I meet Dr. Idil Galip, founder of the Meme Studies Research Network and co-editor of Critical Meme Reader III, in the friendly cyberspace of a google doc. It feels fitting enough for an interview about internet culture and memes. Idil is an academic who lectures in new media and digital culture at the University of Amsterdam, and I have a lot of questions about memes.
The word meme was added to the dictionary in 2015, though most people today wouldn’t need to read the entry to identify one. The traditional definition of the term was coined in 1976 by horseman of the apocalypse and author of The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins. Idil explains that in the Dawkins tradition, memes “are cultural units that are remixed, replicated and circulated” and can be, for example, “an internet joke, a recipe, or the idea of ‘God’ itself.” This concept has since evolved to describe typically humorous or parodied content that is circulated online.
With the rapid development of technology, our daily lives are becoming increasingly entangled with the internet. It’s unsurprising that memes in their digital format have emerged as a dominant form of cultural communication. Idil muses, “Memes are like the trash of the internet. They are like spam or a chain e-mail.” In other words, they are ubiquitous in the online world. In the 2000s and 2010s memes were a fairly niche phenomenon, but “now every fan community, online group (even a group chat) has its own memefied culture.” The more we are dependent on the apparatus of the web, the more visible memes become in our culture.
Take the local example of @busspotteredinburghlothian on Instagram, an account that went viral for posting videos of Edinburgh buses edited in a thirst-trappy fashion. Idil responds, “It’s a surprise that a bus can be made to ‘look/feel’ sexy,” though, “memes become successful because they make you feel something.” Memes are funny and ironic, but there is also an emotional aspect to the way we interact with them. Idil continues, “I think these examples are the best bits of internet subcultures and the content economy, those that have a veneer of sincerity at least. Unlike Brat.”
Brat is a niche gone viral, and a fitting case study of when memes, or their mechanism, get hijacked and used by marketing campaigns or powerful political figures (looking at you NATO). I discuss why this might be the case with Edinburgh-based meme maker and artist @mirrorstage.instapage. Their username references Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’, the identification of one’s self in a mirror image. Mirrorstage’s work involves bringing memes into the physical world through painting and textile printing. They stress that “Memes have so much potential to connect people, so the fact that they can act as a message holds so much power in such dangerous spaces.” As long as they saturate our culture, memes are vulnerable to weaponisation by extremists, such as in the 2021 storming of the Capitol.
At the same time, memes may also provide a space for ‘radical imaginations’, in terms of their potential to be emancipatory, utopian, or liberating from this capitalist hellscape. But, as Idil points out, “Radical futures can also be horrible, it depends on what radicals do with it.” Memes are just memes – replications – they do not have an inherent radical potential. Techno-optimism may have held many people in the internet’s early days, viewing it “as a place of positive radical change, one that isn’t beholden to corporations.” Idil explains that this hope is now gone. “Today we see that turned on its head, with the rise of platforms. Instagram may well be inclined to say that memes help us envisage a radical future, but I would disagree with the idea that memes have some sort of revolutionary quality within them.”
Sometimes, it’s not that deep – or, rather, it’s about having a laugh at the expense of anything remotely deep. The creator of Glasgow-based meme account, @glasgowcellectuals shares that he made the account during the first COVID-19 lockdown, while having little to do and therefore getting into philosophy. The handle (an amalgamation of the words Glasgow, incel, and intellectual) captures what it means to be a self-aware, over-intellectualising incel who “spends the whole day on political Instagram.” Their memes are provocative, shitpost-y, and highly specific to Glasgow. Today it is run by three admins, a move made “so we could post more”, to please the algorithm. The creator explains that over time, some of the initial irony of the account died away. He laughs, saying that, at the end of the day, “It’s just a bunch of random losers who all had the same idea, like, let’s do this.”
Memes convey a dissonance of meanings, whether it’s a funny cat image, a critique of the art world, a Charli XCX reference, or alt-right figurehead Pepe the Frog. At their core, memes are defined by their tendency to spread and replicate. The algorithm is hungry for content, because posting means data extraction, which means profit. Although meme-making is a form of expression, which can be utopian or radical, the meme itself remains constrained by the context in which it is made and disseminated – aka its platform.
