socialoligarchy-blog

[socialoligarchy-blog]

Lel Kekistan: How Meme Culture Shifts Right

By now, you probably have an understanding of what “trolling” is. The act of doing something provocative in order to incite a specific, usually negative, emotion for comedy. This can range anywhere from mild teasing in YouTube or Facebook comments all the way to actively using slurs and calls of genocide in place of comedy punchlines. The major method of dissemination for these jokes is through internet memes. Memes today are similar yet completely different from the concept of memetic ideas popularized by Richard Dawkins in the 1970’s, and a proper understanding of the modern usage is needed to contextualize the negative effects they can lead to in young people. Rather than the term being used to describe any sort of idea that changes from person to person, a meme today is essentially any kind of joke told via text or image online, often with a combination of the two. These images are spread by users across platforms and chatrooms, and are usually changed by the process and the context. In this paper, I aim to explore how the culture of internet users, typically (though not exclusively) young, white males, who create and consume memes has been influenced by right-leaning political thinkers and online personalities, and to argue that, while memes aren’t bad as a whole, they aren’t entirely safe either, and that people need to be careful about the content in them.

This is a topic often discussed by various other YouTube personalities, such as Natalie “Contrapoints” Wynn and other online personalities in her genre of content. I’ll do my best to link to all of the video essays I pull concepts from when they occur. Because of the nature of online personalities, I will only be using the names of people who have publically released their names in association with their online work. If I refer to someone just as their online handle, it is because I couldn’t find their real name.

The more visible reason that memes can be harmful is that they can cause people to normalize extremely harmful material that preys on bigoted opinions and views. This phenomenon is spoken about in the YouTube video “The PewDiePipeline: how edgy humor leads to violence” by the content creator NonCompete. The video discusses why another online personality, PewDiePie (Felix Kjellberg), was mentioned by the shooter of the Christchurch Massacre, and how someone could progress through stages of life to come to the point that the shooter did.

In the video, NonCompete uses a modified version of the Pyramid of Discrimination, a visual guide to how someone rationalizes and normalizes sexual harassment and abuse. He extrapolates the idea to fit ideological violence into it as well, adapting it to a broader scale than just harassment. In context, the diagram is used to show how Kjellberg, who has had om controversies surrounding him and jokes he’s made, is an influence that encourages young people to more right leaning stances. The specific issue with Kjellberg is that, in the past, he has made several jokes by using nazis symbols and repeating anti-semitic call lines (more specifically, paying for two Indian men to dance on stream while holding a sign that said “Kill All Jews”).

The big idea behind the pyramid is that no one starts out as a zealot for any sort of group or a bigot against any group, but it’s a progression that people go through after a set of factors is introduced to them for long enough. In the case of Kjellberg, and meme culture in general, are setting up the first two layers of the pyramid; “Attitudes & Beliefs,” which is where things like subtle racism or homophobia exist, and “Cultural Microaggressions,” which are little actions that follow the beliefs established in the first layer exist. By making jokes about killing Jewish people, it makes it easier for people to look away from those who would actually advocate for such heinous things, because it leads to the thought, “Surely they’re joking too, right? And even if they’re not, they aren’t bad because of it, since this thing I saw wasn’t bad, and it was the same thing.” This is how normalization begins, since the person exposed to the rhetoric begins to see the action as normal, rather than a social break. This is made even more severe once people are convinced that calling out said behavior is wrong, since that implies that an action they perceive as normal is wrong, and that far too harsh of accusations are being levied against a creator they like.

The knee-jerk reaction to people calling you, or someone whose content you like, a nazi or similar insult is to push back against it, which can lead to someone going even further up the pyramid, since it encourages them to seek out people of a like mind, who won’t ridicule or lecture them over the things they like. This is the cycle that leads to extremism; a person likes something edgy, other people push back and makes the person uncomfortable, and then that person goes deeper to try to stay comfortable.

This style of indoctrination is not wholly unintentional, as there are groups out there who will actively look for people, usually young, white men, who are disillusioned with the world and scapegoat other people, such as illegal immigrants or feminists, as the source of their woes. These groups, like web forums known as 8chan or Stormfront, are places welcoming to people further along the pyramid. This is where edgy memes become a lot darker, a lot more pointed, and more focused on their goals than other places on the internet.

This is where something more insidious happens, and it’s the second reason that memes can be harmful.  Perhaps you’ve heard of various things, like a comic frog or the “Okay” emoji, being called hate symbols and thought to yourself, “that can’t be, that’s something I’ve seen many times, and it has this perfectly normal, other connotation to it. How could that possibly be anything else, especially a symbol of hate?” That is a simple and intentional reason; it has been a long standing tradition of far right and extremist groups to co-opt a common place symbol, often one designed to invoke peace, and use it for their own deeds. This is most notably seen with the german swastika, which was a common symbol through the world, particularly in India. The act of c0-opting is known as “dog whistling,” since it’s meant to be a sound or a cry that only a few people can hear and that everyone else will miss.

Memes become a breeding ground for this kind of coded symbol, as done with the two examples above and several others, because most people just see the image as a joke or a reference and it becomes an easy cover for if one gets called out for using said symbol. In a hateful way. The user can just claim it was a joke or reference, and that the person who called them out is the crazy one for believing that a mundane symbol could be anything bad.

The solution to all this is tricky, as there will always be people who are disparaged by something, and there will always be people read to take advantage of those who feel disparaged against. However, it is not impossible, and the best way to do it is to talk to people before they’re able to move further up the pyramid. Since the gut reaction to someone aggressively telling you that you’re views are evil and false is to push back against them, it is important to discuss with the person calmly and to not belittle them for what they believe. To get someone to back down from the pyramid is a fair bit harder than keeping them from it in the first place, but again it’s not impossible. It can be done with enough discourse, and some levels of legitimate force both physically and socially. There are arguments to what method works the best, and which has it’ own merits and demerits. The main camps are to physically fight back when you see the behavior in public, such as punching big name leaders, and the other is to exclusively use discourse and conversation in order to bring the person back. Both have their place, I feel, and both work for different circumstances.

Decrypting the Alt-Right: How to Recognize a F@scist | ContraPoints

"Are Traps Gay?" | ContraPoints

The Darkness | ContraPoints

Incels | ContraPoints

The PewDiePipeline: how edgy humor leads to violence | NonCompete

PewDiePipeline 2: How to Shut it Down | NonCompete

Lyons, Matthew N. “Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Origins and Ideology of the Alternative Right.” Political Research Associates, www.politicalresearch.org/2017/01/20/ctrl-alt-delete-report-on-the-alternative-right/?print=print#sthash.Qc6pbEu0.dpbs.

Heikkilä, Niko. “Online Antagonism of the Alt-Right in the 2016 Election.” European Journal of American Studies, European Association for American Studies, 31 July 2017, journals.openedition.org/ejas/12140.

Kelly, Annie. “The Alt-Right: Reactionary Rehabilitation for White Masculinity.” Latest TOC RSS, Lawrence and Wishart, 15 Aug. 2017, www.ingentaconnect.com/content/lwish/sou/2017/00000066/00000066/art00006.

[socialoligarchy-blog]

Berlin United

My parents children rather late in life, as I wasn’t born until my mom was just over forty years old. She’s a few years older than my dad is. As such, my dad was around my age during the end of the Cold War and the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1991. Around that time, my dad would have been a senior or just graduated from college.

The fear of nuclear annihilation was a constant dread for a large portion of young adults though the 80’s, and it was partially symbolized by the Berlin wall due to the nature of the Soviet leadership that had built it. The goal of tearing down the Berlin Wall was to symbolically dismantle a final vestige of the Soviet union and to literally bring the boroughs of Berlin together for the first time since the wall was built in 1961. It was a rather simple goal, but it was something ever present in the zeitgeist of the 1980’s. The end of the cold war was a monumental thing at the time, spurred on by social protests and political action. For several years prior to the fall of the wall, several artists, including David Bowie and David Hasselhoff, held concerts in direct protest of the wall, seeking for it to be torn down.

The fall of the wall is one of those things that completely reshaped the world, both immediately and long term. One of the immediate factors was the unification of Germany under a single government’s control and of families that had been stuck on either side of the wall when it was built decades before. Since the wall did fall, and this reunion happened, the movement can only be seen as a success. Its goals were accomplished and it shaped the world for years to come. We don’t fear nuclear oblivion in the same way anymore, and the fall sparked a fall of the greater Soviet Russian government.

The movement that lead up to the fall isn’t thought about that often today, but the political effects are still reverberating through the world today. The issues currently surrounding the AMerican government today have ties to the leadership that arose after the fall of the USSR, and the site of the wall is now used as a memorial of power gone too far.

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Segregation in  Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti

I grew up in the small town of Dexter, Michigan, a short drive outside of the neighboring cities of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. All of Dexter is categorized into a single census block, so it isn’t very interesting to look at from a neighborhood perspective. Not only that, but most of the town (~90%) is Non-Hispanic white folks, so it probably wouldn’t be that interesting anyways.

However, Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti are a far more interesting story. Since they’re both much larger than Dexter is, and much more population dense than Dexter, they are far more likely to display signs of social/racial segregation. 

This first map is of where non-Latinx white people live in Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti. It’s clear that they live in almost every block, and it fairly decent numbers all through the cities. However, there are some census blocks that have lower numbers, only 75%.

This next map I have is of the non-Hispanic African-American population in the same area, displaying more obviously where people of color live. It is far more common for black Americans to live in Ypsilanti than in Ann Arbor. As can be seen by the next map, of families living below the poverty line, it’s easy to see a pattern emerge.

A large portion of families living in poverty just so happen to live in very African American populated communities. There’s a chicken and egg style dilemma surrounding what may have caused this discrepancy: do impoverished people move to the area because it’s cheaper to live there, or is it cheaper to live there because impoverished people live there (and thus can’t afford extraneous things like groundskeepers or landscapers)?

Keep in mind that any explanation I can give will not be a perfect model or explanation, since there are a lot of different variables and possible reasons for things.

With the history of redlining in suburban (explained by the Adam Ruins Everything video below), which many of the census blocks outside of the down towns themselves include.

This history of where people were allowed to live, and the aid offered to those areas, goes on to this day. Ypsilanti is often considered to be a worse place to live than Ann Arbor, often because of the high poverty level of the area and how it infrastructure, like public buildings and roads, looks worse than Ann Arbor’s infrastructure.

[socialoligarchy-blog]

Green Book at the Oscars

I read the article “What Makes ‘Green Book’ an Unusual Oscar Winner,” an article hosted on The Society Pages. The author of the piece, Andrew M. Lindner, focuses on why the movie “Green Book” was able to win the Academy Award for Best Picture this year, despite not being  a great film in the eye of the author.

“Green Book” is a movie set in 1962 and follows an Italian bouncer turned chauffeur for Don Shirley, a extremely talented Jamaican-American jazz pianist. The two men travel on a tour through the Deep South of the United States.

The author explains some of the historical trends in the nominees and winners of Best Picture, stating that the majority of the winners are drama and period pieces, and would often be released during the end of the winter. “Green Book’ met both of those criteria, being set in the 1960′s and being released in December of 2018, but it didn’t meet the criteria for what a lot of people would consider a “good” movie. This is often represented by analysis of critical reviews on aggregate sites like Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes.

“Green Book,” sitting at a healthy, though moderate, 80% or RT and 70% on Metacritic was not the highest rated movie of its other best picture contenders, which begs the question of how did it win, and why? This is a very tricky question, since how a movie is ranked is very subjective. What one person thinks is great and groundbreaking another can see as drab and overplayed.

One’s interpretation of a film’s quality is solely based on their own social perceptions of said film. The entire point of critic aggregation is to try to make sense of what everyone thinks and how their different interpretations of a film can all be used to the same end.

However, I feel as though this metric is plainly too simple to be used as the core reason why one movie gets chosen as Best Picture over another. Not even talking about the complex and extravagant advertising campaigns to win over Academy votes, claiming that critics’ opinions, boiled down to a single percentage, are the only way to determine a movie’s quality doesn’t take the personal interpretations of a film into account. As such, I feel as though the author spends too much time discussing numerical values and not enough about the actual content of the film or the way that the film makes people feel.

In the YouTube video “What Makes a Movie Great?,” video essayist Now You See It discusses what makes a movie good and memorable without mentioning critical appeal or reception. Instead, the focus is placed on innovation in the art form, impact on the world at large, and personal impact. These, I feel, are far better measures of what makes a movie good, rather than a focus on a number, which really only comes from the first measure (innovation or production quality).

This is all sociologically relevant because it shows that the meaning and description of a “good movie” is hinges on each person’s own experiences with it, and their specific context.

[socialoligarchy-blog]

Activity 2: Introverted Extrovert

Growing up, I was effectively socialized to be introverted, but in my adult life I find myself needing the comforts of extroversion in order to stave off depressive feelings.

I never had an easy time fitting in with people. Growing up, I was with my parents and their friends a lot; multiple times a year, at least every two months, we would go to a science fiction convention, either in Detroit or Chicago. This sparked an innate love of the genre, and of fantasy, as well as a desire to talk about those things.

However, due to the other children in my town not being into as many weird, more grown up subjects, and my emotional instability at the time, I did not have all that many friends who lived near by who had many overlapping interests. The friends I did have often lived in far-flung locations, most only seen at conventions.

This lack of close friends, both geographically and socially, led me to never really learn how to interact with people properly once I did overcome my emotional failings. I have trouble engaging with people, especially when I have to initiate, and I often find it hard to keep a conversation moving forward. This, to my understanding, is exemplary to an introvert, and would normally be fine.

The issue runs into how I feel when I am by myself. I often need and crave social interaction in order to feel happy and to get work done. Without interaction, I can become stagnant and unfocused, with work falling to the side of my attention in favor of creature comforts and distractions.

The biggest issue this mismatched socialization poses is the fact that I don’t have the skills needed to meet and maintain people who function similarly to me; everyone I hang out with regularly need introversion in order to be happy, which means that I have minimal access to people.

I fit into a weird place, socially. I’m not really able to be alone with myself very easily, but I also lack the social group needed to be with other people. Often times, I feel like a wanderer, drifting at the fringes of various other tribes, unable to actually find one and be happy with them. A jack of all tribes, but a member of none, so to speak. Functionally, it’s difficult to pin down how I aid social institutions. I don’t fully understand just where I fit, so knowing what gears turn around and because of me is even more difficult.

In a conflict sense, I understand exactly how I function; my desire for social interaction leads me to give up my own power to other people, hoping that they engage with me. This can be off-putting or annoying, even a little scary, to people, especially when the person in question is someone who needs to be alone more often than not.

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Uncertain Sociological Findings

The cost of living in an area, specifically of rent and property, is vital to understanding how the habits of poverty are perpetuated and difficult to break out of. If the majority of your monthly income is going towards your housing costs and not to other debts and bills, it can be very difficult to pay everything off each month.

Our way of garnering wealth is typically through secondary education: going to college and accruing degrees and experience which should offer some level of higher income. However, it’s uncertain if a higher education can really cause such bonuses, or if there are outside factors that play a larger role than degrees. Using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) and www.socialexplorer.com, I compared cost of rent to the percentage of people making median income  (according to the 2015 census as reported by CNBC) and percentage of population with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

This is the percentage of homes in the state of Michigan that have a rental price of over $1,000. It’s important to not that rural areas, such as Alcona or Ontanogan counties have extremely low rental rates. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find statistics on how much property costs throughout the state, which makes it difficult to know how much someone is actually paying for a house, rather than renting. This uncertainty could create error in the rest of the comparisons.

The next image is of the percentage of households that make more than the median American income of $50,000 annually. 

The vast majority of counties have 40 - 60% of their populations making the median income. Fifteen counties only have 30 - 40% of their population earning the median amount, while six counties have 60 - 75%.

The final image is of the percentage of people who have earned a Bachelor’s degree or higher.

As you can see here, there is little correlation between the level of education you achieve and the level of income you receive. Since people throughout the state are consistently able to make $50,000, despite some counties only having 10 - 15% of their population receive a Bachelor’s degree or more, it’s hard to argue that college is still a necessity. However, there is a case for it.

The correlation between  highest education reached and cost of rent is an interesting one. This could imply that the shown level of income is actually skewed, since the majority range is between 40% and 60%, which is a significant margin. If that’s the case, then the case for college is stronger.

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Viking age sword discovered at Loppi, Finland. The sword was found by a metal detecting hobbyist from his own farmstead. He promptly informed Finnish National Board of Antiquities. (source in comment) [1199x1330]

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Vietnam soldier’s Zippo lighter, c.1970 “35 KILLS IF YOU ARE RECOVERING MY BODY F*CK YOU” [522 x 760]

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The breastplate of cuirassier 19 years old Antoine Fraveau, struck and killed by a canonball. June, 1815, serving Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo [4200x4800]