Intro note: I'm always anxious about 'first posts' on a platform, as I have no idea how to brand myself. So instead, I'm just going to write a bunch of stuff about philosophy, media, poetry, science fiction, and politics. Expect more on each of those subjects from me in the future ;) Hope you like it!
So. I'm interested in how we think, and whether the way we think has changed over time. I think that the internet has changed how we think, such that we "think in memes." By memes I mean not just captioned images, but anything we collectively circulate and augment to communicate with one another. I don't mean that in just a playful way, as in, that we're so full of memes that all we do is shitpost, but that there are features to making memes that shape how we think now, and that it has very important social, cultural, and political consequences. To think in memes means to think socially/collectively rather than individually, to think in terms of combining ideas, and to prize unconscious thought as a means of generating ideas.
First off, a core definition that frames everything I think about here. I am extremely influenced by media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who argued that media can be understood not as a particular medium or mediums, but as different extensions and reorganizations of the senses. A television isn't just a visual box, but an extension of our sight, and an organization of our social life, changing how we sit, eat, and consume information. Likewise for anything else, and if the 20th century of radio and television (despite the many changes then) had one way of shaping how we interact with each other, then digital media would have to do the same. No question - no news here. What's really important is that it shapes how we think. Smarter people can get into the cognitive and neural aspects, and I can try in the comments, but here I think we can speak more generally.
There is a pattern that was set in the early internet and accelerated dramatically when social media took off, that I expect to persist and deepen in the age of blockchain. We interact with many many people at great distances and at great speeds, with a broad availability of images and sounds that can be reproduced / reshaped quite easily - this is somewhat unique, and shapes thought. About eight years ago a study observed how interacting with networked content made our brains more likely to make surprising connections, but also more likely to skim rather than engage in depth, and this to me was a taste of deeper changes.
10 years ago, memes were a niche hobby of internet enthusiasts. Circulating images and phrases was a badge of community membership. 5 years ago, memes became an established part of pop culture, jazzing up and accelerating how people respond to things. Those same images shifted to being used by artists, journalists, and culture commentators to speak to more than a niche community, but to communicate to society at large. Think how politically impactful "binders full of women" was, how unimaginable it would have been a decade before, and how commonplace it is now. Today, memes are used in advertising and political campaigns to appeal to trends and manipulate emotions, just like any earlier form of media. But alongside that, memes have become so much weirder and more sophisticated, as they are made by members of niche radical political ideologies, genuine 'meme artists,' and as a tool of self-expression. It's good - and it's bad! It's both! We're hilarious and tacky and stupid and brilliant all at the same time, in a unique way that can only be understood by looking at our memes.
During the 2016 primaries, a great deal of Bernie Sanders' appeal was captured in a meme page made by some of his supporters, "Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme Stash." The memes did everything traditional political ads do - idealizing the politician, capturing their appeal in simple terms, and framing the discourse around their ideas - but did so with ZERO input from the campaign itself. It was a collective effort, with tremendous creative output. There were similar efforts on the alt right, and many other political and non-political positions. In many ways, even non political meme culture was shaped or reflected by BSDMS. I want to understand this as a form of thinking. It doesn't look like thinking, because it's not individual and it's not rooted in traditional 'intellectual' activities like writing or mathematics or problem-solving, but it is.
Let's shift gears. Turn on your shitpost brain. You have undoubtedly had at least one day of your life where you posted unconscious nonsense, made a meme you knew was stupid, imagined ridiculous cover/parody versions of songs you wished existed, or dropped a hot take that made no sense but still felt important to make. You tapped into something recognizable, and probably got rewarded for it in the form of engagement. I mean, it's fun lol :) The truth is, engaging the internet in this way is probably one of ways the internet remains fun in the turbulent teen years of the century. There is a brilliance to it - people build youtube careers on it, make genius memes from it. Shitpost brain is a way of thinking. It channels the unconscious, makes surprising connections, and does so using the stock of common ideas we share online. Even more exciting, it's often done not by individuals but by groups - just as cloud computing distributed computer architecture, meme culture distributes culture, such that we all participate. That rules! That's new and I want it to stay. It enriches our ecosystem.
But I want to be very direct about an aspect of it we tend to shy away from, as it has very clear and obvious downsides. This form of thinking amplifies many bad tendencies in us. We become impulsive, isolated, and yet more tribalistic. It can make us lonely and dissociated, unable to engage our problems with the depth necessary to solve them. It can make us unwilling to listen to one another if they represent a bad thing. It has as much potential to make one think in fascist or totalitarian ways as did the radio in the 1930s, or the pamphlet in the 19th century. A political figure like Donald Trump, and I'm not making explicit comparisons here, just observations, to me uses the collective logic of memes to destructive effect - his most effective messaging was funny and playful to his supporters, but appealed to baser instincts and used sloppy reasoning to do so. Trump, and other would-be strongmen of our century, are a 21st century version of earlier versions, but look different because their appeal is based in internet logic rather than that of other media ecosystems. Ideologies proliferate as readily as memes, not because they are necessary or good, but because they are available to be created, and have a reward-center appeal that more traditional politicking perhaps lacks. This is perhaps not too much different from how in tech we will see as many charlatans as we do geniuses, but being ignorant of this fact is, to me, dangerous. Memes are fun, and we think in new and exciting ways that absolutely reflect the new media architecture we live in, but make us think in certain ways that we should be aware of.
Am I arguing that we should think "differently" or something? No. Negative 69 percent. But I think we can learn from history, and bring certain things into perspective. Were Victorians doing something like shitposting in the 19th century? Yes. Look at their magazines. A lot of it was dope. But was the moral center of Victorian England - where people fought for justice, resisted exploitation, and thought hard and critically about their surroundings - solely rooted in the playful, associative, and impulsive aspects of our psyches? Not necessarily, and I think we need to do something similar with how we think today - EVEN while we're kicking ass at creating a form of culture that is new.
The Roman orator and politician Cicero, bless him, had a remarkably earnest and very classical approach to thinking - he believed that everyone is capable of reason. How refreshing and old-fashioned! There were political consequences for this, as he believed that laws are rational instruments of helping people achieve their best potential. Roman democracy in his time was failing, and yet he seemed to hold to fairly democratic ideas - that laws are instruments of social will rather than personal, and that everyone has an inherent worth that ultimately must be factored into the functioning of government. What would it mean for us to think in such a way today?
There is a caveat, however. It is unclear whether or not Rome's sharp distinction between patrician and plebeian, or between citizen and non-citizen, occurred to him. This distinction meant a great deal in terms of legal rights, and could mean the difference between life and death, safety and violence. A related problem, advanced more recently by left-leaning folks and postmodernists, is that even well-meaning political systems based on "equal rights for all persons" has a sharp distinction between legal person and non-person, and that this distinction was often raced and gendered. This criticism is valid, and can be distinguished from a right-leaning critique of democracy in that it is invested in the trustworthiness of a ruler's claim to represent all people, ultimately still believing that people's voices have value. I think a lot about this, and also believe that Cicero's original point, a foundation of classical liberalism, is also valid. If I've been drinking a lot of cold brew, I also add a religious component, that our capacity for reason is given to us by God.
More than ever, it is very important that we engage our complete capacities, and avoid getting lost in the pathways provided by the internet alone. We live in a social world with a history, as well as a technological milieu. Our social world has conditions we must engage, and our history is full of examples of ways of approaching that world - romantics and revolutionaries and rationalists and other words that start with R that I think sound nice. One thing we can do, among our other wondrous faculties as humans, is to remember that we are indeed endowed with the capacity for reason, that can help us think in ways that add to the ways we think by default when we engage social media.
But I'm not drinking cold brew. I'm actually pretty tired and ready to go to sleep. I'm worried that I have failed to make any of my ideas clear. I'm happy to respond to questions and comments as I got.
More than anything, I wanted to cut the knot on what will probably be lots of shitposting about the stuff I love to think about and create, by digging into a question I've thought about a lot. In the future, I might be posting my own memes, notes on my science fiction projects or my poetry, writings on politics, etc.
Thank you for reading :)