Memes During Wartime
What the way talk about war online says about us
I don’t want to come off as callous or flippant but it seems necessary to at least talk about the memes about the conflict in Ukraine. I figured as a person who is trying to change the conversation around how we talk about memes, I should address them. What do the memes, the things we use to convey information on the internet say about us when we make them about world events that may or may not be out of our depth.
First things first, the memes aren’t going away. They are a part of our life now and will be until they turn off the internet. They are how we react to, process, and synthesize information. They can be used and made by everyone from the clueless teenager to the U.S. government. It is not helpful to approach the memes that come from any world event with a “we shouldn’t be doing this” attitude. We’re well past that as we’ve all been memeing everything the whole time. It’s not a question of if all memes about any given topic are good or bad but which ones are useful and which ones are indefensible. We cannot stop them from being made, we can only react accordingly once they are made.
Once we accept the reality of where political discourse is in our modern day salons of Twitter, TikTok, and Reddit, we are better equipped to really delve into the conversation around the memes. What are people talking about and how are they talking about it? Who’s talking the most? Let’s apply analysis to the memes being made rather than scoff at the idea of their very existence. I don’t know that memes are the best way to process information but they’re one of the best ways to present it. The algorithms we engage with on a day to day basis favor photos over walls of text and people in general favor illustrations over reading. The people I follow and look to for politics will favor memes because it gets their point across quickly and to a lot of people. The same ethos applies to Instagram graphics. They are two sides of the same coin when it comes to distributing information in a way that ensures it will be widely shared.
In a conflict like this, we are watching people either figure out their position in real time or use their well established position to mobilize to the next step, where they stand to make a profit. It is not helpful to just tell people to watch the news. Other sources of information should be utilized and investigated. What is each person telling us and what do they stand to gain from telling us this information? A meme is helpful in conveying information that a major source may not want to convey. Say what you will about “Dick Cheney made money off the Iraq war” as a respectful or sensitive meme but it did convey to a large number of people, especially young people, that Dick Cheney did in fact make money off the Iraq war. That meme got potentially countercultural information across to a lot of people quickly and succinctly, more so than reading The Shock Doctrine or watching Vice. It’s reductive and requires a little bit of goggling to figure out exactly what it might mean, but it starts the ball rolling. Especially for people who are not exposed to ideas like that where they live or in their bubble. The internet has always and will always be a useful tool for getting people to broaden their horizons. Memes are a way to do that quickly.
However not all memes are about conveying information. Not everyone is trying to engage at the height of their intelligence. Most memes, if they're not about the news, are about the quotidienne problems of life. They are about the feelings no one thought to document before we had the internet, or new feelings as a result of life on the internet. If one is young, thoughtless and doesn’t realize that their tweets will be seen outside of their circle of the internet, they are of course going to tweet about their fear of getting drafted. It’s not good or sensitive to the larger world but this more a symptom of the world we created online.
Our current rules of engagement online are all about honesty and correctly using one’s platform for good. These rules are not applied only to celebrities who actually have a platform but anyone and everyone. We believe that we all have the power to enact change even on one single person, even if we know that might not necessarily be true. When we don’t know how to act or have anyone to look to for the correct way a plebian like us should act during times like these, we all have permission to act however we want. Who’s to say what’s right when there is no rule book. All we have to go on is our best understanding of empathy through the screen, which to be honest, we have never been good at.
The internet also removes the idea of the plebeian from its society all together. We all have a page, we all have a “platform” we all have the ability to go viral from a particularly cogent point about world affairs. If we all have the chance to contribute to the conversation in a positive way, shouldn’t we all try? Everyone is having some kind of reaction to the news. By giving every person a platform, everyone thinks it's their duty to share. At the very least some people feel that everyone has a duty to share and every post should be judged equally.
This disconnect in attitudes about how to behave and what to post leads to an added unease. We have yet to figure out the proper way to behave online during conflict and unrest. Some people decide we should all pledge ourselves to being full time amatuer journalists devoting our whole attention to the news. Others believe we should be allowed to post as normal, as if nothing is happening. Most fall somewhere in between, grateful for every third post that is not misinformation or a comparison about another bad thing in the world that we are not even focused on. The third are the most clueless, people making memes about their own feelings when there is no need for them.
This also gets at the question of what is the internet for? Why during conflicts do we expect everyone to have a level of care and respect they’ve never exhibited before. How much of the internet is for fun and how much for news and how do we function when we all think the answer is different. If the internet is everything all the time all at once, it then produces every kind of reaction and non reaction to every event. Are people allowed to unplug from everyone they know trying their best to be a newscaster and a sudden expert in Ukraine? Is it putting one’s head in the sand to want to read a funny tweet every now and then. Is it perhaps a better assessment of the function of a website to want it to continue to provide what it has been providing rather than suddenly become a socratic seminar on geopolitics but only when things go south? The websites that spend a good chunk of time over and incorrectly analyzing Euphoria every sunday, suddenly become something most users are not well equipped for nor what they expect when they log on.
I know we all want to think that we will be better in times of great struggle. That we will rise to the occasion of war and put our differences aside to come closer to a utopian world. And some people will. But not all of us. And certainly not teenagers who don’t know any better nor adults who never learned. These people can learn and will probably come to regret the posts they made but there’s a thousand others behind them in line. The children of today will be the thoughtless teenagers of tomorrow and there will always be memes that are selfish and focused on the problems of privileged americans.
The problem with those memes is not that they exist but they are actually more indicative of our culture than any call for them to stop. The actual attitudes of the people of the day will be remembered and memorialized more so than the people telling them to stop. The artifact of the memes made today will be used by the people of the future to grasp what it was like to live during this time. Many people are currently noting that the memes we make now will probably be in a DBQ in the future. The good things about the occasional democracy of the internet is that everything has a chance to go viral, so every possible take is being discussed and passed around. The most popular or inflammatory or funny ones will be screenshotted and put in the history textbooks.
I’m not advocating for everyone to make more memes. I just think they are a part of the world now and rather than get into a tizzy about their very existence we look into their deeper meaning. Memes are a valid part of the conversation, especially when most people are scrambling to figure out their position. I’ve been on the internet for a while and I’ve seen us all try to handle tragedies in many different ways and we keep making the same mistakes. We get mad at the wrong people because they’re easy targets. We give money to the wrong people because we didn’t bother to fact check someone we trusted. We don’t give money at all because we’re afraid of giving it to an organization that functions mostly as a tax haven. We become immobilized by guilt and fear over the “right” thing to do, which often boils down to showing to our “audience” that we care and are educated.
After all this discussion about the correct way to talk about this, the best option to me remains not saying anything. Saying nothing is always an option. It’s usually the best one. Making an international conflict about you is not advisable and I would also say that boiling down the events of the world into an instagram infographic is also the wrong way to go. We’re all stumbling in the dark here and not talking about it, isn’t necessarily ignoring the problem. Waiting to make an educated point or finding a piece of information or source one trusts is better than trying one’s hardest to contribute the most. Especially if one’s follower count is below 10k. All will be revealed in due time and it will be easier to find the correct course of action if there’s not one million voices trying to shout each other down. That being said, I know how the world works and I know the memes will keep coming. Hopefully it will get easier to weed out the ones of little value.