Wednesday, July 12, 2017

the internet for dummies

Unfamiliar with terms like "normie," "Pepe," and "Kek"? Roaming Millennial has a primer for you, and it's consumable in under eight minutes!






1 comment:

King Baeksu said...

Roaming Millennial's analysis is rather superficial, which I suppose is why she's relatively popular online.

1. "Normie" = Nietzsche's Last Man, the herd-man (or herd-woman) of contemporary life. Unreflective happiness is their highest goal, and nothing more. (Bugman or bugwoman are roughly equivalent terms used by neo-reactionaries.)
2. A meme is not just a "funny image." A meme is the conceptual or stylistic equivalent of a gene, as first defined by Richard Dawkins. The best Internet memes are dialectical in nature, and explode the contradictions of encrusted ideologies or received "truths" in a single image. Since most leftists are humorless fabulists, their ability to expose the truth dialectically and in a funny way is almost nonexistent. Also: Like genes themselves, the best memes propagate themselves through rigorous natural selection and Darwinian survival of the fittest.
3. Pepe was "Hitlerized" to steal him back from the normies. Since real fascists are deadly serious, and Pepe is always deployed ironically at this point in Internet history, it's meaningless to argue that he is ever used in a genuinely fascistic way. Pepe is basically punk!
4. "Kek" derives from "ㅋㅋㅋ," the Korean equivalent of "lol," and spread to the West via online gaming culture. You could even argue that it's part of the "Korean Wave" of recent years. Given that Roaming Millennial is part Asian, I'm surprised she didn't highlight the term's provenance. Where's your Asian pride, girlfriend?

Bonus: Stefan Molyneux is the Howard Beale of Generation Pepe!