The Philosopher's Meme

Culture
1. Homesteading the Memeosphere
  Who owns the memes? How dare we ask such a laughable question?
2. GME Frenzy Hints At the New Stage of Memecultures
  A central theme of post-2015 memecultures was the gamification of memes. This gave rise to Facebook memepages as well as a "meme president". Post-2020 memecultures now struggle with the challenge of the cope, which is an inevitable consequence of creating new games with a loss condition.
3. All Memes Are From the Future
  All memes are from the future: the literate memer anticipates that the meme will spread and change in meaning depending on where it gets reposted.
View all Culture
Metamemetics
1. Memes and Humor: Reply to Claudia Vulliamy's "What is a Meme?"
  Simon Evnine responds to Vulliamy's recent article on the definition of memes.
2. What Is A Meme?
  A cluster definition of memes, taking into account memographic practice, comedy, public shareability, use of images and/or text, digitality, appropriation, anonymity, ephemerality and stylistic resemblance to other memes.
3. The Memeticist's Challenge Remains Open
  Seong's thesis on the memeticist's challenge (2018). Supervised by Diane Proudfoot and Douglas Campbell, and completed at the University of Canterbury.
View all Metamemetics
Aesthetics
1. We Can Have Retrieval-Inference Synthesis
  A Modern Synthesis of art criticism is possible.
2. Every Gondola Is a Shrine
  I think of every gondola post as a shrine, for people to come together and appreciate them in a spiritual way.
3. Structure and Content in Drake-Style Templates
  Two dimensions stand out that make the two templates the same: 1. the structure (aversion/affirmation) 2. the content (rappers in music videos)
View all Aesthetics
Irony
1. When You Drink [water]
  Post-ironic memes are great because they are meaningful. Meaningful memes bring us closer to the dream of the timeless meme, just like early comics artists who aspired towards serious literature with an ostensibly unserious medium.
2. Defining ‘Normie’, ‘Casual’, ‘Ironist’ and ‘Autist’ In Internet Subcultures
  The following is my take on doing the same for online subcultures. I do this by clarifying the definitions of three highly popular terms used on the Internet to describe different kinds of subcultural participants, and clarifying the concept of the ironist in the context of online subcultures.
3. Post-Irony against Meta-Irony
  The Ironic Meme Movement was a reaction against the mainstream co-option of the subcultural products of the underground; an attempt to create incorruptible inside jokes. The Ironics employed defensive strategies which paralleled that of the punks against the commercialization of their own subculture. Like the punks, they failed.
View all Irony
Game Studies
1. GamerGate As Metagaming
  GamerGaters were correct in their assessment of gaming culture and the games industry precisely because of the conspiracy theoretical nature of their campaign.
2. The Memetic Bottleneck
  Like a panel in a highly networked version of the Infinite Canvas, every meme is both a potential bottleneck and a possible choice. Since the sense that every meme has a preceding meme is essential to the appreciation of memes, the memetic bottleneck works in the inverse direction of the narrative bottleneck, generating potential pasts. To choose a meme to post is to choose which game to play with the audience. More significantly, it is to choose which save file to load up: it's scenario editing of history, conditioned on current mood.
3. Memes Are Not Jokes, They Are Diagram-Games
  The meme means different things to different viewers as a matter of degrees, not a matter of either getting the joke or missing it, or reading it ironically or not.
View all Game Studies
History
1. Wittgenstein's Most Beloved Quote Was Real, But It's Fake Now
  A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of fake philosophy quotes.
2. 2010's Decade Review, Part 2: Memetaphysics Through Three Lenses
  In this article, I explore the new metaphysics of memes that developed throughout the 2010s. I use three distinct perspectives to approach this vast subject matter: time; place; and, process.
3. Jjalbang (짤방), the Korean Meme
  Fundamental Concepts In International Meme Studies: Jjalbang, the Korean Meme
View all History
Philosophy
1. Postnaturalism
  All technology exerts some epistemic influence on the observer, and this is often epistemologically relevant; the proper function of philosophy is to study the epistemic effect of technology, and to design and produce epistemically useful technology; localised agreements rather than shared beliefs, entailed by the use of common technology, are sufficient foundations for philosophical discourse.
2. How to Digitally Coauthor Articles In Philosophy Class
  A group assignment activity for philosophy students at the undergraduate level, which can be applied in tandem with existing curricula. Consists of a way to standardise the work of each individual student such that each student’s contributions to the group assignment fits in seamlessly with the other team members’ contributions, and a way to apply the system to the specific course material being assessed.
3. A School of Internet Philosophy
  I think there's a school of ‘Internet philosophy’ like there is continental philosophy or Anglo-American philosophy, with its own dominant interests and a unique style of discourse. I'm trying to figure out what this consists of. It's a combination of demographics, dominant areas of interest (both within and without strict philosophy) and conventions and canons unique to the school.
View all Philosophy
Politics
1. On Circlejerk
  The logic of capitalism is reproduced in online communities as circlejerks, where quantified affirmation supplants monetary profit. Like capitalism, democratized Internet culture is inadequate to its own promise of freedom. Originally published in 2017.
2. A Tale of Two Healthcare Narratives
  Some conservatives claim that the free market saved Korea from COVID-19. I argue that it was Korea's Confucian democracy and technological environment that helped them contain the pandemic, not the lack of supply side regulation.
3. The Structures of Hyperspatial Politics
  Sites of content production in Web 2.0 are strategic assets which make up the terrain of political conflict in hyperspace.
View all Politics

Anonymous

Anonymous

3 articles

Articles by Anonymous

Politics October 26, 2016

On Vectoralism & the Meme Alliance's General Strike

We have seen in recent months the blossoming of a protest movement in Weird Facebook, a Meme Alliance of users and memepages wearing pink profile-pictures -- Facebook flags upside-down, signaling S.O.S. -- demanding satisfaction for Zuckerberg’s censorship of their content via automated moderation systems. Though their efforts have served as a coming-out of sorts for meme-scene activists, the failure of the Meme Alliance’s tactics to register demands a reconsideration of the terrain of struggle.

Anonymous
Game Studies October 26, 2016

Twitch Plays Pokemon, the Meme Scene, & the Project of Hyperspace

I stayed up all night, again, playing Pokemon Red with the Internet hivemind; ~60,000 monkeys banging on keyboards: up/down/left/right/a/b/start. The 3rd Millennium has brought with it endless possibilities for collective experience and, therefore, endless experiments in mass-politics. Each new project offers a different method for the users to organize their world through action, and each new project propels itself by bringing order to those actions

Anonymous
Politics April 14, 2016

Creeps, Tweeps, & the Limits of Social Media Freedom

We are faced not with a conflict of political affinity, but instead a problem grounded in a disagreement over whether the design of platforms can substitute for social norms: does digital freedom find its limits at the codework constraints of social media sites, in their manmade spaces of programmed possibility, or can digital freedom only exist in the presence of a robust, just, and enforced set of social norms?

Anonymous