A meme unites more than a common enemy. It makes us smile even when we are against his thesis. And they are hard to forget. Here is Borja’s Ecce Homo, restored in 2012 by Cecilia Giménez, who at the age of 85 and from a town in Zaragoza has become internet history. A decade later it is still the most famous Spanish meme. Or the son of La Tomasa, from Córdoba all his life, turned into the jihadist Yassin who made us laugh by solemnly threatening us with death one day after the bombings on Barcelona’s Rambla in 2017. A meme is an almost magical artifact that pacifies us and reconciles us with the Internet. So it was and so it must continue to be. Its success has been so absolute that everything wants to be memetic: the marketing, philosophy, politics, art and science.
We have spent almost two decades memecene, the golden age of memes The name belongs to Álvaro L. Pajares, who coordinated a book of the same name published by La Caja Books. His case is paradigmatic: while he was teaching Hispanic literature at Indiana University, he started creating memes for his friends; he later uploaded them to Instagram. “Without charging …, it’s very easy to delude yourself with the fantasy of attention on the internet,” he reflects. Finally he managed to live off them. In 2021, during the Madrid elections, he headed the Just a meme campaign. “THE meme makers we are the poor brothers of the streamers. Attention junkies. Internet buffoons who move between inspiration and plagiarism because their success is based on the replication of successful formats”, he defines and, incidentally, reports: “I have stopped making memes, unless they pay me”.
A good meme instantly connects with the collective online consciousness, a sensibility that pundits have termed digital folklore and in which, like it or not, we move with grace and ease. “They arise from fragments of common cultural references: a series, a comic, a historical image, a news story, a film, and for this reason, even if we do not identify with their ideas, we recognize them immediately”, explain the members by Filles d’Internet, the collective that she has been organizing since 2018 the Memefest, at the CCCB in Barcelona.
Being anonymous creations shared in private environments such as WhatsApp groups or internet forums, they are born with an aura of naturalness and freshness that is very attractive for marketing and politics. Elisa Vergara is director of strategy at MeMe, an agency that helps brands convert their advertising campaigns into that language. She made the departments of marketing let her work in peace. “Everything goes very quickly, fonts age, placing texts above or below may seem irrelevant, but no, suddenly you can send an old image… You have to trust those who know the medium well,” she explains. Even for those meme-curious, her half-life is a big mystery. “The Dand ‘the machines’ of Bisbal He is one of those who die quickly, but there are others who are resurrected a thousand times; for example, any of the series The office”, Vergara indicates.
“My self-theory,” says Pajares, paraphrasing the writer Maggie Nelson, “is that memes have been a synthetic solution to the dilemma of the vastness of the internet, they are the ultra-fast consumer product, the Fast food”. That is to say, they are devoured within seconds, but their digestion is slow. They are chewed, swallowed, regurgitated and ruminated. In 2014, a group of researchers working for Facebook showed that a single meme had undergone 121,000 variations while being shared across 1.14 million accounts. It is precisely this process of resignification that is the most interesting of the long-standing memes for Filles d’Internet. “They persist because they are always changing, one day they mean one thing and the next a very different thing. And there is always someone willing to answer and propose new mutations. So it is difficult for them to cease to exist ”, they predict.
However, in Memeceno’s chronology, 2016 is fixed as the year of death of the ironic meme. “He may have died at the hands of the masses, but at no time in history were there so many students of his art as he did,” reads Memeceno. By then, applications such as PicsArt, Canva or KineMaster had democratized the craft of meme makersa job to which you have to devote an average of six hours a day.
After the death of the ironic meme there was a turn towards posironìa and then another towards anti-irony. Memes have replaced transgression with motivational phrases: “I attract abundance” or “if you want you can”. The pandemic has brought a meme binge and, at the same time, a general feeling of boredom, “weariness in the explicit search for virality that makes everything predictable, the feeling that nothing surprises, a continuous swiping of the finger on the screen in looking for a novelty that never arrives”, says the text.
When TikTok and Instagram algorithms started ignoring any format other than a micro-video or file coil, reports of memes left to their fate increased. Pajares himself closed his story in 2022: “the average life of a meme maker It usually does not exceed a year and a half, ”he points out in his essay. What followed was a stream of memes dedicated to the diagnosis of his death and the increasingly insistent idea of opening a museum to preserve his legacy. That’s when the hypermemes come in a survival stunt. “They are not looking for essences or claiming to be part of a place. They are accompanied by neutral backgrounds and landscapes (…), they feed on pop references and social networks of the 2000s, and fill everything with flashes, glitches and fluorescent tones”, describes Pajares. In his opinion, its creators have abandoned the will to make a coherent speech. It would seem that they just want to survive the algorithm. Which is no small thing.