{"id":1517370,"date":"2026-10-01T16:09:49","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T14:09:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/?post_type=articles&p=1517370"},"modified":"2026-10-01T16:09:49","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T14:09:49","slug":"when-memes-take-on-a-life-of-their-own","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/articles\/when-memes-take-on-a-life-of-their-own\/","title":{"rendered":"When Memes Take on a Life of their Own"},"featured_media":1517373,"template":"","meta":{"_has_post_settings":{"highlight_sharing":"default","image_sharing":"default","headline_sharing":"default"}},"schools":[],"areas":[572],"subjects":[419],"class_list":["post-1517370","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","areas-media","subjects-global-affairs"],"custom-fields":{"wpcf-article-leadin":["Memes detach culture from authorial intent, fueling both extremist communities and creative democratic discourse, writes Reed Van Schenck."],"wpcf-article-body":["Thus sayeth Rule 42 of the internet: \u201cNothing is sacred.\u201d\r\n\r\nIf you did not know that the internet has rules<\/a>, consider this your first lesson in meme culture. The \u201crules of the internet\u201d are not \u201claws\u201d that can be enforced, but observations that hold true no matter where you go online.\r\n\r\nIndeed, the internet enjoys tipping sacred cows. When any piece of offline culture \u2013 a movie, TV show, or song \u2013 gets in the hands of the online peanut gallery, its original<\/em> meaning ceases to be its only<\/em> meaning. Someone will reinterpret, remix, and rewrite it, creating new meaning that its original authors never intended.\r\n\r\nThis sacrilegious innovation has made the internet a crucible for creative, democratic discourse. But it is also the driving force behind toxic online communities who use memes to spread hate.\r\n\r\n\u201cLittle Dark Age,\u201d<\/a> a 2018 song by U.S. American rock band MGMT, achieved viral status on TikTok during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, nearly three years after its release. MGMT\u2019s moody synths and thoughtful lyrics accompanied a litany of memes, capturing the equal-parts boredom, anxiety, and creativity that permeated social media throughout the quarantine. Give the song a listen, and consider what its lyrics mean to you:\r\n\r\nPolicemen swear to God, love seeping from their guns<\/a>\r\nI know my friends and I would probably turn and run<\/a>\r\nIf you get out of bed,<\/a> come find us heading\r\nFor the bridge, bring a stone, all the rage,<\/a> my little dark age<\/a>\r\n\r\n\u201cLittle Dark Age\u201d weaves overt references to police brutality, mental health, and feelings of melancholy. At the time, the United States was reeling from the polarizing second campaign of Donald Trump and the Black Lives Matter protests, the largest mass movement in the country\u2019s history. As music critic Alexis Petridis<\/a> puts it, the song is, \u201cfairly obviously, an excoriation of Trump-era America and racist police violence.\u201d\r\n\r\nIf the internet took authorial intent seriously, we would expect \u201cLittle Dark Age\u201d to accompany memes that celebrate progressive social movements, condemn systemic racism, and shine a light on mental health.\r\n\r\nInstead, \u201cLittle Dark Age\u201d has become an anthem for radical racists in North America and Europe.\r\n\r\nMy research into \u201cLittle Dark Age\u201d memes on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram<\/a> confirmed a warning from investigators at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue<\/a>: \u201c[Little Dark Age] is by far the most popular Sound among extremist creators on TikTok.\u201d The song accompanies elaborately-edited, visually-appealing montages featuring historical dictators including Adolf Hitler, esoteric neo-Nazi symbols, and videos glorifying brutal conquests in the Middle East and the Americas.\r\n\r\nAlthough these reactionary memes are a minority, they accumulate millions of interactions, spread rapidly across platforms, and easily outpace memes that reflect the song\u2019s original meaning.\r\n\r\nEven governments have appropriated the song as a callous joke. As recently as 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the United States posted a \u201cLittle Dark Age\u201d edit glamorizing deportations. The post was removed from X<\/a> after MGMT filed a copyright takedown request.\r\n\r\nIt might not be so surprising that some listeners could hear \u201cLittle Dark Age\u201d and twist its meaning to confirm their own worldview. What\u2019s shocking is that the extremist derivative of \u201cLittle Dark Age\u201d has become the most popular<\/em> interpretation of the song.\r\n\r\nThe most popular memes are often those that stray the furthest from authorial intent. To understand why, we need to establish what memes do in the first place.\r\n\r\nIt is difficult to define a meme. Etymologically, the word comes from the same Greek root (\u03bc\u1fd6\u03bc\u03bf\u03c2) as \u201cmime\u201d and \u201cmimesis,\u201d both reflecting a performative imitation that carries symbolic meaning.\r\n\r\nMost researchers who study memes credit British biologist Richard Dawkins with coining the term. In The Selfish Gene <\/em>(1976), Dawkins argued that cultures undergo an evolution that mirrors our biological origin. Dawkins defines a meme as a cultural unit \u2013 a belief or a behavior \u2013 that spreads through imitation: parent to child, peer to peer, community to community. The most beneficial \u201cmemes\u201d are selected and continue onto the next generation insofar as they enable humanity to flourish.\r\n
Like any kind of humor, memes delineate insiders and outsiders.<\/blockquote>\r\nThis definition is an important starting point, but it itself has evolved since Dawkins first proposed it. For one, we now typically use the term \u201cmeme\u201d to refer to internet culture, not any kind of widespread behavior. More importantly, not all memes are socially beneficial. On the contrary, many memes spread hateful and anti-social ideas, flying under the radar by claiming to be \u201cjust a joke.\u201d\r\n\r\nA better definition is best summed up in the famous words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, defining obscenity in the media: \u201cI know it when I see it.\u201d\r\n\r\nIndeed, if you recognize a meme when you see one, there\u2019s a good chance that you have spent a lot of time online, noticing the algorithmic patterns in which memes are born, grow, circulate, and eventually fade into obscurity.\r\n\r\nMimicry, including internet memes, requires audiences to \u201cfill in the blanks\u201d using their imagination. When a mime pretends to struggle against the wind, there is no real fan blowing against them. Instead, the mime uses exaggerated, symbolic gestures. The performance is a bit ambiguous, but that\u2019s why it\u2019s entertaining. The audience imagines the wind because everyone can connect the mime\u2019s performance to a real experience. We know it when we see it.\r\n\r\nBut if you do not recognize a meme when you see one, the online world is quick to remind you of your outsider status. The audience will laugh not just at the meme, but also at commenters who say that they \u201cdon\u2019t get it,\u201d or even worse, \u201cThat\u2019s not what that song means!\u201d\r\n\r\nApply the same logic to \u201cLittle Dark Age,\u201d and it becomes clear why this meme works, not just despite, but because, it contradicts authorial intent. While the song\u2019s \u201ctrue\u201d meaning is \u201cfairly obvious,\u201d it is also ambiguous enough to justify alternative interpretations. Contradicting the \u201cobvious\u201d meaning appears transgressive and edgy, matching the tone of meme culture better than interpretations faithful to authorial intent.\r\n\r\nImagine the response to someone commenting, \u201cThat\u2019s not what MGMT had in mind!\u201d This na\u00efve commenter would become the butt of the joke themselves, because they publicly displayed their ignorance toward the sacrilegious norms of digital culture.\r\n\r\nLike any kind of humor, memes delineate insiders and outsiders, those who are \u201cin on the joke\u201d and those who are not. Over the past year, parents learned this the hard way when they asked their children why \u201csix-seven\u201d is funny.\r\n\r\nIt is therefore easier to define memes by paying attention to what they do<\/em>, rather than just what they are<\/em>. Memes convey in-group status through humorous repetition. Children who laugh at \u201csix-seven\u201d memes communicate their identity as part of the younger generation, and adults (or Popes<\/a>) who laugh along are showing their solidarity. Inversely, adults who roll their eyes communicate that they do not get the joke, and more importantly, that they do not resonate with the identity that it represents.\r\n\r\nFor this reason, memes are powerful tools for political communication. When you repeat a meme and your target audience understands it, they laugh, share, and create new derivatives, reaffirming their collective identity. Outsiders who don\u2019t get it become the butt of another joke, contributing to the cycle of attention and outrage that drives engagement on social media.\r\n\r\nIn an essay<\/a> published in El Grito<\/em>, cultural critic Mario Canal discusses the use of memes to spread ultranationalist sentiment among Spanish youth on Facebook. Creators use kitschy aesthetics to transform ordinary symbols of Spanish identity, like jam\u00f3n serrano, into nostalgia for the Franco era.\r\n\r\nI agree with Canal that condemning memes can make one appear humorless, becoming the butt of the joke, and ultimately increasing the appeal of reactionary digital networks.\r\n\r\nInstead of becoming the sanctimonious parents who \u201cjust don\u2019t understand,\u201d we should recognize what one of his informants refers to as \u201cthe democratization of creative practice\u201d [la democratizaci\u00f3n de la pr\u00e1ctica creativa] that memes can fulfill.\r\n\r\nHerein lies the weakness of hateful memes: They are fundamentally uncreative. By glamorizing the past, rather than looking to the future, they demonstrate a lamentable inability to imagine better worlds in which everyone, not just the most powerful, have the freedom and the tools to express themselves. For this reason, Francoist memes make Canal feel \u201cmore pity than fear\u201d [m\u00e0s l\u00e0stima que miedo].\r\n\r\nPersonally, when I reflect on \u201cLittle Dark Age,\u201d I feel neither pity nor fear, but rather motivation. The best way to combat the spread of hateful memes is to remember Rule 42: On the internet, nothing is sacred. Or, to reprise a line from MGMT, \u201cThe humor\u2019s not the same.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe same ambiguity that makes memes so powerful as tools for exclusion and radicalization also makes memes crucial tools for satire, criticism, speculation, and other forms of democratic discourse. Creators of all stripes must take advantage of the internet\u2019s irreverent atmosphere to tell stories, paint pictures, and build worlds that previous generations did not imagine possible.\r\n\r\n\u00a9 IE Insights."],"wpcf-article-extract-enable":["1"],"wpcf-article-extract":["Memes detach culture from authorial intent, fueling both extremist communities and creative democratic discourse, writes Reed Van Schenck."],"wpcf-audio-article":["https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/Van-Schenck-Audio.mp3"]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/articles\/1517370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/articles"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/articles"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1517373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1517370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"schools","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/schools?post=1517370"},{"taxonomy":"areas","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/areas?post=1517370"},{"taxonomy":"subjects","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ie.edu\/insights\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/subjects?post=1517370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}