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Anniversary Issue, Meme
That Aged… Well
Text Al Hassan Elwan | Annotations by Shumon Basar
Usually relegated to the margins of books and research papers, annotations are rhizomes that grow from a text, coaxing epiphanies into view while inviting critique. Ever the subversive, Shumon Basar is a lifelong annotator; a master of rhizomes, who not only brings minds together but also dilates them to create uncontrived spaces where ideas can come alive. Accepting our invitation to annotate a feature of his choosing from one of our previous issues, the writer and curator chose an essay on meme culture by his comrade, multidisciplinary designer and writer Al Hassan Elwan.
I’m obsessed with Oupi Goupi. Maybe, by the time this comes out, Oupi Goupi could be already forgotten—but I shall attempt to canonise him as much as I can. Oupi Goupi is part of the Goupiland universe, created by Tiktoker @lakaka. He shares origin lore with Lobotomisateur, L’homme Genial, L’électricien, Larry, and many more iconic heroes. Lakaka’s Tiktoks are what many would consider ‘brainrot’ content. Like the Blud vs Tax Collector series, they have their inner worlds that are, at least to their millions of viewers, full of life and stories. In Les Origines de Oupi Goupi (1 minute 3 seconds), we learn the tragic story of Oupi Goupi, the young cat who’s born into the wealthy family of Senior Goupi, but lived through the annihilation of Goupiland and had to start anew. My French isn’t that good, so that’s what I picked up anyway. Ah yes, all Lakaka’s videos are in French—despite their global admiration. This type of humour may not be for everyone, but I was truly curious if it was just funny to me and my fellow Americans because it’s in French or if French people found it funny, too. I asked that question in the comments and, so far, 1,600+ have responded “oui”. My fascination with Oupi Goupi is shared by many, from film theorists who drew parallels between Lakaka’s work and that of Godard to cartophilists who are collecting newly produced Goupiland Pokémon-coded cards. To me, this is an internet experience par excellence, and it offers an illustrative microcosm into what this piece is about to argue for.
Despite Oxford naming it word of the year for 2024, Gen Alpha’s brainrot is not new. Sure, mentions of the term soared in mainstream discourse last year, but the core sentiment of brainrot has been a crucial part of internet culture since its inception. Dank memes, deep-fried memes, shitposting, feralposting, goblin mode, doomscrolling, or whatever insinuates seemingly senseless online content consumption were all essentially describing brainrot. The term, however, is iconic because it marks a significant turning point. It aptly describes the beginning of our biological coalescence with the internet. We consume brainrot, we post brainrot, but we also have brainrot. As numerous studies have shown the effects of online addiction on our brains, having brainrot is de facto a neural fusion with the digital worlds we consume. By having brainrot, we become brainrot. This is great news.
Mind you, my defence of brainrot is not a defence of slop. Slop is used in online verbiage to refer to mindless entertainment as well, but it is lexically slanting more towards describing a specific type of low-effort AI content. Aesthetes, whom I tend to agree with, see slop as shoddy, anodyne, NPC-tier mediocrity, devoid of both awe and disgust. It’s basically waste having a moment before going back to being waste. Its sole purpose is rapid, culturally contagious, profit-maximising, formulaic production and reproduction—a hallmark of late-stage capitalism. This is why AI content is becoming more associated with slop, because it lacks feeling or any semblance of human thought or consideration behind its endless proliferation. “Looks AI-generated” is the new “Walmart version”. Discourse about sloptimism* is already underway, as fears grow around AI content drowning out all other forms of content. Dead Internet Theory* still looms over our online existence, and Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification of the internet* intensifies its glare with every doom scroll.
This is the playing field of the contemporary internet, one that’s actively angled towards severing our connection while maintaining an illusion of it. A dead internet algorithm is engineered to prioritise slop as a way for us to get our doomscroll dopamine fix without interacting with a single person, i.e., without feeling anything. Our technofeudal* overlords are consolidating more power, and we’re infinitely disintegrating into more data points. I am incredibly optimistic, despite this grim picture, because the internet is still very much alive thanks to Oupi Goupi. Oupi Goupi is how we verify to each other that we still exist online, resisting the floods of slop. Oupi Goupi proves our brainrot connects us, and it’s on a deeper level that’s inaccessible to bots, slopists, and even CEOs. It requires an understanding of a universal culture that could forever remain alien to them: meme culture.
Meme culture is an absolutely tired and stretched term, so I will focus on where such universalism is located. Looking at memes from the outside, we see an ever-evolving meta-language dynamic hypercontextual structure, but at its core, it simply operates on a single energy source: empathy. While humour – regardless of how niche it is – drives memes, empathy fuels their spread. A meme resonates when it reflects a shared anxiety, emotion, dissonance, experience, dread, or the sentiment of a cultural moment. This engine of empathy is where universalism is located—of course, mostly within left-leaning/progressive meme cultures.
The popular online theory that ‘the right can’t meme’ hinges on the claim that humour is inherently based on a deep understanding of the injustices of reality, while conservative views are not as they tend to stem from a lack of empathy and a direct, punching-down type of humour that doesn’t require much nuance. This universalism of meme-feels is almost as resilient as the cheesy “unbreakable” human spirit itself. One can even draw parallels along the late David Lynch’s Transcendental Mediation* chart. Oupi Goupi, again, attests to this. Lakaka’s TikToks transcended language and cultural barriers because beneath all those layers of irony, it tapped into meme universalism.
Some form of AI in the future might have a better grasp on meme culture, but when it comes to LLM* AI’s–it appears to be a checkmate. AI doesn’t ‘experience’ culture in real time. It can analyse existing patterns, but it doesn’t ‘feel’ empathy, reliability or irony in any human way. It can recognize patterns, but is not equipped to intuitively feel out current vibe shifts, or emotional relatability. It doesn’t grasp irony beyond its surface layer. For example, in multi-layered meta-irony* where the intention behind a joke is completely obscured in the moment of delivery, AI struggles to keep up. These are all limitations verifiable by existing LLM’s. The feeling of the present, our real time experience, seems to be our protected sanctuary from AI slopinfiltration.
This proves AI is not an inherent enemy of a living, free internet. It’s, at best, a helpful extension and, at worst, an annoying neighbour we can co-exist with. But AI is yet another technology that can be exploited for cyber tyranny and subjugation. Shadowbanning, censorship, addictive algorithms, repealed privacy laws and slopmaxxed feeds are all bad politics by bad(?) people. The lawsuits against The Internet Archive*, the TikTok ban flirtation, and the cyber attacks on Deepseek are among many signs of an encroaching fascist global order and a dying internet. Maybe there isn’t much we can do about legislation or swaying big tech shareholder decisions, but there’s a lot of fun to be had on the feed. The feed is not safe, but posting has not been taken away from us yet.
Inner Worlds: In the latter part of the 1960s, the sci-fi author J.G. Ballard said that while all the hysteria at the time was about “outer space” (the moon landing was merely two years away), he predicted that the more important geography to explore — and dominate, in the colonial sense — was “inner space.” By this, he meant the territories of the mind (unleashed in the Western world with Freud’s theory of the unconscious), the real estate of the soul and nanotechnology, which would be invisible to the human eye but infinitely consequential to us as a species. Ballard’s prophecy of technological modernism ushering in a new kind of social barbarism (see: the comments section) has proven to be impeccably accurate.
Godard: When Jean-Luc Godard died in 2022, I wrote a eulogy to him, in which I suggested that:
“Each of TikTok’s silly-surreal crash-edits is a great-great-grandchild of what [Godard] introduced in [his debut 1960 feature film] À bout de souffle.”
Brainrot: The term “bitrot” precedes brainrot, and is a useful phrase to twin with. “Bitrot” refers to the decay factor in computational files. Which gives rise to the adage that if you want something to really last thousands of years, write it on a piece of paper: it’s way more durable than digital data.
Biological coalescence with the internet: This is something I call “The Great Reversal.” The media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said in his book, “The Medium is the Massage,” from 1967, “that all media are extensions of man.” In the last decade and a half, this has reversed: we are now prosthetic extensions of media, technology, devices and systems. It’s such a huge magnetic role reversal in power relations: who or what controls what or who. The other term for this is the opposite of “anthropomorphic”: “technopomorphic.” When machines become more humanlike, we, in turn, become more machine-like.
Brainrot: We could add that the collateral damage of brainrot is already evidenced in the following: decencyrot, lawrot, wisdomrot, economyrot, soulrot.
Slop: We all know writing slop by now. Or do we? It’s the stuff churned out by Chat. There’s been a recent trend, by “real” writers, to dispense with en-dashes (“—”) because Chat uses them so prolifically. The idea is, if a text is absent of en- or em-dashes, that’s a sign it was, in fact, written by a human.
Looks AI-generated: This will be seen as a historic, early phase of AI generated content: the mangled fingers of 2022 text-to-video (I remember watching an entire The Verge video about why AI had such a hard time faithfully rendering hands); or, the uncanny valley of too-perfect-skin and waist to chest ratios. As richer countries desperately attempt to stymie their plummeting birth rates with robot workforces, and China announced half a million of its unmarried men will now get robot brides, realism may no longer be the litmus test for our thinking machines: they just need to save us from ourselves.
Enshittification: A.k.a. why we can’t have nice things for very long before they turn, literally, evil. Every major US tech company has now been brought explicitly into the military industrial complex, with trillions of dollars of contracts awarded to them since October 7th, 2023. It’s cute to remember that Google’s founding slogan was, “Don’t be evil.”
Optimistic: Alas, I am not sure I share this (sl)optimism. On the 30th birthday of the World Wide Web, its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, confessed that, having seen which direction the WWW took (immense power and wealth concentrated in a handful of companies and soon-to-be-trillionaires), Berners-Lee would take back his gift to us. We are not, in his eyes, worthy of such responsibility.
Bots, slopists, and even CEOs: An unholy trinity.
Empathy: In our book, “The Extreme Self,” we wrote, “Could the expression of empathy be the new Turing test?” Empathy is often regarded as proof of having a soul. A few pages on, we suggest that, “Will people crave the future legal rights enjoyed by data?”
Meme: It used to be said — at the time of Donald Trump’s first presidential election campaign — that, “the Left can’t meme” as well as the Right. If AI generated slop seems to be the latest in the arsenal of right wing politics (think of the Israeli Defence Force tweeting Ghibli memes during the ongoing attacks on Gaza), should the Left learn to slop?
Nuance: I’ve spent many moments in my adult life wondering if all humour is, in its essence, at the expense of someone or something. And if it is, is all humour just another, a;beit more palatable, articulation of cruelty?
Meme universalism: If there is a “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, should there also be a “Universal Declaration of Meme Universalism”?
AI struggles to keep up: There are some ways in which AI falls short of what we would expect from a human counterpart now, and it remains unclear if that schism is merely where the developing technology is today, or whether this lacunae is some unsolvable and unprogrammable “ghost in the machine” which separates man from machine (in a way that makes man feel more important and unique).
AI slopinfiltration: Sloppification is the opposite of civilisation. Where once, human ingenuity built vast cathedrals or complex cities, now, the brightest technical minds are churning out the tools to churn out AI slop, or infinite numbers of scams, from memecoins to deepfake phone swindles.
Dying internet: I’m old enough to have a Pre-Internet Brain. I saw the Internet arrive, adopted it, adapted to it, and now, arguably, am seeing its demise, as it mutates into a market-driven monster only answerable to shareholders and shitposter CEOs.
The feed is not safe, but posting has not been taken away from us yet: To post or not to post, that has been a question facing many of us. The process of “Enshittification,” as coined by Cory Doctorow, where, “online platforms and products degrade over time by first being good for users, then exploiting users to benefit business customers, and finally exploiting both to maximize profits for shareholders,” is omnipresent and omnipotent. We post despite the platforms’ callous and cynical abuse of us, as users, whether in how our data is profited from, or, the pornographic erasure of decorum, which leaves us all figuratively naked in front of billions of others. I continue to post but on most days I do not want to. I post because I know my political enemies want me to stop posting. I post to resist.
We’re in an era of both powerful images and image fatigue. We’ve seen Elon weaponise his Nazi salute as a successful feed-shock virus to drown out coverage on Trump’s executive orders. Luigi Mangione’s thirst edits, on the other hand, were weaponised to stress out the elites. Memes no longer need familiar formats to disseminate–only strong resonance. Templates like the Drake Hotline Bling or the Distracted Boyfriend are antiquated relics in contemporary memetics–which is why Chill Guy and Hawk Tuah raised the eyebrows of galaxy-brained memelords for being potential psyops. Them turning out to be memecoin scams did not help beat the allegations. Such feed takeovers are more of an imminent threat than the aforementioned impending slop flood.
As Elon’s salute feed-contagion was happening, I was posting to try and warn my meagre audience about the possibility of it being rage-bait, and I got a validating DM from artist and friend Tibor Dieters sharing my frustration and telling me “we need to hold the line”. When it comes to meme culture, I would say Elon is a Level 1 Crook or a Level 3 Street Thug at best, but he seized a moment of shared dread to engineer timeline hysteria that went on for days.
Memetic warfare is not new, but it’s beneficial to contextualise with new zeitgeists to identify new tactics of feed control. It’s good to be vigilant against infiltrators, be it bots or sociopaths. Ultimately, the more tapped in we are, the healthier the virtual biome. I’m not saying for every Mr Beast slop we come across we go and take Fanon essays to the PDF to Brainrot converter to plaster it over TikTok. Actually, nevermind, that might be funny. We all out here, resonance-maxxing.
“For the intellectual, the task, I believe, is explicitly to universalise the crisis. To give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered. To associate that experience with the suffering of others. […] The intellectual is neither a pacifier nor a consensus builder – but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense. A sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas or ready made cliches or the smooth ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say and what they do. Not just passively unwilling but actively willing to say so in public.”
This Edward Said quote from his Reith Lectures series distills it all, once we realise the “intellectual” is synonymous with the meme creator/poster. Brainrot, or rather the universal sentiment of it that was very much present in all its antecedents, is a manifestation of the collective dream of the internet as a liberatory technology. And it is the task of those who are in on it to keep that dream alive. I do not want to make it seem like posting is some kind of duty or categorical imperative, but I believe it is the task of the intellectual to protect Oupi Goupi.
Powerful images and image fatigue: JD Vance memes (which turned the Vice President’s face into an endless stream of Oompah Loompah pudgy caricatures) or Charlie Kirk memes (which take the adage “We are all Charlie Kirk” to an absurdist ubiquitous extreme) remind us that images are also just jokes without punchlines, a collective fever froth prompted by keyboard comedians the world over. Images are our species currency and images are also our collective tombs.
Timeline hysteria: Distraction is a weapon. Memes about the rich and powerful may well be initiated by the rich and powerful to keep us gleefully distracted while they re-wire the world we live in, and commit the largest transfer of wealth from the many to the few in the history of mankind.
Mr Beast: He has just opened a theme park in Saudi Arabia based around his personality and brand.
“Intellectual” is synonymous with the meme creator/poster: I can not imagine Susan Sontag would agree with this sentiment if she were alive but Slavoj Zizek on the other hand…
*Sloptimism is a term being discussed in niche art world circles on Twitter describing people who are optimistic, especially financially, about the proliferation of slop.
*The Dead Internet Theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts, due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the internet since 2016 or 2017 has consisted mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipu-lated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimise organic human activity.
*Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is the term used to describe the pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximise profits for shareholders.
*Technofeudalism is the idea introduced by Yanis Varoufakis that we are not transitioning from capitalism to something better, but slipping into a system where tech companies function like modern feudal lords. The economist argues that since the 2008 financial crisis, our economic system has fundamentally changed. The cloud, big data, and digital platforms have become the “land” of this new era, controlled by tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Meta.
*Transcendental Meditation is a form of silent meditation developed by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and popularised by David Lynch through the David Lynch Foundation.
*Meta-ironic humour is achieved when you can’t tell if the speaker is being ironic or sincere. The allure of meta-irony lies in its innate chaos and lack of structure, and in its disinterest in making a point and not having to take a final stance or give away a position.
*LLM stands for large language model, which is a type of machine learning model designed for natural language processing tasks such as language generation. LLMs are language models with many parameters and are trained with self-supervised learning on a vast amount of text, like ChatGPT.
*The Internet Archive is an American non-profit organisation founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org.
*Rage-baiting is the manipulative tactic of eliciting outrage with the goal of increasing internet traffic, online engagement, revenue and support. Rage-baiting or farming can be used as a tool to increase engagement and attract subscribers, followers and supporters, which can be financially lucrative.