The Joke’s on Us
In the 2010s, Hitler memes and ‘ironic’ racism filled the internet. What if we had taken them seriously?
By Helen Lewis
Remember when the internet used to be fun? Whitney Phillips does. The digital anthropologist was recently looking through a huge set of images from the late 2000s that had been posted to Reddit. The first comment described the era as “a more simple time,” and sure enough, the pictures were weird, silly, and creative. Talking cows. Cats playing video games. A bear on a golf course. A guy Photoshopped to have mouths for eyes.
Then she noticed something else. Something disturbing. The thread began, she wrote recently, “with a lighthearted meme about Hitler.” After that was “dehumanizing mockery of a child with disabilities. And more sneering mockery of an old man hooked up to an oxygen tank. And date rape. And violence against animals. And fat shaming. And homophobia. And racism. And pedophilia. And how hilarious 9/11 was.”
If you’ve spent any time online, you will have imbibed both the aesthetic and, perhaps, the ethics of “meme culture” or “internet culture.” This is the mashed-up jumble of images, jargon, and folk art that gushed out of sites such as 4chan, Reddit, and Tumblr from the late 2000s. The look was lo-fi and absurdist, and the tone was…
