Overcoming internet disillusionment
on the principles of meme design Lovink, G.W.
Publication date 2017
Document Version Final published version Published in
e-flux journal
Link to publication
Citation for published version (APA):
Lovink, G. W. (2017). Overcoming internet disillusionment: on the principles of meme design.
e-flux journal, 83, [www.e-flux.com/journal/83/141287/overcoming-internet-disillusionment-on- the-principles-of-meme-design/].
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Download date:27 Nov 2021
Journal #83 - June 2017
Geert Lovink
Overcoming Internet Disillusionment: On the Principles of Meme Design
“Artificial intelligence is not the answ you’re going to pay me”—Molly Soda Instagram filter”—Laurie Penny. “W rational debate have blocked and mut pollution is to fossil capitalism—a by it is us”—Erin Gün Sirer.
1 Evgeny Morozov, “Moral panic over fake news hi giants,” The Guardian, January 7, 2017
Go to Text
2 Designer-researcher Silvio Lorusso, who provide has noted that a similar relativism has taken over reason why trained, professional graphic designe produce effective memes. Instead, memes are oft amateur culture. Meme creation is therefore ofte process, for instance in the documentary the “first meme” and which discusses meme prod
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1 Evgeny Morozov, “Moral panic over fake news hi giants,” The Guardian, January 7, 2017
Go to Text
2 Designer-researcher Silvio Lorusso, who provide has noted that a similar relativism has taken over reason why trained, professional graphic designe produce effective memes. Instead, memes are oft amateur culture. Meme creation is therefore ofte process, for instance in the documentary the “first meme” and which discusses meme prod
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explains in a British TV interview, the Big Other has vanished. There is no BBC World Service anymore, the moderate radio voice that once provided us with balanced opinions and reliable information. Every piece of information is self-promotion, crafted by public-relations managers and spin doctors—and by us users as well (we are our own marketing interns). What’s collapsing right now is the imagination of a better life. It is no longer the “wretched of the earth” who revolt, because they’ve got nothing left to lose, but rather the stagnating middle class and “young professionals,” who face permanent precarity.
After hubris come guilt, shame, an current discontent will ultimately repentance? What comes after the addiction reveals itself, the mood f as frustration, if not hatred. The on people in the outside world scare y warning applicable to all websites.
constant risk of financial collapse, economy in which only imaginary refuge.
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1 Evgeny Morozov, “Moral panic over fake news hi giants,” The Guardian, January 7, 2017
Go to Text
2 Designer-researcher Silvio Lorusso, who provide has noted that a similar relativism has taken over reason why trained, professional graphic designe produce effective memes. Instead, memes are oft amateur culture. Meme creation is therefore ofte process, for instance in the documentary the “first meme” and which discusses meme prod
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happens when we can no longer distinguish between utopia and dystopia?
1 Evgeny Morozov, “Moral panic over fake news hi giants,” The Guardian, January 7, 2017
Go to Text
2 Designer-researcher Silvio Lorusso, who provide has noted that a similar relativism has taken over reason why trained, professional graphic designe produce effective memes. Instead, memes are oft amateur culture. Meme creation is therefore ofte process, for instance in the documentary the “first meme” and which discusses meme prod
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the twenty-first-century-style catastrophe that so many films have introduced us to. Still, we remain encapsulated, captured inside cybernetic loops that go nowhere, in which meaningless cycles of events, series, and seasons pass by. What happens when the anxiety of information saturation flips into a profound feeling of emptiness? Once we’ve passed this point, the digital neither disappears nor ends.
Events simply no longer turn into Roman spectacles. Instead, we experience simulacrum as prime reality. We cannot process such a sudden overproduction of reality. We no long turn on television news thinking that we’re watching a film
is film scenarios and their affects t anticipated our condition, and now Report is now a techno-bureaucrati Virtual reality feels like
avant-garde is very much alive. The industry. Hyperreality becomes ou or absurd.
Let’s look at radical disillusionmen Our social media rage is not just a disenchantment turn into a revolt,
1 Evgeny Morozov, “Moral panic over fake news hi giants,” The Guardian, January 7, 2017
Go to Text
2 Designer-researcher Silvio Lorusso, who provide has noted that a similar relativism has taken over reason why trained, professional graphic designe produce effective memes. Instead, memes are oft amateur culture. Meme creation is therefore ofte process, for instance in the documentary the “first meme” and which discusses meme prod
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boyd asked if media literacy had backfired. Have trolling, clickbait, and fake news undermined the classic belief in the democratization of news production? Whereas for the pre-internet baby-boom generation media literacy was synonymous with the ability to question sources, deconstruct opinions, and decode ideology, media literacy has now turned into the ability to produce one’s own content in the form of responses, blog postings, and social media updates. The shift from critical consumer to critical producer has come with a price: namely, information inflation. (The well-meaning “prosumer”
synthesis never materialized.) Acc distrusting media sources rather th of experts, it is now enough to cite culture that can only ever be outra that favors tribalism and self-segre
The current situation demands a r regarding media literary. How can of the current problem in the first yourself” be a viable alternative wh still rely on the emancipatory pote apps? How does manipulation wor
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1 Evgeny Morozov, “Moral panic over fake news hi giants,” The Guardian, January 7, 2017
Go to Text
2 Designer-researcher Silvio Lorusso, who provide has noted that a similar relativism has taken over reason why trained, professional graphic designe produce effective memes. Instead, memes are oft amateur culture. Meme creation is therefore ofte process, for instance in the documentary the “first meme” and which discusses meme prod
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communication-with-consequences, a next-level hybrid in which sovereign executive power and marketing become inseparable.
What does contemporary psychoanalysis have to offer? As evidenced in Kristin Dombek’s The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism, there is a renaissance of narcissism as cultural diagnosis.
While Dombek avoids referencing internet cultures and refrains from selfie and social media complaints, she does point to a cru
quantitative methods. Today’s narc
“can be measured across large grou beyond the illness metaphors when be a fatal mistake to attempt to ma right as “sick patients.” In a review Dombek’s own view echoes that of narcissism in parents and partners ideally responsive to us it’s becaus
Beyond the fear of narcissism, let’s fact that he is always acting. He mo
1 Evgeny Morozov, “Moral panic over fake news hi giants,” The Guardian, January 7, 2017
Go to Text
2 Designer-researcher Silvio Lorusso, who provide has noted that a similar relativism has taken over reason why trained, professional graphic designe produce effective memes. Instead, memes are oft amateur culture. Meme creation is therefore ofte process, for instance in the documentary the “first meme” and which discusses meme prod
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once celebrated as a “diversity of opinion,” has now reach a nihilistic “zero point” in which the
accumulation of possible meanings can either lead to critical insights (or even knowledge), or implode into a pool of indifference (possibly resulting in the disappearance of networks such as Twitter, which thrive on individual expressions, judgements, and preferences).
These days, institutional dogmas are hidden inside media folklore, hardwired into network architectures, steered by algorithm
sunken so far into daily routines an deconstruct a particular piece of in disposition.
Meme producers have become imm indifference has not yet been hack
“Given the ideological anarchy inh bound by nothing, set a rhetorical point.” Burton concludes that “shi not the age of the Renaissance (Wo
1 Evgeny Morozov, “Moral panic over fake news hi giants,” The Guardian, January 7, 2017
Go to Text
2 Designer-researcher Silvio Lorusso, who provide has noted that a similar relativism has taken over reason why trained, professional graphic designe produce effective memes. Instead, memes are oft amateur culture. Meme creation is therefore ofte process, for instance in the documentary the “first meme” and which discusses meme prod
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8 of 13 22/01/18, 14:02
1 Evgeny Morozov, “Moral panic over fake news hi giants,” The Guardian, January 7, 2017
Go to Text
2 Designer-researcher Silvio Lorusso, who provide has noted that a similar relativism has taken over reason why trained, professional graphic designe produce effective memes. Instead, memes are oft amateur culture. Meme creation is therefore ofte process, for instance in the documentary the “first meme” and which discusses meme prod
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the designer as lone wolf? How do we organize this type of political labor? Do we need even more tools that bring us together? Have you already used Meetup, Diaspora, DemocracyOS, and Loomio? Do we perhaps need a collective dating site for political activism? How can we design, and then mobilize, a collective networked desire that unites us in a “deep diversity”? Is the promise of open, distributed networks going to do the job, or are you look for strong ties—with consequences?
Generations have studied the fatal conclusions, now that we’re enteri of Totalitarianism
everything is possible”). We should Horkheimer, Elias Canetti’s Klaus Theweleit’s
genre. Will these authors assist u these key issues and then act upon have been developed and tested, ca mutated. This means that the over designed to be jammed, yet the cor altered. We can also call this conde
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1 Evgeny Morozov, “Moral panic over fake news hi giants,” The Guardian, January 7, 2017
Go to Text
2 Designer-researcher Silvio Lorusso, who provide has noted that a similar relativism has taken over reason why trained, professional graphic designe produce effective memes. Instead, memes are oft amateur culture. Meme creation is therefore ofte process, for instance in the documentary the “first meme” and which discusses meme prod
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In preparation for things to come, I asked a few people the perennial question: what is to be done? I started off with Nick Srnicek, coauthor of Inventing the Future, who just published a treatise called Platform Capitalism. According to him, we should start getting into the habit of blocking users on social media. “The basic idea on social media also holds for broader issues of public debate: how to refuse voices that are purposefully attacking the basis of reasonable debate?” Eva Illouz, author of Why Love Hurts and
The problem is that they fight wit they are not constrained. We wou question is, how do you make tru invented quickly and tailored to m
A possible answer lies in the refusa reassembled randomly. We should pages. Srnicek:
We need new stories, and that’s d
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1 Evgeny Morozov, “Moral panic over fake news hi giants,” The Guardian, January 7, 2017
Go to Text
2 Designer-researcher Silvio Lorusso, who provide has noted that a similar relativism has taken over reason why trained, professional graphic designe produce effective memes. Instead, memes are oft amateur culture. Meme creation is therefore ofte process, for instance in the documentary the “first meme” and which discusses meme prod
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approach to internet culture:
People sniff out PR very fast. And in the end it can turn against you and your campaign. I understand the need to create easily shareable counter-info-memes, but that’s pretty much already happening. A ton of good images are already circulating in the specific bubbles. But how to get out of the bubble? You can’t penetrate conservative bubbles with liberal content. Your content has to be so obscure and mysterious that it’s not working as a propaganda tool anymore. Or wil
According to free software thinker afford not to use memes:
When the alt-right was gaining gr
“tug” at people and sway them po emotions and visual culture. Yes, back at some quarters of the right it, we will lose a huge base of peo below is a whole other question. M than an elite art vanguard.
1 Evgeny Morozov, “Moral panic over fake news hi giants,” The Guardian, January 7, 2017
Go to Text
2 Designer-researcher Silvio Lorusso, who provide has noted that a similar relativism has taken over reason why trained, professional graphic designe produce effective memes. Instead, memes are oft amateur culture. Meme creation is therefore ofte process, for instance in the documentary the “first meme” and which discusses meme prod
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months have ideas about how this can be done, but it involves pretty vast resources, and more resembles the sort of work done by Cambridge Analytica than anyone in the imageboard or alt-right cultural orbit.
Apart from the need for a narrative, there’s the issue of acceleration. Should alternative memes circulate at the same speed as the overall internet? Are we running out of time? How about slow memes? What if
“real time” is itself part of the problem? According to Franco Berardi, we need a new rhythm of elaboration; we need to slow down
movement. This cannot be realized ruins our bodies, our minds. Accor creating a “bodiless brain.” The inf can even start telling the New Narr
×
Geert Lovink (2003), Zero Comments
Network Cultures at the Amsterdam networks such as Video Vortex (onlin the Query (the culture of search), Mo and the future of art criticism. He als
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1 Evgeny Morozov, “Moral panic over fake news hi giants,” The Guardian, January 7, 2017
Go to Text
2 Designer-researcher Silvio Lorusso, who provide has noted that a similar relativism has taken over reason why trained, professional graphic designe produce effective memes. Instead, memes are oft amateur culture. Meme creation is therefore ofte process, for instance in the documentary the “first meme” and which discusses meme prod
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