A pilot of "the philosophy of memes."

Chapter 1

When I was a kid, I understood the concept of “postmodernism” as something alien to the desires of the common man. In the eyes of my teachers, it was something like the creations of Andy Warhol, the Campbell’s soup and the comic-book style mishmashes. Postmodern art was something that the ordinary Joe or Jane had no attachment to or desire to consume.

It was an ideology for the most advanced of artists and critics.

But what if I were to tell you that, today, there is an entire industry that is churning out true “postmodern” media for the common man? What if, in the limitless world of the internet, there lurked a behemoth of entertainment and consistent enjoyment of true postmodern media by the common man?

That world exists. It is the world of “memes.”

A “meme” is, in the language of the younger generation, a funny picture or video featuring some sort of recycled content that plays on a common punch line. For example, a meme called “Ugandan Knuckles,” (already well past its tolerance date as of the writing of this book) features a stretched figure of the Sonic character “Knuckles” saying, over and over again, “Do you know the way” in a Ugandan accent. The meme was used by people in a game called VR chat to swarm and essentially flash mob an entire group of people. The meme died after a month or two, like all memes, but it contained all the pieces of the art that true postmodern painters and artists put on the walls of famous museums.

I doubt anyone ever thought we would get to the point we are at now. When people first began to view postmodern art, they were turned off by it. It was, to most people, a format of expression that would stay in the hands of the elite and the critics. The common man had no need for a picture of fifty soup cans or a urinal with some scribbles on it.

The thesis of this book is that this form of thinking is outdated. Postmodern entertainment has reached the masses and is overtaking other forms of entertainment in terms of popularity. One simply has to browse the site “reddit” or “4chan” or any other content aggregation website to see that it is flooded with memes.

Memes, in their purest form, are the “television” of postmodernism. Formless, ageless and yet aging faster than any other form of art, memes are the crystallization of the backbone of the postmodern man’s way of thought.

Figure 1 Meme Man in his current incarnation.

I must ask you: do you understand what’s going on in this image? You see a plastic mannequin head, holding mechanics’ tools, fixing a car—in direct contradiction to the overhead caption. Mekanik! That’s the punch line.

This, in its entirety, is the form of true postmodernism. You take things that exist in their natural environment (which is a special case in and of itself in this advanced world) and mix them together to create something unique and yet connected to the entire history of memes and their creation.

Memes are truly comprised of three things: a number of sources, most often from popular culture; a mixture of those sources to create something surreal or funny; and a presence on the internet. Memes, and postmodern entertainment by extension, are lossless. They exist in a world where any number of copies can be made of themselves for any reason and through dozens of methods. This allows for the secondary characteristic of memes: they are remixable, and easily. A single meme “template” can span tens of thousands of individual incarnations, each one different in its own way, an expression of the individual who created it.

Because, of course, memes are created by individuals. There are no corporations behind the creation of memes—though there are those that aggregate them. But they are the outsiders and usually not appreciated by the memeing public: they are considered “stolen.” Whether or not you can actually steal this form of digital content (which does not cost anything to produce and is free in its natural form) is a subject for another chapter.

Memes are the populist’s postmodernism. They are the embracing of all those ideals by the common man, and up to this point their entire history and culture has been dismissed by the higher levels of artistry as “benign” or “unartistic.”

A true meme brings together the flotsam and jetsam of our hyper commercialized world and creates something personal. No one owns a Marvel movie. It was created without our consent—though we most likely do not mind it—and is spread so widely that we register it as a piece of our environment. Memes, like the postmodernism of the fifties onward, are a reaction to this reality. When a blockbuster comes out and everyone must see it to join in any real conversation for the next month, memes are the rejection of this feeling.

For example: everyone knows Thanos. He’s a pop culture icon. But memes about him are all over the place and mostly circumvent his entire existence, both as a character and as a creation of the corporate machine.

Here is an example of what people are doing to this poor creation of a committee:

Do you get it? The whole scene in this movie—one of the most impactful—is downgraded to a stupid joke that everyone will get and yet only those who have A) watched Endgame; B) had this joke pulled on them; and C) know who the hell that person photoshopped onto Thanos’s face is will truly appreciate.

And this “meme” is, paradoxically, part of a template. The “Thanos perfectly balanced” template. Hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of versions of this template are floating around there in the internet. Each version is a remix of meme culture, popular culture, and the irony of the act in and of itself. Memes are statues of the mind, carved by a million Brownian agents to produce a reaction to big budgets and big culture.

Postmodernism is, in its purest form, a reaction to mass markets and mass consumption through the mutilation of those concepts for a point. In the case of memes, it’s mostly humor. In the case of artistic postmodernism, it’s to make a statement.

And that is what differentiates the “artists’” postmodernism from the “common man’s” postmodernism. We’re not making a point here deliberately. We’re simply reacting to an environment that has festered in us a growing anhedonia towards mass produced content. Where the original postmodernists were fighting hyperconsumerism of physical objects, memes are the reaction to hyper consumption of metaphysical content—i.e. entertainment.

No one person controls the meme movement. In fact, no group of people controls the “meme economy.” It is a purely libertarian, post-scarcity environment where, behind an endless flood of content, there exist millions of people who are, in some way, malcontent with the media that they are being fed. Memes are a reaction to things like the Marvel expanded universe. We all watched it. We all loved it. But is it too much?

This is the primary concern of the postmodernist. It’s too much! Too many cans of soup. Too many shows to watch, not enough time to watch them. We consume, consume, and consume some more. Memes are an antidote to this “consumption” for two reasons. One: they are not created with intent to make money, and two: are personally significant. They can be taken and mixed, like clay and water, and be turned into something you, the individual, want to say.

Memes do not exist in an economic vacuum, however. A true postmodern economy is an economy of appreciation. We “spend” appreciation on things we enjoy. “Appreciation” and “money” are technically the same thing to a corporation. However, they are not the same to the meme maker. Appreciation is, in and of itself, the driving force behind the creation of memes. There is little, if any, money involved in the transaction between the meme creator and the meme consumer. Zero physical scarcity is the enabler here.

If you wanted to, you could download one meme and copy it a million times and you would still have room on your hard drive. Pure zero scarcity has not been reached yet—that would require a functional creator AI—but without the cost of distribution, memes are free.

Companies do not like this reality. In the digital world, it is very easy to create duplicates of an artwork. This is, in its essence, the enabler of meme culture.

When you have a huge library of content to draw from, you can create anything. While copyright is still a huge battle being fought on the internet, these memes slip through because they are not monetized in the traditional sense of the word. “Meme money” comes from community appreciation, shown through “upvotes” and “likes” and “shares.” Meme creators are, whatever they say, working for exposure.

And isn’t that what everyone wants? Exposure? Everyone wants to be famous. At the back of the mind of every meme creator, they are thinking of how satisfying it will be when people upvote their post.

Memes are, most often, curated by the public as well. When you log onto the front page of any meme aggregate site, you will be shown the most popular—most upvoted—memes of that day. When a meme gets a good number of upvotes, it is seen more, and given more appreciation.

Meme curation is a very democratic process. Unlike with big budget entertainment, meme makers do not advertise. You watch the movies that are advertised to you, usually. You do not enjoy memes in that fashion.

The act of consuming and creating memes is a reaction to popular culture. Where popular culture tries to reach the widest audience and make everything understandable, memes go the opposite direction. They fight to make themselves as “in-jokey” as possible. One is unable to enjoy memes to their fullest unless one has been with the meme meta for some time. Memes are constantly popping up, new templates are created, and each template and format draws upon the previous ones to create something new, and yet infinitely recycled. Memes are both in-jokes and out-jokes. They fight against the consensus and make people laugh.

Memes are the everyman’s postmodern entertainment. We never thought it would get here. What was once the domain of artists and critics has now lowered itself to the level of the general public, and each person who watches memes understands, on an implicit level, what memes are reaction to.

When the world is filled with big culture, little bite-sized pieces of often surreal humor featuring these cultural moments chopped up save the psyche of the overwhelmed citizen.