Document Dump - The Selfish Meme
Daniel LaPointe
Written 5/25/2022 – so about a month and a half after the bulk of my work on “Learning, Populism, and Reddit” – I was now, all of the sudden, back to liking Reddit. Here, the “last contribution to this blog” referenced is the rather mysterious “Ode to a Sheltered Zoomer”. Like “Ode to a Sheltered Zoomer,” “The Selfish Meme” approaches ironic online culture with a striking sincerity.
The Selfish Meme
1 It’s been three months since my last contribution to this blog. Since then, there have been some changes in my life, most notably the death of my grandfather in mid-April. Still being in the thick of it all, I lack the perspective necessary to speak with intelligence about that event. The following words, then, can be thought of as a break from my immediate situation, and as a taste of my present mood.
I currently find myself disillusioned with the humanities. Any statement not backed by data or rigorous argumentation feels utterly worthless to me. No voice is more privileged than any other voice. It is the height of arrogance to hold that the individualized components of one’s writing – one’s cadence, one’s vocabulary, one’s fingerprint–like web of associations – can somehow be superior to those of another person. Whatever ego that had before allowed me to treat my intuition like settled science has now shriveled up. I no longer have the courage to generalize. I no longer have the courage to project my stray thoughts onto others. I am merely one American among some 330 million. I have a “lived experience,” and that is it.
It’s odd that I’ve finally come around to this idea of “lived experience,” given how long I’ve loathed the phrase. After all, there’s no power in speaking from my own, tiny perspective. Make sweeping generalizations, however, and I feel like a tinkerer behind the scenes. Culture is a battleground – and maybe, just maybe, an idea birthed in my head gets broader circulation in the community at large. One can of course pull this off with “data and rigorous argumentation,” but it’s so enticing to think that one’s intuitions can also receive this sort of success.
A few months back I encountered the creator of a superb image – that of the so-called “Lord Marquaad E” – in a Reddit comment section. This user, u/PuppyBaconChips, was responsible for the most iconic variant of the meme, in which a face mash of Markiplier and Lord Farquaad is photoshopped over Mark Zuckerberg’s body.2 For those in the know, this image was a watershed moment in meme culture. It marked the culmination of a move toward abstraction that had long been brewing in communities like r/dankmemes and r/deepfriedmemes. What was so astonishing about the image is that no one could explain why it was funny, even though everyone agreed that it was funny. This creation, then, brought us straight into the mind of u/PuppyBaconChips. There was no diffraction by way of shared modes of expression – no erasure of his character by the regularity of things like tropes and explicable visual gags. The meme was funny in a truly elemental way, and for that reason it perfectly reproduced the mental state of its creator.
So, what’s u/PuppyBaconChips up to now? Not much. He’s resting on his laurels, occasionally drawing attention to his creation of the Marquaad image whenever it gets a shoutout.3 I’ll note, however, that he tends not to get much notice when he shows up in a comment section. Unlike other social medias, it’s essentially impossible to acquire a following on Reddit. But no matter. If one has truly influenced the surrounding culture, seeing that people have changed their behavior as a result of your actions should be enough. There need not be love-bombing on top of it.
Put another way, u/PuppyBaconChips is content because an idea of his has a robust memetic future. As the theory goes, memes are the units of cultural reproduction. u/PuppyBaconChips can gaze upon his creation much as a parent gazes upon their child. In the same sense that the child guarantees the genetic future of the parent, the success of the u/PuppyBaconChips’ meme guarantees his own memetic future.
Good for him.
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