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Articles tagged post-irony.
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.
The importance of the 2010's to meme history was not in its novelty but its scale. During the 2010's, the world reached a cultural boiling point as the underground spilled out irreversibly into the mainstream and destroyed the boundaries between the two.
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.
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.
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.
Where have all the Long Boys gone? (Plus an exclusive interview with Special Meme Fresh)
Revised model of the four quadrants model of irony.
A working glossary for ironic meme theory, from normies and autists to meta-irony, normification, and the phylomemetic tree.
There's a new meme becoming popular in the Anglosphere called Gondola. It's a derivative of Spurdo Sparde with no arms or dialogue, generally walking around in various scenes from classic artworks to everyday life. I think they could be most easily characterized in opposition to Pepe or Spurdo, both of whom are subversive in the classically Ironic Meme style of inappropriateness. Pepe will murder Wojak over and over while Spurdo will spout every satirizable position in misspelled and poorly drawn way possible. As usual, everyone's worry is about how normies will ruin Gondola. Not if or when; it's taken for granted that Gondola will become corrupted.
Honestly, I miss this meme. I guarantee that Pepe the Frog is going to become the biggest 'normie' meme of all time. It's popular with high school kids, who are basically the equivalent of university activists in the world of internet culture.