Re: <nettime> Rude Awakening: Memes as Dialectical Images by Geert Lovink & Marc Tuters

[sebastian@rolux.org]

> On Apr 4, 2018, at 12:16 PM, Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl> (1) wrote:
> 
> Over the past years, in part through memes, a great many previously disaffected young people became attracted to politics.(17) In this regard, the notion of “red-pilling” became a central trope, a kind of right of initiation into a newly imagined political community, the so-called “alt-right”, based almost entirely online and held together in no small part by its sophisticated use of political memes. But while this reactionary concept of awakening functioned to hold this community together so long as it remained mostly ironic and “incorporeal”,(18) the community began to crumble when it became increasingly clear that the violence at its core was in fact the authentic brown shirt variety and not some sort of Benjaminian divine violence.(19)



this reminds me of the point
where i was in strong but unoutspoken disagreement
with another dutch (;)) media theorist last year
who i sadly missed in berlin in february

the world was not created in 2016
the blue pill vs red pill
wake up from the dream vs stay in wonderland
is an ancient allegory
one of the earliest images
from plato to lewis carroll

just because someone posted something on the internet
it's not that we all have to behave
as if we were stuck in a the basement of a pizza parlor (2)
lets not make a rabbit hole out of a molehill

to repeat not myself:
the pile of debris grows skyward (3)

1999 was a killer year for hollywood
why don't we just keep asking the questions of cinema?

where is the house of my friend?
you take the blue pill?
what is the worst thing that can happen?
you take the red pill?
but what is europe dying of?
and who killed laura palmer?

why do we say: the era before the war?
why don't we say: the era when the woman was hanging the clothes on the clothes line?

bonus question:
who attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses
without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate?



an earlier version of this document was created with a simple markov chain generator
from the last six weeks of my inbox and sentbox. this method usually preserves the
tone of one or more voices, but not the original meaning.

thanks to rasmus, magnus and geraldine for inspiring an even earlier version.



(1) geert: can you come to paf some time soon? i want to give you some movies.

(2) kaspar: what happened to the guy with the very big denial of service dog?

(3) to be fair: the text explicitely acknowledges almost all of the above. it
    is used as a pretext here, not as an object of criticism.



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