Are We Living in a Meme Matrix?
Teach Us About COVID-19, Baby Yoda Can
It’s the dawn of a new decade, and the meme has become the reigning medium of our time…
Anxiety Goes Viral
It is reasonable to presume we are on course toward a future conjured entirely of millisecond commotions. One moment, we will run in panic as World War III is on the horizon. Then, we will prepare for an international pandemic of catastrophic proportions. But just as immediately, we will watch some Disney+, and forget each crises completely.
This will be a world that searches only for instant gratification, a brave new world millions entered in the early weeks of 2020.
On January 3rd, U.S Selective Service shut down its website, as it was overwhelmed with young men wanting to know about the much-discussed draft for war with Iran.
As frantically as they scrolled through their news feeds to find out the fate of a doomed Pax Americana, little did these men know military conscription no longer exists in the United States, and will probably never be needed given our robust all-volunteer army.
Tensions (as always) eased between the U.S and Iran, as war (much less a world war) was always unlikely.
**POST-PANDEMIC EDIT: The only substantive reason for keeping the following passages on the COVID-19 outbreak is that I believe in the value of documentation.
The following figures and opinions are not only extremely outdated, but highly inaccurate. I keep them up as a record of how our situation and understanding of the virus have evolved rapidly over time. ***
Soon after, mass anxiety shifted to COVID-19. Stock markets made their biggest declines since the 2008 Financial Crisis. Men and women began wearing face masks, cancelling travel plans (including tech conferences), and even stopped going to work or school.
The economic toll was staggering but mostly psychological: about 80% of all cases of the virus are in China, while the remainder spread across 100 countries. The seasonal flu is still more dangerous than the coronavirus, something unlikely to spread widely within the states.
These are the byproducts of a society anxiously concerned with circumstances that will probably never effect them.
They are also how our world will one day dwell in nothing but the meme matrix. It is expanding and grows more powerful through each post. Both news events shall dissipate — as many others have — like tides of thoughts subsiding one after another.
“Have You Been Seeing All the Memes?”
At first glance, memes will seem like trivial updates to your news feed, but in reality, they’re a global competition of public messaging: who can make the funniest post and go viral? Like a fun-house mirror at the carnival of internet, it’s become a distorted reflection of reality itself.
“The number one reason they’re sharing memes is to make people laugh.” — YPulse Insights
Memes are opinions that thrive on hyperbole, dark humor, and a need to resonate with an imagined audience. The producer of a meme is reporting and entertaining in one instant; The Daily Show in seconds. He or she utilizes the digital sprawls and fragments of pop culture immediately available for download; a self-replicating process saturated with cartoons, celebrities and anything else that can dumb down a point for maximum appeal.
Like propaganda films of the 1930s and 40s (think Triumph of the Will or Why We Fight), television programs of the 50s and 60s (I Love Lucy, The Twilight Zone), cable networks of the 80s and 90s (MTV, CNN), and the loads of viral videos of the 2000s, memes are our era’s dominant mass communication medium, and are producing the most resonant cultural icons.
Many of us grew up watching cheesy sitcoms that shared similar imagery and themes of a middle class upbringing: nuclear families, big suburban homes, and goofy problems resolved through love and understanding.
Today, we watch the meme program: self-deprecating, sardonic and profoundly stupid pictures or video clips recycled to represent a shared perspective on a world overloaded with information. Family Ties was there to say we can figure things out together, Mocking Sponge Bob Meme is there to say don’t bother trying.
How Memes Happen
Get a smartphone with basic editing tools, be able to type and use Google; memes need no higher production values. They’re a copy-and-paste art form, a mass effect of people wanting to be “liked.”
What happens at scale is a rapid proliferation to be the most relevant and most shared posting possible. No rationality or science required.
The word itself is a postmodern term, and has been used to define the cultural ubiquity of any ideas and or behaviors. Today, it’s a term for the rapidly reproducing visual icons posted by users of social media, with accompanying captions or commentary, usually but not exclusively for comic effect.
A producer of a meme does not derive his or her power from money or connections, but rather, the technical convenience to capture all other mass communications (films, TV shows, YouTube videos, cable news soundbites) and publish them for his or her hyper-localized audience on social media.
- The Los Angeles Times
The greatest power of a meme maker however, is that he or she uniquely captures humanity at the level of impulsive reaction.
Like all species, we are fundamentally a collection of instinctive reactions. For dogs, urinating in a small blotch of dirt is a form of competitive dominance. For humans, thinking up a funny post on the latest public health crisis is the name of the game.
In other words, social competition, the impulsive need to be popular, combined with the instinctive fear of preservation, drive the visual waves and endless distortions of reality showing up on your screen.
Baby on Board
What do you get when you combine the cuteness of a baby, and the multi-billion-dollar IP of Yoda? You get Baby Yoda. Any meme maker could’ve done it, only one corporation had the trademark to do so.
It’s an undying and sound science: cuteness rules the internet, and the movers and shakers of traditional media (from Disney to Mr. Peanut) are quickly taking note.
This is where Baby Yoda was truly born: from the remarkably unimaginative, unassuming investment into this non-industry; the nonsensical matrix of memes. He is like so many of the cute pics and silly cartoons that bare no other depth beyond their appeal to propagate as a form of recreational mockery. Baby Peanut and Sombrero-wearing kittens be damned.
As traditional media learns to get on board, political machines are also jumping in on all the fun…
— Sabrina Singh, Spokeswoman for Michael Bloomberg, (The New York Times).
The Story in a Nutshell
Think about your favorite memes; you’ll realize many of them will be hard to find again, as they probably never showed up on those Top 40 lists on websites like BuzzFeed.
Memes spawn and dwindle from the sporadic thoughts of those who make them. They’re a virtual stock market: rising and subsiding entirely from the psychology of those who exchange them. They collectively add up to form the zeitgeist of a community overloaded with information, and eventually dissipate back into their own irrelevancy.
The meme fundamentally provides a need: to make the recipient feel they’re not alone within the instant. Thus, confused, anxious, knowledge-insecure minds are compensated with rapid cycles of comic relief.
But did the once mighty 24-hour news cycles, satirical comedy shows and shock value Hollywood stars of yore pave the way for this ridiculous conundrum of crisis, amnesia, repeat in narrative-building?
Ultimately, meme makers do what all storytellers have done since the dawn of man. They comfort the tribe’s spirits, convey its thoughts and feelings, and make each member feel connected to the greater whole.
The world of memes burden us by saturating reality with their sardonic hues, but they should never hinder are capacity to see beyond this strange new matrix, to know and believe there’s more beyond the electronic screen.
