It is time to admit that nerd culture is guilty of indulging in the worst aspects of its mien: isolationism, abnegation of responsibility, nationalism and otherwise indolent and selfish pursuits utterly lacking in regard to a common purpose outside self-aggrandization. Worship of digital spaces leads to the pollution of rivers, the hoarding of capital, and the objectification of the citizenry, allowing for trauma transference on a global scale. Capitalism, patriarchy, colonization, xenophobia, white supremacy, genocide: these systems are pain. It is easy to create pain in a stranger to ease one’s own pain, and indulgence in this senseless cycle generates only brief analgesic and zero solution. This morass of open wounds and othering of one’s own problems nurtures a type of quicksand, a sinking feeling which destabilizes in order to exploit weakness.

Pepe is the ultimate fascistic creation: a corruption of art through the redirection of frustrated patriarchy. Right before the sands of obscurity closed overhead, someone grabbed the image of a sweet dumb frog naïf idly commenting “Feels good, man” and fed it into a machine fueled by rejection/ dejection/distance, only half-thinking while they did it. Handed off and deformed in service of mass-appeal memes, Pepe was saddled with spiritual significance of the sort normally ascribed to evangelism and its attendant hypocrisies.

Pepe is a false god because his initial replication is based in falsehood: it doesn’t always feel good, man. Philosophically, “feels good, man” is removed from context and thus one step away from “this is fine” (room on fire). Whereas Gritty is born out of work and danger and cold and struggle and selfless assistance in the face of authoritarianism. Manifesting energy for the collective is struggle, and not necessarily about feeling good all the time. Taking everybody’s energy and rallying it. Acknowledging that one is no longer a helpless child subject to the whims of society, wishing things can or should go your way, absent of self-reflection yet loaded with ego. This is the infant vulnerability that fascism exploits — our reptilian need for things to go precisely our own selfish and self-serving way.

The rise of Pepe memes referred to a universally self-indulgent atmosphere of I Want, I Don’t Care, I’m At A Distance. Reason has been hijacked and employed in the service of racism and white supremacy: separating families, imprisoning the innocent, implicitly (and explicitly) sanctioning murder. One might even argue reason has been distorted in the service of capitalism since the age of exploration, when complex societies around the globe were wiped out by disease and memorialized as savages. There is no reasoning with this type of reason; it stems from a fundamental flaw. Logic and rationalism have failed culture, paving the path to war, and now the only way out is to embrace the wilderness of the subconscious. In this place, Gritty is immediately acknowledged as Pepe’s opposition, terrifying those who would wish for the ease of equivocation and the status quo. This is the landscape of the Gritty meme, where humanity is struggling to eradicate fascism through surrealism, through sex, through the tools of the chaos guardians.

Pepe, in his original form, merely existed as a type of id, living in a perpetual infancy with his hapless half-animal friends. His whole existence, before and after the perversion of his image in the name of fascism, is as digital shadow; a frog unable leap into physicality, he can never place two skates on the ground. Pepe is a smokescreen, a vapor. Gritty, born of the earth itself, three dimensional, challenges and expands the foundation of community in the name of solidarity. They are a vector not of xenophobia but of the collective acceptance of all. Whereas Pepe has been controlled in order to represent control, Gritty is fully-formed, a nothing into a something, representing the same type of unbounded vibration that smashes walls and rebuilds from the ground up. Because dismantling the narcotic tentacles of capitalism and patriarchy happens out in the freezing cold.

Gritty is forces which thrive in unforgiving landscapes, eking an existence out of sheer undeniable life force. A winter god knows that in order for there to be life, there must be death. There must be Death. Death is birth, a gateway to new life and to know that and embrace that is to know one of the great and fearsome mysteries. Death is not an end but a door to a new beginning and only by making ourselves vulnerable and resting in discomfort can we align closer to the true spirit of the cosmos. To face without fear a lack of permanence and to say in the face of not knowing I will still strive for what is beyond my knowing, beyond my zones of comfort, at the outside of my ego.

Furthermore, Gritty is not just resisting. Gritty is revolting. Resistance is a type of ownership and another type of wall — still trying to hold on, still claiming a territory, still attempting to assert a primacy. We see that this type of response does not serve those who have never been given a stake to claim in a white supremacist capitalist system. Gritty is spring summer winter fall, revolution that generates and smashes and revives. Not merely a girding of armaments to sequester oneself and one’s assets but a riotous pushing back. For what claim can resistance take if the ground upon which it is enacted has been stolen, abused, destroyed by capitalism, given to one on the terms of the industrialists and colonizers. From the corpse emerges the mushroom, the tree, the future. The public immediately recognized this in Gritty, recoiling at first glance in active (acts of) repulsion. Change is messy and unattractive — but we all know that arbiters such as “attractive” are foisted upon the people as placeholders for the trappings of capitalism, to infest the cultural people hood with false competitions that distract from the true enemy.

The time is upon us. The old memes, modes, and monuments do not serve us and must be retired. New gods have arrived, and they are muppets.