Dom Alhambra

A friend recommended to me the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis. Since it’s produced in the form of a video essay, I’ll try doing one myself, but in the lazier Daily Show kind of way.

I enjoyed the thesis, Memes Matter, because it’s an alliteration and because it’s true: Memes are a hugely portable media format that offers the audience two questions: 1) Are you familiar with the imagery and sentiment? And 2), if yes, then what’s your opinion? If you fail the first question, a possible follow-up awaits: Why don’t you know? You have been on this social media platform for years, and yet you don’t know the symbolic language of this meme. Why don’t you know? Many people might let the question go, but the purveyors of memes might follow up to understand the new vocabulary.

I think memes work in natural process, like gravity and the flow of water. The meme flows through down materials in the ground; some pieces are inclined to absorb and others deflect it depending on their inherent physical properties. People have their own physiological and psychological circumstances that develop what they are inclined to accept and ignore in terms of language and idea. But some form of meme, eroding the edges of individualized thought by constant flow, will inevitably break through and impact the constructed identities of its receiver.

Why would this happen? Why are memes breaking down a so-called “individualism”? I think it’s because individualism is an effect of thoughts and experiences unshared. The meme helps project the assumption that all people can relate to its experience. If people haven’t, then the meme doesn’t apply to them, and the meme is just visual noise or a curiosity. If people do relate, the meme feels prophetic and humane. At times, the meme’s symbolism may latch onto a once unshared thought or memory, and re-define it in the context of the meme’s symbolism rather than of the individual’s persona conception of it. In the context of religion, born-agains can re-narrativize their previous, secular life as a necessary process to find God.

We see every day how words are re-defined for a constantly changing culture: In politics, Republicans and Democrats have switched functional roles over the past two centuries, but the two party words evoke only a single vision for most. The words Liberal and Conservative may stay the same, but the underlying philosophies behind each word change all the time. Memes work to do the same thing, by asserting shared language over specific activities, identities, and ideologies. Think about how you can’t seem to have a Marxist perspective of the world without using the same words used by the original author. This is because Marxism was more powerful as a linguistic phenomenon than a practical one: The ideology created a shared language that helped people conceive the world through its linguistic lens.

Memes are much more humble. Memes don’t explicitly state they are human universals, they just knock on the door every few moments asking you to think about it for a second. Unlike Marxism, which requires the whole system of conception to focus or none at all, Memes can work through attrition: They chip at personal experiences without any system; they take what they can get. There’s no end goal here, which also highlights the decentralized nature of the meme: Each one is its own kingdom, and is happy with the little piece of turf they acquired. The only thing memes in aggregate accomplish is the constructed belief that there is nothing new under the sun in terms of the human experience. Spiritually this means a different end to history, by asserting that life is now just a re-run, so we can sit back and watch.

So memes do matter, but my foundations are quite different compared to MemeAnalysis. Even worse, I don’t even know where all these memes are coming from—I’ve never heard of 95% of what’s explained on MemeAnalysis’ channel. I see these meme images zooming and panning on the video essay and I don’t know what context they are posted in. How do people react to these things? This is like being shown some ancient carvings without any information on the where or why of the carvings. I’m just getting someone’s personal interpretation of the carving.

So then I feel I’m not really watching an analysis of the meme itself, but how it can be processed through MemeAnalysis’ philosophical framework. This is fine for an opinion writer like myself who doesn’t try to confound conjecture with statement of fact, but the tone of MemeAnalysis is that of a historian that had been hiding out in public libraries for centuries. Rather than analyzing or interpreting given memes, I’m seeing someone divine the truth out of them.

In the video “Gamers Rise Up,” MemeAnalysis is matter-of-fact about their diagnosis of gamers prior to GamerGate.

The gamer was initially a pleasant child, kept to himself, in a pleasant little world, content to play their games, troll the web, and lust for gamer girls. An insular way of life. It wasn’t until 2014, and the GamerGate event that the Gamer would be thrust from his cocoon of pleasure, and into a radicalized political landscape.

The Gamer, as he stood, was impotent. The typical racism and misogyny are not deep felt hatreds, but merely an aesthetic, a very powerful means of opposing the prevailing culture they felt wronged by. When the political right read this as a victory over the youth, they quickly found young disenfranchised people have no real beliefs. Just a rebellious spirit. There is no political alignment of todays energetic youth, and as different forces, establishment media, and alternative radicals fight to politicize and moralize the outbursts of chaotic youth, it will be up to the kids to refuse these ideological shackles.

For the Jungian world of MemeAnalysis, a video gamer is turned into a monolith: The Gamer. As we see above, The Gamer is quiet, yet seething with chaotic energy. They might follow the rules in interpersonal social settings, but while playing video games and engaging in online discussions, a rebellious nature is found. Apparently, The Gamer is not politically aligned, much to the consternation of establishment parties.

But to believe this, we have to assume that The Gamer archetype does exist, and that no individual video gamer is safe from The Gamer covering for self-identity. That is, in order to believe in The Gamer, you have to assume that there is little diversity in a given activity, hobby, or occupation; the meme is constructed on the assumption that someone else must have experienced this as well. It’s an echo chamber in which you might find yourself in the repetition of others.

The problem with this kind of “psycho-sociological” analysis of a meme is that you are going to have to create the symbol—the meme—first, and then desperately seek out behaviors that will fit it. In tarot cards and mentalism and other forms of psychological magic, this works well because people default to seeking identity in the easy-to-follow narratives of archetype. This narrative, with specific keywords that help keep one in their archetype—provides framework-specific vocabulary for people to have a mutual understanding of each other within that given framework. This is a process of “horoscoping”—to throw out a thousand vague characteristics of a group or person and see what they adopt and ignore, and tell them that it was their sign that defined them.

There are people that fit The Gamer archetype. But constructing these people from the archetype only serves to undermine a multi-sided, layered identity. If MemeAnalysis is asking “why does this meme matter?”, I would answer that its because we are seeing language and symbol construction in real-time; yes, the language is crude, exclusionary, and anti-individualistic, but that’s the point of language. Because a private language cannot exist, it must be compromised by all parties that agree to it. However, if this agreement of compromise is not recognized, and the language object is interpreted as a window into the human mind rather than an a product of ever-transforming culture, then you will produce a pseudo-psychology—and the problem of failed psychology is compounded by Jungian theory, which seeks to project from the individual onto the group. You then create a deformed sociological perspective from the innocent and simple question all memes ask: “Am I alone in having experienced this?”

I would conclude that MemeAnalysis is an interesting channel, but I’d watch it with some considerations: When watching, you should pay special attention to how the meme is processed by MemeAnalysis, through a Jungian, early-Nietzschean, classicist way; the consistent use of this framework turns the habitual into the ideological. Whether intentional or not, MemeAnalysis has its own assumption: that this mixed theory is the key to understanding the meme and thusly the people who popularized it. A true historian does little to question the ideological forces behind their constructed history.