The News Is Meme
Cultural capital is key, and Fahrenheit 451 is definitely coming in by the back door.
I’ve said several times before that memes have become the modern equivalent to hieroglyphics, a pictorial way of representing specific information and communicating it in an easy, information dense, and increasingly trivial ways.
That information, to be acceptable, has to ultimately depend specifically on cultural capital- a shared understanding of the context of the information in order for it to be understood correctly.
A pairing of shared knowledge that becomes a background for a new premise, if you will.
The barrier to entry in creating successful memes, in the earlier generation of memes, was their creation — picking appropriate culturally representative images, adding in meaningful references, quotes, or still further images, and crafting them in such a ways as to be both meaningful and ironic, amusing, or memorable in some way.
The better the hammer hits the nail on the head, the better the spread.
That barrier has now been pretty much removed, as the current generation of LLMs, or “AIs” if you prefer, allow not only the instant generation of existing memes reengineered in more specific ways, but the laughably easy generation of photorealistic depictions of pretty much anyone, anywhere, at any…
