A long time ago, well before the COVID-19 pandemic, a sad, dark thing clawed its way into our social media feeds: depression memes. These memes, shared on social platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, 4chan, and TikTok, date back to as early as 2016, although it’s hard to tell precisely. What we do know is that people (meme makers) have been saying to their audience (users with or without clinical depression and/or anxiety symptoms) that it’s okay to feel horrible and that if our therapist asks ‘What do we do when we feel this way?’ we do not reply ‘Add to cart’. The online world has given us clearance to lift the taboo (slightly) on mental health issues while simultaneously educating some boomers along the way, resulting in many users using memes ever since as the life raft they can be.
Poster. We studied Karen meme as a crowdsourced phenomenon, presenting a missed-behaved consumer, involved in multiple sociopolitical concerns over time. Through these memes, the crowd expresses different emotions, visual expressions, and use intertextual references for presenting Karen and the episode of Karen.
This paper analyses the performativity of the sociotechnical imaginaries that the online communities interested in blockchain applications (e.g., cryptocurrencies) construct through the memes they share, in the context of a crisis of truth and amid pervasive precarity. These memes adopt a subcultural language that is a mix of financial jargon and blockchain slang, neither building on the established codes of the regulated financial sector nor belonging fully to the colloquial nature of internet banter. Through them, the community collectively constructs ways to overcome the fundamental uncertainty that traverses all aspects of contemporary life – housing, precaritisation of labour, political ruptures, etc – by doubling down on them. Financial speculation is no longer reserved to those with disposable income but becomes a tactic for survival in a scene that actively destabilizes information for competitive market advantage. Through the use of repeated memetic subcultural phrases, blockchain memes blur the difference between fact and fiction in an effort to reconcile the extreme volatility of cryptocurrencies with the neoliberal conviction that the market is always right. As a result, no one is trustworthy, individualism takes on a new dimension, and what Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou calls a “speculative community” arises. Ultimately, this case study highlights how the iterative and distributed character of memes supercharges the normative character of performativity.
