How To Transcend National Identity
Wojak
What Timothée Chalamet is to A24 films and Hugh Grant is to 90s romcoms, this face is to memes.
Wojak, or ‘That Feels Guy’ is everywhere, and each new role sees him grow with the genre, responding to its evolution and pushing its boundaries. Just like Hugh Grant, who embodied both the floppy-haired wholesome Prime Minister of Love Actually (1994) and the diabolically sexy Daniel Cleaver in Bridget Jones Diary (1997), Wojak has proven quite versatile.
We see him accessorized and altered to become a series of new characters, like in this meme that depicts each person met by the poster during a journey through Ukraine last spring as a kind of Wojak, arrayed on a Political Compass. It’s a weird form of meme journalism.
The Wojak meme face is an image of universality: he can represent anybody in any situation. Throw on a wig, a ghoulish grin, an odd outfit — it doesn’t matter, he remains a Wojak because we all are Wojaks. He’s universal.
But the image of universality which he represents carries certain attributes: Wojak is sad, and Wojak is almost always alone. This, the meme seems to suggest, is what every person online shares.
After all, the first Wojak meme that really made it big (beyond just his face as a reaction image) was this one:
We’ve all been the person standing alone at the party, watching others have fun. If you haven’t, then I’m jealous of you. These feelings — alienation, masculinity, vulnerability, emotionality — stick to the Wojak image. But before Wojak was a mascot of modern alienation in general, he represented a more specific kind of alienation: that of being a Polish or German -chan board user in 2011 who could not get laid.
Wojak As Mass Self-Portrait
The exact origins of Wojak are lost to the sands of time. However, Know Your Meme has thoroughly combed these sands for years, and turned up little traces here and there. We don’t know who drew the original Wojak, but the name (which means “warrior” in Polish) came from the username of the person who first posted the meme to krautchan (German forum) in 2010, after saying they found it on vichan (Polish forum) in 2009.
On krautchan, Wojak really took off. From there, he moved to 4chan, where he became an overall mascot of the platform. This was the first form of universality which Wojak represented — that of 4chan as a collective and anons as members.
Users would often post a Wojak to represent themselves, like in the famous Greentext story below. The usage here is similar to that of emojis or reacts on gaming streams: there’s a Wojak for every feeling, and the withered, weary Wojak here represents the poster and what his face would look like. I say his face, but of course there’s no way to know because 4chan is entirely anonymous.
Wojak is a “based mascot” of 4chan, as the meme below suggests, but he’s also a kind of virtual uniform for the users. By representing yourself as a Wojak, you dissolve yourself into a mass of others Wojaks.
Wojak is not the only meme to serve as “based 4chan mascot:” both Green Man (very early) and Pepe the Frog served this function. Beyond 4chan, we see other kinds of posting that mirror this: the NAFO Cheemses who fundraised on Twitter, the hacktivist group Anonymous with its Guy Fawkes masks, and (stretching the definition pretty far) the image of “Gen Z” conceived on TikTok, complete with its e-boy/e-girl aesthetics and slang.
Of course, this kind of thing existed before the internet: what were punks if not a group of people who defined themselves by dressing and looking the same way, which was a way people outside the subculture couldn’t understand? Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebidge’s study of punk and rasta youth movements in the 1970s and 1980s in Britain, outlines an idea of “countercultural style,” in which choices of self-presentation (especially in clothing, speech, make-up, etc.) are meant to represent rebellion against society and affiliation with a subculture. People signal something political through the way they make themselves look to others. Ethics and aesthetics are laced together: you assess how you dress not based on whether it looks good, but on whether it represents what you and your community believe.
Country Feels
Country Feels is a Wojak meme which emerged early on, in 2013. It depicts a Wojak sitting at a computer, surrounded by objects that suggest a stereotypical national culture. These objects break into a few different categories: there are decorations on the wall, a view out the window, characteristic foods and drinks, clothing on the Wojak, a sticker on his computer.
In terms of classification, this meme seems to be a Photoshop meme, from 4chan by way of Reddit (a common path) which ties into Wojaklore — one of the richest lores there is.1 As far as its function, I think the value it holds is identification value: it identifies the poster as a Wojak, but also in relation to a nationality.
There are a few ways to read these memes. Taking the American one for an example (because, after all, I’m American) you see the Wojak’s obesity and the poster of a burger, pointing mockingly at a stereotypical American life way. The window, which shows a clear blue sky but is crossed by prison bars, also seems to represent something: the American Wojak is not actually free. One way to read the meme might be to say a non-American made it to insult America — and there’s certainly many Country Feels memes which feel xenophobic. But my gut tells me an American made this one. Of course, I can’t know because it’s anonymous.
There are other memes which seem less ironic — for example, the Romanian one or the Brazilian one, which seem to just sort of list Romanian and Brazilian things, perhaps evidencing a pride in the countries and these things. Where these two memes differ is in the quantity of things: the Romanian, like the Frenchman, is surrounded by a dizzying amount of objects, while the American and Brazilian Wojaks are in smaller rooms. Perhaps this encyclopedia effect adds to the humor. It’s impossible to know, however, if actual Romanians, Brazilians, French, or Americans posted these memes because everyone’s anonymous.
But the Country Feels memes don’t just limit themselves to established nationalities. They also depict other kinds of political allegiances. This one above shows an Ulster nationalist Wojak, surrounded by hyper-specific items that connote a Protestant from Northern Ireland. The one below is a Cascadian Wojak, who lives in the Pacific Northwest.
But what strikes me most is how, while the objects surrounding Wojak change, what remains the same is the solitary Wojak and his computer. It seems at first that the meme is about celebrating or insulting a specific national culture, but what it’s really about is 4chan culture and how it transcends borders and histories.
Regardless of how extremely Romanian, Brazilian, or American a Wojak is, these differences are only so much fluff and decor: he isn’t looking at his flag or his national food, he’s looking at his screen — which, presumably, is displaying a 4chan imageboard (or maybe Reddit’s /r/4chan, where this meme took off an found a wider audience). The meme shows national identity playing second fiddle to an online subcultural identity.
And what is it that unifies the Wojaks? At this point, in 2013 on 4chan, Wojak is deeply male, sad, solitary, and screen-addicted. These attributes are the basis for a political constituency and a form of sovereignty over the space that is 4chan.
4chan As Political Space
One of the remarkable things about 4chan politically — other than its famous role as the internet’s most fecund rightwing fever swamp — is its horizontality. Every poster on 4chan is equal to every other poster, because they are all anonymous. Nobody is above or below anyone else. Anons can’t get followers, or accumulate more clout than others.
4chan is also one big commons, collectively owned. The timeline of posts that appears before you is the same timeline that appears before every other user. Unlike the personalized, atemporal feeds of Twitter or Meta’s platforms, 4chan posts are organized by one metric only: how recently the community interacted with them.
This organization-by-recency means that every anon has the same power to determine the way the platform will look. If I comment on a post, it vaults up to the top of the feed — until someone else comments on another post, which puts that post at the top and knocks mine down, until eventually it disappears. I can’t write something and then have everyone on Twitter see it right away, but on 4chan I can.
On 4chan, all discourses are equal, since the only reason why you read one thing instead of another thing is because it was posted more recently. There’s no algorithm tracking your past interactions and recommending new content, no blue-checks to proffer the truth. Just a feed of faceless strangers talking over one another, sharing one space.
Nobody has an individual identity here: they are dissolved into a mass. Country Feels Wojak represents that mass, which isn't defined by a common national identity, but by a common occupational identity: posting on 4chan. I think this has very strong fascist vibes, and I am scared.2
What Will The Future Hold?
If you look at the changes Elon Musk has pushed to Twitter after taking charge, they seem designed to make Twitter more like 4chan. Blue checks and the verification system are gone, making us all equal anons (unless we pay him money). He’s added the option of a purely chronological feed 4chan-style rather than an algorithmic one. These are not business choices. They are political choices.
In this infamous tweet, Musk uses Wojak to mock liberals and progressives, while furthering his anti-trans and pro-Putin agendas. The Wojak he’s chosen is NPC Wojak, a cyborg-like evolution of Wojak which represents an automated “non-player character” in a video game. The political resonance of NPC Wojak has always struck me as dark, even for 4chan: the idea is that people who “support the current thing” are not fully conscious or human, and those who think like Elon are the actual human characters in the game that is life.
Given this political context, what can we learn from Country Feels Wojak?
First, the politics of the alt-right is not addressed to the nation-state or national identity, despite their usage of nationalist symbols. It’s grounded in online community, and is legitimate to its constituents because it cures loneliness and offers an identity.
Second, it shows the importance of a platform’s structure in forming the identities and politics of the people who live in them. The political constituency of Wojak-posting anons exists because 4chan is horizontal and anonymous. The term to discuss how platforms are run is usually “content moderation,” but this is much too narrow a lens: online space needs to be governed, and we should care about how it’s governed in the same way we care about how our real space is governed. It may even be more important to govern online space than the real space it is rapidly superseding (through telework, the internet of things, etc.)
As more and more of our living takes place under the jurisdiction of online platforms and in the fold of online communities, more and more of our liberty, safety, and dignity will depend on how the internet is run. Memes are not only useful data for understanding the political dynamics on the internet, but they are also one of the mediums through which this new politics and governance takes place.
The story of how Country Feels moved in 2013 between 4chan, Reddit, and Bodybuilding Forums could be the subject of a whole other post. All platforms are permeable and interconnected. It’s primarily a 4chan meme, but it’s also a meme in other places too.
It should be pointed out that arguably not all Wojak memes are explicitly fascist: he’s suffused meme culture, he’s everywhere. And tons of people use Wojak, left, right, and center. But Country Feels does feel fascist.