Editor’s Note
Afew weeks ago I read an article about a strange new quasi religion called QAnon that’s sprung up on platforms like 4chan and Reddit. Their basic tenet is that global elites are seeking to bring down Donald Trump, who they see as the world’s only hope to defeat the “deep state”. According to followers of Q, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, leaders of the “deep state” along with George Soros, run paedophile rings out of pizza shops. What’s more, the pandemic was planned — they apparently have pictures of Obama and leading US immunologist Anthony Fauci creating the virus in a lab to prove it. The spread of the virus, it seems, has been accompanied by conspiracy theories spreading like viruses.
Memes are of the same genus and order. Sometimes smart and pithy, sometimes offensive, often puerile or political, sexist or racist, these sharable units of culture have become a suasion tactic of debatable effectiveness. Mostly we exchange them on our social media groups and they elicit no more than a smirk or a disgusted “what did you send that to me for?” response. But if we look carefully, they’re also a pretty good indication of the sender’s proclivities, prejudices and inclinations, often barely hidden under a thin layer of humour. Last week I received one that said: “How do you know if a woman is going to say something intelligent? She starts with, ‘My husband said …’ ” To be honest, it didn’t tell me anything about the sender I didn’t already know.
And really, what are they, but a few words typed on an image? Yet memes can have a powerful effect, becoming a kind of language between those in the know.
“Meme”, from the Greek for “that which is imitated” first meant anything that could be learnt, replicated and spread from one brain to another. Now it has become a piece of media that’s rapidly copied, born, as the Guardian puts it “from the swamps of the internet, distributed from the bottom up”. Memes are like the ultimate deep fake. They let anyone with a computer and internet access put words in other people’s mouths. And though this all seems pretty innocuous, I’m with “Meme Yoda” when he says, “Only just begun, the meme war has.”