Quickshot 4
The Law of Memes — Nothing Important Lasts Anymore.
“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”
― Jack Kerouac
There you have it, people. We officially live in a time when everything relevant enough ends up being turned into a meme, or a trend.
It used to be that curious things or embarrassing circumstances were picked up by people online to be funny. There was a genuine simplicity about it.
Now nothing is safe. The meme language has become so powerful and omnipresent that it’s actively sought out by all sorts of entities trying to become influential.
In this age of trend analytics, cold machines and robots, nothing important lasts too long before becoming a fad to milk dry, a meme, until its importance is exhausted and the idea gets thrown away into the sands of time.
Talk about 15 minutes of fame…
To a certain extent, culture has always moved in waves that compound on one another, every generation growing the seeds planted by the one before. It’s the nature of creativity. Ideas open up new possibilities and they are fully explored until there is nothing left to give, so a new wave comes along to fulfil the creative drive.
But what is happening right now takes this simple matter of fact to the most extreme consequences.
In this landscape of lightspeed distributed culture, there are billions of people online at all times, sharing and recreating material faster than anytime before. Things get created, blown up, processed, repurposed and thrown out at a velocity that’s hard to keep up with.
Memes are the universal language of this collective worldwide culture. Spongebob and Palpatine now carry the weight of cultural evolution. Maybe it’s not what the forefathers of the internet had hoped for, but it’s still something.
Memes have a very short life span, usually. Just about two or three months at best. And since they have become the factual building blocks of a new linguistic experiment, precisely because of their versatility and disposableness, everyone is on a race to capture the next meme sensation or to even become it, in order to obtain some influence in the public discourse.
Cringey parades of try hards flock abundantly to the web, in vain attempts to promote themselves using the language of memes. Brands, artists, politicians and other figures happily throw their personalities away to get on with the kids and the dankest trends.
But all in all this behaviour would just remain cringey, and not dangerous, if not for the fact that it seems to work many of the times, and has programmed every digitally conscious person to treat everything like a fad.
If you want to get noticed you have to adopt the language of the moment, even if it looks insincere and tone deaf. You have to take your idea and push it out fast, now, and you better be quirky and funny too. There is no limit to what you can do, accepting that you only have two weeks to live and die if you’re lucky, and you shouldn’t take yourself too seriously.
Every occurrence, from the release of a movie to social activism, must become an online campaign with a clear identity and all the features of a good meme. The ones that succeed truly become parts of the shared online language, but lose their own original identity. What made them stand out in the first place. They become decontextualized, repurposed and used for nothing else than jokes and meaningless comparisons.
Everything can be a meme, and everything can exist on the same level of dispassionate humour. A Starbucks cup in GOT? Meme. Spiderman? Meme. Brexit? Meme. Even fucking climate change is becoming a meme now. Everything is kind of the same, down in the depths of sarcasm.
Things end up losing depth and significance, in favour of short term virality.
Ideas that have real value and deserve to breathe get assimilated in the most cynical of ways because they only work to showcase how in tune with the times whoever is using them is.
They become blind hot topics to chat about, joke about and then discard. By anyone. Even when it looks astoundingly hypocritical.
Seeing Facebook embracing privacy, or Burger King veganism, or Star Wars feminism is disrespectful to those causes, damaging and insulting.
Maybe memes still are the way we cope with reality, turning information into funny little jokes. But it’s a long way until they can become a mature enough language to discuss the most important themes of our lives with the necessary complexity and nuance.
It’s too soon to say, but I think we’ll get there.
Because you know, I’m something of a socially conscious kid myself.
