Good morning 🐣

Memes.

(I started with this word so you wouldn’t think I don’t know how to spell “memory.” You can never be too careful these days.)

So anyways… Memes.

They’re, for good or ill, a major form of communication in this day and age.

I remember first hearing the word “meme” back in the early ’00s, but not in the way we use it today. Internet memes were already a niche thing, but the original concept goes back to the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in the ’70s. He was playing with the words “gene” and the Ancient Greek word for “an imitated thing” (which has the same roots as the word “mime”) in order to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena from an evolutionary biological perspective. Basically a meme is a single unit of culture — a catchphrase, a popular design, fashion, etc. — that has spread like wildfire. (Leave it to the Internet to reduce it down to Pepe the Frog.)

Needless to say my classmate in high school straight up looked at me and said, “That’s not a word.”

But guess what, Paul, joke’s on you! Our entire political system is run on memes! Dynasties have fallen because of cat videos. Empires toppled.

A subset of memes are storytelling tropes. Renée DiResta, a technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, writes in The Atlantic:

A few years ago, I happened across an exceptional website called TV Tropes, whose users meticulously document every narrative device that has appeared on a screen large or small. I’d first stumbled across it while trying to find out how the final season of the HBO show Big Love had ended. On the show’s TV Tropes page, contributors good-naturedly skewered the writers for including a “Creepy Child” and for showing the “Expository Hairstyle Change” of a character going from brunette to blond following her mother’s death. The site is funny because all shows draw on the same devices. I went down a rabbit hole of Expository Hairstyle Changes, reading about various manifestations of the form (a male character growing a “Beard of Sorrow” means they’ve been through it) and about other notable movies, including The Matrix and Frozen, that use forms of expository hair.

A trope, [the site] explains, is a convention — a plot device, a character archetype, a linguistic idiom — that an audience will “recognize and understand instantly.” These storytelling devices are a kind of shortcut. They create a sense of immediate familiarity. If a movie begins with a large fin slicing through water, with ominous background music, you know to expect what TV Tropes calls an “Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever.” When you see a lab technician furtively “Playing With Syringes,” you know that dinosaurs or a virus will escape imminently. These building blocks help viewers orient themselves, and efficiently foreshadow what will likely happen next.

DiResta then goes on to relate these tropes to real life — do “Discarded Ballots” and “Tricky Voting Machines” sound familiar?

In political rumors, the same plot elements and character archetypes recur with minor variation from incident to incident — to the point that conspiracy buffs should realize they’re watching the same show again and again and again.

What about COVID and the “Mad Scientist” or “Synthetic Plague” tropes?

Narratives and stories aren’t just present in movies and TV shows; they shape our perceptions of what transpires around us, align us within communities, and even serve as the foundation of movements.

DiResta concludes by wondering, “if more Americans were like TV Tropes’ users — that is, if they could spot the recurring motifs in purported political plots — might they also be better at separating fact from fiction?”

There’s actually a long history of memes being used as political weapons, to belittle, even to strike fear. An early example of a modern, worldwide meme can be traced back to World War II with the “Kilroy was here” graffiti, left across battlefields by US soldiers.

But perhaps the most widespread meme is “the Karen” — the scourge of managers everywhere. Erik Hoel writes about his own experience with a “Karen” and uses it as a gateway to talk about the nature of evil. He claims that “what American culture lacks most is an adult understanding of what motivates evil,” comparing the childish mentality of good versus evil with a more nuanced view of “good corrupted.”

Of course there are sadists in society, but Hoel explains that they are overrepresented in American culture because “it’s easy to see how they’re bad. Compare that to the actual historical reality, which is that most evil was caused instead by people best described not as sadists, but as moralists,” people who committed sometimes the greatest evil because they thought they were doing good.

He brings up “Princess Mononoke,” a movie I wrote about a while back, and compares it to the more black-and-white plots of Disney movies:

Now compare Disney films to Studio Ghibli films (Japan’s Disney). Studio Ghibli movies are totally different. The most common plot concerns two warring factions who both have self-motivated and differing views of the world. In Princess Mononoke the conflict is between the forest spirits and Iron Town, a village of technological and even social progress (like having women in prominent roles and taking care of lepers). On the side of Iron Town, there is Lady Eboshi, the reason for all this progress; on the side of the forest spirits, we have Sen, the wolf girl. Both sides come across as sympathetic in some ways, and the goal of the protagonist Ashitaka is to prevent escalation. The last shot of the movie is a picture of regrowth as the town and forest learn to live side by side.

Now watch this 👀

So leave it to that Disney corporate synergy that we might have a great merger of Eastern and Western sensibilities: Studio Ghibli meets “Star Wars.”

You might recall one of my very first newsletters was about “Spirited Away,” in which I was particularly enamored with the enchanted little soot balls. They’re cute, they’re mischievous, they have more personality than some people I know.

The creators of that movie, Studio Ghibli, have partnered with Lucasfilm for a three-minute hand-drawn animated short titled “Zen — Grogu and Dust Bunnies” about those cute little soot balls meeting Grogu (formerly known as Baby Yoda) from the “Star Wars” TV show “The Mandalorian.” There’s zero dialogue, hardly any plot, but it’s a perfect serendipity of all these topics folding together: two memes meeting in a trope that leads to conflict resolution. It’s short, it’s sweet, and it’s just what the world needs in these times.

Until next time! 👋