From Meme Bullies to Meme Mutinies: How could Meme-tivism help us challenge the systems of power, domination, and oppression?

Memes may appear to be fleeting jokes, but they carry a profound capacity to shape narratives. This text explores how memes, rooted in discriminatory online spaces and landscapes, have also been reworked and reclaimed as tools for resistance and advocacy. By examining their participatory nature, it reflects on their potential to dismantle harmful systems, counter-narrate, and foster organizing. In turn, questioning how could Meme-tivism can help us challenge the systems of power, domination, and oppression?

Have you ever created a meme? Maybe you have, but it’s more likely you haven’t. For most of us, memes are something we encounter in the wildernesss of the internet—scrolling through feeds, smiling, cringing, or sharing—but rarely do we think of ourselves as their creators. And yet, every meme has a creator, and with that creation comes a peculiar power. Memes may appear to be nothing more than universally agreed-upon jokes, but there’s more beneath the surface.

While today the word “meme” almost exclusively evokes “internet memes”, the term predates the internet itself. Coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976), it originally referred to cultural units of transmission—ideas, songs, or phrases—that replicate and evolve much like genes. While Dawkins emphasized imitation and adaptation as central to cultural evolution, the concept found a new life in the digital age, now referring to shareable, visual content spreading rapidly across online platforms. In 2020 alone, at least one million posts mentioning the word “meme” were shared daily on Instagram —a staggering volume that underscores their ubiquity in our digital lives. But this widespread presence didn’t arise in a vacuum; it is deeply rooted in the dynamics of the early internet

How the web and digital platforms are shaped today reflects a continuation of who was able togot to gain access to the early internet. The early web 2.0 era, dominated by platforms like 4chan, Something Awful, and Reddit, was largely shaped by young, Western, white, male, and tech-savvy users. This is where meme culture took root. As one might expect, these platforms that laid the foundations of the meme landscape fostered a specific kind of humor—insular, caustic, and often exclusionary. Early meme communities mirrored the biases of their creators, drawing heavily on reductive stereotypes and reveling in a self-aware cruelty that left little room for marginalized voices.

Women, BIPOC, disabled, and other disadvantaged groups have been frequent targets of this humor, cementing these platforms and memes landscape as digital spaces of dominance steeped in misogyny and racism. Furthermore, this hostility isn’t limited to the content of memes; it also extends to their form; often drawing on visuals that reflect patriarchal norms even if inexplicitly.

Take the “distracted boyfriend” meme, one of the most widely recognized and used meme templates. Originating from a stock photo titled “Man Looking at Other Woman” captured by photographer Antonio Guillem. Most of us have likely laughed at a meme using this template at some point in the last couple years. It’s a relatable shorthand for distraction and misplaced priorities, often used humorously to highlight shifting loyalties or fleeting desires. But is it really that simple?

Perhaps, before we even realize it, the image taps into and perpetuates entrenched gender stereotypes, representing the man as eternally unfaithful, and the woman as possessive or jealous. Its popularity hints at an underlying societal tendency to find humor in these “familiar” and taught dynamics, reflecting deeply ingrained narratives about gender norms. Similar stock image meme templates have also thrived. For instance, the one where a man lies in bed, seemingly lost in thought while a woman glances over, interpreting his silence as something far more personal. These images rely on assumptions that feel lighthearted on the surface but carry echoes of the same gender norms. This narrative embedded in the visual media is hardly new. Variants of this trope have appeared throughout history, from Charlie Chaplin films to 18th-century paintings which then became meme templates themselves,: building on the same genre of memes. Memes thrive on repetition and variation, making them ideal vessels for dominant narratives. Their widespread circulation reinforces these norms, embedding them deeper into cultural consciousness.

As social media platforms gained unprecedented control over data and content dissemination, the power of memes became even more potent. The rise of technofeudalism—where a handful of corporate giants gained the ability to dictate what information we consume digitally, often through algorithmic profiling—has turned memes into tools for purposes ranging from corporate marketing and political propaganda to social engineering.

While we have been witnessing how memes have been used in the political sphere across the whole globe, the Biden 2024 election campaign’s decision to hire a “meme manager” made it evident how central memes have become to shaping public opinion on a wider scale, capable of influencing elections, shaping public discourse, and even controlling narratives on a global stage.

Beyond formal political campaigns, memes have been utilized by lobbying groups to craft and spread targeted narratives as well, providing visual resources for propaganda or meme-washing1 to flood digital platforms.

\Far-right movements, incel groups, extremist organizations or conspiracy theorists have also recognized their potential, weaponizing them to spread disinformation, recruit adherents, and embed extremist narratives into mainstream online culture. In some cases, memes have even been used as violence manifestos for terrorism.

I always found it strange how humor, something so seemingly benign, can morph into a tool for such violence. Yet, humor has always been political. For me personally, but also for my creative work, it has always been a way to cope—a rebellious act against systems that seemed too vast, too powerful to confront head-on, or a subtle form of political criticism where direct commentary carried its own risks. It’s not just about lightening the weight of heavy realities; it’s about mocking the structures of domination and exposing their absurdities in ways they can’t easily counter. Humor holds a subversive power, a way to twist the blade of oppression back on itself. In those moments, it feels like the only tool I have to resist, to reclaim my voice, even when everything else feels stripped away.

That’s what first drew me to having a critical eye on memes. They’ve long been used as tools of resistance, reworked and reimagined to challenge the status quo. There was something intriguing about how this seemingly silly, fleeting medium can be reclaimed to reverse the language of oppression, and to remix, and turn it into something disruptive.

Reclaiming memes starts by challenging the idea that they are apolitical. Memes' participatory nature indeed makes them powerful tools for shared knowledge production and resistance. But this raises crucial questions: Who controls the narratives that dominate meme culture? Who decides what is funny, shareable, or worth replicating? Which memes are amplified by algorithms, and which are buried?

For some of these questions, I found threads to pull in the climate justice movement. Observing how climate advocacy and activism have been using memes not just to spark engagement about the climate emergency, but to also cultivate collective awareness and literacy around the issue. They do this in the moments that we do not actively seek out this information, but also as we encounter it while scrolling through our feeds, drowning within the ocean of aspirational content, performances, and lifestyles crafted to perpetuate and sustain endless consumerism.

Instead of amplifying despair and eco-anxiety, they reframe the conversation, dropping disruptive yet relatable reminders of the urgency of the crisis in ways that are accessible and incisive. This shift highlights how memes can operate as a bridge, translating information into forms that resonate with audiences who might otherwise feel alienated or disengaged. Beyond simply raising awareness, memes can foster critical literacy by encouraging individuals to question the systems and structures driving the problem, as climate memes were doing.

As someone involved in critical literacy and advocacy work around data and data-driven algorithmic systems, I’ve long engaged with creative mediums as a way to provoke thought. But back in April 2023, I came across a post on X (previously Twitter) that, in a way, triggered and pulled me deeper into this niche area. It was a proportional area diagram meme mocking the disparity between “people doing AI research,” represented as a tiny red dot, and “people who feel qualified to talk about AI,” depicted as a massive blue circle, posted by an AI researcher. When I saw the tweet, I felt an immediate sense of frustration—but I wasn’t sure how to respond to such ridicule, drawing a line between those who “know” and those who “don’t,”. Reinforcing an elitist view of expertise about such a topic where the harms are so disproportionately distributed, with a stark imbalance between those who benefit and those who are harmed, and a pervasive gap in understanding how these systems actually operate.

Then, I scrolled down to see how others were reacting to this position and was relieved to stumble upon Sasha Costanza-Chock’s reply to the tweet. They had taken the graphic and reworked it. The red dot now represented “people working on AI,” while the massive blue circle was labeled “people most likely to be harmed by the ways companies and governments use AI.” With a single edit, they had flipped the narrative entirely. What began as an elitist and technocratic joke aimed at mocking people who do not have a technical understanding of AI, was transformed into a powerful critique of power imbalances, systemic harm, and the exclusion embedded in AI systems.

Costanza-Chock, who is also the author of the inspiring Design Justice book, created a meme by mirroring the original graphic’s behavior; “memeing back” as Sama Khosravi-Ooryad calls such acts. Using the same visual style but subverting its content to spark a socially-driven rights-focused conversation. It was a perfect example of how memes can work to reverse the very harmful ideologies at the core.

Learning from meme-feminism and digital feminist activism; what if, instead of letting memes be co-opted to reinforce harm, we wielded them to dismantle, to rebuild, to disrupt and to counter-narrate on purpose? Maybe the memes we create—or reclaim—aren’t just fleeting images but seeds of organising and resistance, quiet acts of defiance with the potential to grow into something far louder.

What could happen if we move beyond passively scrolling and started subverting, memeing-back? How could Meme-tivism help us challenge the systems and structures of power, domination, and oppression?

Note: OpenAI ChatGPT4o was corporated for the editing of this writing.

REFERENCES

1. Chloë Arkenbout, Jack Wilson, Daniel de Zeeuw (Eds.). 2021. Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image.
2. Chloë Arkenbout, İdil Galip (Eds.). 2024. Critical Meme Reader III: Breaking the Meme
3. Richard Dawkins. 1941-. (1989). The selfish gene. Oxford; New York :Oxford University Press
4. Westminster University. Knowing Meme, Knowing You: How Memes Influence Our Society. Retrieved from https://www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/our-university/outreach-for-schools-and-colleges/extended-project-qualification-epq-support/knowing-meme-knowing-you-how-memes-influence-our-society.
5. Anastasia Denisova. (2019). Internet Memes and Society. New York: Taylor & Francis
6. Anastasia Denisova. (2016). How the Internet turned US election into a medieval carnival. The Conversation
7. Kara Rogers, Encyclopaedia Britannica. Meme. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/meme.
8. Ema Smekalova. 06 Nov 2024. The Skinny. Passing Pixels: On contemporary meme culture. Retrieved from https://www.theskinny.co.uk/intersections/features/contemporary-meme-culture.
9. Iryna VITIUK, Olena POLISHCHUK, Nataliia KOVTUN, Volodymyr FED. (2020) “Memes as the Phenomenon of Modern Digital Culture”, WISDOM , 15(2), pp. 45–55. doi: 10.24234/wisdom.v15i2.361.
10. Hope Talbot. (2024, October 12). Meme Culture and Institutional Critique: An Interview with UoB History Memes. The Bristorian. Retrieved from https://www.thebristorian.co.uk/features/https/wwwthebristoriancouk/uobhistorymeme.
11. Yuliya Samofalovaa , Andrea Catellania, Louise-Amélie Cougnon. (2022). Greenpeace Memes for Communicating Climate Change. Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum.
12. Andrew S. Ross, Damian J. Rivers. (2019). Internet Memes, Media Frames, and the Conflicting Logics of Climate Change Discourse. Environmental Communication, 13, 975 - 994.
13. Yanis Varoufakis. (2024). Technofeudalism: what killed capitalism. Brooklyn, NY, Melville House.
14. Institute for Strategic Dialogue. ISD Explainers. (January 30, 2024 ) Memes & the Extreme Right-Wing, https://www.isdglobal.org/explainers/memes-the-extreme-right-wing/
15. Ashley Mattheis. Open Democracy. (12 September 2019). Manifesto memes: the radical right’s new dangerous visual rhetorics. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/manifesto-memes-the-radical-rights-new-dangerous-visual-rhetorics/
16. Amanda Silberling. Tech Crunch. (May 22, 2024) The Biden campaign is looking to hire a seasoned meme lord. https://techcrunch.com/2024/05/22/the-biden-campaign-is-looking-to-hire-a-seasoned-meme-lord/
17. Lisa Bogerts, Maik Fielitz. Global Network on Extremism and Technology. (31 March 2020). The Visual Culture of Far-Right Terrorism. https://gnet-research.org/2020/03/31/the-visual-culture-of-far-right-terrorism/
18. Victoria Goldiee. Outrider. (August 26, 2024) Climate Change Memes Are Helping People Cope with Eco Anxiety. https://outrider.org/climate-change/articles/climate-change-memes-are-helping-people-cope-eco-anxiety m
19. Sama Khosravi-Ooryad. (2024). Memeing back at misogyny: emerging meme-feminism, visual tactics, and aesthetic world-building on Iranian social media. Feminist Media Studies, 24(5), 984–1003. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2024.2319423