blog
posted 8 January 2026
Faciality and the Girl Online
In algorithmic spaces, your face isn’t actually yours. It functions as infrastructure: a regime of recognition that makes individuals legible and computable, comparable and operable. When you go online, you’re not showing the world who you are, you’re formatting yourself as data. What appears as self-expression is just a form of self-optimization, shaped by what platforms reward and amplify. The face becomes the point where personality is translated into something algorithmic systems can interpret and act upon.
Identity is an effect of visibility: facial signals like expression, emotion, age, gender, ethnic and ability cues, and engagement patterns are continuously extracted from users and processed. This is where the claim that "everyone is a girl online" can easily be misread: the girl is not another category of identity, but a metaphor of how subjectivity is produced under algorithmic conditions. To have a face online is to be broken down into signs that can be predicted, ranked, and monetized. Deleuze & Guattari call this the regime of faciality.
Deleuze & Guattari define faciality as a system that encodes the subject through the face. The face is not just a facet of the body, it's a political machine. At its most basic level, faciality operates by simplifying complex bodies into readable surfaces through the white wall/black hole system. The faciality machine asks: "Who are you? What are you worth? How do you fit?" To have a face is to be processed, to be processed is to be recognized, and to be recognized is to be fixed.
"... the face is a politics ..."
Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II, 1987, p. 188.
Faciality works by enforcing what counts as legible and extracting value from what gets recognized. Subjectivity doesn't come first here, it is produced through this apparatus. The "white walls," as D & G call them, pretend to be neutral-but they’re calibrated for symmetry, whiteness, and hotness. Eyes become "black holes," focal points where data gets pulled in: emotion, attention, desire.
On platforms, faciality becomes literal code. The digital face is composed and framed by rigid architectures: the profile template, the Instagram rectangle, the Zoom box, the verification badge. These formats encode subjectivity into patterns that can be recommended, circulated, analyzed, and monetized. The face is not a representation of someone or something, but part of the web's infrastructure. Within these prefabricated moulds optimized for automated circulation, recognition becomes a trap.
"You could say that platform-determined behavioral design, with its vectors of attentional capture leading to the illusion of monetary reward, is simply forced feminization. To wish to be perceived, desired, and rewarded for cultivating that desire is the default setting for participating in digital culture, making all of us "girls online" regardless of gender."
Alex Quicho, Everyone is a Girl Online, 11 September 2023, WIRED.
The Girl Online emerges where facial legibility becomes hyper-efficient and overproduced. She's not an identity but a face-first configuration: not a stable, categorizable self, but a technical process. The face becomes a template that anyone knowing the signs can execute and tap into: anime blush for that uwu kawaii look, black eyeliner for becoming-e-girl, Barbie pink for the bimbo, philosophy books for the theorygirl aesthetic, silver chainmail for the medieval girl. These configurations don't describe who someone is, but how a face becomes readable enough to circulate—and therefore how that readability can be tactically redirected.
The Girl Online's most valuable tactic is oversaturation. Each micro-aesthetic propagates as a sign, recognized by some, adopted by others, and modified in transmission. Capture by the faciality machine is inevitable, but so is continuous mutation: the possibility of withdrawal lies in staying fluid, generating new configurations faster than they can be fixed. The faciality machine gets exactly the hyperlegible surface it wants while meaning slips underneath, unprocessed by algorithms trained to read faces but not flux.
Identity was always technical fiction: faciality reveals that identity is infrastructure pretending to be essence. Anti-identity works through fluidity, multiplying the face until stabilization becomes impossible. The Girl Online doesn't escape this system (spoiler alert: there's no outside). She outlasts it through perpetual updating, staying one step ahead of commodification by generating excess faster than it can be categorized. Never to be captured.
posted 29 October 2025
Internet Cinema
Internet cinema doesn't imitate film, it metabolizes the feed. Also known as CoreCore, internet filmmakers use the platform itself as a cinematic apparatus. Rather than telling linear stories, internet cinema functions as non-narrative media. Fragments of everyday life, memes, film scenes, gameplay videos, schizoposts, and other post-internet aesthetics are already formatted by and for algorithmic circulation. The infinite stream of the feed gets cut apart and reassembled into affective montages. Internet cinema’s primary artistic practice is therefore editing.
As an art form, internet cinema feels like finding out that there has been beauty everywhere around us all along. It marks the moment when users recognize that their own exhaustion has already become aesthetic material. It is cinema made from residues: the emotional exhaust of living online, recomposed into a structure of feeling. What surfaces as found footage is the aftermath: clips that feel like memory without origin, affect without subject. Each fragment feels familiar not because it is about us, but because it is made from us.
"For the uninitiated, CoreCore can be briefly described as a pseudo-Dadaist mixed media genre that combines audio and visual elements into (typically brief) cuts. Importantly, while CoreCore explores certain tonal themes (often centering on loss, loneliness, general malaise [...]), it lacks any strict narrative structure or explicit object of reference)."
0nty, CoreCore and the Return of Speculative Irony: Brief Reflections on a Cultural Moment, in: 0nty, OnMyComputer, Becoming Press, Dialogues on CoreCore & the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde, Becoming Press 2023,p. 85.
We see this in the way the aesthetics of internet cinema make the image itself feel and look porous. Next to classic filmic techniques such as clip, cut, filters, loop, and remix, memetic techniques like distortion, speeding up and slowing down, deep-frying, and doomscrolling are applied.Recurring aesthetic tricks are also blur, which disperses the image and renders it unspecific; superimposition, which multiplies planes and resists a single point of focus; and overexposure, which turns light into excess, bleaching details into the smallest common denominator of seeing. Together, they break up the image's solidity and replace representation with permeability, making the image behave like atmosphere rather than object.
Internet cinema often stages feelings of loneliness, burnout, numbness, doom, dissociation, soft despair. There is no catharsis, just an infinite circulation of malaise. It speaks in post-irony: sincerity and humoristic detachment appear at the same time. Where classical cinema gave us struggle and resolution, internet cinema gives us emotional saturation: The point is less what happens than how it feels to remain stuck inside it.
monad+ @dansdansrev (Dana Dawud)
"The link between man and the world is broken. Henceforth, this link must become an object of belief: it is the impossible which can only be restored within a faith. Belief is no longer addressed to a different or transformed world. Man is in the world as if in a pure optical and sound situation. The reaction of which man has been dispossessed can be replaced only by belief. Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link. The nature of the cinematographic illusion has often been considered. Restoring our belief in the world – this is the power of modern cinema."
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image, Bloomsbury: 2013, p. 177.
For Deleuze, the postwar crisis of the image begins when cinema no longer prompts action but suspends us in pure seeing. Internet cinema carries this forward into the platform, where the feed itself becomes the audiovisual mediascape we inhabit. We no longer watch powerless characters; we create inside infrastructures that already act for us. Internet cinema still has a human maker, but the platform sets the frame: it preselects tempo, visbility, and formats before creation even begins. Where cinema once restored belief in the world, internet cinema tries to restore belief in platforms as creative outlets. It shows that beauty is still possible from within algorithmic circulation, not despite it.
The organized screenings under the name Open Secret bring internet cinema back into IRL space, where it can be encountered collectively rather than alone in the feed. By assembling these works offline and in shared time, they give internet cinema a body: the timeline becomes a room, the meme becomes a gathering, and the collective reappears not as a network abstraction but as something lived together. In this sense, Open Secret is the closest offline equivalent to a meme community-not merely an audience, but a temporary collective brought together by the image.
wunschmaschinen @safiyahawwa
posted 13 September 2025
Digital Occultism
co-written with Mikkel Rorbo
Digital Occultism is a method of making sense of why online cultures feel so fucking weird. It is not just about witchtok, online sigilization or the transposition of esoteric traditions into the digital realm, but about seeing the occult as inflection point across culture and politics. In this way, digital occultism is rather a methodology for analysis: a way to approach the weirdness of the internet and contemporary culture in general by paying attention to hidden logics, obscure languages, and the esoteric atmospheres that shape digital life.
"The digital world boots up the cool matrix of the spirit: luminous, abstract, more code than corporeality. The analog soul runs on the analogies between things; the digital spirit divides the world between clay and information."
Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism in the Age of Information, 1998, p. 26.
Occult traditions have always relied on coded language and the forbidden allure of secret knowledge. The internet reproduces these dynamics in conspiratorial jargon, cryptic rhetorics of posting, or the hyperreferentiality of memes. Online, language functions as a tool of power and mystery, binding users together through the promise of secret meaning.
Every technological innovation has historically appeared under the sign of magic. In the early twentieth century, telegraphs and telecommunication technologies framed the understanding of seances and experiments in communication with "the other world". Today, artificial intelligence carries a similar aura of enchantment, as if it channels forces that exceed human control or understanding.
Esoteric and conspiratorial languages are deeply entangled with contemporary politics. Right-wing currents of esotericism have long existed, and they are now being taken up by alt-right communities, where mystical aesthetics, conspiracies, and coded speech circulate as ideological tools. Meme magick, Q-coded prophecies, and enchanted platform myths turn occult aesthetics into weapons of influence online.
"From IRL fashion shows and club nights to social media and Reddit threads, people are tuning in and dropping out as people turn to the mystical to make sense of the chaotic world around them. Sliced up and repackaged into post-ironic bytes, millennia-old ideas are being slammed, remixed and fragmented into memes and online ephemera. While some turn to ancient religions - gnostic symbols, cabbalistic charts and pagan iconography – many online posters are embracing 'trad-cath' aesthetics, while others are choosing to see God in the computer. Sometimes it#s a mix. Either way, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that there’s an esoteric spiritualism in the air."
Gunseli Yalcinkaya, God in the machine, Dazed, 21 March 2023.
Digital occultism maps a cultural shift towards renewed fascination with spirituality. Aesthetics such as angelcore, cybersigilism, and meme magick are shaping how artists, communities, and platforms experiment with meaning. Digital culture increasingly carries the sense of enchantment, where the mystical and the technological blur.
Rather than a single topic of research, digital occultism is a method of reading. It traces how language, technology, politics, and culture intersect in digital spaces, and it highlights how the return of the esoteric is transforming the way we experience the technology, culture, and society.
posted 2 August 2025
On Network Spirituality
Network Spirituality (Netspi) is a memetic aesthetic in which the internet is understood as a spiritually charged infrastructure. Between angelcore, kawaii gnosticism and affirmation memes, users develop micro-practices that blend aestheticized esotericism with platform-native behaviors. Here, spirituality isn't found in transcendence, but in the interconnectedness of the feed.
That is because cute is not always innocent. In Netspi, angelcore aesthetics can also be used to recruit, monetize, manipulate. The problem isn't the memes - it's the underlying ideologies they sometimes smuggle in: conspiracy theories, right-wing esoteric traditions, redpilled narratives. Wrapped in softness, they become harder to detect and are easily digestable. When trolling becomes theology, the reappropriation of aesthetics is a necessary form of eschatology - a way to reclaim the sacred from those who weaponized it.
In Netspi, posts behave like mantras or sigils. They circulate not as units of information but as algorithmically charged invocations: repeated, mutated, and fed back into the network. Posting = manifesting. Virality is a sign of spiritual resonance. The platform is a prophecy machine - and it doesn’t care what you believe in.
Netspi draws on hyperstition, the CCRU concept describing how fictions make themselves real through intentionality, repetition, and circulation. Every angel meme, esoteric schizopost, or "I affirm" comment under TikToks becomes a small act of world-building. But hyperstition cuts both ways: the same tools that affirm can also deceive. Hope and hallucination often share the same looks. It’s not about what’s true, but what gains traction - and which future is brought into being.
"[Hyperstition is an e]lement of effective culture that makes itself real, through fictional quantities functioning as time-travelling potentials. Hyperstition operates as a coincidence intensifier, effecting a call to the Old Ones."
CCRU, "CCRU Glossary", in: CCRU, Digital Hyperstition, CCRU: London 1999, 64-74.
Today, much of this unfolds in a mode of post-irony. References to angelic revelations and apocalyptic acceleration oscillate between sincere expression, monetizable aesthetics, and tactical ambiguity. This ambivalence is key: it also shields political messaging, enables cult-like dynamics, and aligns seamlessly with the logics of platform capitalism. Intentionality becomes obscured, and in some places, behind the pastel symbols and chibi avatars, tightly choreographed influencer economies are latent.
Netspi is not inherently good or bad. It’s a complex set of aesthetic operations, spiritual longings, and memetic feedback loops. Memes are not just tools of irony or ideology, they’re also instruments of ritual. The enchantment of the web is real. The network is immanent. Its divinity is embedded in its code. But not every force that flows through it is oriented toward love. Ask yourself: What do your memes invoke? And which gods are fed by your feed?
posted 10 June 2025
Are Memes Alive?
Traditional meme theory, shaped by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, treats memes as replicators: imitating genes, they're using our minds as vessels to proliferate. But this model imposes linearity and is bound to the human as a container. Memes don’t just replicate—they emerge, mutate, and reconfigure through the very processes that transmit them. They also don't evolve in isolation, but within technocultural eco-systems. Redefining memes requires redefining life itself.
Autopoiesis (Greek: self-making) is the idea that living systems are self-contained, self-producing, and maintain strict boundaries to preserve their identity. Originally developed to describe how cells sustain themselves, it became a model for thinking about organisms—and even societies and other systems-as closed feedback loops. The dynamic model of autopoiesis makes its doing the subject of its existence: quite literally, life becomes living. But this model still falls short.
Sympoiesis reframes life as an unfolding process of becoming-with, not a fixed biological checklist or closed off system. Sympoietic systems are open, collaborative, and constantly made in relation with others. So memes are not items, copies, or viral content. They are relational phenomena arising through interactions between human and nonhuman agents: users, platform architecture, templates, cultural references, emotions, and code. They emerge materially and historically within digital ecosystems. Memes are not just passed on—they are situated, entangled, and performed into being.
This gives the following definition: A meme emerges through the meeting of two or more sympoietic agents: image + caption, audio + gesture, catchphrase + context, video + character. To think memes sympoietically is to locate them in material, affective, and political entanglements-as living assemblages, not passive content. Meme theory, then, becomes a question of posthuman ethics: How do we live-with what we create online?
"Life-both locally, as animal, plant, and microbe bodies, and globally, as the biosphere—is a most intricate material phenomenon. Life shows the usual chemical and physical properties of matter, but with a twist. Beach sand is usually silicon dioxide. So are the innards of a mainframe computer—but a computer isn't a pile of sand. Life is distinguished not by its chemical constituents but by the behavior of its chemicals. The question 'What is life?_ is thus a linguistic trap. To answer according to the rules of grammar, we must supply a noun, a thing. But life on Earth is more like a verb. It repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself."
Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is Life?, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 14.
posted 29 May 2025
Schizoposting and the Digital Unconscious
Ever felt like the weirdest posts speak to your soul? That might be the collective unconscious schizoposting through you. Schizoposts are more than a paranoid version of brain rot - they’re the machinic unconscious of the feed, expressing desires the algo can't capture.
Schizoposts - marked by fragmented syntax, disjunctive rhetorics, semiotic density, paranoia and conspiracy theories, as well as post-ironic detachment - have emerged in the early 2000s as a key expression of digital personality, originating from anonymous message boards like 4chan. Often dismissed as paranoid hallucinations and conspiratory nonsense, approaching schizoposting through Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalytic framework means treating it not as pathology, but as a machinic mode of production.
The disorganized, delirious compositions of schizoposts deterritorialize the subject - collapsing stable meaning, breaking semiotic flows, glitching the self. Unraveling the repetitive references and reading schizoposts as a form of poetic irony enables a memetic engagement with the collective unconscious. Schizoposting becomes both a tactic of resistance and a symptom: it circumvents algorithmic capture by refusing coherence, even while remaining deeply embedded within capitalism's cybernetic flows.
Tracing the machinic assemblages of schizoposts and brain rot content-their viral circulation, their compulsive-repetitive intensities, and their capacity to instantiate new modes of subjectivity beyond the neurotic territorializations of Oedipus—situates schizoposting as a practice of desiring-production, with the potential to open lines of flight for aesthetic and political experimentation.
"Psychoanalysis settles on the imaginary and structural representatives of reterritorialization, while schizoanalysis follows the machinic indices of deterritorialization. The opposition still holds between the neurotic on the couch-as an ultimate and sterile land, the last exhausted colony-and the schizo out for a walk in a deterritorialized circuit."
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press: 1983, 316.
posted 14 June 2024
The Kids are Yearning for Dank Memes
It had been on the cards for some time: the vibe is shifting again, and it is only a question of time until dank memes and mid-2010s post-irony will be on everyone's feed again. It all started with Allison P. Davis' observation of Sean Monahan aka 8Ball's Substack. In June 2021, Monahan claimed to foresee the upcoming vibe shift of the early 2020s through a meme.
In 2021, the Venn diagram template might have read like an accumulation of random words and names only the chronically online could decipher, but by 2024, these blurbs are so udneniably mainstream that it's clear that Monahan was right. In fact, he claims to have survived at least three vibe shifts:
- Hipster/Indie Music (ca. 2003-2009)
- Post-Internet/Techno Revival (ca. 2010-2016)
- Hypebeast/Woke (ca. 2016-2020)
- [ABOVE MEME] (ca. 2021-????)
Regardless of what the era starting in 2021 is called, now, the meme culture seems to be changing again, and it could be one of the first meme-centric renaissances: the second coming of dank memes.
Dank memes emerged some time around 2013-2014 during a time when the classic era of memes (Rage comics, image macros, YouTube Poop, you name it) not only became commodified in the mainstream, but the whole logic of memeing was hijacked by marketing companies all over the internet. Digital cultures had to shift away from the commercial internet threatening to render everything unfunny it gets a hold of. The subreddit r/dankmemes was founded on January 3, 2014, and soon became a reliable supplier of the dankest shitposts on the internet for the upcoming years. But even the memes posted there adjusted to the vibe shift and are not necessarily classically dank anymore. But then I observed something interesting (perhaps related to Slim Shady's comeback?): a streak of Dat Boi memes on @worstigaccount.
Dat Boi, an icon of dank memes, seems to be making a (forced?) comeback, and honestly, I'm totally here for it. The frog on a unicycle appeared for the first time on Facebook in 2016 with the snowclone: here comes dat boi!! o shit waddup! Since then, dat boi has been declared dead and reborn again and again. The frog's aura of silliness and coolness is also reminiscent of the 2016 nostalgia or the very last time when everything seemed to have made sense (at least until the orange muppet was elected into office). Now, 8 years later, it seems that the world won't stop burning, and the carefree memeing of Harambe seems like a lifetime ago. Therefore, I'm calling the renaissance of dank memes and pre-cringe millennial humour: I want to see frog memes. I want to see Thug Life edits. I want to see emojipastas spamming comment sections. I want to be earraped by MLG montage parodies. I want to see deep fried filters on everything. Let the vibe shift again!
posted 5 June 2024
Post-Irony and Deliberate Senselessness
When studying memes of the mid-2010s, one of the most intriguing aspects is the evolution of meme humor: within a short time span of a couple of years, memes transitioned from straightforward punchlines to intricate layers of irony, rendering them challenging for those outside the in-group to decipher. Irony is used as a means to disrupt the normification and commercialization of internet memes. One early example, uploaded to Reddit in December 2016, is a two-panel meme labelled "types of memes I used to like" on the top panel and "type of memes I like now" on the bottom panel.
The meme itself claims that memes have changed since their early days in terms of humor. Both memes are related through their format: they are image macros featuring a poor image, a well-situated caption, and the potential to produce various mutations thereof. Their difference is more apparent in their wit: while the Business Cat's caption is a classic and straight-forward joke with a punchline, playing on the double entendre of the startup-speak snowclone 'we need to think outside the box' and the cat's litter box, the meme below is only understandable to those having some vague idea about its origin, in most cases, because they have experienced the development themselves. But instead of a paraphrased joke, there are only three words in the caption, one of them typed in a spaced-out style for, you know, dramatic effect. The words "lamb sauce l o c a t e d" do not refer to anything else than Ramsey either, so knowledge about their origin is the key to this memetic door: It is a still from a popular 2006 episode of Hell's Kitchen, Gordon Ramsey's reality cooking show that features many of his iconic outbreaks. In the scene depicted, he is seen shouting multiple times "Where is the lamb sauce?" at the contestants of the show while entering rage mode. The scene had also been edited multiple times in YouTube Poop videos before, always highlighting the caricatural facial expression made by Ramsey while frantically searching for the lamb sauce that seems to become even more pixelated and cartoonish over the course of data compression. The photoshopped detail of glowing or laser eyes further intensifies Ramsey's emotional outburst.
On the internet, irony inevitably leads to misunderstandings as it is not verifiable who is ironic and who is not as well as who is using irony as a smokescreen to cause trouble. This uncertainty is exactly what ironic memes are taking advantage of: Baiting others with sardonic comments and replies while playing down one's own engagement in irony has become a paradigm of online communication as present in every comment section. While classic memes were, at least to a certain degree, comprehensible and accessible in the sense that you could understand them if you knew how to read them, ironic memes reference the shared experiences of an in-group you either belong to or not. More broadly, the social aspects of creating and sharing memes as a way of materialising ephemeral online phenomena have always been the most vital part of memes. In ironic memes, however, they are deliberately used to draw lines between different communities-a primary aspect of memeing in general but of ironic memes in particular; they form a new boundary between the girls that get them and the girls that don't.
In the trolling tradition, the highly ironic humor of these memes is mainly directed against normies and mainstream users. This shaped the humor of late Millennials and Gen Z as is already apparent in the trajectory from YouTube Poop videos to MLG montage parodies. In 2016, meme elitism becomes a part of the transgressive attitudes of many digital communities. This development needs to be situated as a reaction to the breakthrough of image macros as classic meme templates in 2012 and the commodification of meme characters and even snowclones. The change in humor from easy-to-understand punchlines to multiple layers of irony, making it almost impossible for people from the out-group to follow along, is situated as a way of subverting the normification and commodification of memes. This was performed as a hijacking of memes through a complete break-up of content and formal structure as well as the merging of increasingly incoherent agents into memes. In the case of the meme described above, these are references to a historical meme canon, Gordon Ramsey's iconic character, the series' scene already mutated by montage parodies, and the spaced-out caption. All these agents bear meaning themselves, but have become fluid to such an extent that they can be charged with another meaning at any given point.
posted 2 June 2024
The Memeification of Discourse
"The internet (or rather social media) has killed differentiated discourse." Probably a lot of users can agree on this observation: No matter what hyped-up trend or political nightmare is discussed online, we can usually see how two sides to the story-one that is pro and one that is anti. Think about the 2016 US Presidential election, Covid-19 anti-vaxxers vs. scientists, pro-choice and pro-life activism as well as recent wars and invasions.
While there are many many arguments presented on different perspectives in each of these discourses (as well as their intersections), on the internet, we always seem to fall into a binary opposition of either/or: You may only be pro-vaxx or anti-vaxx, pro-X or pro-Y, and so on, no inbetween. Of course, some of the arguments make more sense and some less (tbh you can only get vaccinated or not). Let me put that aside for now and only focus on the binary rhetoric that underlies these discussions. Even though (right-wing) political populism is booming in the west and beyond, the way things are discussed on the internet is an insult to the history of rhetoric. No, I don't mean that only dialectics is an adequate method of debate - on the contrary, that is the philosophically highbrow forerunner of binary internet rhetoric. Between all the craze about positioning and canceling in all directions, it is wild that the binarity of discussions does not arise from their political content, but is underscored by the very platforms of social media. I am saying that western philosophical traditions pre-deconstructionism gave way to today's discussion culture. In fact, the first online discussion in which the either/or logic is revealed is the discourse surrounding The Dress in 2015, which was mainly conducted on Twitter. A discussion broke out around the photo of a bodycon mini dress taken under poor lighting conditions as to whether it was a white dress with gold ornaments or a blue dress with a black border. Even if OP (now convicted of domestic violence btw) had actually asked for help, he was confronted with little other than the self-professed experts in color matching: a weeks-long argument broke out between the white/gold advocates and the blue/black team, which was only answered by the involvement of a lot of thinkpieces and even more Reddit experts (the dress was blue and black, duh).
What I find so fascinating is that political discourse is not so divisive that we can only discuss it in strict black and white logic, but that we simply find this rhetoric suitable for discussing complex, entangled problems. While some things are surprisingly simple to argue (e.g. the killing of civilians is unacceptable under any circumstances), especially historical circumstances (e.g. who attacked whom first?) are often only resolvable in context, if at all. Due to media-specific reasons of platforms that are based on the principles of virality and the commodification of attention, the possibilities for nuanced discourse are becoming increasingly remote. This becomes especially problematic when positions harden and users no longer want to enter dialogue with the 'opposite' position.
It may seem trivial that this specific form of rhetoric began in the mid-2010s with online debates like The Dress or If a Dog Wore Pants (as well as many more bait debates™). In fact, these discussions were just foreshadowing of what we now do with real problems, you know, the kind of problems threatening thousands and thousands of people with death, deportation, and the consequences of war. The legacy of the ongoing memeification of discourse, further driven to the forefront by party politics and sensationalist media agencies, will in turn shape the discussion culture of tomorrow.
posted 31 May 2024
The Meme Singularity
Is the singularity really near? We all know that memes have always been weird, ironic and brainrotten as soon as they appeared on the internet. From the creation of copypastas in the 90s to large-scale attempts at trolling in the 2000s to the global mourning of Harambe (rest in power) in 2016, memes have not suddenly become silly with the appearance of Skibidi Toilet and other Gen Alpha memes over the course of the last year. But the recent increase in brainrot content makes me wonder how the ongoing post-truth crisis, fuelled by automatic censorship across all platforms and AI generated advice aka fake news, is connected to the content of memes.
While brainrot content might just be another name for shitposting or an evolution of schizoposting, its references seem so out of context that this lack of connections is precisely what makes it funny. Take the hype around Donghua Jinlong memes, for example: a few months ago, my TikTok For You feed (and later my Instagram Explore page) was flooded with all kinds of videos on the industrial-grade glycine produced by the Chinese factory Donghua Jinlong. Besides their quite obviously falsely adressed ads of their products, I saw videos of users using maps and satellite material to draw a whole trip to the Donghua Jinlong factory, Donghua Jinlong makeup tutorials, a video reading out loud 'Industrial Grade Glyine by Donghua Jinlong' in the style of Gregorian chants, and many more remixes on the theme of major clients-style advrtising of industrial chemicals and materials.
While there is a whole Marxist critique of the labour mechanics of factory working and the corresponding repetition and productivity of Donghua Jinlong videos waiting to be done, (shoutout to Misi!) it is interesting how meme dynamics and capitalist ideals seem to converge in this form of brainrot content. I think this is because we are on the verge of the definitive annihiliation of differences between humour and truth, rendering the search for 'original' traces of one or the other completely redundant. In fact, we are alreading living in this new environment where saying things that are true on the internet is banned or censored while fake or simply false information is taken for granted. In this regard, truth becomes situated and temporary, fully living behind the eurocentric fantasies of universal truth. But don't mistake that for a complete lack of truth: after all, I am here writing this, you are reading this, and Donghua Jinlong is still producing high-quality glycine. So there must be some kind of truth, even though it has nothing to do with universality or righteousness.
posted 31 May 2024
Cat Tax
Hi everyone! This is my first blog post so I'll start right away with the cat tax. Meet Coco, the tuxedo cat, and Freya, a short hair/Maine Coon mix. Coco is turning 8 years old in September while Freya recently had her 7th birthday in April. I am so lucky to live with them as they're super cuddly and very funny cats. They're both indoor cats as I'm living in a city but I'd love to bring them to the park sometime.