social-media – Emotional Climate

My weekly column in the daily Plymouth Herald (17.12.24), musing on memes. It is said that young people are now living in a 15-second information-age, although my current experience talking with students suggests quite the opposite. But to what extent the headlines are read and consumed instead of the analysis is up for debate. As ever, the unexpurgated version is below (minus the grammatical errors in the printed article…and, as ever, it’s not my headline…):

We’re Living in a Land of Social Media Memes

Every day we are assaulted, jolted, confounded or simply amused by the memes appearing across our social media.

A phrase, often printed in front of a provocative picture, is posted online to capture, sum-up and sloganise, seeking to impregnate our minds with a dominant thought of the day. No reason to read the contents, just scan a headline and move on.

We are being bombarded with what we are supposed to think, and consequently become hyper-critical of others in order to hide our own insecurities. The Blame Game, Trolling, Gaslighting, anti-bullying-Bullying and the nonsense non sequitur have become common discourse.

The best memes evoke an emotional reaction by which they’re judged and then shared towards the much-prized accolade of “viral”. Indeed, their creation has inspired a cottage industry, thousands of times larger than that initiated by the Spinning Jenny, producing home-spun phrases or sayings.

What used to be jokes have now been weaponised into ideologically-charged phrases to be liked or to cause anger.

On TikTok and Instagram memes are politicised to win hearts and minds, celebrities of the Right and the Left vying for the punchline quip or deathly allegation that will be shared ten million times. The picture propaganda lasts longer on X and Facebook, and now Bluesky, and tend to come round again, for months or sometimes years, thoroughly out of context from their original intention.

Categories follow news themes. Recent memes include “Care homes charging £5,000 a week – you could get a room at the Ritz for that! Nationalise social care!” Not funny really. A similar one with a picture of Bugs Bunny in a dress suit reads “I wish all CEOs a very healthy fear of the working class.” Yep!

Another, “Health Care should not be cheap and accessible. It should be free and universal”, ran across all apps. A favourite, mocking a TV advert of an elderly man on the phone searching for a specific book reads, “I’m looking for a copy of “How to Avoid Paying Tax by Buying a Farm” by J R Clarkson.”

There are left-wing memes and far-right memes and feminist memes and misogynist memes. There are also a growing percentage of memes created by artificial intelligence and shared by bots at a rate devised to swamp the internet.

Elon Musk, US-based multi-billionaire owner of X, is posting memes calling for a UK General Election, calling our society a Stalinist regime and authoritarian police state, and offering support for the jailed fascist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson. The aim is to pull the elected UK Government rightwards into ultra-nationalist and racist policies to appease the opposition. It appears to be working.

When Musk bought X he “unbanned” far-right misogynistic and racist groups, allowing the posts and memes that labelled all asylum seekers as child abusers and sparked the anti-immigrant riots last summer. He bears some responsibility for all those provoked into violence and later jailed for exemplary prison terms.

It’s not just the Billionaire media-owners seeking political influence online. Apparently all States across the world are applying meme tools in order to cajole and confuse enemies both within and outside their national borders. Similar strategies, tho’ on a much smaller scale, were adopted during wars where planes distributed thousands of flyers saying “surrender now or die!”.

Conversely, some of us attempt to stay with facts and truths. For example, the dictionary definition of “genocide” has been shared in thousands of different memes, many with harrowing pictures of dead children and civilians, as a counter to much of the mainstream news coverage of Gaza. As fast as the online moderator can delete them as “contrary to our community standards’, another appears, illustrating the tens of thousands dead in Palestine and Lebanon.

The question is begged. Who is best placed to censor these ten-second messages, and in whose interests? Surely not the billionaire social media moguls least representative of the majority of working people. State censorship is a reaction to widespread opposition. Free the Meme!

The best this morning, given the very clear and present danger of climate chaos facing us all, is the picture of thousands of people labelled as “scientists”, being challenged by a single man saying “you are all wrong”. His label? “A man who saw a You Tube Video”.

Published in the daily Plymouth Herald (12.3.24) soon after the Communities Secretary, Michael Gove (a far-Right racist) made his Statement to the House of Commons redefining “extremism” to target Muslim organisations that are charitable and promote peace. The obvious whipping-up of racism in front of national elections all-but back-fired as various civil liberties organisations challenged the attack as “ideological”. Nevertheless the Tories were always only speaking to their core voter base, and whipping-up the far-right extremists into more street violence. Whether they are a central purpose or a sideline, the divisions created inside the working class have to be challenged and defeated, otherwise we all perish.

We live in the most extreme of societies. In a country of 67 million human beings, the UK hosts 177 billionaires, their mutual wealth growing by £35billion to almost £1trillion last year, their numbers swelling from profits made during the COVID epidemic. The richest 10 of them own as much as the poorest 5 million of us.

One billion is one-thousand-million. To count to one million, at a rate of one number each second without pause or sleep, would take 12 days. To count to one billion would take 32 years.

There is no comparison between millionaires and billionaires. To own a billion pounds is to live an extreme existence, above and outside of society. And most UK billionaires are multi-billionaires. Jim Ratcliffe, of the steel company Ineos is worth £30billion, his company extracting billions in surpluses from the huge increases in charges for oil and gas.

Household appliance manufacturer, James Dyson has £23billion, the ultra-landlord Duke of Westminster £10billion – £9billion of it inherited without paying a penny in tax. Not to mention Charlie Boy, “Basher Bill” and the rest of “The Firm” living off our backs.

Together they make their money from exploiting the workers at home and abroad, extracting the surplus between the wages they pay us and the price they charge us for the goods produced by us.

The three named here have wealth and power beyond our imagination through over-charging us for the essential heating, housing and hygiene we have to purchase. This is the case for all the 700 billionaires in the world, together owning more than nearly two-thirds of the World’s wealth. 700 versus 8,000,000,000 people – now that’s extreme!

You only get that rich through ruthless competition, destruction of challengers, the most extreme exploitation of the natural environment and mass of the world’s working class. Death and immiserisation on an industrial scale.

No-one needs the wealth of a billionaire. It is the most extreme travesty, producing a cruel lottery of birth that determines entitlement or poverty for life.

The vast majority of us live our entire lives on a total income of a minuscule fraction of theirs to a point where the ruling class have no idea of our day to day experiences. Such extreme division is of no positive benefit to society, completely undermining democracy and human rights.

The Corporate executives – the Capitalist class – lobby and buy-off the politicians to do their bidding. The current outrage about the racist and misogynistic outbursts of Frank Hester, OBE, who donated £10million to the Tory Party is a single case in point. Hester is sole owner of a £1billion company granted £400million of NHS and prison contracts in the last 8 years. An extreme return on investment.

Yet, with typical hypocrisy, the UK government now seeks to label those who challenge such extremism as the real extremists. The new rules propose that anyone who challenges the current status quo is a potential threat to the Nation. We who expose the lies, who condemn the warmongering, who demand investment in social welfare – we are extremists allied with terrorists!

Are we extremists when we openly condemn the corruption that has seen at least £40billion of tax-payers money pocketed by private individuals through the COVID pandemic? Is it a threat to the Nation when we challenge the allocation of multi-billion contracts for the NHS to members of politician’s families?

Is it extreme to expose the multi-faceted scandal of record profits from fossil fuels whilst 12 million of us live in fuel poverty, 2 million of us are reliant on food banks, and 1 in 3 of our children suffer poor nutrition? Are we supporting terrorism when we show that their industries endanger the future of all humanity by warming and polluting the Planet?

Even when they promise to “level-up” they prove themselves liars – less than 10% of infrastructure commitments met. The rich don’t want to spend our tax money on us.

Is it extreme to challenge the enormous growth in the profits from sales of weapons to countries openly committing genocide, enforced migration and ethnic cleansing?

The latest announcements by Sunak and Gove seeking to curtail democratic rights and workers’ voices are not policies promoting fairness and open society. And the Labour Opposition has supported the policy but argues it doesn’t go far enough!

The real extremists are labelling all those opposing them as extremists! These are the policies of the real extremists in government, seeking to maintain the corrupt privilege and power of their class by shutting down any and all challenge.

They have played the “race card” in front of the General Election, falsely labelling all Muslims as terrorists and promoting racism in an ideological offensive aimed at dividing the working class and distracting us from the real cause of our woes – the greed and violence of the ruling class.

This is class warfare. The ultimate aim of the ruling class is to atomise the working class, preventing any and all protest or collective action. We have to fight to stop them. Those truly in support of democracy, free speech, human rights and social justice must oppose this latest declaration of their supremacy over our rightful legitimacy of Faith and ethnicity, of skin colour, of gender identity, and of collective organisation including the trade union right to strike. If that labels us as extremists, so be it.