Can Jokes Bring Down Governments?

 Notes on Metahavens' 'Can Jokes Bring Down Governments?

‘Memes play a distinct role in protest; they seem to be the resistance of today, just as ‘political posters’ were yesterday - the embodiment of shared ideas in a community’ 

‘The development of memes at an accelerated pace… ideas arise, are immediately ‘market tested’ and then are seen to either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves into the mainstream’ - Paul Mason

The qualities which ‘define the success of memes; longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity’ according to Richard Dawkins 

Longevity ‘indicates how long a meme can last’, fecundity applies to ‘the appeal of a meme, whether it is catchy and thus likely to spread’, copying-fidelity ‘is about the strength of a meme to withstand mutation in the process of copying and imitation’ 

‘Memes are not a phenomena of language; they are phenomena with language’ 

Susan Stewart in her book Nonsense: by classifying something as ‘nonsense’, ‘the legitimacy and rationality of sense making was left uncontaminated, unthreatened’ 

Limitations of memes are that ‘if a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of ‘rival’ memes’ - Richard Dawkins

‘Successful memes balance their reference to a commonly held world with an element giving them a strikingly new meaning’ 

‘Every generation has to construct and reconstruct its political beliefs, and subsequent visuals, out of the stuff that surrounds it at any given moment. The same goes for the visual stuff of the internet; every generation will construct new ‘political’ beliefs out of all kinds of stuff which seemed initially non-political’

For example, the ‘leftist political jornal ‘kittens’ features radical leftist writing only alongside photographs of cute kittens’

‘Every bit of visual information on the internet can, through the spectre of self-politicisation, become revolutionary, because it exists in a shared gene pool’ 

Ethan Zuckerman calls this phenomenon the ‘cute cat theory of digital activism’; the ‘network standard’ for sharing innocent cat images has the ‘resilience to then also carry the exchanges of political activists’. Memes prove that this ‘network standard’ can ‘politicise’ the content existing within it, from ‘Rick Astely to the Lolcat’

Places like 4chan ‘mass-produced and weaponised the online meme’, using ‘trolling’ and pranks to ‘make the fun out of the ridiculous’. 4chan is anonymous; ‘refuge from work, obligation, class and name’ 

Metahaven, 2016. Can Jokes Bring Down Governments?. Moscow: Strelka Press.