The Unseriousness of Ironic Detachment

On the need for seriousness and what happens when we are controlled by cheap irony.

The internet meme has a style all of its own, a style called “internet ugly”. Features of internet ugly are low-resolution images, often crudely drawn faces or old photographs scraped from the corners of the web, with poorly photoshopped text crammed inelegantly over the whole thing. In spite of this anti-aesthetic, many memes are actually created by teams of professionals, hired by today’s glibly postmodern and safely iconoclastic companies to give their brand a veneer of creativity, which internet culture mistakes memes for.

One such group of meme engineers was visited by a journalist for Vox in a video on why memes matter. In the video, we meet a man named Sonny who’s asked about what makes a meme speak to a wide swathe of the internet audience. Sonny answers with candour, “I notice the stuff that I work harder on goes less viral than the stuff that I make in, like, two minutes.” The most telling part of his interview comes when he reflects on what memes are for and he says:

“Most of…