better ways to imagine the internet
Think with me for a minute about imagination and its uses. The latest crop of tyrants can imagine flying cars and colonies on Mars, but they can’t imagine you and I going to the doctor without worrying what it will cost. They can imagine a world transformed by AI, robots, and cryptocurrencies — "the whole structure of society will be up for debate and reconfiguration,” Sam Altman remarked recently — but they can’t imagine that peace, justice, or dignity are reasonable demands, that we might have a society where wealth and influence are not concentrated in the hands of an arrogant few, or that clean air and water will be the rightful inheritance of your children.
If you can imagine these things you have already beat them in one sense, however symbolic that may be. You can’t outspend or outgun them at this point, but you can see your way to a world that is richer, wider, and kinder than theirs. These guys who have dawdled their lives away arranging numbers on screens and trading in the digital traces of other people’s pain are doing nothing new with the power they have gained, despite the apparent novelty of the technology they have used to secure it. They are doing nothing different than what Pharaoh did on the Nile’s banks in ancient times or Lee did on the Potomac’s banks a hundred fifty years ago.
There have been few moments in my life that I’ve recognized, as the Quakers put it, “the spirit moving in me.” One of them was a protest in 2020, at the Lincoln Memorial. We knelt in prayer and reached a hand out to touch the nearest stranger. My breath matched the crowd’s and I looked beyond the line of national guards, over the tops of federal buildings, to the sky which is just as blue now as it was back then or a hundred fifty years ago, and which is as blue here as it is wherever you are.
This is a newsletter about memes. But my reasons for writing about memes have always been spiritual — I do this for the same reasons people write about great books. It is not just that a work of art makes you feel good or interests you (these things do happen) but that a work of art incites you. Like German poet Rainier Maria Rilke said, looking at a sculpture by Rodin, “for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.”
So how do you change your life? The sculpture by Rodin doesn’t know and Rilke’s poem doesn’t know either. While I am a great fan of memes, they also don’t know. But what memes, like other kinds of art, can do is demonstrate how it is up to you. You must change your life — not Elon. It isn’t up to him or his ilk to change your life.
Which is why it’s time to adjust some of the narratives we have been telling about social media and memes.
First, the tech bros didn’t build this. You did. The core force and substance of the internet is users and their attention. The servers exist to serve that attention and the companies exist to format that experience. Nobody would’ve gotten on Facebook if their friends weren’t there. Nobody would be on TikTok if it wasn’t for creators who make content that helps people laugh, find friends, work, live, and play with each other. Nobody would be on Reddit if it wasn’t a site of useful, mutually-supportive communities. Nobody would be on Amazon if there weren’t sellers and buyers.
And yet, in most conversations, people assume the digital public is a pool of passive addicts or manipulable sheep, consumers rather than producers. Online cultural production is dismissed as shallow, and your own participation is thought of as a bad habit, a thing to cut out in a New Year’s Resolution list. The recent emergence of massive amounts of actual slop on social media platforms (and the backlash it has received) should demonstrate that what we post is actually important and useful — that it did and does add value to the internet.
Second, the internet isn’t only or even primarily about posts. If it were just about speech, I would agree with commentators like Janus Rose and her recent piece at 404 Media, You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism. The internet, like a real-life public square, is a space and not just a linguistic construct. It’s about the vibe you structure, the businesses you run, and the social architecture you build. As I argued in previous posts, the contributions of mods, admins, subscribers, content curators, and engaged followers have constituted the internet — and these practices should be seen not as consumption, but as production. The kind of online engagement that matters isn’t just saying what you think, but creating the zones into which others may plug their thinking, find themselves welcomed and supported, and learn from one another.
Discourses about misinformation, media, and memes often overlook the context in which these phenomena take place. There are economies, community structures, and patterns of interaction which support the content you see. Most of these structures are created by users themselves, often on the faulty architecture which platforms provide. Think about projects like Operation Olive Branch, or the K-Pop stans who pranked Trump rallies.
Memes and trends are a record of how users experiment with the affordances of platforms, developing the vibe and brand of online spaces, steering and criticizing the direction of progress. When newspapers put stories about the internet in “tech” and “business” verticals rather than “politics” and “culture” verticals, it’s a symptom of how we’ve failed to narrate the internet’s story in a way that empowers users and citizens.
Third, to respect memes is to respect the world around you, to see the value in the time you spend off the clock and in the people you were raised around. This latest authoritarian political project rests upon a fundamental disrespect for the world of regular people, and especially for the worlds of marginalized people. It relies on reducing you to a consumer to be manipulated or a worker to exploited, turning every community into a marketplace and every person into a pawn. Insisting upon the importance of your life as a life, of our being as an end in and of itself, is crucial.
Finding the value in memes means affirming that who we are now matters, warts and all. It is worthy of honoring, studying, and protecting.
Memes aren’t a thing that we should evaluate by the terms of the old world, seeing them as lesser or modified versions of the art we already study. There is no “contemporary novel” in the sense there was a “modernist novel” in the early twentieth century, because memes do that work instead. Memes are their own thing, and most importantly, they’re your thing in a way the novel can’t be. The old traditions, like the old institutions, are over. That doesn’t mean the old ways should be abandoned, but it does mean they can no longer be relied upon.
A picture of contemporary life that does not foreground internet culture and operate by its terms, within its modes of sense-making, is at best a charming romantic illusion and at worst a dangerous misunderstanding. This is not a technology like cigarettes or television but a technology like railroads. It is a new civilizational form that alters the collectively-lived experiences of time and space upon which any social construct, or contract, is scaffolded.
And it’s yours! You must change our life.
I appeared on Slate’s internet culture podcast, ICYMI hosted by the wonderful Candice Lim and
(who writes the great newsletter here on Substack). Check out her work and listen if you like (seen below).My international meme investigations continue over on TikTok, with my video about German brainrot. Unlike many of my posts, looking at the viewership on this one it seems to be 75% actual Germans. They have been very nice to me about it. I’m planning to write a post here soon about this latest train of inquiry, so stay tuned!
That first paragraph goes hard. Great stuff as always.