Meme Wars sets out on a journey that is altogether daunting and immense: how online presence and “memes” have influenced social culture into true political conflict. The idea is a good one, as globalization has increased exponentially due to access to information and the sharing of ideas via the internet; propaganda and misinformation has never been so easily digested. And Meme Wars confronts this head on, albeit misjudging the force with which it may need to collide with this particular wall in order to break it open. That its authors are chronically online is admitted in the introduction, but it’s also apparent in the writing. They include a sentence that simply says, You know, normal shit when describing something outrageous an alt right individual has done, use posted pics rather than “posted photos,” and wrote this wreck of a sentence:
Most anons on /pol/ hated Obama, kind of because he was a democrat, and primarily because he was black.
Seemingly attempting to come off unbiased, Meme Wars fails to obscure its distaste for the alt right and its reverence for their opponent. This is not to say that this is a poor stance (it isn’t); rather we are aware as readers that personal beliefs are fueling the research and coloring the report, and as such, risking utilizing media such as itself as a means to alienate rather than inform. Again: my argument is not that alt right perspectives ought to be accepted or consumed without significant criticism and skepticism. Rather, should a book such as this claim to be investigative, it ought to report the information without the personal take.
Perhaps the biggest struggle of Meme Wars is its failure to define a meme. The closest to a definition is found in the introduction, where we find the following:
The video clip of her was reconceptualized, remixed, and redistributed, carrying all sorts of meaning. That’s the definition of a meme, first coined by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 text The Selfish Gene.
And you must be thinking, surely, Paige, you’ve left some of this out, because that’s not a definition!
I have not.
Memes as we know them colloquially are generally images or phrases shared on social media sites such as Instagram, X, Reddit, etc. Perhaps from a sociopolitical standpoint their definition must include some psychological or sociopolitical undercurrent, but the authors never really push in this area. Memes are a catch-all for, yes, the digital information as we know them to be but also general online activity. Just as the Occupy movement failed to have a clear goal and thus was never fated to be successful, without a clear definition of a meme, Meme Wars pursues a thesis it can never quite reach. Tied to its refusal to define a meme, Meme Wars rather liberally labels any and every conflict a “war;” with no evidence to support this description, the narrative tone comes off as dramatic and unserious, which is perhaps a fatal flaw in a book that by its very nature must refer regularly to the Pepe meme as a legitimate driver of political conflict.
Finally, Meme Wars spends a lot of time talking about political conflict and just…not that much time talking about memes. We are provided a relatively thorough play by play of the 2016 election, which is, notably, almost entirely devoid of memes. The individual who murdered a group of people after penning his Rhodesian manifesto or whatever the hell it was had a mini biography that included the supreme gentleman meme but largely didn’t dwell on it. Meme Wars effectively disgorges some of the more horrific details about the rat nests of the internet where incels and various other alt right groups have gone to live, but it does not do the work to showcase that memes and alt right meme culture are the catalyst for much of the American political unrest of the last decade. Rather, the picture it paints is cyclical, in which some people have a strong emotional expression that results in a meme (either intentionally or unintentionally), others react to and spread the meme, additional emotions rise from the meme, which results in some level of public behavior outside of the internet, which then fuels more emotion, which then fuels more memes, and on and on forever. All the while, political discourse runs, for the most part, parallel to and somewhat separate from these darker corners of the world.
It’s a shame that Meme Wars presents the thesis that it does; the body doesn’t match the introduction, and it shows.