The swarms of online surveillers typically only know how to detect clearly stated opinions, and the less linguistic jouissance the writer of these opinions displays in writing them, the easier job the surveillers will have of it. Another way of saying this is that those who read in order to find new targets of denunciation are so far along now in their convergent evolution with AI, that the best way to protect yourself from them is to conceal your writing under a shroud of irreducibly human style

Such camouflage was harder to wear within the 280-word limit on Twitter, which of course meant that the most fitting and obvious way to avoid the Maoists was to retreat into insincere shitposting — arguably the first truly new genre of artistic or literary endeavor in the 21st century, which perhaps will turn out to have been as explosive and revolutionary as, say, jazz was in the 20th.

Our master shitposter has perfectly mirrored the breakdown of sense that characterizes our era — dril’s body of work looks like our moment no less than, say, an Otto Dix painting looks like World War I

Layers upon layers of references are stacked together in a single post, while the posts themselves fly by faster than ever in our feeds. To someone who isn’t “chronically online” a few dislocated images or words may trigger a flash of recognition – a member of the royal family, a beloved cartoon character – but their relationship with each other is impossible to unpick. Add the absurdist language of online culture and the impenetrable algorithms that decide what we see in our feeds, and it seems like all hope is lost when it comes to making sense of the internet.

Forget words! Don’t think! In today’s digitally-mediated landscape, there’s no need for knowledge or understanding, just information. Scroll the feed and you’ll find countless video clips and posts advocating this smooth-brained agenda: lobotomy chic, sludge content, silly girl summer.

“With memes, images are converging more on the linguistic, becoming flattened into something more like symbols/hieroglyphs/words,” says writer Olivia Kan-Sperling, who specialises in programming language critique. For the meme-fluent, the form isn’t important, but rather the message it carries. “A meme is lower-resolution in terms of its aesthetic affordances than a normal pic because you barely have to look at it to know what it’s ‘doing’,” she expands. “For the literate, its full meaning unfolds at a glance.” To understand this way of “speaking writing posting” means we must embrace the malleability of language, the ambiguities and interpretations – and free it from ‘real-world’ rules.

Hey guys, I just got an order in from Sephora – here’s everything that I got. Get ready with me for a boat day in Miami. Come and spend the day with me – starting off with coffee. TikTok influencers engage in a high-pitched and breathless way of speaking that over-emphasises keywords in a youthful, singsong cadence. For the Attention Economy, it’s the sort of algorithm-friendly repetition that’s quantified by clicks and likes, monetised by engagement for short attention spans. “Now, we have to speak machine with machines that were trained on humans,” says Basar, who refers to this algorithm-led style as promptcore.

As algorithms digest our online behaviour into data, we resemble a swarm, a hivemind. We are beginning to think and speak like machines, in UI-friendly keywords and emoji-pilled phrases.

through the lens of critical media literacy, I argue that shitposting exists as an online pedagogical technology that can potentially reorient the network of relationships within social media spheres and expand the possible range of identities for those involved. To illustrate this argument, I conclude with a close reading of posts from two Twitter accounts: dril, an anonymous user who has managed to inform political discourse through his shitposts, and the corporate account for the Sunny Delight Beverage Corporation. I describe how tweets from these accounts engage shitposts in divergent ways. In doing so, I contend that these tweets reveal shitposting’s potential for contributing to the democratic aims of critical media literacy education, but the appropriation of that practice by large corporations and individuals imbued with political power jeopardize that already fraught potential.

Beyond the narrow framing of previous literature that only considers the use of shitposting for social exclusion or as fascist propaganda, I argue for an encompassing approach to this discursive tool that embodies a polysemic and open-ended cultural politic.

The analysis presented here shows that the circumstances under which shitposts circulate hold significant information when trying to understand the potential of these texts within a critical pedagogy. Expanding this assertion to consider other discursive technologies, it follows that both public pedagogy and critical media literacy research must continue to examine not only media itself but how pieces of media circulate, considering both who (or what) this media circulates between and where in that circulation people can begin to challenge the digital milieu.

I contend that positioning shitposting as a uniform tool in terms of its politics within previous scholarship misrepresents the practice. Instead, shitposting can serve a multitude of pedagogical ends depending on how individuals and groups use shitposts.

shitposting represents one tool within this broader, holistic understanding of public pedagogy, albeit one that often manifests unintentionally. By producing turbulence within social media, shitposting can contribute to the public pedagogies of social media that mirror the goals of critical media literacy education. However, a deployment or engagement with public pedagogy does not guarantee a critically oriented outcome.

But memes also have a serious side, according to researchers looking at modern forms of communication. They are a language in themselves, with a capacity to transcend cultures and construct collective identities between people. These sharable visual jokes can also be powerful tools for self-expression, connection, social influence and even political subversion. Internet memes "are one of the clearest manifestations of the fact there is such a thing as digital culture", says Paolo Gerbaudo, a reader in digital politics and director of the Centre for Digital Culture at Kings College London. Gerbaudo describes memes as a "sort of a ready-made language with many kinds of stereotypes, symbols, situations. A palette that people can use, much like emojis, in a way, to convey a certain content".

"We see the replication of mundane reality in many forms of art," says Idil Galip, a doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, and founder of the Meme Studies Research Network. "Even going back to, let's say, Hellenic times, you've got something like tragic theatre, that takes things that happen to you that are upsetting and real-life and makes them into comedic things, which is what memes do." With the arrival of the internet, however, memes have become a more tangible phenomenon that can be observed as they grow, spread and mutate. "In a way, it's like internet users paving the way for academics to look at memes more scientifically," says Limor Shifman, a professor of communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Researchers at Facebook showed in a study in 2014 just how widely memes posted on the social media site can spread and evolve. In one example, they found 121,605 different variants of one particular meme posted across 1.14 million status updates.

Shifman's definition of memes, now widely used in the field, describes them as "a group of texts with shared characteristics, with a shared core of content, form, and stance". Broadly, "content" refers to ideas and ideologies, while "form" to our sensory experiences such as audio or visual, and "stance" to the tone or style, structures for participation, and communicative functions of the meme.

Memes tap into collective consciousness online and have been referred to as digital folklore – or "Netlore". "We can see not just the new ways people do things or the new ways people express themselves in public but also some of the themes, some of the anxieties or desires people have. All of these complex issues are reflected in things like memes," says Gerbaudo.  But for an idea to become a meme, it needs to be shared. Most successful internet memes – in that they spread wide and far – share a few key attributes. "Usually the most viral, most loved memes are memes that are about things that are very recent in public memory," says Galip. But often they are also "something that was important to many people", she says. "Viral memes usually appeal to the most common denominator. So you don't have to necessarily be embedded in internet subculture to understand what it's saying. And the final thing I think is, it's the most basic thing but it's very hard to replicate, is that it should be fun to look at, and fun to share."

Memes also have an uncanny way of capturing a feeling, experience, or state of mind which resonates with people, depending on the "niche-ness" of the meme. One small recent study found that people with depression rated depression-related memes as more humorous, relatable and shareable. The researchers suggest memes elegantly portray the experience of depression which some may find hard to vocalise. And because they are highly relatable among people with depression, they could offer the perception of social support and emotional connection. The findings echo those in other studies that have suggested internet memes can contribute to the formation of a collective identity among marginalised groups such as the LGBTQ+ community or among disparate networks of people, such as those who have been conceived with donated sperm or eggs.

"Niche memes are not meant to go viral," says Galip. "They're meant usually to create things like in-group belonging, something that kind of strengthens a sense of identity."

One perspective put forward by Joshua Nieubuurt, who studies misinformation and disinformation at the University of Maryland in the US and the University of Okinawa in Japan, is that memes can be regarded as a modern digital equivalent of the propaganda leaflet. He points to the way memes have been used to support or undermine arguments for Covid-19 restrictions and vaccinations, using humour and sarcasm to delegitimise the stances of people on either side of the debate.

Online, memes are important facilitators of communication, belonging, and digital activism, that can both unite and divide us, depending on who we are and how we participate with them.

"This format of communication is here to stay because it's a very stable way of expressing your individuality and your communality," says Shifman. Gerbaudo notes that memes are already evolving – branching out more into video sharing. "TikTok videos are memetic in character," he says. "They respond to challenges, which have a certain format, where people need to kind of play with a given, pre-established set of interactions."

Inside an online platform everything, even reality, is just content and content just begets more content. And in a world run by big platforms, a person’s post becomes discourse, discourse creates memes, memes inspire a fandom, and fandoms become social movements. And over the last decade, as platforms flattened everything into content, most news publishers, hiding behind antiquated ideas about objectivity and made desperate from vanishing ad revenue, allowed themselves to be flattened, as well. And now, even though they don’t think of themselves as a competing news fandoms, they absolutely are.

I don’t think the way people react to news stories in 2023 is all that different from how it’s ever been. Here are two great threads comparing funny mean-spirited reactions to the Titanic sinking to the similar memes everyone made this month about the imploded submarine billionaires. But now, if you don’t like what’s in the newspaper you can just write your own thing and get more readers than it did.

Can’t possibly comprehend that extreme levels of wealth created an environment of arrogance that led to a submarine vaporizing a bunch of guys in the middle of the ocean? Just tweet that that’s not actually what happened. The fact the Russian coup didn’t even last a full day and no one got arrested sounds suspicious to you? Easy. Just make up something else.

Eventually every platform wanted the same kind of content, but to fit specific algorithms and specific demographics, which no one would bother to do, so the same videos just got posted everywhere until none of the networks felt distinct from each other and every site just pivoted away from the whole idea.

Content creators chasing engagement, regardless of what kind, to grow their followings happens all the time. And content creators morphing into a weird caricature of themselves much to the chagrin of their audience is pretty normal too.

unlike still-image memes, we still think they must contain some kind of truthfulness to them. And, worse, the more they’re shared, the more we believe it. So when we see a video like the ones Zesu makes — something that appears to be shot out in the world, without any immediately obvious tells that it’s staged, being passed around different platforms — we continue to share it as if it were real. And smart creators, like Zesu, or the porn star with the fake podcast, are taking advantage of that as a growth hack. But it’s also hard not to think that this is, at a macro level, making social media a more annoying place to be.

How they translate into 3D spaces, how they are integrated with architecture, lighting, textures & materials enables more avenues for brand expression, and often elevates the perception of a brand over time and exposure, even if the logo fades somewhat into the background.

The preceding pandemic year had been a time of unprecedented digital immersion. With less material to draw upon from the outside world, we frantically generated content about content. Memes evolved at an accelerated rate, all the more recursive because they were all we had. At the time, this didn’t even feel strange, because it was the mere culmination of what we’d been building toward for the prior decade, and we were already acclimated. 2020 put the finishing touches on that process of rewiring our brains for social media, fully orienting us toward a world where everything is content and potential raw material for memes and discourse.

New Gentrification — metagentrification — is post-millennial, illegible, and hyper-self-aware (“Not me eating breakfast at Dimes!”). Micro-neighborhoods and scenes rapidly emerge, memeified from the start, encouraging an incessant exegesis among their ever-expanding horde of participants, many of whom seem to simultaneously exist within those worlds and at an ironic distance from them. The most sophisticated providers of detached commentary, and the most viral memes, become symbolic pillars of the neighborhood itself. The entire construct feels like a Russian doll of such knowingness, the center of which, if you ever reach it, may or may not turn out to be anything at all.

Hipsters had a coherent if embarrassing system of values, celebrating elusive objectives like authenticity; with so many of those ideals long since commodified or extinguished, an impenetrable nihilism has replaced it, accepting that if everything is just content, it can all be worn like a costume and then discarded when the starter pack of which it’s part evolves and renders it obsolete.

Sundberg quotes a Dimes Square local who worries that the neighborhood’s new hotel development will unleash another wave of thinkpieces and clueless tourists — people who “think it’s a real thing.” She continues, “It’s not a real thing. It was a joke that journalists and people who don’t live here kind of escalated into a reality.” To the tourists, the firsthand experience of the place must indeed be puzzling, even disappointing, like visiting the diner from Seinfeld. Clandestino is an ordinary bar, albeit more crowded these days. The real thing is anchored somewhere else, and those visitors have probably already found it.

what I think the Know Your Meme report illustrates so well is that we’re now currently in a world where we have two different kinds of social platforms: Ones that make new culture and ones that consume that culture. And, according to the report, the two most important platforms for creating new internet culture (which is now just pop culture) are Twitter and TikTok.In fact, according to Know Your Meme, about 60% of the memes we’ve seen in 2022 were created by Twitter or TikTok. And the three biggest apps behind those two —YouTube, Reddit, and Instagram — all trail far behind, contributing around 10% each.