There’s this word people use a lot when talking about the philosophical nuances of contemporary memes especially liberal arts students who just read Lacan, and that word is post-irony. The Wikipedia definition of Post-irony is “…a term used to connote a state in which earnest and ironic intents become muddled. Confusingly, it may less commonly refer to its converse: a return from irony to earnestness, similar to New Sincerity.” In other words, it’s nonsense and it doesn’t mean anything, but if you ever dabbled in post-structuralism or postmodernism you’d know that nothing means anything anymore, but seriously some words are harder to define than others, and yeah post-irony is one of those words. “…there are a number of misconceptions about irony that are peculiar to recent times….the eighth is that “post-ironic” is an acceptable term — it is very modish to use this as if to suggest one of three things: i) that irony has ended; ii) that postmodernism and irony are interchangeable, and can be conflated into one handy word; or iii) that we are more ironic than we used to be, and therefore need to add a prefix suggesting even greater ironic distance than irony on its own can supply. None of these things is true.” — (Zoe Williams, The Guardian). Even though I agree with Zoe Williams I still think the word can be used to describe a certain feeling, a certain zeitgeist that hunts the humor and atmosphere of our contemporary culture, the culture of the cynic.

This new generation of hyper-political post-ironic cynical memes in the last decade can be blamed on mainly two things: 1) The internet 2) Millennials and generation z. Most social media websites that memes spread on like Reddit, 4chan, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are overwhelming ran by teenagers and young adults, and these are people who owe thousands of dollars in student loan debt, People that have to worry about climate change and higher prices of living, etc. So, of course, you’ll see dark humor in their memes which (in the case of most people) is their only way of grieving with all of this. One of the best memes to showcase this dark cynical post-ironic humor is the doomer meme. The doomer is a caricature of a 20 something-year-old guy who is a mentally unhealthy cynic that spends all his time on the internet while smoking cigarettes and talking about how there’s no hope in the future of society. Here’s an excerpt from an article about the extreme political ideology of the communities on 4chan where the doomer meme rose to popularity in which effectively sums up the context of the irony filled cynicism of the doomer. “The toxicity of these online communities, of course, never counts as a factor in the doomer’s mental state, and yet the doomer memes themselves — amid the pop-cultural and drug references — here and there inject bits of far-right extremism: anti-semitic tropes, fear at the incipient collapse of “the West,” hand-wringing over birth rates, interest in domestic terrorism. This is the very stew of ingredients that currently fuels a global network of violent white supremacy. That it’s couched in “irony” makes it no less dangerous, as I wrote when the New Zealand mosque shooter’s manifesto turned out to be crammed with these “jokes,” culled from the same subculture that produces doomer content. Combined with total despair — the defining trait of the doomer is the belief that change isn’t possible, and therefore nothing matters” -(4chan’s ‘Doomer’ Memes Are a Strange Frontier in Online Extremism Klee, Miles).

This attitude of what can be called post-cynicism is at the heart of this wave of doomerism; the idea that we’re now beyond cynicism to where change isn’t possible, and therefore what’s the point of even trying; Mark Fisher calls this phenomenon reflexive impotence. “British students today appear to be politically disengaged. While French students can still be found on the streets protesting against neoliberalism, British students, whose situation is incomparably worse, seem resigned to their fate. But this, I want to argue, is a matter not of apathy, nor of cynicism, but of reflexive impotence. They know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it.”-(Fisher, Mark “Capitalist Realism”) The social reality for which these memes are born in have very potent parallels to the outer society. The overwhelming ideology of cynicism in our culture is perfect for the doomer meme to thrive.

The doomer meme doesn’t conform to a specific political ideology, which makes it appear post-ideological and the ironical distance makes it seem like we shouldn’t take them seriously, but whether or not we take them seriously these memes are still having real-world political effects. “then today’s society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. And at this level, we are of course far from being a post-ideological society. Cynical distance is just one way … to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.” -(“The Sublime Object of Ideology” Zizek, Slavoj). As Zizek puts it things that appear post-ideological or ironically distant should be analyzed more carefully. For instance, the alt-right claims they memed Donald Trump into the white house using an ambiguous meme about a frog named Pepe. (Spencer, Paul “Trump’s Occult Online Supporters Believe ‘Meme Magic’ Got Him Elected”) The ambiguousness of the Pepe meme is exactly why it’s so effective; a funny picture of a frog isn’t inherently racist, but they put just enough dog whistles in the meme to still get off political messages. It seems that the right has a dominant stronghold of the political communication medium of memes from the idea that “the left can’t meme” which came into popularity from trump voters in 2016, but there’s been a rapid incline in pro-Corbyn leftist memes in Britain lately which gives me hope for the future. As time goes on it becomes more and more clear that this “culture war” on the internet plays a heavy role in real-world politics. The more we counteract these right-wing memes by analyzing the psychological and sociological mechanisms of them and producing leftist memes of our own the better our chance of making a change is.