Every now and then a great meme sticks in your mind the way a great line of poetry or a particularly heart-wrenching scene in a movie can. Here’s one of those memes that’s clung to me:
I’ve seen several variations. The best was on TikTok, with a deep thunderous voice reading the Instagram-octopus text followed by a discordant edit of a Red Lobster commercial that played as the same voice read Psalm 23, the one about how “the Lord is my shepherd.”
This meme is a variant of the “Thank you for changing my life” Wojak Comics memes from the winter of 2020, in which the Trad Girl Wojak mistakenly puts too much stock in something that’s actually kind of mid. The earliest traceable viral posting made fun of Taylor Swift fans, but you also see examples where Trad Girl is thanking murderers from True Crime shows, emo musicians, and types of food. The format comes about at the late period of Wojak Comics, after the virality of other Wojak Comics formats like “boys and girls with a time machine” and “soyjaks vs. chads.”
In this format, the butt of the joke is the social type represented by the Wojak character. The meme began by making fun of the kind of woman who loves Taylor Swift (represented by Trad Girl) but made a formula that you could readily fill in with other characters from Wojaklore. There’s memes with Yes Chad (icon of traditional masculinity) thanking beers or sports for changing his life, or memes featuring Doomer making fun of pretentious young men:
So the Instagram-octopus meme is making fun of people who say social media is ruining their life. And it’s accurate: people are always blaming the internet for things that are actually within themselves. Much of the discourse around social media slots it in the mental spot of “sin” or “drug” — we talk addiction, users, companies exploiting people — but while it may sometimes feel that way, a social media platform is not a drug. So what is it?
It’s a monster and a reflection of us, according to this meme. And it’s a tool for “shadow work.”
In psychology, “shadow work” is the process of investigating repressed or unpalatable parts of the self. The term is pretty overloaded with Jungian vibes. I’m not opposed to Jung, but I do think what he’s doing (and, arguably, what Freud was kind of doing) is more of a conceptual art project than medicine or social science?
The “shadow” maps onto the subconscious. Urges you don’t want to admit to, biases you have but aren’t aware of. It is represented mythologically by the demon, the ghost, the monster. “Shadow work” is the process of uncovering and possibly reconciling with the shadow. I’ve mostly seen the term in memes made by spiritualist communities, the kind of people who talk about unlocking chakras. I am not one of these people, but I do believe we could all benefit from a less rational perspective on the internet.
People usually tell the story of the internet as a STEM thing. It’s a political, mechanistic, scientific phenomenon. We treat the web as an entity made of electricity and the brilliant people who circuit it, manipulate it, and profit from it. The relevant actors are coders, regulators, marketers, hackers, and entrepreneurs, while the user is just that: someone consuming a product, ensnared like a hapless insect in the web spun by these more powerful others.
This story is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The internet is made of culture as much as it is made of businesses and their servers. Put another way: the platforms, the machines and the industry are just the container and what’s actually generating value is the content. The container, of course, matters — but we focus on it because it’s what we’re trained to do when approaching internet culture. Content matters just as much.
A useful comparison here is the contemporary novel, which we are trained to think about in the exact opposite way. Dan Sinykin recently put out a book called Big Fiction, analyzing post World War II American novels. He argues that we should be reading American novels from 1945 to the present not as expressions of individual genius, intention, or style (as we are usually trained to do) but as products produced by institutions. These institutions are, first of all, publishing houses — and the 1900s saw a lot of consolidation in the publishing market, so that now we have just the “Big Five” publishers and a few literary presses out there. University creative writing programs, which trained and employed essentially every American writer after 1945, also played a role. For Sinykin, the major influences on literary style in this era are the business practices of publishing houses, not the creativity of Toni Morrison or Margaret Atwood.
A lot of people disagree with Sinykin’s interpretation — I definitely don’t like to think about publishing houses when I read novels, it feels like literature should be some kind of sacred, intimate space. But the conventional way of reading internet culture is exactly the way that Sinykin reads literary culture. If you read most journalistic and scholarly writing about memes, the focus is rarely the artistic expression of creators and the deeper meanings that appeal to audiences. It’s more about the industry, the niches, the “power of influence” and the structural forces around memes.
I don’t think Sinykin is wrong, but his view is incomplete — and so is the conventional view of internet culture. Returning to this Instagram-octopus meme that is stuck in my mind, the description of the algorithm could be applied to literature. Isn’t a good novel or play “mirroring back that which, consciously or not, captivates you and the social worlds through which you move”? Art born on social media disturbs and dazzles the same way literature does, reflecting us back to ourselves in fresh ways.
The Instagram-octopus meme makes me think of a line from the most meta Molière play, La critique de l’Ecole des femmes (1663). In the play, an assortment of characters representing different social types gather together to discuss Molière’s play L’Ecole des femmes (1662) and whether Molière is a vile and immoral author. Uranie, a savvy fan who seems to think Molière is cool, says: “(Comedies) are public mirrors in which you must never admit that you see yourself, to do so is to charge yourself with a fault and make a scandal of yourself when you reproach it.”1
Molière’s defense of himself, given through Uranie, is this: if you’re disturbed by one of my plays — if you find it too profane, if you find sexist — it’s because the play is showing yourself and our society back at you, and you are disturbed by your own reflection. Social media is also a public mirror. In the same way that we all really are the depraved, horny, greedy beings that Molière depicts in his comedies, we all really are the cringe that we meme about — and we have to deal with that shadow.
A meme, just like a play or a novel, is a tool for doing that shadow work. As representations of ourselves, the kind of knowledge they are equipped to offer is not necessarily empirical knowledge but (getting very 17th-century about it all) moral knowledge, just like literature. We are the content.
The French original: “Ce sont miroirs publics où il ne faut jamais témoigner qu'on se voie ; et c'est se taxer hautement d'un défaut, que se scandaliser qu'on le reprenne.” Hope my translation was good.
Wow. Unironically, one of the best things I’ve read on the recent collective handwringing of Social Media and the psychological impulses surrounding it. I think our little brains can’t handle observing conflicting (repressed) culture outside of ourselves and certainly not at the scale we intake today. Thanks for the historical anecdotes as they help make your case that it’s been around a long, long time. Well done. Now I’m off to drool.