didn't already. The meme and its ability to spread has no moral component. If something spreads it spreads. There is no mechanism to account for whether the thing spreading is good or bad, it's indiscriminate. So talking about it is spreading it. In the meme exchange, just as in the equally amoral 'real' stock exchange, the bad thing happening can raise its market value just as much as the good. Probably, in our sensationalised world, even more so. Slenderman and Incel in the market sense of the word, have a higher value when these tragedies happen. And I (for writing it) and you (for reading it) just made that worse.
BUY! BUY! SELL! SELL!