When filmmaker and scholar Hito Steyerl wrote her manifesto “In Defense of the Poor Image” in 2009, internet memes were only in their infancy. But in the years since, the meme has become the dominant form of the poor image — “an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image.”
Of the poor image, Steyerl wrote:
Altogether, poor images present a snapshot of the affective condition of the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia, and fear, as well as its craving for intensity, fun, and distraction. The condition of the images speaks not only of countless transfers and reformattings, but also of the countless people who cared enough about them to convert them over and over again, to add subtitles, reedit, or upload them.
The poor image for Steyerl described the low resolution, out of focus, bootlegged, chopped and screwed films (if you could call them that) and videos that made up large swaths of DVDs piling on top of each other in landfills and internet mush gunking up the fiber optic cables.
from “In Defense of the Poor Image”
As internet content becomes increasingly lucrative, perhaps there’s a merging of the poor image with the high-resolution, high-production images to produce something like a Mr. Beast video. Sponsored influencer content that many companies are opting for over ad campaigns with camera crews, costume departments, makeup artists, professional actors, and the like. The big, bad world of marketing is being rapidly deskilled as labor costs are cut and offloaded onto influencers, whose 30 second clips slapping on a skincare product they can hardly remember the name of still prove more effective than high-budget campaigns.
The word “meme” originated as a play on the words “gene” and the Greek mimeme, or to imitate. Like genetic mutations, memes iteratively develop or mutate from their original form, occasionally spawning entirely new memes.
As Rian Phin (@thatadult) articulated in a TikTok Story (ephemeral), “Memes are mimetic.” Philosopher Rene Girard wrote of “mimetic desire” in 1961, arguing that our desires don’t develop independently of one another, but are derivative, triangulated with the desire of others. We don’t want things simply because our desire has spawned from our brains, but often because we see others desiring the same thing and we determine the object of desire as desirable.
Beyond Girard, memes and pop culture are reminders that our society shapes us as we in turn shape it. The idea that any of our desires exist in a vacuum, severed from social, political, and historical contexts, is an illusion. As Martin Heidegger or G.W.F. Hegel might say, we are always already in the world. In other words, we live in a society.
martin heidegger made this meme actually
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