The Joke's on Us

[Celerity]

In the 2010s, Hitler memes and “ironic” racism filled the internet. What if we had taken them seriously?

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/09/how-memes-lulz-and-ironic-bigotry-won-internet/616427/



Remember when the internet used to be fun? Whitney Phillips does. The digital anthropologist was recently looking through a huge set of images from the late 2000s that had been posted to Reddit. The first comment described the era as “a more simple time,” and sure enough, the pictures were weird, silly, and creative. Talking cows. Cats playing video games. A bear on a golf course. A guy Photoshopped to have mouths for eyes. Then she noticed something else. Something disturbing. The thread began, she wrote recently, “with a lighthearted meme about Hitler.” After that was “dehumanizing mockery of a child with disabilities. And more sneering mockery of an old man hooked up to an oxygen tank. And date rape. And violence against animals. And fat shaming. And homophobia. And racism. And pedophilia. And how hilarious 9/11 was.”

If you’ve spent any time online, you will have imbibed both the aesthetic and, perhaps, the ethics of “meme culture” or “internet culture.” This is the mashed-up jumble of images, jargon, and folk art that gushed out of sites such as 4chan, Reddit, and Tumblr from the late 2000s. The look was lo-fi and absurdist, and the tone was eye-rolling, cynical, self-aware. Blocky white letter captions on pictures of exaggerated facial expressions. “HALP,” “OHRLY,” “KTHXBYE.” Adorable cat GIFs. In the 2000s and early 2010s, Phillips was one of a group of academics, activists, and intellectuals who studied memes, and promoted the idea of the web as a space of unfettered, anarchic creation. The revolution would be user-generated. (The founders of social networks—primarily young, carefree, middle-class white Americans—agreed.) Okay, the argument went, this outpouring of creativity had its darker elements, but that was part of its countercultural charm. The casual sadism of trolling was just “lulz,” which shouldn’t be taken seriously. Sexism, racism, and other hatreds were being invoked for nothing more than shock value. It was ironic, duh.

In 2009, she attended a live show called Meme Factory, which aimed to explain this new language of the internet. Three young men sat in front of microphones, talking deliberately fast, occasionally projecting pictures onto the screen behind them. There were “fails”; there were “owns”; the viewers didn’t have to think much about the people who were the butt of the joke. The first Meme Factory show began with a disclaimer about its offensive content, delivered in front of a picture of a white cat captioned with what was a popular phrase at the time: Internet. Serious Business. Phillips remembers laughing until she cried at a repeat performance the next year. There was an assumption that everyone in the room “got it,” that they understood who was being satirized—the racists and the homophobes—and that everything was just for lulz. But the blizzard of memes didn’t allow any time to distinguish between the cute and the offensive, the innocuous and the hateful. One section, Phillips recalled, showed “several internet-infamous young white women who had inspired widespread mockery online.” Such women, the three men explained, were referred to as “camwhores.” When the photograph of one flashed on-screen, the crowd booed. A man in the audience shouted: “Kill her!”

Phillips, an assistant communications professor at Syracuse University, now thinks she got it wrong. All that ironic racism doesn’t feel so ironic anymore. “I don’t even know exactly when it totally shifted,” she told me, from her yellow-painted living room in Syracuse, New York, her hands anxiously fluttering around her face as we spoke over Zoom. “What seemed to be fun and funny ended up functioning as a Trojan horse for white-supremacist, violent ideologies to shuffle through the gates and not be recognized.” The 2010s were the decade when internet culture ate real life; when the boundary between “IRL” and “on the internet” dissolved. By the time the decade ended, a certain kind of liberal was forced to accept that we had been far too complacent about how dark politics could get, and how the ironically awful parts of the internet helped that to happen. Many others have walked down the same path of recognition as Phillips. What was once dismissed as “trolling” is now recognized as harassment and abuse; where flat earthers and 9/11 truthers once seemed laughable, today’s conspiracy theorists commit acts of violence.

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[StClone]

1. That Green Bug-eyed Frog image has always repulsed me

Pepe is for pigs of meme and I know people hate Wiki but it has a decent take on this ugly little harbinger of hate:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepe_the_Frog

[Celerity]

2. I do not hate Wiki at all, it is transparent and verifiable, and an absolute wealth of info

and yes, fuck Pepe

[StClone]

3. Well that's works for me