Figure 5.1 An Adbusters OWS promotional poster, depicting a ballerina dancing atop Wall Street’s Charging Bull statue. Collected in 2011.
On September 17, 2011, approximately 1,000 protestors descended on New York City’s Zuccotti Park, located at the mouth of the famous financial center known as Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was initiated by activists associated with the anticonsumerist organization and “culture-jamming headquarters” Adbusters. The plan was to stage a long-term protest of prevalent social and economic injustices such as income inequality, corporate influence on politics, and unregulated business practices. A contingent of protestors stayed in Zuccotti Park full time, sleeping, eating, meeting, marching, and organizing in order to draw consistent attention to the financial practices that protestors argued were detrimental to social welfare and individual prosperity.
The protest initially garnered little traditional media attention, even though participants on sites like Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and Reddit were actively employing memetic logics to disseminate OWS messaging. In the days, weeks, and months that followed, however, media coverage of the protests grew. This was concurrent with an increase in protestors, demonstrations, participating cities (American and international), arrests, and charges of police brutality. While police disbanded the initial occupation of Zuccotti Park on November 15, 2011, OWS has lived on in altered forms across the globe; so has its broader influence on political discourse. “Most significantly,” Kevin DeLuca, Shawn Lawson, and Ye Sun note, “in a mere few weeks, OWS changed the national conversation despite the initial neglect and dismissive framing by traditional mass media organizations” (2012, 484). This influence on public conversation may well be the legacy of OWS, and that legacy is largely dependent on memetic media.2 In the case of OWS, memetic media were vehicles for public voice.
From the beginning of its public-facing campaign, OWS messaging was in the hands of public participants. Even if Adbusters branding, messaging, and influence were evident in the movement, memetic logics allowed the OWS message to spiral out from its Adbusters origins. As OWS messaging resonated in the fall of 2011, dismissiveness by traditional media outlets gave way to a groundswell of memetic voice. So intertwined was OWS with memetic logics that Nathan Schneider, writing for the Nation, calls the movement as a whole “the Occupy Wall Street meme” (2013). During the height of the protests, key pieces of OWS content—like the flagship Adbusters poster of a ballerina dancing atop Wall Street’s Charging Bull statue (figure 5.1)—spread through participatory media. In the process, the same logics foundational to the Kanye memes discussed in chapter 1 and the identity antagonisms examined in chapter 4 were employed for explicitly political commentary. The images in figures 5.1 and 5.2—shared from OWS media accounts in the fall of 2011—would not exist without a media system premised on memetic logics. They’re individual strands contributing to a vast tapestry of political participation.
Figure 5.2 Three OWS promotional images, directing readers to hashtags and Google searches. Collected in 2011.
The images in figures 5.1 and 5.2 employ multiple modes of communication to make their argument. They’re simultaneously visual and textual, and point to hypertextual communication (hashtags, Google searches) even though they’re static themselves. They’re bricolage; they reappropriate found material to craft their message. Fixed icons—like the iconic Charging Bull statue—are poached in service of novel critique. Pop cultural reappropriation is central to the resonance of these images. The bottom right image in figure 5.2, for instance, plays with a popular lyric from hip-hop artist Jay-Z. “I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain’t one” becomes “They have 99 problems when we become one,” and the familiar cadence of the song’s hook is put to civic use. OWS supporters—keeping with the populist aims of the movement—pulled from popular icons and popular tropes to make their arguments. The images hail their readers as common citizens, casting them against powerful capitalist forces. As examples like these spread through participatory media, OWS messaging intertwined with the banal, the popular, and the populist.
In this way, OWS took full advantage of the collectivist affordances of memetic media. Images like those pictured here spread freely among the same networks and collectives housing the everyday expressions, commentary, and even antagonisms we’ve seen in previous chapters. The relative openness of these systems mirrored the openness at the heart of the OWS ethos. Images were shared without signature or citation; Twitter profiles, YouTube accounts, subreddits, and tumblogs affiliated with OWS sprang up with little apparent oversight and no clear single author. However, those critical of the movement could use the same tools and logics to counter the OWS message. Memetic logics opened up the argument to new discussants and new means of discussing, as divergent camps used memetic media to comment and debate. Vibrant public conversations about the movement and its central aims emerged as discursive strands intertwined.
As the last chapter demonstrated, memetic logics can be employed both to denigrate individuals for their core identity categories and to facilitate agonistic counterpublic contestation of that denigration. When /r/ShitRedditSays carves out a space to counter broader conversations on Reddit, or when OWS supporters spread their narratives about the protest on YouTube, memetic logics give counterpublics voice. If the marginalizations we saw in the last chapter are premised on silence, voice—the kind evident in engagement with OWS—is premised on conversation. Without these conversations, there is not much hope for a healthy public sphere.
Participatory media of the sort that carried resonant OWS messaging in September 2011, even as traditional media outlets ignored the movement, can facilitate active, polyvocal citizenship. If more people holding more perspectives can log onto Reddit or Tumblr and engage in political expression and discussion, democracy benefits. The marginalized can use these media to engage in public conversation on more equal footing. Memetic logics—at their worst when they facilitate antagonistic silence—are at their most vibrant when they facilitate open, polyvocal public conversation. The conversational dimensions of citizenship are crucial; civic life is nothing without civic talk. This vibrant public voice has been one of the central promises of participatory media—a promise still largely unfulfilled due to what Nick Couldry calls rationalities and practices “that take no account of voice” (2010, 10). We saw these exclusions manifest in everyday identity politics in chapter 4, but we also saw the counterpublic contestation of those exclusions. Identity antagonisms spread easily through memetic media, and that can’t be forgotten. However, even as they facilitate antagonism and silence, memetic logics can also facilitate public voice.
The rest of this chapter will tie memetic media to this polyvocality, evidencing the ways vernacular creativity can be utilized for collective civic talk. It will use memetic participation surrounding OWS as its core evidence, but lessons from the movement apply to mediated public conversations before and since. We’ve already seen examples of memetic political participation, such as the “It Gets Better” YouTube campaign to combat depression and suicide in LGBT youth, and #YesAllWomen emerging in response to the misogynistic UC Santa Barbara killings. Assessing the political dimensions of this kind of memetic participation, the following section will examine the relationship between popular culture, participatory media, and populist conversation. It will address the vital role of popular culture in public commentary as well as the vernacular creativity evident in this interrelationship. As I’ll argue below, memetic media can indeed facilitate vibrant polyvocal participation, and our public conversations are stronger when they do.
As I evaluate the relationship between memetic media and public commentary throughout this chapter, many of the images included are of private citizens captured by amateur photography. Even if those private citizens were photographed at a public protest or if they uploaded a photo of themselves to a public website, I have done my best here—as I have throughout this book—to not reproduce their likeness. This has meant cropping some photos in order to better anonymize them. I recognize the tensions that come with altering photographs during analysis, but have decided to value the privacy of the subject over the sacredness of the text.3
Pop and Populism in Participatory Media
Memes—even going back to Richard Dawkins’s (1976) concept of cultural replication—are inherently intertwined with the popular. The “best” memes—i.e., the ones that are best at surviving in the cultural soup—are the ones that resonate with the most people for the longest amount of time; the most “fertile” memes are, by definition, the ones that the most people connect with and share. In participatory media, memetic logics are predicated on the popular as well; what resonates with memetic collectives is what spreads. Memetic texts often reappropriate popular media—films, television shows, and song lyrics—in order to produce novel expression. As we saw in chapters 2 and 3, even the most esoteric and subcultural memetic collectives—like the less-trafficked pockets of conversation on 4chan, Reddit, and Tumblr—intricately weave broader popular culture into their in-jokes and insider lingo. The tensions we saw in chapter 3—between the vernacular as the subaltern and the vernacular as the common—also speak to the interrelationships of memetic media and popular culture.
And this interrelationship can facilitate vast public conversation. As the popular intertwines with the populist in public commentary, participants can make assertions about the social and political issues that resonate with them. Because they facilitate polyvocal participation, pop reappropriations have political potential beyond “mere” entertainment. However, the utility of this relationship can be contested. Pop culture reappropriations used in political discourse may be nothing more than the dumbed-down, imitative pastiche discussed in chapter 2, a commercialized distraction unfit for the hallowed practice of civic talk. Popular culture might be a fine enough inspiration for reaction GIFs, but the stakes may be higher for public protest. Keeping these tensions in mind, this section assesses how memetic media intertwine popular culture and vernacular creativity in the service of polyvocal public commentary, and what this means for broader civic engagement.
Populism vs. Pastiche in Political Commentary
Populist media—which foreground the concerns and struggles of the working class—have long been employed to open up narrow, restrictive public conversations. As Liesbet van Zoonen writes, populism “always involves a protest or policy on account of ‘the people’ who fall outside the reach of the political system” (2005, 147). She contends that, inherently, “a populist reaction is an inevitable counterforce to the structural contraction of the political field” (147). As populist participation intertwines with popular culture—as more and more people lend their voices to conversations about structural inequalities, about gaps in opportunity, about the haves and have-nots—polyvocal public commentary can flourish. We saw this flourishing expression in the fall of 2011, as participants used memetic media to discuss the OWS movement and spread its core messages.
An example of the counterpublic value of populist media is illustrated by “The Ruling Clawss,” a series of editorial cartoons that ran in New York’s Daily Worker between 1933 and 1935 and were shared in support of OWS in the fall of 2011 (figure 5.3). New Yorker cartoonist Syd Hoff penned the cartoons while moonlighting at the Daily Worker as “A. Redfield.” As Robert Mankoff (2012), the current cartoon editor for the New Yorker, explains, Hoff’s moonlighting allowed him to express an explicit critique impossible in his regular work for that magazine. In Mankoff’s words, “Hoff’s New Yorker cartoons showed humorous empathy for the lower middle class that he was a member of, but no apparent antipathy for the class that employed and, very often, unemployed them at will. That’s not surprising, since Hoff’s employer, the New Yorker, was actually doing quite well during the Depression, in part by appealing, in its advertising, to that very class.”
Figure 5.3 Four editorial cartoons from Syd Hoff’s “The Ruling Clawss” series. Published in the Daily Worker between 1933 and 1935.
The Daily Worker, a more counterpublic populist outlet, gave Hoff a means to comment beyond the constricted scope of the more established New Yorker, and in the process facilitated his public expression. This expression resonated almost eighty years after he penned his “Ruling Clawss” comics. At the height of OWS protests in fall 2011, participants spread his comics through participatory media, connecting their Depression-era themes to twenty-first-century income inequality. Their memetic reappropriation bridged decades of distance; new populist outlets spread established populist messages, and Hoff’s voice lived on.
By their very nature, memetic media house the potential for populist expression and conversation. Vibrant public conversation depends on more voices having access to channels of interaction, and that’s what memetic media provide. Of course, participation in the memetic lingua franca is not wholly open, as this participation is bound both by cultural context and material inequalities. However, the structure is decidedly more polyvocal—more the realm of “the people”—than narrow one-to-many modes of mass mediated communication. Even in restrictive regimes, memetic logics can underscore vibrant public voice, provided cultural participants have some freedom to employ them. To this end, An Xiao Mina analyzes the relationship between memetic media and political subversion in China, arguing that:
Memes, as micro-actions of media remixing and sharing, are particularly important in a censored, propagandized state, which seeks first to isolate individuals who express opinions contrary to state interests, and then to deaden the sort of public debate that fosters a diverse sphere of opinion. With rich visual language and a culture of creative remix and communal participation, meme culture has provided an outlet for new forms of public conversation and community building. (2014, 362)
Through this conversation and community building, memetic media inspire hope for broader discussion. Populist messages and popular means facilitate and amplify public voice.
Like populism, popular culture—in its most favorable readings—encourages participation in public conversation. Henry Jenkins (2006) argues that as people “Photoshop for democracy” by using participatory media to produce their own populist, political commentary, civic talk is braided into everyday participation. By employing memetic logics, public participants can create, circulate, and transform texts in the name of political expression. And these expressions are not restricted to those who own large platforms or have large audiences. Instead, the vernacular creativity essential to YouTube videos, Twitter trending topics, and Reddit Photoshops depends on memetic participation situated outside of constricted media gatekeepers.
In the case of memetic media and OWS, the reappropriation of popular culture facilitated diverse expressions of citizenship, resulting in the amplification of populist messages. Iconic statues, Jay-Z lyrics, Depression-era comics, quotes from The Matrix and Star Wars, and other resonant pop media were woven into the OWS conversation, all of which made the political and economic issues at OWS’s core more accessible and resonant to a wider range of the population. These populist footholds connected a broad spectrum of participants to the discussion. One prominent example of this intertwine, and one that persisted beyond OWS, is highlighted in the Guy Fawkes masks worn by OWS protestors (figure 5.4). These masks, which reappropriate iconography from the 2005 film V for Vendetta (itself based on a 1980s graphic novel), have been associated with the “hacktivist” collective Anonymous since 2008. In that year, as Rob Walker (2011) reports for Slate, physical protestors wanted to keep their identities hidden while the Anonymous collective challenged the Church of Scientology over media censorship. The Scientology protestors decided to wear the Guy Fawkes mask because it was already a resonant meme on 4chan (it was worn by a stock character called “Epic Fail Guy” in ironic honor of Guy Fawkes’s failed 1605 plot to assassinate England’s King James I), and because participating protestors could all find cheap masks in their cities.
Figure 5.4 Three photos of OWS protestors wearing Guy Fawkes masks, reappropriated from the 2005 film V for Vendetta. The mask is associated with the “hactivist” collective Anonymous. Collected in 2011.
As traditional media coverage of the Scientology protests spread, the mask became a memetic touchstone, a loose and ambivalent icon for the loose and ambivalent Anonymous collective. From there, it began to pepper forum threads, physical graffiti, and ambiguous YouTube videos associated with the collective. Its memetic lineage—from a 1605 assassination plot to a 1980s graphic novel to a 2005 film to a 2008 protest—is woven from thread after thread of pop reappropriation. As Whitney Phillips puts it, the Guy Fawkes mask, “once a symbol of failure,” was by 2011 “a rallying cry for social justice” (2015b, 150). It spread widely, eventually becoming one more resonant pop icon mobilized for civic use at the height of OWS. Banal bricolage and quotidian reappropriation intertwined with directed protest, facilitating public voice and furthering populist ideals in the process.
But the reciprocity between public conversation and populist participation can also inspire worries about a negative “restylization” of politics (see Corner and Pels 2003), especially when that populism is tied to popular culture. These concerns echo the charges of pastiche we saw in chapter 2—charges that civic conversations are cheapened when popular culture and its predominant mass commercial logics become part of political discussion. When popular culture and civic participation intertwine, necessary counterpublic criticism and subversion may be lost. This was an accusation leveled at performer Jay-Z during the height of the OWS protests. As Lauri Apple (2011) reports for Gawker, in November 2011 Jay-Z’s Rocawear brand started selling an OWS-inspired t-shirt on its site. On the screen-printed shirt, “Occupy Wall Street” was written in white lettering, but red ink scratched out the W in “Wall” and added an S after “street.” The new memetic message read, “Occupy All Streets,” a sentiment that fits the open OWS ethos well enough. Jay-Z’s trouble came, though, when allegations surfaced that Rocawear was not donating any of the proceeds from the shirt to the OWS cause. The brand’s appropriation—perceived as purely commercial and therefore absent any political teeth—met resistance, which eventually led to the shirt’s removal from the Rocawear site. In this case, opportunistic pop culture appropriation attempted to restyle public activism into a commercial endeavor, and ultimately failed on both counts.
Beyond Jay-Z’s transgression, broader arguments were made during the height of OWS that pop cultural iconography undermined the movement’s aims and delegitimized its participants, reducing commentary on significant political issues to mere pastiche. For instance, figure 5.5 collects images used to critique the connections between Anonymous, memetic media, and OWS, all implicitly tying the Guy Fawkes mask to a lack of real political efficacy. According to the vertical comic on the left of figure 5.5, even if OWS protestors think they’re participating in an uprising as glorious as the French Revolution, they’re really just losers quoting denigrated slang and banally parroting toothless platitudes. In the bottom left panel, the middle figure, a bemused green-faced subject wearing a tie, is “Green Man,” the face of “Old Anonymous.” Before the Guy Fawkes mask became a resonant symbol, Anonymous (or 4chan’s /b/, which is deeply, if ambivalently, tied to the origins of the collective) was sometimes portrayed as a man in a suit with a green face free of any defining facial features. In this case, Old Anonymous looks on, frustrated with the state of mediated engagement and activism; the pop vernacular of OWS protestors undercut the efficacy of their message.
Figure 5.5 Three images critiquing Anonymous and its connections with OWS. Left: a vertical comic that contrasts the French revolutionaries in Jean Victor Schnetz’s 1830 painting Battle outside the Hôtel de Ville with OWS protestors; top right: an image of protestors points out the irony of Time Warner’s ownership of the Guy Fawkes mask; bottom right: a capture of a 2011 episode of South Park that spread as a satire of OWS protestors. Collected in 2011.
However, to van Zoonen (2005), calling pop engagement cheapened pastiche is an oversimplification and a way to shut out alternative forms of understanding. Instead, she says that “popular genres and means” allow for richer participation in public conversation. If sharing clips from The Daily Show or The Colbert Report “can be seen as a political act or a performance of citizenship—a means of engaging with and intervening in matters of personal and public concern”—as Geoffrey Baym and Chirag Shah (2011, 5) put it—then memetic media can be populist tools. Public participants can employ popular culture for multiple ends, and these diverse uses do not preclude civic ones. Memetic media are not, after all, predetermined in content, form, or stance. They do not have a prescribed purpose. Rather, they are a vernacular mode of public conversation; they’re dependent on everyday creative expression that can be brought into service for leisure entertainment, for directed activism, and for a whole range of intentions in between. When media created for one purpose can easily be reappropriated for another, the popular is always a breath away from the political.
Vernacular Creativity and Pepper Spray Cop
As we’ve seen, memetic media—in their popular resonance—can facilitate poignant commentary through creative reappropriation, just as they can facilitate silencing antagonism. This fits well with the counterpublic conceptualizations of public conversation we saw in the last chapter. Far from being mere pastiche, popular culture texts are vibrant with possibility; they can be poached for agonistic political commentary just as easily as they can be poached to make a joke or connect with a friend. The memetic grammar and vernacular we saw in chapters 2 and 3 can transform the populist and popular into the explicitly political, as public participants creatively combine resonant popular texts with resonant political commentary.
The personal and collective resonance that underscores memetic creative expression underscores agonistic politics as well. Chantal Mouffe (2005, 2009) argues that “vibrancy” and “passion” are central to agonistic engagement among political adversaries. Similarly, Peter Dahlgren states, “the life of democracy requires that people be informed, and that they discuss and deliberate, but also that they be emotionally engaged, aroused to involvement, and at some point made to feel that they are sufficiently empowered to make a difference” (2013, 76). This engagement depends on participants crafting messages that resonate with them, but also with other members of the public, who produce their own expressions in kind. The voice we saw exercised by participants on /r/ShitRedditSays in chapter 4 demonstrates this vibrant, passionate, engaged agonism. With a mix of adversarial commentary and ironic play—largely predicated on the resonance of specific phrasal, performative, image, or video memes—the subreddit’s participants pushed back against perceived misogyny on Reddit more broadly. Van Zoonen (2005) sees these forms of play and imagination as central to the connection between popular culture and public conversation. Like the “Beyoncé Voters” tumblog highlighted in chapter 1, popular culture texts can help tie “everyday” experience to civics, politics, and the public more broadly. In this intertwine, broader publics can bring shared experiences to political conversations.
One prominent example of the interrelationship between the popular and the political is highlighted in an iconic OWS meme called “Pepper Spray Cop” (see figures 5.6 and 5.7). The meme was inspired by a photo of a police lieutenant named John Pike walking with apparent nonchalance as he pepper-sprayed a group of sit-in OWS protestors at the University of California, Davis, on November 18, 2011. The significant presence of amateur media at the sit-in ensured that Pike’s disciplinary action was captured, and the subsequent resonance and spread of the footage drew enough attention to make the incident a landmark OWS moment. Citizens shared videos and images of Pike walking up and down the line of young protestors, their arms linked and their heads down, as Pike’s pepper spray can dusted them; in the background, additional officers approached the line to wrench the students apart and drag them away. One image in particular—posted to Reddit on November 19, 2011—resonated enough to explode into mass coverage. As it spread, it inspired extensive memetic remix of its own. Participants wove Pike’s likeness into new contexts, crafting commentary about his actions in the process.
Figure 5.6 “Pepper Spray Cop” targets cultural innocents. Top left: “Pepper Spray Cop” sprays George Bailey from the 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life; top right: he sprays Snoopy from the long-running Peanuts comic series; bottom: he sprays Jesus as portrayed in Leonardo da Vinci’s c. 1495 painting The Last Supper. Collected in 2011.
Figure 5.7 “Pepper Spray Cop” targets antiauthoritarian heroes. Top left: “Pepper Spray Cop” sprays an unknown Chinese protestor in a 1989 Associated Press photo; top right: he sprays civil rights icon Rosa Parks in a 1956 United Press photo; bottom: he sprays an American revolutionary, as portrayed in Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 Washington Crossing the Delaware. Collected in 2011.
In the days that followed the posting of the original Reddit photo, Pike was cut from the background of that original and inserted into several fictional and historical contexts; the “Pepper Spray Cop” meme was thus born. In these images—which spread across sites like Tumblr, Reddit, and Twitter and into traditional media coverage—Pike’s police tactics are applied to new contexts, and vernacular creativity is employed for populist commentary. As “Pepper Spray Cop” is Photoshopped into new images, Pike is made to target Dr. Seuss’s Cindy Lou Who, the sunbathers in Georges Seurat’s painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte, and even the U.S. Constitution itself. In these reappropriations, participants simultaneously displayed vernacular creativity and evidenced counterpublic commentary.
In particular, “Pepper Spray Cop” was repeatedly portrayed applying his force to innocents from popular texts. Figure 5.6 collects three “Pepper Spray Cop” images that cast the officer against portrayals of cultural heroes. In the top left image, “Pepper Spray Cop” victimizes the all-American little guy George Bailey from the film It’s a Wonderful Life. The officer is inserted to control an iconic showdown between George and the wealthy town bully, Mr. Potter. His position behind Mr. Potter gives the impression that he is a hired goon, dispelling a man who spoke up for equality of opportunity and transparent business practices. In the top right image, Snoopy—the good-natured troublemaker from Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts comic series—is told to “behave” by the staunch authoritarian Lucy. He sticks his tongue out in defiance and is pepper-sprayed for his insolence. In the bottom image—an annotation of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper—“Pepper Spray Cop” applies his force to Jesus of Nazareth on the eve of his crucifixion. These images reappropriate resonant cultural icons that carry an ethos of innocence and goodwill. That “Pepper Spray Cop” disciplines these subjects is a discursive choice with political undertones made by the citizens doing the Photoshopping; the collective memetic joke comes with an evident critique of Pike’s tactics during the UC Davis sit-in.
“Pepper Spray Cop” was made to oppress civic heroes as well. In these iterations, the same populist humor is applied to more explicitly political sources. Figure 5.7 collects “Pepper Spray Cop” images that direct Pike’s force at historical antiauthoritarian heroes, victimizing beloved freedom fighters. The top left image in figure 5.7 reappropriates a photograph of an unknown Chinese protestor, called “Tank Man.” In the original photo, Tank Man stands resolute in Tiananmen Square, even after Chinese authorities have forcibly removed other protestors and sent their tanks through the square. In this image, “Pepper Spray Cop” joins the tanks. The top right image turns a social justice victory on its head. It reappropriates a 1956 photo of Rosa Parks—who famously refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955—riding the newly integrated Montgomery, Alabama, bus system. “Pepper Spray Cop” makes sure that Parks’s courage does not go unpunished. The bottom image modifies Emanuel Leutze’s painting Washington Crossing the Delaware, which valorizes American revolutionary George Washington’s surprise attack on British imperial forces in Trenton, New Jersey. The moment is a defining part of the story of early American resilience and independence. “Pepper Spray Cop” revises that history. Each of these historical moments signifies the stern resolution of citizens in the face of oppressive state forces. In these iterations, Pike targets subjects that resonate as heroes.
Taken together, the aesthetic choices made in many “Pepper Spray Cop” remixes make an argument about the events of November 18, 2011. Participants extended this argument with each new iteration of the meme. Even remembering the ambiguities that exist when reading the stance of memetic media—even acknowledging that we can’t read the minds of those creating or engaging memetic texts—a prevalent political narrative emerges across “Pepper Spray Cop” images. Each person who decided to share an image that pricked them spread that commentary further. The collective corpus of “Pepper Spray Cop” images portrays innocents and heroes oppressed and attacked by an instrument of soulless governmental control. Multiple moments from public history and popular culture combine to form mediated, polyvocal commentary.
During the height of OWS, memetic media, pop culture texts, and political engagement intertwined in complex ways, bringing the vernacular creativity always evident in memetic texts directly into civic service. As Dahlgren argues, humorous commentary works to “strip away artifice, highlight inconsistencies, and generally challenge the authority of official political discourse” (2009, 139). In doing so, humor “offers pleasurable ports of entry to current political topics, as it contributes to the evolution of mediated political culture” (139). Whether the end result was pastiche or empowerment, memetic logics facilitated public commentary surrounding OWS, and have facilitated commentary during significant conversations since. Pop texts and participatory media were crucial to the resonance of OWS. They inspired political conversation—the kind we’ll see next section—as participants more than made do with the cultural and technological tools at their disposal.
Polyvocality and Public Conversation
Despite concerns about pastiche, the intertwine of popular culture and political commentary is not as dangerous as a system that keeps strands out of the tapestry, keeping some voices out of public conversation. Democracy depends on diverse citizens expressing themselves and having those expressions valued. Civic talk hinges on polyvocality. From this perspective, the agonistic dimensions of /r/ShitRedditSays that we saw in chapter 4 are valuable to vibrant public voice, as are the “Pepper Spray Cop” Photoshops we saw in the preceding section. Memetic logics that foster civic talk—no matter the form—are a net win for public voice, and for democracy in turn. This section will focus on this potential for civic participation. It will explore how memetic media facilitate polyvocal expressions, assessing the conversations born when those expressions intertwine.
Memetic Media and Public Voice
At the height of the OWS protests in the fall of 2011, citizens with a wide range of opinions employed memetic logics in their public conversations about the movement, evidencing polyvocality in the process. In their analysis of OWS Facebook pages, Sarah Gaby and Neal Caren find that the content most shared was not the result of direct framing by anyone in charge of OWS; instead, “those posts that resonated with different audiences became popular through online sharing, while thousands of posts with little appeal were simply passed over” (2012, 372). While Gaby and Caren express concern that this memetic spread may “reduce the power of movements to shape their own frames” (372), Sasha Costanza-Chock (2012) sees such openness as key to the OWS ethos. This memetic participation exemplifies what Dahlgren (2009) calls the “very talkative media culture” essential to polyvocal public participation. Active citizenship demands agile communicative tools, and memetic media were agilely employed to make diverse arguments about OWS.
This added voice helped carry the OWS message across participatory media, which eventually inspired traditional media attention. According to Saki Knafo (2011), writing for the Huffington Post, Anonymous hacktivist collectives were part of the reason the OWS message spread, despite the early indifference of mass media outlets. Inspired by faux grassroots “astroturfing” practices, Anonymous collectives reportedly seeded links about OWS into news story comments, connected with sympathetic Facebook groups, and uploaded YouTube videos supporting the movement. In doing so, Knafo says, “Anonymous ensured that news of the scene in Zuccotti Park went viral.” Even if “ensure” might be an overstatement, such collectivist participation was significant in furthering awareness of the movement. Using memetic logics, citizens could engage in counterpublic civic talk, sharing their OWS support outside of traditional media framing.
Figure 5.8 collects four images sympathetic to OWS and its aims, each advocating for populist power in the face of repressive practices. The top left image comments on police practices that—as we saw with “Pepper Spray Cop”—were a resonant point of critique throughout the protests. It’s a shot of a female protestor—mouth agape—being groped as she’s detained. No matter how intentional the grope was, or how long it lasted, the fixed image communicates a static violation. The written text adds a pun, overlaying the image with the slogan and font for JPMorgan Chase Bank. Though it was not narrowly tied to income inequality, evidence of police brutality nonetheless provided general sympathy for OWS protestors.
Figure 5.8 Four images sympathetic to OWS. Top left: a capture of a police officer apparently groping a protestor, annotated with the slogan for JPMorgan Chase Bank; top right: a photo of imperialist privilege, annotated with memetic “99 Percent” and “1 Percent” designations; bottom left: images connect OWS protests with “Arab Spring” protests in Egypt; bottom right: image critiques the 1 percent by alleging they’re afraid of OWS encampments. Collected in 2011.
An early memetic critique in this regard was aimed at New York Police Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna. On September 24, 2011, Bologna pepper-sprayed a young protestor already “kettled” in orange police mesh. As with “Pepper Spray Cop,” the incident was caught on amateur photo and video, spreading via sites like YouTube and Twitter. Charges of police brutality were levied, and the incident became an early rallying cry for those supportive of the movement. “Tony Baloney” became a memetic villain critiqued through Photoshop and image macro. Costanza-Chock (2012) claims the social sharing of the Anthony Bologna incident was a catalyst for mass media coverage of the protests. When The Daily Show lampooned Bologna on September 29, 2011, the satirical news program simultaneously introduced OWS into its coverage. The resonance of the Bologna pepper spray incident inspired participatory spread, which eventually caught the attention of someone at a massively popular television program, which in turn spread the message even further, among the program’s millions of viewers. Charges of police brutality implied that protestors’ right to peaceful assembly was being undermined, and that argument resonated beyond direct sympathy with the movement’s economic claims.
The other images in figure 5.8 convey other resonant messages sympathetic to OWS. The bottom left image encourages protestors to continue by connecting their populist efforts to those of Egyptian protestors who toppled the Hosni Mubarak regime in February 2011 during the Arab Spring movement. The top and bottom right images both invoke distinctions between the bottom “99 percent” of U.S. income earners and the top “1 percent.” These distinctions became the source of the “We are the 99 Percent” memetic phrase employed by those supportive of OWS. The argument implicit in the shorthand is that those at the top of the wealth pyramid have disproportionate opportunity, power, influence, resources, security, and agency as compared to the rest of the population. The references to the “99 Percent” meme in figure 5.8 replicate this populist divide. Each of these images thus uses multimodal shorthand to connect OWS to established populist arguments.
But beyond expressing support for the movement, memetic logics were also employed to express ambivalence, dismissal, and outright disagreement with the goals and methods of OWS protests. Supportive civic talk coexisted alongside critical civic talk, as seen in the memetic images collected in figure 5.9. The top left image contrasts American OWS protestors with Arab Spring revolutionaries, who are portrayed as facing explosions, fire, blood, and bullets while OWS protestors sit idly in homemade Guy Fawkes masks. The other images dismiss OWS protestors as hippies, whiny children, or hypocrites.
Figure 5.9 Four images critical of OWS. Top left: American OWS protestors are contrasted with revolutionaries in “Arab Spring” nations; top right: an image of Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in the 1942 film Casablanca is annotated to call OWS protestors “hippies”; bottom left: a stock photo of a crying child annotated to imply OWS protestors are entitled; bottom right: a protest photo annotated to imply OWS protestors are hypocrites. Collected in 2011.
These images—and the arguments they invoke—charge that OWS protestors are anticapitalist while taking advantage of the fruits of capitalism, are revolutionary without any real consequence, and are complaining about the problems of an entitled leisure class. All these critiques are congruent with complaints levied about OWS across traditional media outlets, indicating a deep interconnection between the arguments being conveyed through memetic media and the broader conversations occurring during the height of the protests. Critiques like these were themselves memetic; they spread via new iterations across participatory media, into embodied conversations, and through pundits addressing massive audiences. In the process, narratives of entitlement and hypocrisy came to dominate perspectives critical of OWS, as much as narratives of inequality and brutality came to dominate perspectives supportive of OWS. Different messages resonated with different publics.
As sites like Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, and YouTube were mobilized in support of OWS, critiques cropped up in tandem. Just as OWS supporters used participatory media for polyvocal, counterpublic contestation, OWS critics used the same media tools to rebuff supporters’ claims. In the fall of 2011, conversations in memetic media collectives and networks were inundated with multiple arguments from multiple perspectives about OWS. Participatory media facilitated polyvocal political assertion. Active citizens produced diverse texts, engaged politically with multiple perspectives, and demonstrated intricate conversational citizenship.
Conversational Citizenship and the 99 Percent
While participatory media can inspire polyvocal engagement with public issues, they also provide enough customizable information to allow users to find whatever they want whenever they want it. “Echo chambers”—the result of collectivism that’s too insulated from other perspectives—are the negative corollary to polyvocality. In a boomerang effect, the wealth of public conversation on sites like Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and YouTube might lead users to seek and engage only opinion-confirming information. Individuals can create their own metaphoric giant room where they shout an opinion and hear the same opinion bounce right back.
In DeLuca, Lawson, and Sun’s (2012) analysis of how right- and left-leaning political blogs covered OWS, they do not find that participatory media resulted in polyvocality. Instead, they write, “in the two alternative worlds of right and left political bloggers, these decentered knots of world-making, the OWS protest is a wholly different event” (492). But there is evidence of polyvocal interaction beyond these political blogs. The sentiment regarding OWS on participatory media collectives was certainly not monolithic. Instead, it was vibrantly (at times ferociously) polyvocal. Sky Croeser and Tim Highfield (2014) speak to the ambiguities that came with the polyvocal dimensions of the “Occupy Oakland” contingent of the OWS protests. In their ethnographic work, Croeser and Highfield find that Twitter helped connect physical protests to mediated messaging, helped spread awareness of Occupy Oakland, and gave protestors an outlet to conversationally engage with the broader public. However, Twitter conversations also meant that protestors had to simultaneously address both insiders and adversaries, and had to debate using both antagonistic and agonistic registers. Polyvocal participation wasn’t always easy, but it was a staple of Occupy Oakland both on the ground and through Twitter.
In the case of OWS, one example of memetic conversation was particularly vibrant. In the fall of 2011, the “We are the 99 percent” memetic phrase began to resonate, making its way to protest signs, hashtags, chants, and images shared online. As it did, the “99 Percent” meme spread across OWS protests, moved through participatory media networks, and entered into traditional media coverage. The term has since become common in American vernacular, a memetic shorthand for income inequality. The slogan was powerful, Jenny Pickerill and John Krinsky argue, in that it “immediately created a sense of inclusion and majority” (2012, 281), hailing the vast majority of the population into the OWS ingroup. The phrase owes much of its prominence to a tumblog that featured OWS sympathizers holding up photos with handwritten messages telling why they supported the movement (see figure 5.10). These write-ups became some of the most prominent OWS images shared on Facebook, according to Gaby and Caren (2012). Memetic participation gave force to public argument as participants created, circulated, and transformed personal iterations of collective texts.
Figure 5.10 Four images from WeAreThe99Percent.tumblr.com, arguing in support of OWS. Posted between October 1 and 2, 2011.
However, the shared “99 Percent” aesthetic was not entirely organic. At least on the most prominent “99 Percent” tumblog, WeAreThe99Percent.tumblr.com, the rules for remix were made explicit by the curators who were gatekeepers for submissions. The meme’s fixed premise was outlined in detail on the tumblog’s submission screen:
Let us know who you are. Take a picture of yourself holding a sign that describes your situation in one sentence—for example, “I am a student with $25,000 in debt,” or “I needed surgery and my first thought wasn’t if I was going to be okay, it was how I’d afford it.” Below that, write “I am the 99 percent.” Below that, write “occupywallstreet.org.” If you don’t want to show your whole face, please show at least part of it. Please have your note be hand written. Please do your best to be concise. Put a face to the 99 percent. Let’s get known.
Some of these guidelines were flexibly enforced. Many participants only showed part of their face. A few posts were not handwritten. More than a few were noticeably not concise. Instead, some handwritten pages contained words scrawled so tiny they were impossible to read without an accompanying caption. Still, the instructions were followed with enough consistency that the “99 Percent” aesthetic became an immediately recognizable part of the protests. Participants creating and circulating “99 Percent” images may or may not have also been marching down city streets. However, their engagement helped frame the broader political conversation. Long after the physical occupation of Zuccotti Park ended, the “99 Percent” meme was part of public debate. The meme survived years after the occupation.
But—even as it hailed inclusiveness—the phrase was met with polyvocal pushback and ample agonistic conversation. The “99 Percent” meme inspired conversational citizenship, as multiple perspectives used its memetic core to directly engage each other. Figures 5.11 through 5.13 collect memetic variations of the “99 Percent” aesthetic, which reappropriate its form but shift its content and stance. The images in figure 5.11 satirize the “99 Percent” aesthetic, invoking the broader critiques of OWS highlighted earlier: that its message was vague, that it was the product of entitled hipsters, and—as the partial re-creation of Hitler’s backstory implies—that it wasn’t worth the sympathy it appeared to merit. These satirical takes on “99 Percent” images were conversational in their implicit address of the meme and their explicit appropriation of its form. They are examples of a point-counterpoint that emerged as “99 Percent” messages inspired their own satirical contestation.
Figure 5.11 Three memetic images that reappropriate the “99 Percent” aesthetic in order to satirize it. Collected in 2011.
Figure 5.13 Three images from WeStandWithThe99Percent.tumblr.com that reappropriate the “99 Percent” aesthetic in order to support it. Posted between October 12 and 13, 2011.
Along with satire came outright contradiction. Another number-based phrase was employed to counter the “99 Percent” meme as it rose to prominence. Based on the premise that only 53 percent of Americans pay income tax, “53 Percent” images began to circulate in the fall of 2011, responding to “99 Percent” images. The notion resonated as a conservative counterargument to the 99 percent claim.4 The “53 Percent” meme also had a prominent tumblog, The53.tumblr.com, which reappropriated the “99 Percent” aesthetic in order to make arguments against OWS. The images in figure 5.12 are in their very form a rebuttal to the “99 Percent” meme, and their content responds to “99 Percent” messages as well, arguing by subtext that “99 Percent” images “blame others,” “give the world puppy eyes,” and are produced by “government-supported bums.” While the original “99 Percent” images began as a first-person declaration (a way to “describe your situation,” says the “99 Percent” tumblog), the “53 Percent” images attack that declaration, and by extension the resourcefulness, patriotism, independence, intelligence, and overall social worth of those creating “99 Percent” images. While the value of this strategy is up for debate, it’s a polyvocal response to a public assertion.
Figure 5.12 Four images from The53.tumblr.com that reappropriate the “99 Percent” aesthetic in order to counter it. Posted on October 11, 2011.
The memetic back-and-forth went even further. There was even a tumblog, WeStandWithThe99Percent.tumblr.com, that purportedly featured members of the top 1 percent of income earners “standing with” the 99 percent. The images in figure 5.13 reappropriate the “99 Percent” aesthetic to express solidarity with its message, even from those who seem to be the outgroup. Repeated on the tumblog are phrases like “TAX ME” and “redistribute.” As these examples demonstrate, the hand-drawn, personal aesthetic resonated as a key part of OWS discussions in the fall of 2011. This shared aesthetic gave multiple perspectives a voice and a fixed premise by which to make their own novel assertions in the midst of a buzzing public conversation.
Commentary via the “99 Percent” aesthetic also went beyond single-turn assertion to engage in multiturn civic talk. Arguments emerged across texts and even within texts. In one “99 Percent” image, penned after the rise of “53 Percent” images, the creator uses his handwritten sign to address the countermeme explicitly:
Since 2008, you have complained about the economy. You have said that big money has corrupted the system. You have worried that your jobs would be outsourced. You have said so … over and over. Now that people are taking action … you’re suddenly satisfied with the status quo, accusing others of wanting handouts. YOU ARE THE 99%. Admit it! (Emphasis in original)
The message is a direct address; it is polyvocal beyond single-turn commentary. “You” is repeated five times with underlines, instead of the “I” that signals personal declaration in most “99 Percent” posts. The content, through this second-person address, calls out conservatives who have “complained about the economy” for years, but are “suddenly satisfied with the status quo” when another political group starts “taking action.” The last line is another inverse: “YOU ARE THE 99%. Admit it!” The message uses shared aesthetics to argue that there is hypocrisy in “53 Percent” posts. In the post, a citizen directly addresses an implied audience of interlocutors, and in the process memetic reappropriation affords polyvocal, conversational citizenship.
Because of multimodality, multiturn argument could occur even within a single image. For instance, participants sometimes used annotation to argue with a source image right on top of it, circling some passages, crossing out others, and adding their own text to the image they were annotating. The vibrancy inherent to “99 Percent” images didn’t demonstrate “echo chamber” parroting or even simple assertion. Instead, citizens engaged in public commentary addressing both implied and specific interlocutors. In this way, they were engaging in conversational citizenship. By participating in memetic commentary surrounding OWS, participants were not just commenting on the activism of others marching in a major city, but were inserting a sliver of their voice into the conversation. Their claims were strands in a discursive thread. Participatory media were mobilized for polyvocal argument.
A More Vibrant Tapestry
This chapter illustrates that there can be a positive relationship between pop-savvy mediation and polyvocal, political conversation. Public perspectives on OWS were articulated vibrantly through memetic logics. The aesthetic practices and humorous tone common in memetic media also carried populist perspectives about the movement. Pop texts and pop networks intertwined as individuals with the literacy to weave discursive strands crafted commentary from everyday sources.
Memetic logics enabled OWS conversations to be widely reappropriated, and, admittedly, not all appropriations shared on sites like 4chan, Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter were seemingly “productive” commentary on OWS methods or key issues. For instance, figure 5.14 collects politically ambiguous pop uses of the phrases “Occupy” and “99 Percent,” ones that might be closer to pastiche, or appropriation without a subversive edge. The most straightforward read is that these images address the core OWS issues only tangentially, and do not explicitly support or deride the aims of the movement. They seem indifferent to any specific political stance, ambivalent at best, trivializing at worst.5 The images in figure 5.14 seem to be more of a remix for the sake of creative play than explicit political commentary: they take a memetic convention and find new ways to apply it for a humorous effect. But this ambivalence is important too, since it reminds us that political participation is not always a simple binary. There are degrees of engagement with political events and popular culture.
Figure 5.14 Six images employing OWS memes to ambiguous ends. From left to right, the top three apply the movement’s “Occupy” signal term to the fictional universes of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and The Lord of the Rings. The bottom three images make jokes by reappropriating the “99 Percent” meme. Collected in 2011.
Even with these ambivalent texts, those worried about shallow political discourse can take comfort in the intricate multiturn commentary occurring through memetic practices. Even simple images like “Pepper Spray Cop” were premised on intertextual depth. The “Pepper Spray Cop” meme may have been shallow pastiche, or it may have been political commentary that served an important argumentative point, making a visual statement about the nature of police action during the protests. If participants wished to engage the UC Davis pepper spray incident, they could write a long-form textual argument about state control and civil liberties. They could post it to their blog or pass it around to friends and hope they read it thoroughly and engaged it fairly. Or they could produce an image that portrays “Pepper Spray Cop” assaulting George Bailey, negating Rosa Parks’s moment of political triumph, or blotting out the U.S. Constitution. Better yet, they could do both simultaneously. They could intertwine pop and the political in order to craft a more participatory argument using more modes of expression. Katy Pearce and Adnan Hajizada (2014) contend that humorous, memetic pop culture texts are essential to public commentary in the repressive state of Azerbaijan. “Memes eschew attribution,” they write, “and the anonymity of them enables a type of freedom, especially in cases where a meme is transgressive” (79). In an environment where government-sanctioned media are not trusted, “interpersonally driven, viral narratives can be powerful” (82). Even in explicitly repressive contexts, a polyvocal public sphere has room for diverse perspectives, logics, and ideas.
While chapter 4 points to the significant problems with voice on participatory media, the evidence from this chapter indicates that memetic logics have the means to support a vibrant tapestry of public conversation. Those worried about echo chambers should be encouraged by the multiturn conversations that occurred through the “99 Percent” meme and its iterations. The vibrant collectives highlighted here housed extensive commentary and polyvocal debate from multiple nuanced perspectives. Not only were images used to represent these perspectives, but they spawned intricate text-based discussion on the arguments they presented. The spread of polyvocal assertions through image memes inspired complex public conversation.
Both popular culture and polyvocal conversation were fundamental to the memetic dimensions of OWS. Members of the mediated public produced nuanced commentary and conversation by drawing on a broad range of sources. Alongside the daily deluge of jokes and links, participants on sites like Reddit, 4chan, Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube shared public perspectives on issues fundamental to democratic rule. Through this activity, one of the core goals of OWS was realized: members of the public had a means to consider and debate issues of wealth, power, and inequality. The polyvocal assertions of mediated citizens intertwined. When memetic media made their perspectives on OWS part of the broader conversation, citizens could engage from many perspectives using many modes of communication. Their voices were amplified as they participated in polyvocal public debate.
However, even the engagement of multiple voices doesn’t guarantee truly polyvocal conversation. Unequal power—central to the antagonisms analyzed in the last chapter—means voice can also be tainted with silence. Pearce and Hajizada (2014) make that caveat in their work on memetic logics and public commentary in Azerbaijan. They remind us that—as we saw in chapter 4—“inside jokes that reaffirm a dominant position can in fact reinforce oppressive ideologies” (80). In Azerbaijan, these dominant jokes weren’t always the organic outgrowth of participatory media but were the result of memetic logics used by the government to spread messages undermining protestors. Critical, humorous images are planted. Fake Twitter accounts take on the identity of known protestors in order to mock their aims and spread misinformation. Hashtags are hijacked with discouraging messages. Likewise, Mina (2014) argues that the extensive censorship on the Chinese internet necessitates that memetic public commentary be limited to code, innuendo, and pun. Pop savvy mediation is, in China’s case, a necessity due to the directed suppression of public voice.
Any opening of public conversation opens it to antagonism, inequality, and manipulation. We saw this in the previous chapter with the identity antagonisms prevalent in conversations on sites like Reddit, 4chan, and Tumblr. We’ll see it again in the next chapter in the sway that culture industries hold over memetic media. Voice itself can lead to ambivalent examples of cultural participation, when that voice isn’t vibrantly polyvocal. Conceptions of agonistic politics raise questions about how to simultaneously value factionist voice without letting one faction silence another. Even with diverse voices participating, unequal power relations can result in mobs swarming to crush dissent, and agonism drowned out by antagonistic marginalization. When the participation of some silences the participation of others, the agonistic ideal is corrupted. Voice must come with pluralism; diverse perspectives must be in equal conversation for the public to thrive. If there’s a Goldilocks “just right” of polyvocality, it is voice that facilitates counterpublic solidarity without trampling opposition.
The OWS protests—at their height in the fall of 2011—evidenced vernacular creativity and conversational citizenship in the participation they inspired. While identity antagonisms still keep the tapestry of public conversation far too muted, polyvocal potential is embedded within memetic logics. We saw bursts of this vibrant color in the fall of 2011. The OWS debates are examples of polyvocal conversation that can occur through memetic media, at least among people well enough situated in the grammar and vernacular to participate. Of course, true polyvocality depends on a much wider contribution to public conversation than the fraction of the population that is active on sites like Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, and 4chan. Gatekeeping practices still exist, and we’ll address those practices in the next chapter. But the gates are cracked open, if not flung free. Even in the midst of antagonizing silence, there is ample evidence in memetic media of robust, polyvocal, counterpublic voice.
