Did memes drive us to invade Venezuela, or did invading Venezuela drive the memes?
Most likely Yes to both. But, let’s speculate for a minute.
I think it might be mimetically possible that we have invaded Venezuela because “memes.”
I.e., memes are funny > taking any big and serious action in present-day presents many meme-able opportunities > one strong one will latch on > and then the cycle kicks off ending with no one remembering or taking seriously the original seriousness of the action that starting the mean.
Simply: it’s a very big deal to send American Special Forces into Venezuela early in the morning and extract (kidnap?) their sitting president and his wife from their home and bring them back to the United States. However, hours after it happened our president posted a picture of their president onboard an American aircraft carrier in a grey Nike jumpsuit and some other memorable garb. It’s an incredibly memorable picture, and probably would’ve been just as memorable if the tracksuit had been green or blue or white, but maybe not if it he’d been in an actual (business) suit.
So you have the circumstances (the kidnapping) and you have the characters (Trump and Maduro), the unique and interesting clothes (the grey Nike tracksuit), and you have the medium (Trump himeself posting this on social media). All of these throw together have created a meme.
And once you’ve seen it, you’ve forgotten all about the seriousness of this whole thing.
Importantly, the original meme is not absolute and singular. It is derivative. This is the key factor that further removes the average viewer (me) from remembering what is really going on here and instead you’re just sitting back watching the meme war play out.
Here are some examples of the derivatives. Put yourself in the viewers shoes: you’re on social media, watching whatever you’re watching, and this one pops up. You know that the U.S. “invaded” or “attacked” or “went after” Venezuela by “capturing” or “kidnapping” or “extracting” their president. But you watch this video, laugh, and then move on to watching the next video on your algorithm. It fits in where everything else fits in: It’s either funny or it made you mad or it got you to consider buying something.
The seriousness of the situation has been flattened into the other 100 GB of information you’ll consume that day. It stands out for the 5 seconds you watch it, you move on, and your impression of this whole “Venezuela thing” is that it’s just Trump trolling another foreign leader and sovereign country on social media.
So, it’s a legitimate question to wander whether the memes made us do it, or us doing it create the memes?
I’m not saying that we did it to create the memes. I’m saying that mimetically, through our revealed preferences, the memes already in circulation pre-Maduro kidnapping drove the inevitability of the Maduro kidnapping.
Chiefly, I think you could look at the Trump admin releasing the videos of the “kinetic” strikes on “drug boats” to social media over the last 6 months as memes in and of themselves and that those were the initial culprits in the breakdown of the seriousness of this whole situation.
The government blows up a bunch of “drug boats” in the ocean, posts the video them to social media (just like you post whatever video you post to social media),and basically says “haha whattup!” does a lot of work to make it hard to decipher what’s really happening with all this.
Anyways, as with most things here, this is a proto-thought and something I’ve noticed so I’ve written it out here to try and better understand the thought for myself.
The messaging, mediums, and such have all changed and are changing incredibly fast which makes all of this much harder to follow and understand wha is that’s really going on, if that was ever possible.
As in, the next war might be announced by the White House generating an AI video with Sora showing the President hilariously communicating this message instead of a buttoned up presidential address to the America People from the Resolute Desk.
The Resolute Desk doesn’t mean anything anymore compared to the Maduro Memes.
Oh, and the Nike tracksuit Maduro wore in the meme sold out in a few hours I believe. So either a few opportunists saw the photo and bought them all up to try and resell them because they thought it would become a meme, or a bunch of people saw the photo and thought “lol this’ll become a meme. I’m gonna get one for the lolz.”
Either way, where is the plot?