Welcome to my website! I'm delighted that you could make it here. I assume you would like to learn a little bit about me? I'll try to give you a brief outline.
Half american and half swedish, I grew up primarily in Sweden. In my teenage years I sought refuge in the industrial halls of the anarchist culture center Utkanten, along with their hackerspace Forskningsavdelningen. In parallel, my 13 year old self, attended the annual demonstrations on the 30th of november - and weekly meetings - with the syndicalist youth union, SUF. They taught me to think of society from a critical and systemic perspective.
As I matured, so did the maker movement, and at 18 years of age I flew to Barcelona to join Fab10 as an intern of FabLab Barcelona. The move further opened my eyes to the possibilities of local production and decentralization and I stayed in the scene for 7 years.
Worried about the censorability of the internet and the resilience of communication networks I shifted focus to the distributed webs, specifically to Scuttlebutt, the gossiping protocol and spent another 5 years on rebuilding internet architectures together with a beautiful and caring network of solarpunks.
Originally posted on scuttlebutt around 2020
The TLDR: How memes are increasingly running society and how it’s leading to a societal gap between the sexes.
Recently I watched a youtube video of one of the creators from Rick and Morty, Justin Roiland, who was part of a meme review together with Elon Musk. During the review itself there were some obscene parts, one meme portraying a dead deer in a swimming pool and the meme in a jokingly remark pointing out how the deer was like a broken dolphin. This caused Elon to laugh manically at the dead deer while Justin Roiland says to the sound of Elons hysterical laughter, “I think this is a reflection on how… how dark we’ve become. There are a lot of dark forces at odds with each other. There’s a lot of weird forces at odds with each other in society right now.”
This sums up a bit of where this is going… The meme-review turned out to be part of a recent video by the most famous youtuber PewDiePie. In the video PewDiePie remarks on “Memes are actually making a difference in this world. I swear, in the future memes are just going to control everything…Our moral code will be ruled by memes, our economic system is already being overtaken by memes. I mean, it’s inevitable at this point.”
The next day I met up with a friend, (whom I later also told about SSB and he joined, welcome @myusen btw! Straight into one of the long posts I mentioned haha) and we talked about memes and propaganda, he told me that he has just got to second round in his PhD application which is on the topic of memes. We talked about how there are groups on encrypted channels on discord which exist actively to push memes and propaganda of their chosen political field, in this case some form of neo-nazis. He gave a lot of recommendations, hopefully he can share some of them here as well!
With the thoughts of memes and how they influence society, all from how easy it is to [buy your way to the front page of reddit, to how corporations have started pushing meme formats as a form of highly effective and subliminal advertising (see latest pikatchu meme format, popularised around mid November 2018, right in time for the release of the pikatchu movie on May 10th 2019) and I started thinking more about how memes influence society and what an important role they are starting to play in the “social fabrics” or as @Richard D. Bartlett puts it, the “metacrisis of relationship” in his article on Microsolidarity.
Later this evening, I decided to watch another meme-review by PewDiePie to try and understand meme culture. Foolishly I had started entertaining the thought that maybe, if I grasp this tool of memes better than I already do, I could use it as an influencer in my activities on the default platform of Instagram. I was not expecting the strong emotional recoil I would feel after the video I was just about to watch.
The video called “Me and the boys” named after the [format of meme which is highly popular right now. The video starts off with a short meme on how lonely Keanu Reeves is, “Get this man some puss right now! My man, Keanu Reeves, will not suffer.” PewDiePie states. (One can notice how this feeds back into the good ol’ male target group of “incels”, Keanu Reeves being known as internets favorite good guy, or in this case “[nice guy”) PewDiePie continues by saying “This is a video for all my guys out there. If you are a girl watching this right now, leave.” This statement is repeated multiple times to eerie cultish music with flames, increasing in intensity by each statement telling all women watching it, “I’m telling you to go, you cannot be here… Begone Thot”. It continues with memes referencing how boys commit ritualistic sacrifices of babies and work together. It finishes with PewDiePie stating in a parodying voice "The media classified this video as sexist because I excluded an entire gender? Whaaaaaaaaaaaat! " followed by a commercial for his new game.
...
... y u p.
I’m not going to delve into my emotional reaction, as I’m sure you can figure that part out. What I do want to bring forward in this is the realization that struck me. The internet has clearly become an efficient tool of propaganda and a means of embedding messages into larger groups of people, memes in particular often have a certain target group, circulating on plattforms where the majority is male. With this in mind, it is now possible to specifically set the norms and “social fabric” of exclusively a singular gendered target group in a way which I don’t think has been possible to such a large extent since women were not allowed in the physical workspace alongside men.
It is a fearsome thought, this gap of communication and its implications, especially as a woman in todays society. It’s so easy to forget how recently it was that women were considered second-class citizens yet the headlines in the news do a good job on reminding us that it’s not so far away.
If you got this far in reading this; Thank you for taking the time and sharing these thoughts with me. I’m sure we’ll find a way. We’re communicating here already, right? 💕
Written: 14th of August 2020
Welcome to this text and brewing. It has been developed within me, grown from the seedling of microsolidarity, in the soil of syndicalism and anarchism, over the course of many months now.
To start of, I want to specify what I believe Microsolidarity is necessary for, in extention to the points provided in the original article.
Microsolidarity is a necessary step to hinder mass-manipulation in contemporary society. I have come to strongly believe this. I will attempt to bring you with me on my thought journey. I will also try to include my emotions as I believe one (thought) is seldomly without the other (emotion) no matter how contemporary scientific paradigms may portray it. This display of emotion and thought in combo is not something I have done before, I guess practice makes… . . . So now, to continue my imperfection:
With the points of “14 billion tons of ice melting just yesterday”, “a need for people to come together”, “to shape new ways of society” and “to connect and support each other”, all rang true to me, strong enough for Microsolidarity to embed itself within my thought patterns, I had yet to see how it connected, en masse, and why it would even come to happen at all.
In a dark corner of my mind, a bitter voice was whispering “Why would this even take off?”. I tried not listening to the voice as best I could but silently started looking for an answer. It seemed too big of a task for humans to re-organize. I would have to see an innate contemporary human need, which microsolidarity could provide for, before I could truly believe Microsolidarity could take off.
About two years before I read the article on Microsolidarity I watched a documentary called “ "The Swedish Theory of Love" Perhaps it spoke to me as a love seeking Swede, but more so it spoke to me in its reflections on the arcitechture of the isolation designed one-room, four-people-families of todays skyrises and white-picket-fence-den societies. A change which has come upon Northern Hemisphere humans in the latest 0,001% of her history. I had seen the need. Could Microsolidarity be a cure of loneliness, the satisfaction to a deep human need, a desirable solution?
I observed todays society to find an answer as to why society had not already collapsed by the architectured societal loneliness, for my inner logus told me it should’ve. I found that in a timely fashion, internet and the world wide web came to be, creating and comforting with a community for those for whom there were none.*
I look at the internet and see a substitution, a band-aid to the loneliness. Corporations feeding endorphines and a sense of belonging to the infected wounds of isolation.
What started irking me was who that sense of belonging was to, really? The identites of the communities, ranging from Twitter to Reddit, from Instagram to Tumbler, were rarely through connections to any individual people but to the masse of agreed jargon and inside-jokes, meta-memes, gifs or trends. More musings on this can be found here yet the bottom line was that these spaces were filled with payed for content, inceptions placed there with corporate incentive, propagand/commercials wearing costumes made up of memes or other relevant community coding to melt into the social settings of the artificial communities.
So what had I found so far?
⮕ I found that there was a societal need that Microsolidarity could fill: loneliness.
⮕ I found that the need was already covered by artificial communities on the www.
⮕ I found that these artificial communities were easy to incept with messages if one has money and that it was already happening as there was no real way of differentiating between the “real” users and corporate shills.
⮕ The breeding ground for mass-manipulation is close to reaching its final form, setting the tone and delivering messages with disguised messengers.
What did I feel?
⮕ Slight desperation
⮕ An urgency to do something
⮕ A big “Ahaaaaaa” moment
⮕ An increased personal need for Microsolidarity
It allows for this by enabling people to build their own social norms and ethics rather then being spoon-fed by a company in disguise.
Microsolidarity is not only a step for a healthier earth and person, it’s a necessary step of rebellion.
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