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Politicians can never seize the memes of production

  • Dazed Digital

Joe Biden is hiring a $85,000 meme manager and Labour is sharing Keir Starmer fancams on TikTok – but why does it all feel so embarrassing? ✍️ - Thom Waite

Politicians can never seize the memes of production by Dazed Digital
2024 is a huge election year, but many young people are feeling more apathetic than ever, tasked with finding the least-worst option from a field of dire candidates. So how are politicians planning to win them back? By taxing billionaires? Cutting student loans? Displaying a bare minimum of human decency? No! They’re going to share some epic memes. That’s what the kids want.

Last week, in fact, Joe Biden’s presidential campaign team announced a new $85,000 job role for a meme manager. OK, so it’s not actually called a “meme manager” – the official title is “partner manager” on the campaign’s Digital Partnerships team. Don’t let the corporate jargon fool you, though, a successful applicant’s day-to-day duties will very much revolve around memes. Specifically, the meme manager will be required to “initiate and manage day-to-day operations in engaging the internet’s top content and meme pages”. Apparently, this also includes podcasts, for the full sweep of smooth-brained internet media.

This isn’t the first time that presidential candidates have enlisted the help of meme page admins, in what’s presumably an effort to win over younger voters. In 2020, Michael Bloomberg reportedly spent $1 million on a barrage of Instagram memes by the likes of @FuckJerry. He then dropped out of the race after crushing defeats in a number of states, so the campaign wasn’t exactly a shining success.

The US government isn’t the only one trying to leverage memes for political gain, either. In the UK too, all the worst people you know are engaged in memetic warfare, trying to sway the outcome of the genny lex via the power of viral digital media. There’s a pretty good chance that you’ve already seen some of the results on social media, from videos casting Rishi Sunak as Shrek’s Lord Farquaad, to a particularly heinous Keir Starmer fancam from @uklabour, soundtracked by their own take on “Trust Fund, 6’5, Blue Eyes”: “I’m looking for a new prime minister. Big plans, good vibes, change lives.” More examples are out there, but unfortunately I can’t list them because I’ve just been sick in my mouth.

Now, are any of these meme campaigns actually going to change young people’s minds on the major political parties? Probably not. While the likes of the Telegraph muse on the “first TikTok election”, a majority of comments on social media point out the overwhelming cringe of the content itself. “I think this TikTok will be the sole reason the Conservatives win with the largest ever majority,” reads a comment under one pro-Labour post. “I’m scared for this country,” adds another.

It doesn’t help, of course, that the political pivot to subpar memes is about as transparent as Sunak’s soaked shirt when he announced the election in the first place. In the UK and the US, there’s a lack of real plans for a brighter future – but maybe a funny little Come Dine With Me edit will distract us from our slow slide into dystopia! The problem is, the memes just aren’t that funny.

Maybe a particularly shrewd meme manager can turn this around, and get the right personalities on board to win a meaningful meme war. But it seems unlikely, because that’s not even how memes work. The beauty of memes is that they’re created, shared and circulated in a decentralised network of users. The ones that gain the most traction often arise spontaneously, or through a quirk in the algorithm. They’re a bottom-up phenomenon, rising up from a swirling soup of content on message boards and social media. This makes them much better suited to circulating ideas among mass movements than helping political institutions claw back a shred of relevancy among their online voters.

Media campaigns organised by political parties, on the other hand, mistake memes as a top-down phenomenon. They try to broadcast their ideas via official TikTok accounts, and cultivate transactional relationships with creators that rarely pay off, since the content they post is blatantly a paid promotion. (The 2016 campaign of Donald Trump, the one person who did arguably manage to meme his way into power, was a notable exception, grabbing onto memes that bubbled up through his follower base, like Pepe the Frog.) As a result, the memes are just as embarrassing as they are ineffective in changing the minds of young voters, who are smart – and internet-literate – enough to see past the facade. Does that mean that political memes will stop flooding our feeds? Of course not. There will be plenty more Dark Brandon references and bad-taste National Service puns before the year is up. Don’t like it? Maybe it’s time to log off for good.
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