All through 2017, a pretty eventful year in my life, I went down a rabbithole of memes across various Facebook pages, groups and sub-reddits. This was before the Cambridge Analytica scandal turned me off the evil social networking site completely — but until then, I enjoyed the glorious absurdity of these corners of the internet and what they taught me about humanity and culture. (Originally published on Sanjana Ramachandran Tells the Future, my WordPress blog.)

24 January, 2018

It all started when, sometime soon after the middle of 2017, I realized I’d engineered my own personal, super responsive method of browsing memes. Most people I knew, myself included, mainly got their dose of memes from such varied sources as Reddit, 4chan, Tumblr, Twitter, 9gag (lol), etcetera. To the extent of my own knowledge, we were all essentially individually curating memes we found funny, from many different sources, using different methods for each. Casual conversations with my friends told me that for most of them, there were certain subreddits they frequented more than others, with Reddit’s saved or upvoted posts serving as their chaotic repository for referring to the memes they’d appreciated over a period of time.

I will now outline my own infinitely more sophisticated method of both accessing and retrieving as a constant stream arguably the best memes of our age. It is only reasonable for me to expect a certain amount of shock, perhaps even a spate of condescension, as the aftermath, for my technique typifies the age-old Rumi quote about not needing to look for something out there but needing to see within by involving something that all of us are accustomed to, perhaps too intimately, on a daily basis – Facebook. I could hardly have foreseen that the app I had vainly installed on my new phone in July last year to continuously monitor my galvanizing social life would become the superior engine it is for delivering the most absurd, outrageous, surreal, out rightly LOL, imaginative memes. Facebook functions as a quite astounding source of various types of humour, with its highly satisfying recommendation system taking me from the mainstream and/or only slightly offbeat Facebook pages  I already followed to increasingly obscure, extreme pages… pages that made me wonder in amazement at how a stranger across the world had managed to create something that made me feel like a really close friend would if we’d constructed a particularly keen inside joke that combined elaborate layers of previous inside jokes while somehow interweaving the world’s current zeitgeist. These strangers are touching me in ways I mostly would not press the “Report Abuse” button for.

Facebook and Some Memes

With this system in place, I now open my Facebook app to see meme after meme after meme, interspersed with the occasional slap in the face about someone else’s latest achievement or the latest feminist movement or advertisements or the almost always bipolar opinions on recent headlines or weddings.

Needless to say, this high ratio of memes to reality is quite ideal, for now, and I am convinced that social media no longer poses to me those threats that the world at large should be extremely concerned about. On the other hand, I seem to have found an inexpensive, perennially available, and very astute personal comedian in the prime meme-makers around the world, who are, somehow all together, acutely aware of the contentious, almost satirically absurd nature of our times. Let’s start with a few examples, in no particular order.

This meme rode on the waves of Ajit Pai’s recent decision to repeal net neutrality rules in the USA, exploiting the “Understandable, have a nice day” format, which typically features Shaq rolling up in a car and asking for some X, only to be told by the smiling waiter that X broke, to which Shaq replies with the eponymous catchphrase. A deep-fried version of the meme conveys more drastically the same essential message; the shaky appearance and the font on the meme go beyond their initial dramatic effect, not unlike the virtual earthquake of outrage caused by Pai’s decision, depicting the volatility of freedoms we’ve come to take for granted (People who want to indulge in perverse Japanese anime should be able to, damn it!). Hopefully, the replacement in the third panel of the typical cool-Shaq-in-a-car with a distraught black man uttering the superficially cheerful phrase will not be reflective of our own helplessness in coping with what happens around us.

The next meme is about the internet’s observation of how people’s behaviour online has changed over the years.

There is more than one point of interest in the phrase the meme uses to describe 2017 – fucc is a good place to start. The practice of altering words to end with ‘cc’ instead of ‘ck’ can be traced back to 1990’s Los Angeles, when the Bloods, a street gang notorious for its rivalry with the Crips, called themselves ‘CK’, an initialism of ‘Crips Killa’. With the rise of the world wide web in the late 90’s, the trend found its way into internet culture, perhaps most commonly popular today with “thicc” and “succ”. While “succ” is usually used in tandem with weird facial expressions to make **strange jokes about fellatio, it also works well as a non-sequitur punchline in situations where the **word “success” can humourously be halved.