Luigi and the memes

beyond rhetorical posting

Last week, I made a video discussing the memes around Luigi Mangione and what they tell us about the structure of politics happening on social media. More than most videos I’ve made for the Tok, this one led to interesting comments and exchanges.

I would like to dilate on this post (isn’t that a wonderful old-fashioned way to use the verb “dilate” — we gotta bring that back in 2025!) and get more in-depth on what I said.

The most viral meme images of Mangione, the alleged shooter of that healthcare CEO, came from the security apparatus which caught him.¹ We have the original security camera footage in which, according to lore, he was flirting with a blue-haired Starbucks barista; the mug shot where he’s perhaps mewing but definitely mogging; and more recently the melodramatic perp walk with Eric Adams. These images became the basis for viral memes. I argue their popularity isn’t simply due to them being widely available or being particularly hot images of Mangione — rather, they appealed to posters because they came from the security apparatus and reinterpreting them is an attractive and easy political gesture.

All these Luigi pics from the police came with a baked-in prescription for how the public should interpret them. By steadfastly refusing to read these images the way authority wanted them to be read, and proudly proclaiming their counter-readings through memes, posters performed a kind of civil disobedience. Remixing a mugshot into a thirst trap or beatific portrait of a saint is a potent gesture, and it’s only possible when an image is so obviously tailored to mean another way.

Part of what attracts me to this reading is it shifts focus away from the violence which Mangione allegedly committed and to the nonviolent actions of citizens. What makes this a cultural event isn’t that somebody killed a CEO, but that millions of people refused to respond the way they were supposed to respond. That refusal was signaled through memes and this is neither the first nor last time memes play that role.

Guiding, anticipating, and conditioning public response to events is a major piece of governance. Looking at history, what permitted the murderous for-profit healthcare system to bloom was the normalization of its brutality by the entities charged with narrating society’s story.

I use the word “entities” in the last paragraph, having backspaced “people,” because I don’t think this situation is the result of only people but also institutions and technologies. I choose the word “normalization” because nobody was convinced by the media that the healthcare system worked, just that it was normal and impossible to change, a kind of natural disaster rather than a long and cruel con. The way it was talked about helped keep it going.

Noam Chomsky calls this process (or something near it) “manufacturing consent.” His 1988 book of the same title is mostly responding to how the media treated the United States’ various Cold War conflicts and tried to convince citizens they either wanted these wars or else couldn’t stop them. But I prefer to think of Foucault’s idea of governmentality, in part because “manufactured” consent implies its opposite, “organic” consent, and I’m not sure such a thing exists.²

The weave is getting wide here. Let me pause for a moment and lay my analytic hand on the table. I’m saying memes — and the Luigi memes in particular — are an instrument for interrupting the normal process of telling society’s story. I’m also saying this disruption is direct political action because while the media is not formally part of the government, setting and sustaining narratives is a part of how societies are governed — and since the narrative is now set by what people post and share rather than what news outlets tell them, posting is more important than most people are ready to admit.

The way we talk about things becomes the way they are. Individual experience may have some objective basis — you either feel it or don’t, saw it or didn’t — but collective experience is always mediated. To be a collectivity, you have to communicate between yourselves. Whatever we as Americans, Westerners, or social media users see and experience as ourselves must be the product of a process. Power influences that process, but power also needs that process. 

And it’s a process which is larger than conspiracy: it is a cultural and civilizational form. The media’s parroting of what police say has a procedural component (you tend to get more quotes from cops than criminals) an economic component (“if it bleeds, it leads”), a cultural component, a contingent component, and many others.

But the component which interests me most is the material component — in a classic media studies sense, the medium. What happens when the news is no longer a thing that flows from an authority figure’s televised lips the way clean water flows from a faucet, but instead a kind of game you participate in?

The core cognitive maneuver of most memes is looking at somebody else’s looking. Whether it’s an image you’re recaptioning to mean something new, an audio you’re lip-synching to make a statement about your own life, or a character you’re ironically venerating, the relation that is most vibrant and meaningful is the one between the current speaker and other imagined or past speakers rather than the one between the speaker and the subject at hand.

In my writing about Distracted Boyfriend, I’ve highlighted interface as the material basis for this maneuvering: memes are layered, with each layer representing a different communicative context, audience, speaker, and intended meaning. The meme is funny because the image wasn’t made for the caption somebody slapped on top of it, but the pairing either works anyways or clashes in an interesting way. Quote tweets, reposts, and stitches operate by a similar logic: here I am, reframing somebody else, for you.

If you’ve been a subscriber for a bit, you may recognize this image I made — one of this newsletter’s core objectives is developing this one theory about interface.

On a purely material level, you might see this as a series of screens layered on top of one another, each leaving its trace. There is both a temporal and a power relation sketched out by the layering. Screens lower down in the embedded post are in the past, and are dominated by the screens further up: on my phone, I help decide the fate of what other people posted. Whether it’s just through my interactions which nudge the algorithm or through my intentional alterings, sharings, and reframings, as the owner of a higher-up and more recent screen I hold power over what comes before.

This type of authority matters more in today’s media environment than institutional authority. Smartly reframing a piece of media gets you more eyeballs and more money than smartly reporting it. The game of the news is about shuffling these screens, reinterpreting, and reframing — and the reinterpretation of the Luigi memes, by asserting the authority of interface over the institutional authority of the police or the media, is a way to shift the narrative in a new direction and attack a load-bearing post that holds up the for-profit healthcare system and the oligarchy more broadly.

Many people online applaud this move, and rightfully so. But one thing I’m suspicious of is naive optimism about the power of social media. And this is why I want to go with the Foucault term “governmentality” rather than the Chomsky one, “manufacturing consent.” I don’t see the process of memetic reinterpretation as any less manufactured than the late-twentieth century one which happened primarily through television, newspapers, and the radio. The claim can’t be that memes and revolution through social media are more virtuous because they represent the organic will of the people, while the institutional media doesn’t — because, after all, what are the platforms and algorithms if not another kind of entity that channels, tweaks, and molds society’s narrative in a fundamentally undemocratic manner? And what they are allowing to bloom may be just as bad as the for-profit healthcare system and oligarchy.

The thing to do is develop and formalize the power of posters. As long as posting remains disorganized, individualistic, and considered as just a rhetorical practice, it is essentially powerless and the platforms are the only real winners. Instead, posts which try to reset the narrative should be seen as interventions in the actual structure of online (and real-world) governance, and we should coordinate. Sharing a post should be thought of more like voting than like saying a thing to another person or an audience.

1. There were a large portion of commenters angry that I didn’t use the word “allegedly” in my video, either because they believe in the presumption of innocence that is core to the American judicial system or because they believe the whole thing is an inside job and Luigi has been framed, #freeourboy. I apologize for neglecting to say “allegedly.”

2. This account of governmentality is a bit fast and loose. Foucault means like “the ways of thinking that make the actions of power feel rational and normal, and are in turn reified/confirmed by the consequences of those actions” not specifically “the media” or anything like that.