THE MEME DILEMMA: How Memes Help to Destroy Creative Thought and Popularize Ignorance

Before I go further than anywhere beyond the admittedly sensationalist title and subtitle above, I feel it deeply necessary to clarify two key things. First, this article is about internet memes, and although I am loosely aware that other types of memes exist conceptually in fields such as evolutionary biology, for brevity’s sake I will be using the broad term meme to specifically mean internet memes; this is something most people seem to do already anyway, but I still feel compelled to make the point, just in case. Second, I often enjoy memes myself and see many reasons for their appreciation, not just as entertainment, but also as appropriately-titled capsules of modern culture. Years from now, generations will presumably be able to look back on the popular memes of our time and see a uniquely vivid social depiction of their ancestors. Like super advanced hieroglyphs in a higher dimension, our memes will leave a kind of virtual wall to be deciphered and interpreted by future discoverers. Who were we? What did we think and feel? How did we interact with each other and what were our lives like? In almost enviably intimate detail will the humankind of tomorrow be able to see into the human experience of the distant past. Similarly, memes connect you and I to our own culture today in an equally detailed and intimate way. What would have once been deeply internal subjective experiences of specific phenomena become globalized, and memes are at their absolute best when they enable us to discover our collective similarities in this extraordinary new way. “Wasn’t this a scary character in that old TV show we watched as kids?” “I never eat this part of the meal either.” “Why does this particular logo always look like something else to me?” “How I feel when I do A, B, C, or D.” Etc., etc., etc…

I’ll be the first to admit this is all wonderful stuff. What a joy to discover all these shared experiences! Anything that has such potential to create global friendship and deepen our understanding of ourselves and each other has got to be worth holding on to, and this is precisely the baby I intend not to throw out with the bathwater. But with such piercing insight into our own culture and thought, there comes a steep price: piercing insight into our own culture and thought. I feel I owe a preliminary tip of the hat to memes, largely because it is precisely through memes themselves that we are granted such a clear and thorough view into their destructive power. As usual, careful analysis shows nothing is black and white, and while memes are without question extremely cool in some ways, they are formidably dangerous in others.

Now having said so outright, I’ll anticipate a reactionary question likely to come up. Which memes? I doubt a comprehensive list of all the world’s memes exists, but if it did, it would be extremely long and would require superhumanly fast constant updating. What’s more, the variety is staggering. There are memes about almost everything; movies, music, food, cars, cities, celebrities, mental health, self-image, social interaction, dogs, driving, careers, religion, homework, chimpanzees, mugshots, politics…and even seemingly random photos of otherwise ordinary people doing something particularly interesting or amusing. Memes also seem to frequently utilize the comedic trick of using a picture from one category and an idea from another; for example, a picture of the Pope’s facial expression being used in a meme about gratitude towards a generous marijuana provider, or a bizarre screengrab from a cartoon being used to make an adult joke. Memes are difficult to categorize for this reason. Specific “types” of memes do exist, in the sense that many are based on one specific image being continually given new captions, thereby making “new” memes within very narrow confines. “Bad luck Brian” is a good example; another is “success kid.”

Both these memes, and in fact most other memes, could be thought of as templates of a sort, each of which depicts an image (usually of a person) conveying a particular thought or emotion applicable to a wide variety of situations or topics. These could perhaps be thought of as “categories,” but they are so specific, numerous, and unorganized that it frankly doesn’t offer any help in the way a legitimate system of categorization is supposed to. As far as I can tell, memes are generally organized (if ever) by themes, much like those I listed before (celebrities, careers, etc.) and it is unclear at any point whether the theme is in regards to the image being used, or the subject of the caption, or both; it varies seemingly at random, without any apparent structure.

I say all this not to be a hard-ass about organization; anyone who knows me will attest to the fact that I’m the furthest thing from it (God forbid you ever witness the state of my bedroom). I make the point because it not only explains why I’m simply unable to ever pin down the “bad” memes or delineate categorically between “these” memes and “those” memes, but also because it segues somewhat nicely into my first major critique of memes as a whole. Memes are disorganized. They are random, extremely brief, dispensable, interchangeable, repetitive, and limited severely and inescapably by their inherently fleeting nature. Nobody makes popcorn, curls up in a blanket and dims the lights to look at a meme. One meme is almost never something to look at for more than a few seconds, and while it’s certainly possible to spend more time looking at a long series of memes, the result is usually chaos. The iPhone app iFunny (which is estimated to have been downloaded on roughly 1/3 of all the iPhones in the US) is a prime example, supplying millions of Americans with a relentless daily stream of endless memes having absolutely nothing to do with each other whatsoever.

This is the type of entertainment that satisfies only the most impatient attention span; a consciousness so utterly impoverished of sustainable focus as to make hideous sacrifices in the depth and substance of the content which entertains it. In a feature length film, or a novel, or a standup comedy performance, relatively immense amounts of time are dedicated to developing characters, weaving storylines, illustrating and elaborating on concepts and tying them together, and making (often times) complicated and sophisticated statements intended to make substantial lasting impressions on the audience. Memes cannot do this. There’s no question memes can be profound or even somewhat sophisticated conceptually; anyone who has read my other article about dealing with haters (and I’d love to pretend that there may be someone out there who actually has) will have seen that I quoted a meme at the start of the article, which I felt represented the gist of my viewpoint pretty accurately. But memes cannot be complex. In fact, complexity is totally antithetical to the very format itself, and that is a problem for something so universally popular.

It should go without saying that there is tremendous value in having the ability to grapple with complexity and spend more than just a few moments contemplating a singular concept in its full complexity. To instead prefer rapid, surface-level contemplation of a wide variety of topics is to inevitably cultivate an overly simplistic worldview, most likely wracked with an inaccurate sense of binarity and stark polarization between right and wrong, good and bad, true and false, and to further assume, on average, that oneself is conveniently on the preferable side of all equations. “This is how it is, and it’s just not that complicated; all those people are wrong.” I firmly believe memes further empower our pre-existing natural tendency to want to alleviate ourselves from the intellectual heavy lifting associated with looking honestly at difficult problems and complicated questions. They train our minds to be satisfied with less; it is a textbook instance of “quantity over quality.” Memes stimulate our senses with a barrage of discombobulated flashes of unrelated, shallow entertainment and atrophy our ability to be adequately stimulated by singular instances of drawn out entertainment with any richness or depth to it. To suggest this may have something to do with the problematic political landscape in the US today and the destitute absence of American bipartisanship amid so much important controversy is to make, in my view, a straight-forward logical progression. Might our ideological entrenchments and our unwavering certainty of the other side’s total ignorance and incorrectness be manifestations of our short attention spans and inability to reconcile complexity? Fuckin’ yeah, I think it just might.

But the trouble doesn’t end there. Memes don’t just make us vulnerable to being satisfied with incomplete, overly simplistic non-comprehension; they also make us perilously vulnerable to brutal manipulation and social engineering by numerous malevolent forces hoping to sway non-comprehension in their favor. Memes can become outrageously popular practically overnight; and in that time be seen (fleetingly but nevertheless thoroughly) by millions upon millions of minimally-discerning, quick-fix seeking newsfeed scrollers not in any mood to stop and analyze complexity in any form. “Show me the meme, ha ha good meme, show me another one.” But in that short time, subliminal influence can most definitely occur undetected. I said earlier that it’s hard to nail down a specific type of meme as the culprit, and it is; but I also must say that, as a general rule, “ad memes” (or memes based on famous advertisements) are troubling in almost any case. If you are trying to advertise a product, the best thing that could possibly happen to your business is to have a popular meme made about it. Old Spice has spent several years running bizarre, zany commercials which I believe are intentionally designed to inspire templates for memes like those I described before, and with considerable success. Terry Crews can be seen in all sorts of different popular memes based on his most wild appearances as a star in Old Spice commercials, and this does more than serve as powerful advertising for Old Spice; it permeates culture itself, giving the brand immediate high status among all that is relevant, current and “hot.” From a marketing standpoint, it is nothing short of a dream…and while being manipulated to buy deodorant is hardly a crime against humanity, the fact that it is so readily possible leaves a frightening door open for more malicious intruders…we’ll get to that in a moment.

Another example is the fabled “Most Interesting Man in the World,” Dos Equis’ arguably all-time great ad campaign, which turned into a meme suddenly a few years ago and inspired a tremendous resurgence of public appreciation for the brand. But this is precisely what is so disturbing: people seem shockingly unaware that what they’re appreciating is a brand. I’ll be the first to admit that I love “The Most Interesting Man in the World.” The campaign was first launched in 2006 and ran through most of my early teens, making me a prime target to fall for the “worldly, cultured man of many stories” archetype. Fall I most certainly did! Whenever a friend’s older sibling leaned through a car window outside the liquor store and asked “what we wanted” before we fumbled over a wad of cash, I always said “Dos Equis!” Now that I’ve been legally able to order beer in bars and restaurants for over a year, I’m somewhat horrified to realize I still order Dos Equis when I see it on the list, almost exclusively because of the fond memories associated with it…and maybe even funny memes…

Don’t worry, as will be made very clear by the following paragraph, Dos Equis is not sponsoring this article, nor is Old Spice. While I have no problem admitting I adore the ads themselves, and I marvel at how willing I was (and still am) to ultimately be persuaded by them, I must stress that I am nevertheless aware of what’s going on. I know I’m being manipulated, I know drinking Dos Equis does not make me more interesting, and I know there is no validity to the absurd idea that Dos Equis is a brand of beer that “interesting” people drink more often than others. When I see memes based on The Most Interesting Man in the World, I feel a pang of nostalgic fondness, but I also recognize the face of a company, with a morally questionable agenda, designed to influence my choices and behavior.

My assumption is that most people have the same awareness to some extent. The problem is that it still works! Even when our most careful defenses are raised, the cleverest advertisements can sneak their way into our subconscious and compel us to “prefer Dos Equis” even when we know full well we’re being tricked into doing so. This is why ads being used in memes is so dangerous. They present themselves to us when our defenses are at their lowest. First off, it’s the main attraction. The ad is part of the show, instead of part of a break from it, defying the usual binarity of television programming which allows us to recognize when the ads are running and when they are (for the most part) not running. Plus, the company itself may very well have had nothing at all to do with it; the funny kid from your high school made it, or that blogger you like, or the page you follow; all the more reason to be unsuspecting and oblivious to the brand agenda being presented to you. Worst of all is the previously discussed problem of complexity. Memes are generally consumed in such a way as to be wildly unconducive to lengthy contemplation. Brand slogans and advertising campaigns are designed meticulously to be consumed in precisely the same way, and to stick as indelibly as possible in one’s subconscious without requiring careful examination. In fact, careful examination is typically the arch-enemy of advertising, and it is the arch-enemy of memes too; they make for a perfect partnership. I’m sure any brand that has had their product freely promoted by cultural influencers in the form of memes is cackling maniacally in their secret lair, writhing orgasmically in a swimming pool of money…okay, maybe not to that extreme. But it is undeniably clear that our affinity for memes is making us easier to advertise to.

Meme’s ripen our minds for unprecedentedly persuasive manipulation at the hands of corporate interests. Like intellectual junk food, they accelerate our appetite for stimulation, train us to prefer quantity over quality, and jeopardize our already dwindling capacity to look at complexity. But advertisers aren’t the only ones thrilled about this; political agendas are also reaping enormous benefits from the exponentially increasing ease with which we can be seamlessly manipulated into conveniently simplistic and stridently held viewpoints. In 2016, I saw more memes than I could count relaying blatantly false and outrageously terse information about then-Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and we now know for a fact the Russian government was directly involved in this. Remember: memes help train our minds to be satisfied with incomplete, surface-level comprehension of simplistic information. That’s a foreign government taking advantage of exactly that phenomenon in order to help elect the least qualified and arguably least competent president in United States history, Donald Trump. For fairness’ sake (though it isn’t fair), false memes were spread about Trump as well. I recall seeing several memes quoting something Trump never said from interviews that never happened, invariably saying something totally outrageous, as if there weren’t enough real quotes to be outraged about already. Out of respect to you, the reader, I make no effort to disguise my own political bias.

To say that memes themselves are directly responsible for the election of Trump and the political turmoil of the United States is definitely a stretch. There are lots of obvious bigger factors, and I don’t want to get sidetracked addressing them all, but I do want to make the point in case I’m ever mischaracterized (perhaps in a meme) as “the guy who thinks memes are to blame for Trump.” I’m not that guy, necessarily…but I would say that memes as a modern phenomenon are certainly not without fault. Their widespread popularity across social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram provided additional ways in which false information could be spread effectively. It seems hard to deny that our collective desire to consume memes, including political memes, as inherently fleeting surface-level entertainment blips had to have provided a clear advantage for those seeking to deceive us and skew the electorate towards misinformed choices. Lies were able to go undetected through millions of newsfeeds, and that’s just not possible without precisely the kind of attention-span-conditioning I’ve been talking about.

While this has got to be the worst, it’s still not the last of the issues in the meme dilemma. A problem of personal significance to my own heart is the sense that memes are created through a remarkably uncreative process. Clearly, humor is the main intention of most memes, and there’s no question it takes a fairly creative person to come up with quality jokes that actually land with a large audience and gain widespread popularity. Other memes require creativity too; I have seen memes that do in fact share presumably original profound ideas (written, however, as simplistically, tersely, and colloquially as possible so as not to bore the audience).

I won’t say there aren’t creative or even brilliant people creating memes, because it’s not true. But you may recall in the subtitle I said that memes “help to destroy creative thought,” and I really do mean it. Memes don’t just train our minds to be vulnerable to manipulation; they also enable creative minds to create less. They provide a tragically constricted, restrictive, repetitive, recycling medium by which only the most limited self-expression is possible. There’s no question people also get hooked on the attention and sense of popular modernity they get from creating successful memes, and I’m convinced many of these people are drastically short-selling their creative potential by cramming themselves in this unremarkable category. Worse than that, if I remove some benefit of the doubt, I also suspect many people unwittingly abandon some of their creative depth and quite literally waste their gifts to some extent by growing overly satisfied with the minimal effort needed to succeed. “Are you really saying making memes is a lazy form of creative expression?” Yes!

But in truth the most major way in which memes destroy creative thought is not the effect they have on creators themselves; it is the market-value decimation they impose on substantive creativity as something anybody notices or wants. Perhaps the most disturbing quality of all when it comes to memes is the fact they are so popular. In the enormous, heavily-sought-after market of content consumers on social media, it is What. They. Want. Memes spill in a rushing cascade across user accounts, percolating down every newsfeed like a lubricant that makes them scroll faster and faster as content gets quicker and easier to digest in less and less time. This lubricant also smothers, obfuscates, or even completely washes away most if not all of the less quick, less easy to digest content put out by more long-winded contributors. You know, all those people who keep posting their own written articles on Medium? Or who write those unbearably high-character-count statuses where you have to click “See More” to read the whole thing? *GROOOOAAAANNN* Nobody has time for that! If you have something interesting or important to say, make a 6-second video, or a picture with a caption, or at least keep your status to within a few hundred characters. (If you’ve made it this far in the article, you rock.)

For the most part, I would imagine the obvious connection between a shortening attention span and a decline in the substance of creative thought is self-explanatory. There’s no question that our devices and the entertainment we derive from them are major contributors to the undeniable fact that our attention spans are generally getting shorter in modern times, and in my view, a meme-heavy diet is at the causal forefront. But I must be careful in using the word “cause.” This is a key point: memes do not destroy creative thought, nor do they popularize ignorance, so much as they help accelerate the development of these things. Memes tend to the soil which has already been there all along in our natural human tendencies, rather than swoop in as some foreign agitator and poison our innocence. To not recognize this would be a crucial mistake, the likes of which has been made many times before.

A similar mistake was made about a much more horrible and dire subject following the Columbine school shooting in 1999. The whole country immediately lost its mind scrambling, as is natural for us, to explain precisely what caused it, so as to prevent it from ever happening again. As usual, many people, though vitriolic, were generally well-intentioned in their speculative accusation of various things, but alas many supposed explanations were deeply flawed in just the way I mentioned above: they mistook that which was merely tending the soil for that which was planting it. One example was the dialogue that got started about violent video games, which were gaining popularity at the time. Many felt that playing violent video games could actually transform otherwise non-violent children into vicious psychopaths by teaching them behaviors they would have never learned on their own. While this theory does correctly recognize a correlation between violent children and violent video games, it gets it backwards. It’s sort of like the chicken and the egg; violent children come before violent video games. The children who are already predisposed towards violent tendencies for other, more complex and obscure reasons naturally gravitate towards the violent video games, which simply tend to the pre-existing soil (or arguably may even work the other way by providing an outlet for their impulses).

I bring this up not to compare Columbine to memes, because it would be a ridiculous total non-sequitur; I bring it up to give an example of the mistake I’m being careful to avoid in my speculation: I must not make the mistake of accusing memes of causing the destruction of creative thought and the popularization of ignorance in our society, because those things are already happening for a variety of reasons that ultimately have to do with us, not memes. Memes are instead something that we are gravitating to naturally as a symptom of our current state of mind; and memes are aggravating the issue. The comparison to violent video games is appropriate only in the strict sense that both are not the source of the problem, but are solid indicators and illustrators of the problem that also enable it to get worse.

Memes help destroy creative thought and popularize ignorance, but if all memes suddenly ceased to exist, we wouldn’t suddenly become exceptionally more creative or less ignorant. The purpose of this article is to point out that we may be underestimating their negative influence, and to use memes for their own express purpose: examining our collective state of mind.

Over this past holiday break, I played a card game with some family and friends called “What Do You Meme?” The game is based unmistakably on Cards Against Humanity, which is based unmistakably on Apples to Apples. All three games share the same simple format of having a theme card, held by a judge, and a large deck of other cards which have different things written on theme to go with a theme. Each player anonymously submits one card from a hand of “thing” cards, and the judge (who rotates to the left every turn, just like the dealer in an amateur poker game) is tasked with choosing the play card best matched to the theme. Even though this format has been used at least twice before, I have to say “What Do You Meme?” makes the most sense of any game I’ve played in the format. The judge has a card with a picture (or what I called earlier a “meme template”) and players choose what to play from a hand of possible captions to go with the picture, thereby creating a meme.

If your interest is in a game requiring elaborate strategy or skill of any kind, this is most definitely not the game for you. I was reluctant to play, and at first I felt slightly irritated by the gameplay, where luck is 99.99% of the process and the winning card is barely ever even chosen based on how well it matches the picture; judges just pick the funniest card. But I quickly shifted my perspective and fell in love with it. My whole family was laughing uproariously throughout the game. Nobody particularly cared who was winning or who was losing, and it became obvious after only a short time that the game is clearly designed for what might be thought of as a higher purpose of sorts: ice-breaking. So what there’s no strategy? So what there’s barely a winner or a loser? So what the criteria by which the judging happens is utter garbage? Everyone is smiling! Everyone is warming up to each other. Perhaps the key is to think of it, not as you would a typical game, but as something else; its own thing.

This is what I suspect the key is with memes in their regular, ever-present format. Memes are certainly dangerous if they become the dominant form of entertainment we consume daily, especially if their dangers go undetected like I fear they often do now. But there’s really nothing wrong with having a good laugh at something totally silly or meaningless…just look at Monty Python! In the end, there must be balance. I aspire to live in a world where we all understand the difference between memes and deeper entertainment; a world where we never mistake memes for a complete education; a world where we are aware of the messages we’re getting and we make conscious decisions about how to respond to them. We must consume memes responsibly and with a critical mindset, and in order to do this we may need to think of memes as a different thing. They’re not just any form of entertainment; they’re junk food. If a Shakespeare play is an organic vegetable salad at a five-star restaurant, then memes are a bag of Doritos at a gas station. Obesity is a public health crisis, and we all need to eat less Doritos and more organic vegetable salads, even though they might not taste as good at first. But hey, every once in a while, go ahead: eat some Doritos. Crack open a big jar of Mars-mud cheese dip, wolf a huge bag of Doritos, and watch the Super Bowl. But always remember to maintain a balanced diet in daily life. ;)

If you’re one of the lucky few who made it to the end, thank you so very much for reading! I hope you enjoyed it and I’d love to hear your thoughts if you’re willing to share them. I’ll see you next time!