Memes and Meaning

Serious ideas in unserious form, plus what's elitist?

I wrote this tweet awhile ago, in reply to someone’s roundup of Twitter urbanist memes:

Yeah, I typo’d “it’s,” but the point is, I’m using the word “meme” as basically shorthand for “unserious.” There was a moment—when I was in Croatia and saw how quiet a bustling city could be without motor traffic—I had a sort of “Wait, that stupid meme is actually concealing a real insight!” moment. So much so, I actually headlined that piece “Cities Aren’t Loud, Cars Are Loud”!

I dislike internet memes a lot—they strike me as childish, immature, smart-alecky, generally the opposite of sincere debate or commentary. And being on the internet has conditioned me to instinctively assume any argument contained in a meme is a poor argument, or is meant ironically, or is winking at some bit of the very-online discourse you’re supposed to be in the know about. The presentation of these ideas as glib internet memes makes them seem to mean nothing. But they’re very deep, almost metaphysical observations.

Look at the contrast here between this NSFW-named account’s meme and the underlying observation that the logic of orienting mobility around the car squeezes out so many other possibilities.