"deeping it" manifesto

on memes, mimetic desire, and why it's always really that deep.

When filmmaker and scholar Hito Steyerl wrote her manifesto “In Defense of the Poor Image” in 2009, internet memes were only in their infancy. But in the years since, the meme has become the dominant form of the poor image — “an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original image.” 

Of the poor image, Steyerl wrote: 

Altogether, poor images present a snapshot of the affective condition of the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia, and fear, as well as its craving for intensity, fun, and distraction. The condition of the images speaks not only of countless transfers and reformattings, but also of the countless people who cared enough about them to convert them over and over again, to add subtitles, reedit, or upload them.

The poor image for Steyerl described the low resolution, out of focus, bootlegged, chopped and screwed films (if you could call them that) and videos that made up large swaths of DVDs piling on top of each other in landfills and internet mush gunking up the fiber optic cables. 

from “In Defense of the Poor Image”

As internet content becomes increasingly lucrative, perhaps there’s a merging of the poor image with the high-resolution, high-production images to produce something like a Mr. Beast video. Sponsored influencer content that many companies are opting for over ad campaigns with camera crews, costume departments, makeup artists, professional actors, and the like. The big, bad world of marketing is being rapidly deskilled as labor costs are cut and offloaded onto influencers, whose 30 second clips slapping on a skincare product they can hardly remember the name of still prove more effective than high-budget campaigns. 

The word “meme” originated as a play on the words “gene” and the Greek mimeme, or to imitate. Like genetic mutations, memes iteratively develop or mutate from their original form, occasionally spawning entirely new memes. 

As Rian Phin (@thatadult) articulated in a TikTok Story (ephemeral), “Memes are mimetic.” Philosopher Rene Girard wrote of “mimetic desire” in 1961, arguing that our desires don’t develop independently of one another, but are derivative, triangulated with the desire of others. We don’t want things simply because our desire has spawned from our brains, but often because we see others desiring the same thing and we determine the object of desire as desirable. 

Beyond Girard, memes and pop culture are reminders that our society shapes us as we in turn shape it. The idea that any of our desires exist in a vacuum, severed from social, political, and historical contexts, is an illusion. As Martin Heidegger or G.W.F. Hegel might say, we are always already in the world. In other words, we live in a society.  

martin heidegger made this meme actually

The meme is not just the poor image of our time, but the image of our time. And, like the poor image, memes “show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable—that is, if we can still manage to decipher it.” 

WHY SO SERIOUS? 

For as long as I’ve been making videos on the internet, I’ve received comments informing me that “It’s not that deep.” Social media trends? Not that deep. Memes? Not that deep. Nail polish? Not that deep. 

And critical analysis? Well, you should just let people enjoy things. 

primary source material. haterlations 9:20

My comments section doubles down on this when I choose to analyze the trends in social media and pop culture that are closest to me: those that target women. Can’t women just have fun? Can’t women just like pink, or bows, or “girl dinner”? Does everything have to be a thinkpiece? 

For a while, I thought I could stave off these kinds of comments with acknowledgements and disclaimers that I, too, enjoy things. I’m known to indulge in the occasional girl dinner. I wore a ribbon in my hair the same day I made a video commenting on the rise of “coquette-core.” I got blueberry milk nails — my second time at a nail salon, ever — a week after going viral for analyzing them. 

But of course, that’s not why these comments are being written. Instead, I believe there are two main explanations for why cultural criticism is often perceived as a personal attack, one that should be hampered because liking things is more fun. 

@c.a.i.t.l.y.non the coquette aesthetic, ribbons & bows discourse, and the spectre of the girlboss thank u @rian for ur genius as always #socialism #feminism #girlboss #coquette #sandyliang #glossier #marxism #lanacore #girlmath #romanempire #bimbotiktok #softlife #philosophy #culturalcriticism

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1. INDIVIDUALISM

“no i just like bows” 

“i just like the aesthetic” 

“i’ve always loved everything pink and bows before it became a trend.” 

“i just love sandy liang and pinterest. it’s not that deep for me.” 

Oftentimes when provided with systemic critiques of capitalism, of the marketing schemes used to drive overconsumption, of the limitations of liberal feminism without socialism, people tend to interpret these criticisms as personal attacks. This inability to understand criticism not as that of systems but of people comes from a deep-rooted individualism. 

The issue is that people become incapable of interrogating why we enjoy what we enjoy. Thinking critically about something is somehow synonymous with a moral condemnation of that thing. This is likely part of a broader issue of moralizing and hand-wringing over cultural phenomena (i.e. noticing a young person with a particular aesthetic style in your local thrift store, where prices have recently gone up), rather than seeking to understand and address them structurally (i.e. understanding the systemic problems of overconsumption in the fashion industry, including the thrift stores that dump metric tons of clothes overseas each year and raise their prices simply because they can). 

Because we often lack the tools to challenge these structural problems at their root through collective action — due to the overwhelming dearth of grassroots political institutions for working-class people — we tend to interpret these structural problems through a purely individual, moralistic lens. If the “babygirlificiation” of women is part of a broader social trend towards traditionalism and gender essentialism, individual resistance to it looks like throwing my pink ribbons into the trash and yelling at people on the internet. 

Collective resistance, on the other hand, might look like mass organizing for the material underpinnings that produce these trends in the first place. It might look like building feminist movements that understand attacks on reproductive rights as linked to an economic goal of the capitalist class to force reproductive labor to be done as cheaply as possible, as well as a political goal of nativism and anti-immigration policy. 

Systemic problems require systemic solutions. Our hesitation to interpret systemic problems as systemic in the first place is itself, well, a problem. 

2. ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM

“i’m tired of think pieces turning these cute things into more than” 

The recent rise of let people enjoy things as a form of shutting down cultural criticism, a well-documented trend of the last decade, is a current of anti-intellectualism. In their 2002 essay “Action Will Be Taken,” authors Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti write of the anti-intellectual current within anti-war “activistism”, which prizes vague notions of “action” over ideas, including ideas about what that action should be. “Ideas don't belong on pedestals,” they write. “They belong in the street, at work, in the home, at the bar and on the barricades.” 

Resisting anti-intellectualism isn’t elitist. In fact, it should be the very opposite. It should be rooted in a firm belief that everyone has the ability to think deeply about the world around us. We can — in fact, we must — interrogate the culture and society that simultaneously shapes us as we shape it. Otherwise, we submit to our own perceived powerlessness to make change. The way to resist anti-intellectualism is not to say that the “intellectuals” are a distinct, superior class of educated elites, but rather that we are all capable of becoming intellectuals ourselves, if we so choose. 

None of this is to say that the specific things we consume or enjoy are themselves innately political, but instead that we exist constantly in a world shaped by politics. Our refusal to think critically about the ways that our consumption or our For You pages might be reflections of that deeply political and social world is an alarming trend. Because regardless of whether or not we think about them, these trends will continue to be there. And if we think that the rise of self-proclaimed “bimbos” and “stay at home girlfriend” influencers parallel to the crackdown on reproductive rights is pure coincidence, we’re, for lack of a better word, fucked. 

me if you even care

THINKPIECE-ISM OR BARBARISM 

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. — Engels, 1890

Ideas may not drive history, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important. Challenging capitalism, sexism, and racism will require at least some discussion of ideology. And the dominant ideology of our society is everywhere, from the manosphere podcasts of FreshandFit even to the opening up of previously secretive and subversive subcultures to broader audiences by way of the Information Superhighway™.

Rather than empowering, the particular idea that the activities of women and girls online can’t be studied because we should “let girls enjoy things” is deeply infantilizing. It suggests that the behavior of women and girls are apolitical and ahistorical when, to the contrary, our behavior is both reflective and transformative of the world we inhabit. In fact, it took decades of feminist organizing and consciousness-raising to make this point in the first place. To become aware of these ideologies, to analyze them, is to at the very least start to change and challenge them. It’s really that deep.