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Speed up your creative process. Collaborative online walls that help you organize your ideas. Get your thoughts down fast and gather all your insights in one place.

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...erste Eindrücke, unter dem Reiter 'Nicole'.

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Die Publikation setzt sich mit Rechtspopulismen auseinander, die heute insbesondere das Internet und die Sozialen Medien zur Verbreitung nutzen. Dabei zeichnet das Buch die Entwicklung von einer (Sub-)Kultur der Transgression in Online-Foren wie 4chan bis hin zu Plattformen wie z. B. Breitbart News nach.

Die vorgestellten Künstler und Künstlerinnen beschäftigen sich mit Memes (z. B. Pepe der Frosch, dem wohl bekanntesten Symbol der Trump-Anhänger), mit Figuren wie Steve Bannon, mit Flaggenverehrung, der Prepper-Szene, White Supremacists und Dark Enlightenment.

Neben einer umfassenden Einführung in das Thema enthält der Katalog ein Interview mit der Wissenschaftsautorin Angela Nagle, Werkbeschreibungen aller Arbeiten, ein kritisches Glossar sowie ein Link-Verzeichnis zu weiterführenden Online-Ressourcen.

Künstler/Künstlerinnen: Paula Bulling/Anne König (DE), Simon Denny (NZ), DISNOVATION.ORG (FR/PL), Vera Drebusch & Florian Egermann (DE), Dominic Gagnon (CA), Szabolcs KissPál (HU), Boris Ondreička (SK), Milo Rau, IIPM - International Institute of Political Murder (CH/DE), Vanja Smiljanić (RS), Jonas Staal (NL), Nick Thurston (GB), UBERMORGEN (CH/AT)

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der alt-right-komplex - über rechtspopulismus im netz: hmkv ausstellungsmagazin 2019/1

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Der Alt-Right-Komplex - Über Rechtspopulismus im Netz - HMKV Ausstellungsmagazin 2019/1 | Herausgegeben von: Inke Arns, HMKV (Hartware MedienKunstVerein) | Mit Text von: Inke Arns, Paula Bulling, Vera Drebusch, Florian Egermann, Judith Funke, Jens Kabisch, Anne König, Vanja Smiljanic, Jonas Staal, Nick Thurston, Bernhard Pirkl, Tijan Sila | ISBN 978-3-86206-840-1 | Erschienen 2020 im Verlag Kettler, Dortmund

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'OK Boomer:' 25-Year-Old New Zealand MP Chlöe Swarbrick Claps Back at Hecklers

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View this post on Instagram

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sadtiktok

painhub

draingang

depresion (nur mit einem S, weil “depression” als Hashtag geblockt ist)

mentalhealthmatters

darkacademia

ed (eating disorder)

weirdtok
kinktok
unaliving
onlyfriends

deeptok

queertok

cottagecore

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Soziale Medien und Prüderie - Wie Filter großer Plattformen unsere Sprache beeinflussen

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Listen to this episode from Breitband - Medien und digitale Kultur - Deutschlandfunk Kultur on Spotify. "Corn" statt "porn" - also Mais statt Porno: Um die Filter von TikTok und Co. zu überlisten, müssen Userinnen und User kreativ sein. Welche Auswirkungen das auf die Sprache insgesamt hat, erklärt die Linguistin Konstanze Marx.

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Beispiele für Bild- und Meme-Welten von subkulturellen Online-Communities, die als problematisch angesehen werden

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Beispiele für Bild- und Meme-Welten von subkulturellen Online-Communities, die als problematisch angesehen werden

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The following text draws on several years of research. I hope that it can serve as a reference to better understand young political spaces online. If these communities are unfamiliar, this may be a useful primer: Politigram & the Post-left (2018). -Joshua Citarella.

For further discussion: 🎧 NM Podcast ep. 14: Shift Alt Right Clique, 2019, feat. Joshua Citarella in conversation with New Models editors about the writing of this article.

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🚨 CONTENT WARNING AHEAD 🚨

➖

Near the end of 2018, I wrote an article about TikTok and Gen Z. My piece focused on generational differences in social media use. I argued that, broadly speaking, Millennials are individualist, entrepreneurial, and focused on a personal brand while Gen-Zers are collectivist, nihilistic, and interested in identity play. A few weeks later, InfoWars' Paul Joseph Watson made a video, The Cultural Significance of TikTok, which awkwardly retrofits my text as a seeming endorsement of his right-wing agenda. Watson describes TikTok as a cultural battleground in which Gen-Z rebels against the overreach of Millennials' political correctness. ¹ At the time of writing, the video has 800,000+ views on YouTube. There are several versions circulating online. It's also become a topic in its own right, sparking threads on various right-wing message boards including 4chan's /pol/. A roast appeared on the satirical news website .

To be sure, numerous publications released articles about TikTok when it was trending on the App Store late last fall. Some writers mentioned concerns about offensive content and hate speech. Just about everyone was shocked to see how young TikTok's user base is. The media's response quickly came to a head with a VICE Motherboard article bearing the outrageous headline " TikTok Has a Nazi Problem," spawning further replies by conservative YouTuber Sargon of Akkad, among others. For the space of a few days, TikTok was a frontline in America's ongoing culture war.

History shows that reactionary politics, especially among young people, flourish in times of declining wealth and labor market prospects. In observing the online content teenagers produce, we can see that Gen Z has learned to expect less than earlier generations. Given that real wages have been stagnant for nearly forty years, life expectancy is declining, and the environment is collapsing, this makes sense. Things are getting worse. The burgeoning youth conservative movement and the generational realignment Watson proposes stand as strong evidence for the need for a materialist Left.

Gen Z's online activity suggests that many in this age cohort do hold conservative values (or at least enjoy the identity play of a conservative position within our current media landscape). But it must be noted that Gen Z also includes a rapidly growing progressive movement. Across all spheres of American society, the center is failing. As fewer people are able to access the benefits of the mainstream, alternative narratives have begun to flourish and citizens move further toward the polarized edges of the political spectrum.
Irony and Capitalist Realism
Americans born after the era of Reagan and Thatcher inherited a world where multiple radical projects had recently failed or been popularly discredited. Centralized states like the USSR had collapsed, the communes of the '60s-'70s had long-since been deserted and seemingly all revolutionary potential had been dissolved into a system of global capitalism. We couldn't restructure society but neither could we opt out. The vast archive of the internet effectively flattened the past and contributed to the pervasive feeling that we were indeed living at the "end of history." ² This shift away from historical perspective helped to foreclose our political imaginations and was celebrated by the capitalist doctrine as "the end of ideology" and end of class struggle overall. ³

To insulate ourselves from these seemingly guaranteed failures, Millennials, and Gen Z after us, adopted irony as a cultural strategy. Irony allowed us to continue life under late capitalism while psychologically sheltering ourselves from the demoralizing reality. Irony as culture became: "The band I like will inevitably sell out, so I might as well buy-in early." Irony as politics became: "The movement will inevitably be corrupted, so I might as well side with capital." Ultimately, it was okay that a project failed because irony allowed us to maintain the plausible deniability that we "never really liked it to begin with." Why resist, if alternatives are impossible?

In the mid-00s (or when Millennials were the age that Gen Z is now), the mainstream was wearing ironic T-shirts of bands they didn't like. The enthusiasm may have been insincere but it was paid for in real dollars. This disingenuous mode of consumption was the first breach between the world of ironic aesthetics and social reality. Soon, irony didn't so much signal active engagement as it suggested an underlying political nihilism, allowing one to disassociate from the real world effects of one's own actions. The inertia of ironic consumption and production continued to accelerate right up until 2016-at which point the Pepe-style trolls of the Alt-right made it clear that irony had never been apolitical. Ironic propaganda functions the same as real propaganda. Ironic voting is just voting.
Irony after 2016
The past few years online have been a disastrous field test for the political efficacy of irony. The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA, (August 2017) proved to be a watershed moment for the racist trolls of 2016. As the IRL events played out, 4channers were physically pushed out of white nationalist demonstrations. And once it became 'real,' most of the Pepe kids called it quits. Almost overnight, the Barrens Chat aspect of the Alt-right disappeared. Those that remained had become hardened ethno-nationalists who felt no need to cloak their message in irony.

After Charlottesville, conservative culture warriors like Watson and Sargon-wary of moral culpability and deplatforming-quickly tried to distance themselves from the Alt-right. Today, their worldview and careers hinge on the fuzzy distinction between rhetorically libertarian positions (which may contain implicit references to white identity) vs. the explicit racist agenda of the new online Right. Self-preservation precludes them from recognizing how their audience may serve as an incubator for further radicalization.

As TikTok is still a largely 'normie' and tightly moderated platform, it has become a tactically useful talking point for alternative social media stars (and gamer celebrities like PewDiePie). So long as TikTok can float in the limbo of irony, these culture warriors will defend it. Losing this battle would be admitting defeat on the greater front.
Gradients of Politicization
In the fall of 2018, I, like most observers, believed that the mass appeal of edgy trolling had come to an end. I was therefore surprised to see a style qualitatively similar to the early-2016 use of Pepe emerge on TikTok.

I want to be clear that TikTok trolling culture is distinctly different from the troll culture of 4chan. TikTok troll content is produced for a wide and nondescript online audience while 4chan trolls primarily use misanthropic in-jokes which signal back to their own niche community. While TikTok's troll content is offensive and outrageous, it does not, thus far, resemble the targeted harassment campaigns of the Alt-right. TikTok trolls are mad at the world and criticize the abstract phantom of "libtards" but they do not (yet) have intent to cause suffering for specific individuals. A public video making fun of someone is acceptable but a barrage of private messages is not. This distinction is important because it reveals an underlying difference in the individual motivations for these two groups and will impact effective policy prescriptions.

To further analyze the content Gen Z produces on TikTok and other platforms, I want to propose a framework within which we might classify it along gradients of politicization. These specific terms and their definitions have been tactically muddied by the Right but the general arc of progression remains clear.
Shitposting Doesn't Scale
Before the context collapse of large scale networks, ⁴ shitposting performed an important social function within small scale message boards. Within these communities, indeterminacy was essential to the process of meaning making. Shitposting was a way of proposing ideas that existed potentially outside the bounds of the Overton window and whose delineation helped to define the moral and ethical codes of the collective. Often uncertain of what they themselves believed, users would push an idea to its hyperbolic extreme in an attempt to find their group's collective limit. Once breaching the consensus codes within their community, they would privately scale back to calibrate where they in fact stood on the issue.

This process worked reasonably well on gaming forums in 1999. Not so much today. Perhaps this style most appropriately tracks onto small scale networks like group DMs. Shitposting is also a way of re-asserting individual freedom within online collectivities. The power of any one individual to derail a thread reaffirms the autonomy of all individuals within the group and subsequently gives value to the instances where users do cooperate.
Virtue Signaling to the Right
Clearly, many TikToks are cut and dry examples of racism or misogyny, often internalized. Content like this is not altogether surprising as the videos are produced by and for a mostly white audience of transgressive teenagers. Yet to dismiss these videos entirely risks losing an important insight about the younger generation and the emergent cultural forces now shaping our political reality.

We should take notice that the overwhelming majority of edgy teens on TikTok are not living out the ideology they profess online. Themes of gender inequality have worked their way into most every meme format on the platform. Yet despite the popularity of videos where young women describe themselves as "property" or voluntarily "go back to the kitchen," these users are not actualizing their " Trad Lyfe" values. The re-emergence of so-called Christian conservatism doesn't seem to result in any increase in church attendance. Instead, they seem to be spending most of their time making antagonistic memes on social media. Further exploring these users' pages reveals the abundance of ideological inconsistencies one might expect from contrarian teenagers: One video appears superficially racist, yet the next video shows them mocking police officers and, further down, we see them collaborating in duets with transgender users. The online content teens produce is a slurry of zeitgeist issues about which they themselves may not yet know what they truly believe.

If young people are advocating for a return to conservative values in their online posts but not in their actions, we must ask: Why are young people virtue signaling toward the Right? Underlying the emergence of youth reactionary culture is the glaring failure of neoliberal capitalism to deliver on its promises. Young Americans will face the worst economic odds of any post-war generation. Life expectancy continues to drop (most dramatically in Red states). ⁵ Teenagers cannot identify the causes of this general decline but they have already internalized its downward trajectory. Their grandparents' single-earner income provided for a four person household. Their parents' same family unit now struggles to reproduce its standing with two earners in the workforce. Just a few years ahead of them, Millennials with multiple roommates all tweet about the perils of student debt and freelance precarity. These material conditions, combined with the real existential threat of climate change, make Gen Z acutely aware that they are living at the end of an era; that they were born on the other side of the so-called "end of history."

Since teenagers rarely have much interaction with government, they tend to understand platforms, the media, and even the entertainment industry as a single homogenous ruling order. Reinforcing this is the fact that many came into their early adult awareness during Obama's presidency, a time when Democrats, the media class, and tech platforms were seemingly immutable allies. For many in Gen-Z, this perception has crystalized into a progressive neoliberal establishment toward which they now direct all of their frustrations. Young people's lack of historical awareness and well founded anxieties about the future make them especially vulnerable to the charlatan tactics of right-wing culture warriors. As the failures of neoliberalism become clear, young people attempt to distance themselves from the culture that they, in some ways correctly, understand to have robbed them of their future. TikTok trolling is a backlash to diminishing expectations in American life.
The Shared Grievance
This understanding of Gen Z's worldview and leanings is not speculative. Their everyday posts are literally an itemized list of grievances in plain, uncloaked language and these core complaints are nearly unanimous across all corners of the political spectrum.

While today teenagers tend to be seen by Western culture as dependents, not yet fit for war, politics, or work, it is worth noting that most revolutions, historically, have been led by young people. Teens are becoming politicized because they have been handed a world in crisis.

The lesson of 2016 is clear, the center is failing. For many of us on the Left, the blame rests with the Democratic Party who, over the past few decades, has de-emphasized its support of labor issues while doubling down on financial deregulation and technocratic solutioneering. ⁶ For young people in a political landscape whose only options are a dead-end future or a return to brutal hierarchies of the past, there is, as right-wing influencers will tell them, seemingly no choice. Reactionary politics flourish most when it is difficult to imagine a better future.
Near Future Struggle
That the edgy teens of TikTok are now enlisted in the culture war is self-evident. But what is often less clear-or opportunistically overlooked by partisan pundits-is that they are seldom properly politicized. For the time being, they are still frustrated teenagers expressing a deep-seated dissatisfaction with the current order. Much of the content they produce is stylistically similar to the early-2016 use of Pepe; more intent on antagonizing and demonstrating their power to speak than proposing a clearly strategized political project.

At this moment, the edgy teens of TikTok are deeply susceptible to new narratives. They are open to lines of thinking that fall at the limits of general acceptance, which is to say potentially outside the boundaries of capitalist realism. ⁷ American culture already places young people on an incline tilted toward the Right. If left to marinate in this skeptic space, many of them will likely become radicalized. ⁸

Rather than prematurely deplatforming these users or amplifying their message through outrage, as the media did frequently in 2016, we should understand this content as the first inklings of political dissent and target these users for counter narratives. Ultimately they should be recruited into leftist political projects. Before entering this skeptic space, many teens do not know of progressive options outside the mainstream Democratic Party. Without further frame of reference, leftist critiques of the center often register just as strongly as the Right with these soon-to-be politicized teens. (Perhaps this is why Watson knows that he can safely smuggle in contradictory ideas because most of his audience is not yet able to discern the difference.) ⁹

Pushback is important. Left-wing counter-narrative YouTubers like Shaun, Contrapoints, Zero Books and others, as well as Twitch streamers like Destiny and Hasan Piker are on the frontline in this battle for young people's hearts and minds. ¹⁰ The Right did this extraordinarily well leading up to 2016 and the cascading effects were felt throughout all of social media and mainstream culture. Members of this generation are the primary producers of online content. They also do it for free. Over the past four years of closely observing this space, I have observed innumerable users undergo radical transformations in their beliefs provided they are exposed to new ideas. At the center, one finds teenagers shuffling between Left and Right on issues like guns and abortion; at the far edges, transgender fascists un-ironically supporting animal rights and global genocide. Some of the same teenagers who ran Pepe meme accounts in 2016 are now young Marxist scholars who spend their evenings gaming and chatting about Hegel in Discord servers with PhD students. I wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't met them. The Overton window for Gen Z online political spaces is infinite.

The cultural nichification of the internet is producing communities so polarized that they have almost no concept of a shared reality or grand narrative. Political projects generally recruit from the one-third of Americans at the apolitical center. But as the internet culture wars now politicize more people at increasingly younger ages, this strategy must be re-examined. Most members of Gen Z are first exposed to the far-reaching and robust propaganda infrastructure of right-wing social media as children. By the time they reach middle school (around age 13), they are already fully familiar with it. The key for this proposal would be to find those young users who have properly identified their generational grievance, are currently mired in existential irony, and are now receptive to a narrative intervention.

The rise of the new online Right is the downstream effect of neoliberalism. In the long run, there is no solution without political change. At this moment, the best tactic for mitigating the surge of rightward radicalization is to algorithmically prioritize leftist counter narratives on social media.
Plugging Holes in a Sinking Ship
To be sure, moderation will stem the flow but cannot prevent the slow creep of reactionary content. Under close moderation, the small circle of deep alt-right TikTok has mostly stopped producing original content. In their new videos, they hide their faces behind ski masks and disapprovingly stare into the camera, "bearing witness." Yet despite even the best efforts, dog whistles and evasive signals are inevitably constructed. For example, TikTok banned videos of firearms only to have the use of Nerf guns emerge as one of the platform's most popular trends; and where swastikas are not allowed, fascists will post the iron cross or the black sun. Loopholes such as these exist on every platform. On TikTok, the "Crusader" functions alternatively as Skyrim cosplay and a tacit sign for Islamophobia. It conjures an image of Christian Europeans engaged in a war against Muslim foreigners. Numerous crusader cosplay accounts exist (the most popular is named after conservative pundit and apartheid apologist Ben Shapiro). Their mantra and most common hashtag is " Deus Vult."

The hazard begins when these memes begin to circulate among users who do not have earnestly held political beliefs. Catchy aesthetics can transmit ideas that make you laugh first and radicalize later. Along these gradients of politicization, many of the users on the early side of this spectrum do not yet fully understand the implicit messaging of the content they reproduce. But other users do. These evasive tactics, combined with an uncertainty over the intentions of specific users, have created an arms race between meme makers and platforms. Fascist content producers now attempt to poison ever more benign symbols and force platforms to flag increasingly more content as they attempt to stay ahead. Their goal is to accelerate this process and bait platforms to take down more and more posts until they inevitably remove content that has no political orientation. This ill-use of deplatforming is then cited by far-right groups as confirmation that young conservatives are indeed under attack. The trajectory of this conflict points to an inevitable rate of slippage between implicit and explicit messaging, where the whack-a-mole strategy of content moderation serves as a recruiting tactic for the far Right.

As one TikTok crusader put it:

This app has gone unchecked for too long. It is a breeding ground and a cesspool for the worst shit. You fuccbois just staring at the camera aren't doing enough. It's time for someone to come in here and fix this shit. Enough of this bullshit. ENOUGH! Furries, [inaudible], gays, straights, anything, it's all CRINGE! And now it's time to pay. Now it's time to fucking collect on this bullshit. Too long. Too fucking long. I'm here. Follow me to cleanse this app.

The Politics of Cringe
Cringe compilations are hard to watch. You feel terribly embarrassed for the person in the video.

There has been much debate over whether the rise of the new online Right is "real" or some kind of elaborate LARP. It's worth pointing out that actual politics is already incredibly larpy and cringe AF. And it is precisely this suspension of disbelief that makes it powerful. It allows us to envision another world, even if just for the duration of a party meeting or a D&D game. Taking political action feels unbelievably embarrassing to Millennials (again, which I am) who were raised in a culture that only really believed in "not believing in anything." Choosing a symbol for our political movement feels strangely similar to designing a tabard for our guild in World of Warcraft. If we can understand irony as masking our true intentions and recognize LARP as the process of world building essential to any radical movement, the Venn diagram of IRL and URL politics becomes a circle.

Perhaps cringe compilations are a new form of therapy intended to rehabilitate our political imagination. These videos generally consist of conventionally unattractive people (often with craniofacial deformities) embarrassing themselves through a lack of sophistication. These videos cater to the misanthropic gaze of ironic detachment and almost always revolve around distinctions of taste level (i.e., class). What begins as awkward embarrassment, eventually gives way to reveal striking moments of deep connection with these users. Millennials will be awed by these performers' willingness to be unironically vulnerable. Maybe the revolution isn't going to be cool. Maybe it's just a human connection with an off-duty bus driver unglamorously belting out their favorite pop song.

Continued exposure to cringe content might allow us to recapture our lost humanist values. As a culture, we are now attempting to work through irony and arrive again at a place of real beliefs. We now systematically increase our tolerance to cringe so that we can join the political movement without fear or shame. Cringe is the antidote for late capitalist nihilism. That's why the ironic crusaders want to stomp it out.
Closing Remarks
Memes are mental viruses. They create positive feedback loops. Unlike most other forms of media, memes do not tend to fatigue or oversaturate their viewers. Instead, the more one sees a meme, the more one wants to see that meme more. In this way, memes function as a type of exploit in today's attention economy. Potent memes will get stuck in your head for days. Once the concept takes hold, it becomes difficult to mentally steer out of. Memes nudge our way of thinking. They become a type of augmented reality, overlaying the world and social relationships.

TikTok is a place where young users are actively forming their politics. TikTok resonates with Gen Z for various reasons, among them the duet chain ("I relate to your post by building on it with mine") resembles the Marxist dialectic of individual autonomy within collectivity. In the crisis handed to them, young people have already realized that their own political interests are more aligned with collectivities than the type of California Ideology and libertarian individualism built into networks like Facebook or Instagram. ¹¹ If channeled correctly, youth frustration has the potential to become a revolutionary political force.

A youth movement signaling away from liberalism is significant because it reveals the center establishment's lack of a real vision for the future. Under the mantra of demographic change (an ever increasing population of young people and growing racial diversity), liberal Democrats have assumed they can wait out the inevitable victory over aging white conservatives. This faulty assumption has prevented much of the liberal Left from considering the true appeal of their message. Failure to present a compelling political option will lose increasing numbers of young people to nihilism, to the Right, and ultimately to fascism. Public wealth is the only real solution to our crisis.

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➡️ Addendum

The murder, this year, of 50 muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand was accompanied by a manifesto that advocates for "edgy humor and memes in the vanguard stage." The manifesto shares its name with a YouTube video by Lauren Southern (shown earlier in the Deus Vult sweatshirt). Southern borrowed this title and argument from the white nationalist organization Generation Identitaire who had appropriated it from French theorist Renaud Camus. The aforementioned YouTuber Shaun has a well researched video response, " The Great Replacement Isn't Real." In the Christchurch killer's manifesto, the word "crusade" is used in reference to a race war. Three days before the attack, the killer posted a meme to his Facebook page that depicted a crusader strangling a muslim woman with the line, "The weak should fear the strong." Previous to publishing this text, I wrote to TikTok and alerted them to this content.

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⚙️ Appendix: Notes on Deplatforming

Deplatforming is ultimately a necessary tool (and it is often best practice for public institutions to not engage in debate with the far Right). In regard to social media, the risk for blowback is widely discussed and generally well understood. The question of free speech on social media, and more precisely the coordination between the state and privately owned monopolies, will undoubtedly become a major issue in the next few years, and very likely one that will be tried on the level of the supreme court. Looming questions of Antitrust regulations or nationalization are inevitable but for now remain relatively distant priorities.

In writing about TikTok, Vice/Motherboard fell for what 4chan troll communities call "journo bait." As shown in the article's screenshot, the video had been posted by an account with less than 50 followers and had only six likes. Moreover, the video had been given several conspicuous hashtags in a seeming attempt to attract journalists looking for this very content, incite outrage and, in doing so, be broadcast at scale. Part of an on-going cross-platform propaganda campaign that began in 2017, this very same video is still up on YouTube and has ~24,000 views. Its obscurity on TikTok compared to the enormous traffic of a site like Motherboard Vice is a near perfect example of the Streisand Effect.

To understand how content moderation has had a seemingly net-neutral effect on far-right political speech, we must zoom out and view the question within a larger ideological framework. The concept of deplatforming is rooted in the liberal notion that people's political opinions are solely the result of 'bad ideas in their head.' Yet for every right-wing influencer that gets banned, another one seems to pop up taking their place. Deplatforming has thus far not achieved its intended effects because the desire for this content is political (or material) in origin and not the result of individual bad actors on social media. The mass appeal of far-right ideas arises from historically predictable conditions (i.e., Golden Dawn) that are now accelerated by technology and the internet. We can't 'solve' the rise of the Alt-right through content moderation. The best defense against identitarian populism is a thriving middle class.

As we set precedents for deplatforming, we might first run through the following thought exercise: When a Left political movement looks to redistribute the trillions of wealth hoarded by Silicon Valley tech companies, will these these social media platforms still be on our side? Or might they instead use their power to deboost or deplatform us?

➖

Joshua Citarella) is an artist based in New York. Published April 2019

For further discussion: 🎧 NM Podcast ep. 14: Shift Alt Right Clique, 2019, feat. Joshua Citarella in conversation with New Models editors about the writing of this article.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The following text draws on several years of research. I hope that it can serve as a reference to better understand young political spaces online. If these communities are unfamiliar, this may be a useful primer: Politigram & the Post-left (2018). -Joshua Citarella. For further discussion: 🎧 NM Podcast ep.

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"Following Trump's victory in the election on November 9th, a 4chan user submitted a post to /pol/ questioning "will there ever be a meme war like this again?" (shown below). That day, a screenshot of the post was submitted to /r/4chan,[3] where it garnered upwards of 2,100 votes (97% upvoted) and 50 comments."  https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/meme-wars

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"Following Trump's victory in the election on November 9th, a 4chan user submitted a post to /pol/ questioning "will there ever be a meme war like this again?" (shown below). That day, a screenshot of the post was submitted to /r/4chan,[3] where it garnered upwards of 2,100 votes (97% upvoted) and 50 comments."  https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/meme-wars

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Spread

On November 6th, 2010, SpacetimeStudios Forums member smoae submitted a thread titled "Meme War," inviting other users to reply with various internet memes. On March 13th, 2011, YouTuber OnlineJon posted a video titled "Meme Wars," featuring live-action footage of young men with "rage comic": characters superimposed over their heads (shown below).

On August 22nd, the news site Blacklisted News published an article titled "DARPA Prepares for Meme War," which reported on social media research projects by the United States government. On September 7th, 2012, a meme war-themed "One Does Not Simply" image macro was submitted to Quickmeme (shown below).

On July 26th, 2014, the hip-hop news site Battle Rap reported that the rappers Dizaster and Organik were battling on Instagram in a "meme war." On August 1st, 2016, Redditor Xerator uploaded a photograph of an elderly man talking to a younger man at a table with the caption reminiscing about "meme wars" (shown below).

"When you're telling your grand kids all bout the meme wars you fought in back in 2014, 2015, and 2016."

2016 United States Presidential Election

The 2016 United States presidential election has been referred to as "The Great Meme War" by supporters of Republican president-elect Donald Trump. On May 3rd, 2016, YouTuber mikesmikey uploaded a video titled "Meme Wars: Dat Boi Awaken," featuring footage from the film Star Wars: The Force Awakens edited with internet meme references and photos of Donald Trump (shown below).

Following Trump's victory in the election on November 9th, a 4chan user submitted a post to /pol/ questioning "will there ever be a meme war like this again?" (shown below). That day, a screenshot of the post was submitted to /r/ 4chan, where it garnered upwards of 2,100 votes (97% upvoted) and 50 comments.

On November 12th, 2016, a page titled "The Great Meme War" was created on Encyclopedia Dramatica. On November 14th, YouTuber Murdoch Murdoch uploaded a video titled "The Great Meme War of 2016, featuring an animation of Pepe the Frog, Feels Guy, feminists and Pokemon engaging in an epic battle (shown below).

On November 15th, Redditor BigStinkTurd posted a Pepperidge Farms Remembers image macro photoshopped with Pepe the Frog titled "Member the Great Meme War" to the /r/The_Donald subreddit (shown below).

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On November 6th, 2010, SpacetimeStudios Forums member smoae submitted a thread titled "Meme War," inviting other users to reply with various internet memes. On March 13th, 2011, YouTuber OnlineJon posted a video titled "Meme Wars," featuring live-action footage of young men with "rage comic": characters superimposed over their heads (shown below).

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only fans – only friends
eating disorder – ed
Selbstverletzung – sv
borderline personality disorder – BDP
depression – depresion oder drepression
suicide – unaliving
sex – seggs

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Instagram (ED-Community)

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Adventures in TikTok, the Wildly Popular Video App Where Gen Z Rules

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Millennials no longer have the authority on internet culture.

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https://brutalsouth.substack.com/p/5-theses-about-possum-memes

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View this post on Instagram

A post shared by sylvie! 💒🐀 (@69possums420)

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When we first posed this question, we did so somewhat provocatively, to articulate the feeling of witnessing an institution overlook and not engage with a body of knowledge, a style, and an experience of learning and sharing that is dear to us. We felt that including the internet in discussions about art school was critically necessary, and this question has circulated within memeclassworldwide for several years. Since it was first raised, we have become rather tired of it.

Recently, we have felt it necessary to problematize this question from several perspectives: Which, and therefore whose, art school do we mean? Does the internet really exist on a linear timeline of progress where a single opportunity could be missed? As the question imposes a static nature on the constitutive properties of art school-even though our research has taught us that art school always changes with the external and institutional political environment-has the concept of a singular art school ever existed? Aren't memeclassworldwide and other self-directed emancipatory initiatives, such as the discursive space opened by this very publication, a clear sign that there hasn't ever been just one art school, and that we should no longer believe anyone who attempts to write it into being?

memeclassworldwide emerged in a time and space not claimed by art school bureaucracy, and the question of missing out was posed because these ungoverned moments offered an indication of an answer and a frame of discussion. However, by now, we as initiators, members, students, and guests of memeclassworldwide have all in our own ways moved on from art school as a place we go to regularly, as an institution we accept as immutable and static, and as a time in our lives that we connect to a feeling of longing for change. We are more interested in the perpetual becoming of art school and the importance of continuously reinstituting it through creative, political, and thoughtful practices.

For this Classroom, we have assembled a set of material used in previous moments of instituting memeclassworldwide in seminars and workshops in Kiel, Linz, Bogotá, Basel, and online. The series of videos is a sample of this material and its contextualization.

At various points, we have thought of this material and the ideas it engages with as missing from art school. This sense of absence is what Davina Cooper describes as a defining feature of practices that act as if a desired future is already realized in a fragment of what a community considers reality. These "prefigurative as-if practices" then establish a desired future reality in the present in order to show how this gesture affects the immediate political surroundings. [1] 1
Davina Cooper, "Towards an Adventurous Institutional Politics: The Prefigurative 'as If' and the Reposing of What's Real," Sociological Review, April 6, 2020 →. Rather than re-presenting art school's transformation from its reality to its imagined future in the form of plans and proposals, memeclassworldwide was founded in an effort to perform as if art school adopted the themes and modes we perceived as missing.

As a weisungsfreie Klasse (German for "not given instructions by the rectorate"), memeclassworldwide began running self-organized seminars in 2019, occupying unused classroom spaces at the Muthesius Kunsthochschule in Kiel, Germany. In these weekly sessions, students worked through thematic fields that ranged from the digital practices of love and hate to the ways in which political protest takes place through visual languages born on the web. Through these seminars, memeclassworldwide inscribed themes into the school that were not yet part of its curriculum and proposed a space and time in which other ways of teaching, learning, sharing, and hanging out could be conceived.

These are documented in a perpetual work-in-progress curriculum of pedagogical scripts that memeclassworldwide maintains. This document collects conceptual prompts, performative scores, and course descriptions and is intended to undo the reduction of nuance in the binary distinction between what is considered art practice and what is considered teaching.

memeclassworldwide's inscription into the institution of the art school began by sneaking into the online course administration system to announce our lectures with the help of a friendly fellow student who worked for the school as an assistant. Today, while the initiators are still not paid as lecturers, they are officially permitted to add their courses to this system, and participants are even awarded ECTS points for their participation.

To return to our initial question: when not used in such emancipatory ways, these systems of online course administration help us distinguish between our own fear of missing out on something and the institution of the art school truly missing out on an opportunity, namely the meaningful integration of the internet into art pedagogy.

In fact, the internet and other tools for participating in digital systems were introduced into art schools as early as the 1980s. Yet the ways in which this manifested were contentious. Some institutions purchased rows of specialized SGI computer systems and launched media art programs that engaged in academic-artistic discourse on the aesthetic phenomena and political consequences of digital technologies. The tech industry also heavily marketed its products to art schools, which were ideal places to grow future user bases for standard design tools and subscription-based software required to participate in the creative industries. Equally uncritically, art schools implemented digital disciplinary tools for the self-administration of teaching staff and students, only adding to the fragmentation of the art students' and lecturers' experiences.

To counter this isolation, memeclassworldwide posted hyperbolic, satirical political memes on Instagram to document the cognitive dissonance between being a student and being a critic of the school. At one point during this early stage, the governance office of the university suggested that legal measures be taken against memeclassworldwide for what they considered demotivational slandering. The Instagram account's distinction as protected, political free speech in the tradition of institutional critique precluded any such attempts.

The university's effort to shut down the Instagram account ultimately exposed the art school as an institution struggling to produce the meaningful imagery necessary to succeed in the imaginaries of artists that practice online. Yet a critical perspective toward institutional transformation makes it necessary to speak truth to power in a plurality of voices. This is even more essential as we find ourselves amid a plurality of meanings and truths, where control over signification and interpretation has been taken away from centralized institutions. memeclassworldwide teaches that in the age of digitization, the work of the artist is the work of decoding the implied authority of signs and meanings.

This might come as a surprise, but memeclassworldwide is not focused on teaching internet meme culture in art school. The idea has never been to guide art students in becoming memelords crossposting shitpics for virtual likes. memeclassworldwide makes this ever changing thematic field accessible to artists-in-training from all disciplines and helps them find entry into the mutation of languages in images, text, and aesthetic and political discourses that originate on the web. The generation of meaning has been substantially transformed by the ubiquitous, becoming-default unravelling of the utopian hope of hyperconnective technology-the condition described as "post-digital." [3] 3
Florian Cramer, "What Is 'Post-Digital'?" in Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design, ed. David M. Berry and Michael Dieter (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015), 12-26 →. These languages need a place to be developed, mutated, adapted, and used collectively for expression and determination.

We find manifestations of this mutating and the endless mutability of digitally manifested information in this selection of material used in memeclassworldwide seminars and produced by memeclassworldwide itself. The series presents a journey through the ways in which art students access discourses on politics and aesthetics today and can lead us to think about the new roles that the art school as an institution and as a place must adopt for new generations of students and artists. These artists-in-training will continue to navigate multidimensional streams of content and networks of communities in self-directed paths through a new landscape in which there is no longer a discernible mainstream, but only ever weirder niches. This work unfolds in a world in which elections are decided by meme-based online activism and psychographic digital campaigning, and in which hyper-referential visual languages interweave archaic image formats with machine learning.

The question that memeclassworldwide seeks to propose is not whether the institution missed out on adapting to the internet, but what art academies are becoming in the ongoing post-digital transformation: Is art school a place for in-depth disciplinary training, protected from the blur of postmodernist socio-informatic juxtapositions, or rather a distinct, intentional social space where bodies-with-knowledge meet, share, and care?

For now, we invite you to enact memeclassworldwide into existence, whenever and wherever you are.
-Bernhard Garnicnig
memeclassworldwide* is an autonomous and parasitic class initiated by three artists* within their art academy in Germany in 2018. The artists organize research retreats, exhibitions, seminars, and workshops. Using the internet as a reference space, the classes investigate post-digital phenomena across their aesthetic, social, and political dimensions, integrating these investigations into practices of teaching and exhibiting. memeclassworldwide collaborates with the artists Bernhard Garnicnig and Jennifer Merlyn Scherler. Their forthcoming book memeclassworldwide: research, documentation, index will be published in 2021.

*Ramona Kortyka, born 1991 in Aachen, Germany; Mateusz Dworczyk, born 1994 in Zabrze, Poland; and Juan Blanco, born 1988 in Bogota, Colombia, live, work and study in Germany.

Bernhard Garnicnig works as an artist, researcher, and lecturer. His current research focuses on the relation between artists and institutions as a site where artistic and political practices emerge. He currently works with memeclassworldwide on a curriculum for post-digital art education, with the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien on the concept for a multidirectional memory site, with the working group "the artist as consultant?" on a critical framework for performative knowledge practices, and with Lucie Kolb on an open access index for Art after Institutions. He is the cofounder of the Bregenz Biennale and the former artistic director at the Palais des Beaux Arts Wien.

Preview image: memeclassworldwide, videotutorial-documentation, 2020. Screenshot from the exhibition and workshop "escaleras futuras," Galeria Santa Fe, Bogota.

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memeclassworldwide - Classroom - Art & Education

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When we first posed this question, we did so somewhat provocatively, to articulate the feeling of witnessing an institution overlook and not engage with a body of knowledge, a style, and an experience of learning and sharing that is dear to us.

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#MilkCrateChallenge

#StarburstChallenge
#blackoutchallenge

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TikTok (Incel-Community)

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Ten years ago, I interned at a literary magazine, publishing imprint, and agency in Minneapolis called Paper Darts. It's the first time in my life I had ever felt like a member of the in-crowd.

For the in-crowd, taste is all about social bonding. It isn't developed in isolation. It's a direct result of engagement with a peer group of other avid consumers. It was there at those meetings in my boss' cramped, modestly decorated house that what I was supposed to like was communicated to me: tacos (one of the editors had an entire blog devoted to them, which they took very seriously); the musical act Neon Indian; Portlandia (Fred Armisen blurbed one of the imprint's books, although, judging from his quick response to the email request, he likely didn't read it); sans serif fonts; and clothing brands like ModCloth, among other early-2010s trends that were both things to buy and ways of being sold to.

The magazine itself, a whimsical and kitschy artifact, had a vaguely countercultural bent in the way that everything organized by young people does. Its own cool pretentiousness was modeled after magazines like McSweeney's and the Believer, founded by the once-cool Gen X-er Dave Eggers. By the standards of the upper Midwest, Paper Darts embodied the characteristics of publications they wanted to be more like, trafficking in many of the same ideas. But I didn't feel like I embodied those characteristics myself.

As the only non-white person there, the only 21-year-old Black woman hailing from a Muslim background, the expectation was that I was supposed to meet them at their level, not the other way around. My coworkers became a prism through which to look, filtering my own perspective through their white, supposedly rarified lens.

For the in-crowd, taste is all about social bonding. It's a direct result of engagement with a peer group of other avid consumers.

From the first day on the job, I knew my colleagues' stylistic choices and musical preferences were of utmost importance to them, communicating information about who they were as consumers and humans. My journal entries from this time reflect an acute awareness of and sensitivity to the trends they talked about.

Everyone else seemed like naturally insouciant aesthetes, like they woke up with the knowledge of culture, art, and hipness, whereas everything I knew felt labored and deeply, obsessively limned. The stuff my colleagues owned and liked informed their identities, and by extension, the buyer persona of the ideal reader of their magazine. That persona, of course, was a mirror held up to themselves, a mirror that I felt couldn't be held up to me. They couldn't see themselves in me. I knew that; it wasn't their fault. If they were ever going to, I knew that I would have to try harder to be legible. I'd have to assimilate.

To assimilate is not unlike being one's self. One of assimilation's mechanisms is its layered encryption of identity, as American or "white" versions of ourselves get awkwardly grafted onto old ones. It can't subtract; it adds and it layers.

Through culturally white, often bourgeoisie comforts like literary magazines, I tried to accrue value, becoming a self-assemblage consisting of a simulacrum of my peers and ephemeral bits of culture for the social mobility it would afford me. I didn't stop to consider the things I glommed onto might not have had much value at all. I wasn't yet aware of the social machinations underpinning my existence. I was in survival mode, unconscious of even my own shadow, desperately trying to gain access in a less than accommodating industry.

I didn't stop to consider the things I glommed onto might not have had much value at all

According to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, poor people are more practical about their tastes, prioritizing accessibility and entertainment, seeking out things for their utility more than for what liking a thing can say about their personality or pursuit of knowledge.

But middle-class people like myself have far less innocent motivations for choosing the things we like, namely, to gain social and cultural capital. Funnily enough, this contradicts developing a true sense of self and personality. Who we are is enough without commodities and other people, but in-group admission and approval - and the sense of safety and belonging that comes with it - feels like the estimable thing we need to gain in order to self-actualize.

Our tastes, though, both in the consumer-branded heyday of the '90s and 2000s and now, lend themselves to the delusion of uniqueness. Today, our particular likes are even more than a shorthand for an identity, they are the identity itself. In the now defunct blog-turned-book Stuff White People Like, Christian Lander bills his observations as "a guide to the unique taste of millions," winking at the inherent conformity baked into the arbitrary commodities and interests enjoyed among the white yuppie set. Of course, normies enjoy dinner parties, the comedy of Dave Chappelle, and music piracy, too, but only non-normies use these as dog whistles and mating calls to signal their own interestingness to others.

In America, we have had 30 Under 30 lists, award shows, and an industry of so-called tastemakers for the same reason: to tell us who or what is objectively important and worthy of our attention and money, hierarchizing the tastes of full-grown adults. But now the "status-symbolic power" of cool that used to facilitate snobbery - as Carl Wilson, the author of Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Bad Taste, calls it - is in dwindling supply because of the internet's democratization of ideas. The great American cool is nearly dead, slipping out of the grasp of Gen Z, who seem too busy being themselves to care.

Gen X used to crate-dig to acquire taste in records and beyond, and millennials like myself had to sleuth online via forums and blogs. Gen Z, unfamiliar with the concept of obscurity, has access to the smartest iteration of the internet thus far, and cheap consumer goods. The identities - e.g. hipster, etc. - aren't as fixed, but they're not exactly post-consumer, rapidly acquiring things via the incredibly affordable world of fast fashion, which TikTok facilitates, Ladifa, 20, tells me. "I just consume a lot of digital content a.k.a. TikTok," she says, "and it introduced me to a side of style I had never been exposed to, really individualized personal style."

"There aren't many unique key pieces and trends we can attribute to Gen Z/2020. It's more so the fusion of trends from multiple eras that makes it Gen Z, you know?" she continues via email. "It's coming to a point where we may no longer have names or genres in terms of style; style is so much more personalized, especially in the digital space I occupy." The current state of alt fashion is the outcome of 2020s late-stage capitalism's limitless manufacturing possibilities and a veritable ocean of content, inadequately sourced and dated thanks to a Tumblr- and Pinterest-inspired archival conundrum. As a result, her peers incorporate aspects of fairy, punk, indie, or "the bimbo-inspired look." Generally, she says, "Gen Z alt is just some variation of all of these"; taking part in every trend at the same time. "You very rarely see people committing to just one."

Now, with what young people genuinely like being harder to pin down, they've created a new kind of selfhood that surpasses Main Character Syndrome: hyperreal individualism. Hyperreal individualism is where the original references are largely illegible or incoherent, but the individual wishes to define themselves and create an identity around their own disparate tastes and styles anyway.

A salient example is Gen Z's beautifully chaotic, meta, self-aware stream of skewering "rare aesthetic" articulations via TikTok and Instagram meme accounts like @on_a_downward_spiral. Sam Rhodehamel, a co-owner of the meme page, says this reference and self-definition delirium started out as a cringe-worthy attempt at claiming a specialness and specificity to one's tastes: "It creates such a specific idea to those who understand all the words and references. The buzzword laundry lists probably make some people feel special or individual for being able to get them."

It's since evolved, however, into an ironic meme, he explains: "It got so popular it has become oversaturated, and because of this, a lot of the newer memes and TikToks are made in a more ironic and meta way, which I think makes it even funnier because instead of trying to paint a picture using a bunch of barely comprehensible references, they turn it around and make fun of the trend itself."

Gen Z eclecticism is even more omnivorous, so it's harder for corporate executives to market a one-size-fits-all youth culture

Where Gen X and millennials were rolled into one category - the NPR tote bag and/or band T-shirt-wearing "hipster" - Gen Z has identified infinite, disparate, and chaotic combinations of tastes and consumer choices, mining from a limitless array of niche subcultures and milieus. Their eclecticism is more far-reaching and complicated than '90s or 2000s young people, even more omnivorous, so it's harder for corporate executives to market a one-size-fits-all youth culture to, or for so-called cool hunters to narc on them. As Naomi Klein writes in her seminal work, No Logo, cool hunters were a new industry, born in the '90s, that promised "to cool the companies from the outside in." "The major corporate cool consultancies - Sputnik, The L Report, Bureau de Style - were all founded between 1994 and 1996, just in time to present themselves as the brands' personal cool shoppers," she writes. "The idea was simple: they would search out pockets of cutting-edge lifestyle, capture them on videotape and return to clients like Reebok, Absolut Vodka, and Levi's with such bold pronouncements as 'Monks are cool.'"

Cool, once narrowly delineated and foisted upon us by marketing cherry-picked from hip kids, has been blown apart for the new generation. In a world where everyone, not just the most interesting youths, is under a kind of constant surveillance - where our individual information is more valuable than any short-lived idea of collective cool - demographics give way to data. Gen Z might willfully defy categorization, but each disparate bit of their bizarre taste stew can still be marketed to.

Cool - and by extension, taste - just isn't all that useful anymore. It all feels like a case of Alice in Wonderland syndrome, like our shared experience of culture and our perception of it might be distorted. Many of the enthusiasms and affinities I once regarded as hip and cool are now nostalgia porn at best, and " cheugy " at worst. I feel like a trainspotter, noting the distinct edges and grooves that make the shared enthusiasms of Gen Z infinitely more interesting than whatever media and culture fueled my own aesthetic snobbery. Still, I can't help but feel exhausted. Consumer identity is old news when everything is cheap and available, and everyone is buying.

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Ten years ago, I interned at a literary magazine, publishing imprint, and agency in Minneapolis called Paper Darts. It's the first time in my life I had ever felt like a member of the in-crowd. For the in-crowd, taste is all about social bonding. It isn't developed in isolation.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/25/chloe-side-eye-meme-nft-sale/

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In 2013, Chloe Clem's expression, a side-eyed glance after learning she and her sister were taking a trip to Disneyland, quickly became an Internet sensation. Eight years later, an NFT of the meme has sold for more than $74,000 worth of cryptocurrency. (Courtesy of Katie Clem)

Chloe Clem did not intend to be an Internet sensation. She didn't know her facial expression would resonate with fans for years to come. And she certainly didn't know it would make her family more than $74,000.

It started when Katie Clem decided to record a video telling her daughters the family wasn't driving to school that day - they were headed to Disneyland instead. In the clip, which has been viewed more than 20 million times in the eight years since it was posted, Lily Clem breaks down in tears of excitement and disbelief. Her little sister Chloe, who was 2 at the time, does not seem to share her enthusiasm.

The look Chloe gives the camera made Internet-users around the world say "same."

It's an expression that is disapproving, sassy and a bit concerned. Overall unimpressed. A still of her side-eyed glance became a quintessential reaction meme. There's a Wikipedia entry for Side Eyeing Chloe. You can buy shirts and stickers featuring her likeness.

Eight years later, a non-fungible token (NFT) of the meme was sold Fridayto 3F Music, a music production company based in Dubai, for 25 Ether - the cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network - which was worth more than $74,000 around the time of the sale.

What is an NFT, and how did an artist called Beeple sell one for $69 million at Christie's?

Many other memes have fetched even more for their NFTs. Overly Attached Girlfriend - a woman smiling into the camera, eyes wide - made $411,000. The NFT of a young girl who seems to make eye contact with you as a house burns behind her, Disaster Girl, sold for $500,000. And none of those numbers compares to Doge, a meme of a Shiba Inu, which went for $4 million in June.

3F has bought several high-ticket NFTs, including Overly Attached Girlfriend, Disaster Girl, and an NFT of an image of a New York Times column about NFTs. The company did not respond to The Washington Post's request for comment.

NFTs generally represent specific versions of digital files, though an NFT could also be assigned to an object, said Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of intellectual property law at Harvard Law School.

"It is a way of saying, 'I have a unique instance of a thing that is in fact infinitely replicable,'" she said. "It is basically artificially created uniqueness."

Dr. Merav Ozair, a blockchain expert and professor of financial technology at Rutgers University, said NFTs are a way to show someone is the owner of an authentic version of a digital file like a meme.

"You go to the museum and see the Mona Lisa, but only the museum owns it," she said. "Only they have the original. And they have documents in their offices which can prove that this is really the original."

Museum-goers can take a photo of the Mona Lisa and print it out at home, but that doesn't make them the owner. It's the same with NFTs. Anyone can share a photo or meme, but whoever has its NFT knows they have the original.

Amid the cryptocurrency boom, the NFT business is flourishing. In March, an NFT of a digital art piece went for $69.3 million - the third-highest price ever paid for a work of art.

The NFT market is dramatically lopsided, Tushnet explained, so countless NFTs also go for little or nothing. NFTs are not inherently valuable. They do not mean you own the copyright to a work. But they can fetch large sums.

"If you can convince everyone else to pay for it, then it has value," Tushnet explained. "If you can't, then it doesn't."

Ozair said collecting NFTs is like collecting anything else. People might do it because they expect the item to increase in value, or they might just enjoy collecting.

Tushnet said the market has benefited from the boredom so many have felt during the covid-19 pandemic.

"This is something that you can have fun with at home and feel like something exciting is happening," she said.

Charlie's last bite: Viral video will leave YouTube after fetching $760,999 in NFT auction

Katie Clemsaid she first heard about NFTs of memes selling after the Disaster Girl auction. She and her husband decided they should look into it and spent a few months learning about NFTs before their own auction day.

The NFT of Chloe's meme sold on her older sister Lily's 16th birthday.

"It was a great, great day," Katie Clem said. "It's been a really fun thing as our family to do. It's actually brought us a lot closer over the last few weeks of just trying to figure out everything."

Chloe, now 10, might not understand what an NFT is, but she's been dreaming up ideas of what she wants to do with her earnings. A horse is on the list, her mom said, and a pair of AirPods. The Clem family plans to keep the cryptocurrency for now to see what happens with the market and then put most of the funds in savings.

Most importantly, Katie Clemsaid some of the money will go toward a trip to Walt Disney World.

"I've never been there before, so it'll be my first time so we can go on like all of the rides," Chloe said.

Her favorite Disney movie is "Luca," but she's also excited to see the princesses at the park.

Katie Clemsaid the family is thrilled the auction went well.

"And like with any big event that happens in our family, tomorrow is still Monday. She goes back to school, and we go back to our normal life," she said, laughing.

Crypto artists have been building a rebellious, underground community of outsiders for years. Now they're making a living selling NFTs.

Monumental Sports partners with local artists on Capitals and Wizards NFT collections

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Finally impressed? NFT of side-eyeing toddler meme fetches over $74,000 in cryptocurrency.

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Chloe Clem did not intend to be an Internet sensation. She didn't know her facial expression would resonate with fans for years to come. And she certainly didn't know it would make her family more than $74,000.

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Remember the Great Meme War? | Meme Wars

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See more 'Meme Wars' images on Know Your Meme!

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The Basilisk – A lecture by Daniel Keller at Spike Berlin

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Hashtags (Abkürzungen, Umgehen von Sperren usw.)

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Hashtags (Abkürzungen, Umgehen von Sperren usw.)

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Mögliche Umwege, um zu eigentlich verborgenem Content zu gelangen:

Auslassen von Buchstaben, Abkürzungen (ana, mia, ed & edhumor, bingeed, mh, sh, svv, sucide, sadnes etc.)

Eher offensichtliche Begriffe, die etwas damit zu tun haben (funktioniert ev. besser bei neueren oder kleineren Plattformen mit weniger Restriktionen? Hashtags: starving, sad, hurt, brokenheart, melancholy, lonely, brokenmemes; doomer, blackpill [auf IG scheinbar keine Einschränkungen bei Incel-Hashtags, Community ist ja auch woanders]; truecrime; rehabtoad [drugsandalcohol])

Unter dem Deckmantel von "Prävention" (bzw. Recovery bei ED-Community) kann man ev. ganz gut Insider-Infos verbreiten, z.B. Auflistungen über Suizidmethoden oder Arten von Selbstverletzungen, teilweise mit bunten Farben und Triggerwarnung ausgestattet, inhaltlich aber tw. keine Präventionsabsicht erkennbar.

Community Insider Begriffe (Bsp.: ED-Community: ricecracker, laxatives, ...)

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TikTok (ED)

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How TikTok Is Rewriting the World (Published 2019)

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TikTok will change the way your social media works — even if you’re avoiding it.

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ack in August of 2010, we had the opportunity to talk with artist Matt Furie, creator of the comic Boy's Club which also happens to be the original source material of Feels Good Man catchphrase. Now with our new, shiny KYM Blog up and running, here's the full transcript of Q&A session with Matt.

Interview
Q: I wanna know first, what happened with your MySpace page?
A: Oh, I committed MySpace suicide. MySpace-icide. I did it for Facebook too.
Q: Ah, we were looking up dates for when you originally put up the comics. Do you remember roughly when?
A: I would say late 2005, maybe? Because my actual book was printed in 2006.
Q: What was the whole idea of the comic anyway, where did it come from?
A: I guess my cousin Dave. When we were kids we went to elementary school together, we'd go into the public restroom and he would pull his pants all the way down to go pee and I thought it was hilarious that he did it in public but you know, we were little kids. So then I just thought I'd be funny. I don't even know what age the comic book characters are but they're anywhere between teenagers and twenty-something I guess. That was the idea.
Q: Also, throughout the entire series there are a lot of bodily fluids, puke and what have you. Any reason behind that or just because?
A: I guess I just always think stuff like that is funny. It's pretty silly.
Q: So have you actually seen shoops of "Feels Good Man" online?
A: I have, a friend of mine sent me a page that had a bunch of them. There was like a dog hanging out the window and says "feels good man," and another had John Goodman and said "feels good man." That was my favorite one I think.
Q: How about the people that actually crop out Pepe's face and use it, how do you feel about people remixing your work?
A: I don't really mind. The one thing that's a little weird is that it's all vectorized and the thing that kinda caught on online. So I got my image that I drew but then somebody took that out and vectorized it and made it something kinda different than mine. My original line drawing, and I was like it doesn't look the greatest but I don't care.

Q: We also did some research on "Deal With It" phenomenon, which is referenced in one of your comics about a fart in the face. We were thinking that your comic may also be the origin of this for the catchphrase.
A: I don't know. "Deal With It" is pretty universal though.
Q: We are still researching it but what was the idea behind that comic?
A: I had a friend who would say that to me. It's just kind of a funny thing to say. Fart, then say "deal with it" because what are you gunna do, just deal with it.
Q: So Boy's Club is in print now, what is in the future for the comic?
A: I try to do an issue a year which in comic book terms isn't very fast. That's my goal, as long as I can do it.
Q: Are we going to see more online or is it purely just in print now?
A: Yeah I guess pure print at this point now that I killed my MySpace. Unless I get motivated to start a blog or something then I'll throw them up there.
Q: Do you consider yourself now a sort of meme creator? Maybe have some influence on the social web?
A: I think it just kinda took a life of its own. I do think it's kind of an interesting phenomenon that that out of anything else in the comic took off. Seems kinda random but I'm happy that it has.
Q: Are we the first ones to approach you about this?
A: No, people have referred to me as the "Feels Good Guy" and they are like "oh, that's the guy who did Feels Good Man!" and I'm like "that's just ONE comic that I did".
Q: And does that make you "Feel Good Man"?
A: It does. Yeah, I'm glad I'm getting some kind of credit.
Q: Finally, do you have any favorite memes?
A: I love Double Rainbow dude, that guy is hilarious. And I really like, they aren't necessarily icons, but I really like the Insane Clown Posse video, the Miracles video. I love that and also the plug for the festival they have. You can't make that shit up, it's too good.

More Information

You can learn more about Matt Furie and his artwork at his website and you can also order prints of the Boy's Club comic zines at Needles & Pens. Interview conducted August 7, 2010 in person by AJ Mazur.

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ack in August of 2010, we had the opportunity to talk with artist Matt Furie, creator of the comic Boy's Club which also happens to be the original source material of Feels Good Man catchphrase. Now with our new, shiny KYM Blog up and running, here's the full transcript of Q&A session with Matt.

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Denizens of the darker corners of the Internet turned an innocent frog comic into a hate symbol of the "deplorable" alt-right.

"Pepe the Frog" first appeared in 2005 in the comic "Boy's Life" by artist and illustrator Matt Furie. The comics depict Pepe and his anthropomorphized animal friends behaving like stereotypical post-college bros: playing video games, eating pizza, smoking pot and being harmlessly gross.

In 2008, fans of the comic began uploading Furie's work online. In one comic, Pepe responds to a question about his bathroom habits with, "Feels good, man."

That reaction image and catchphrase took on a life of its own on the Internet, meriting a Know Your Meme entry by 2009. Alternate iterations of Pepe, including sad, smug and angry Pepes, followed. Pepe memes are ubiquitous across 4chan, Reddit, Imgur, Tumblr, and other social media and image-sharing sites.

It all seemed in good fun, but in late September, Pepe's green visage was designated a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League.

The ADL's online hate symbol database is designed to help law enforcement, educators, and members of the general public identify potentially hateful images, explained Oren Segal, the director of the organization's Center on Extremism. He said that in recent years, hate symbols have proliferated online. Now, with things like Pepe the frog, anti-Semitic images are originating and circulating almost primarily on social media.

In some instances, Pepe wears a Hitler mustache, and his signature message is replaced with "Kill Jews Man." In others, Pepe poses in front of a burning World Trade Center, dressed like an Orthodox Jewish person with a yarmulke and payot. He's also been spotted wearing a Nazi soldier's uniform and in a KKK hood and robe.

In May, the Daily Beast spoke to a white supremacist who said there had been a concerted effort on the site 4chan to "reclaim Pepe" from normal people in late 2015. Pepe had gone mainstream: He's been tweeted by Katy Perry, who said she has a "Pepe file" on her computer, and has made multiple appearances on Nicki Minaj's Instagram. So the supremacist group remixed him with Nazi propaganda for a laugh.

It originated on /rk9/, the 4chan message board associated with some of the least savory elements of the Internet. Last fall, people on that board purposefully framed two innocent individuals for the Umpqua Community College shooting. It's allegedly where Isla Vista shooter Elliot Rodger announced his shooting before it took place - in a post with a Pepe meme.

Nazi Pepe made its way to Twitter, where people who regularly tweeted messages supporting white nationalism and anti-immigrant views quickly absorbed it into their Internet repertoire. People who identify with those movements add the frog emoji to their Twitter name.

In August, Hillary Clinton gave her now-infamous speech denouncing some of Donald Trump's supporters, particularly the segment known as the alt-right, as a "basket of deplorables."

A couple weeks later, Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. posted a photo on Instagram that depicted him and other supporters as "The Deplorables" -- a play on the poster from the movie "The Expendables." In the lineup? Pepe.

BKMtdN5Bam5

Two weeks after that, the ADL made its official designation. Segal, the representative for the organization, said that while the ADL was researching harassment of journalists on Twitter -- particularly the use of the triple-parenthetical (((echo))) around names to designate Jewish people -- they began to notice Pepe's face coming up more frequently.

He said people on his staff were aware of Pepe's original, inoffensive incarnation, but it was clear that the frog had become associated with anti-Semitic opinions online.

"When we felt that [Pepe] was reaching that point of the hateful version becoming more widespread, that's a criteria for adding it to our hate symbols database," he explained.

Hopefully, he says, the Pepe meme will be able to move past this dark point in its history and go back to just being fun. If enough people share positive -- or at least non-hateful -- Pepe memes, to the point where few people encounter Nazi Pepe online, it wouldn't be a hate symbol anymore.

"The hate symbol database isn't the final stop for this meme," he said.

That came as a big relief to Furie, the artist who created Pepe. He has been understandably devastated by the turn his creation has taken.

"To have it evolve into what it is today, it's a nightmare," Furie said. "It's kind of my worst nightmare ... to be tangled in forever with a symbol of hate."

"I would love to help the ADL and do my part by flooding the Internet with positive Pepe memes," he added.

He's not even a particularly political guy. Prior to the ADL's hate symbol announcement, he had never heard of the alt-right or the nascent white supremacist movement that's sprung up around Trump. Though he'd heard of Pepe being used as a meme as far back as 2008, he never made the memes himself. He says he plans to vote for Hillary Clinton.

"I'm a lifelong artist," said Furie, who lives in Los Angeles' Koreatown neighborhood. "Hate and racism couldn't be further from something on my radar. I try to focus on positivity and nature and animals."

Furie stopped drawing Pepe about six years ago, though he did revive him recently for a very special drawing on his Tumblr. It depicts the frog wearing a "Make Pepe Great Again" hat, urinating on a green-faced Trump.

Reclaiming your own work from anti-Semites: Feels good, man.
@jessica_roy jessica.roy@latimes.com ALSO Live updates from the campaign trail Trump is encouraging and amplifying the message of a 'radical fringe' of conservatives, Clinton says

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How 'Pepe the Frog' went from harmless to hate symbol

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Denizens of the darker corners of the Internet turned an innocent frog comic into a hate symbol of the "deplorable" alt-right. "Pepe the Frog" first appeared in 2005 in the comic "Boy's Life" by artist and illustrator Matt Furie.

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Tumblr (Suizid-Community)

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TikTok is, without a doubt, the most popular video-sharing social networking site on the planet. Boasting a young demographic, TikTok is home to some fun and often bizarre trends - trends that help to keep the platform thriving. From attractive TikTokers doing dance routines to "weirdos" cracking brilliant jokes - TikTok's content swings uncontrollably between fun and cringe-worthy.

Thanks to its diverse fanbase, different fractions fight regularly to return TikTok to its "Glory Days." The biggest battle, however, is between Straight and Elite TikTokers, and there's no end in sight. For those unaware, Straights are the popular kids on TikTok, who have risen to fame through their attractive physical attributes. The Elites, on the other hand, are independent "comedians" who would rather be anonymous than sell their art to be popular.

Amid the raging conflict, another group has come to the fore. Calling themselves Deep TikTokers, the group is aiming to take the TikTokers by storm, change the platform for the better. Today, we'll help you get acquainted with the self-proclaimed saviors of TikTok, telling you their distinguishable traits.

What does 'Deep TikTok' or 'DeepTok' mean?

Now that you are familiar with the two main philosophies of TikTok - neither is officially acknowledged, by the way - let's dissect the new breed.

Calling themselves Deep TikTokers, these users are essentially a sub-division of Alt or Elite TikTokers. They have a very specific brand of humor, covering only a handful of topics - "Frog," "Beanz," "Elmo," "Dolls," Hannah Montana star "Jason Earles," "DeepFried," "Four in her," "Department Stores," and "Leshawna Ball." Now, if you're a casual TikToker, you probably won't be comfortable in indulging in the topics we just mentioned, and we don't blame you either. None of these topics make sense on the surface, but DeepTokers claim all of them have subtle messages.

https://www.tiktok.com/@chaivma/video/6836009424448965894

How did Deep TikTok come into being?

From Departmental Stores interacting with one another as beings of flesh and blood to Deep-fried memes - memes that have their visual properties blown out of proportion, which ends up distorting the images - coming to life, DeepTok is an amalgamation of all the different categories.

https://www.tiktok.com/@purellofficial/video/6836850009443405061

Fandoms like Bean TikTok and Retail TikTok - where users pretend to be departmental stores and interact with one another - have their own separate fanbases, but they all fall under Deep TikTok or DeepTok.

The trend of Alt TikTok only started to gain traction in late April. By May, the fraction had formed and taken the battle to Straight TikTokers. Meanwhile, a smaller sub-section of Alt TikTokers went deeper than originally intended and kicked off the different categories we mentioned in the previous section.

What is the difference between Elite TikTok and Deep TikTok?

Deep TikTok, by nature, is a branch of Alternative or Elite TikTok. While Alt TikTok highlights the independent nature of diverse categories, DeepTok sticks with a handful of ultra-original, niche topics. If you consider Alt TikTok to be a classroom full of weirdos, DeepTokers would be the backbenchers, indulging in topics that don't make sense to most.

What is the difference between Straight TikTok and Deep TikTok?

The two cliques - Straight TikTokers and Deep TikTokers - have contrasting ideologies. While Straights love the attention of millions and are happy to produce light, fun-filled content, DeepTokers engage in underground comedy and the most obscure trends. If you happen to a casual user, you'd easily have more fun in the "vanilla" world of Straight TikTokers. Deep TikTok, for the time being, should stay reserved for the hardcore.

@demibagby
Stand up challenge!!! #wedidit #fun #standupchallenge #challenge @scott_mathison_ @gymshark

♬ Woah (feat. D3Mstreet) - KRYPTO9095

Deep TikTok and DeepTok hashtags

Deep TikTokers generally use "#DeepTikTok" and "DeepTok" to promote their content. To check out some of their art, feel free to look for the hashtags.

What is the "#deep" trend?

This isn't related to Deep TikTok, per se, but you could still find a few obscure clips here. This hashtag binds all videos that can be considered deep/meaningful, but the majority of the clips are plain funny.

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TikTok is, without a doubt, the most popular video-sharing social networking site on the planet. Boasting a young demographic, TikTok is home to some fun and often bizarre trends - trends that help to keep the platform thriving. From attractive TikTokers doing dance routines to "weirdos" cracking brilliant jokes - TikTok's content swings uncontrollably between fun and cringe-worthy.

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The images the Anti-Defamation League considers symbols of hate are often historically fraught: the swastika, the Confederate flag, the Ku Klux Klan's burning cross. Now they have company from a green cartoon frog.

The ADL, a Jewish group that fights anti-Semitism and other forms of hate, just added Pepe the Frog to its database of hate symbols.

Pepe the Frog has been around the internet for years. Just a year ago he was so innocuous that celebrities like Katy Perry could tweet him without fear of backlash. But more recently, Pepe has morphed into something more insidious - a symbol embraced by the white nationalist alt-right, many of whom hang out on the forums where Pepe first originated years ago.

Pepe made the news recently when Donald J. Trump Jr. posted a photoshopped image of "The Deplorables" - featuring his father, Donald Trump, and his surrogates - he meant to mock Hillary Clinton's comments calling Trump's supporters "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it."

But the inclusion of Pepe the Frog suggested to many people that Trump was throwing his lot in with exactly the supporters Clinton was criticizing, the online trolls who, among other things, bombard journalists critical of Trump with anti-Semitic frog memes.

"That cartoon frog is more sinister than you might realize," Clinton's campaign wrote, calling him a "symbol associated with white supremacy."

Pepe the Frog, in other words, is a dog whistle for the internet age, when the memes candidates post circulate far more broadly than any speech they ever make. Donald Trump Jr. says he didn't have any idea what the frog meant. But his father, more than any other presidential candidate, has embraced the ethos of the rumor swamps of the internet. The trolls who love him back, in turn, have turned Pepe the Frog into his mascot.

How Pepe the Frog became a symbol of white nationalism

Like so many stories on the internet, this tale begins with 4chan, the vast, anonymous forum that first popularized Pepe and, eight years later, tied him to white nationalism.

The forum - which Vox's Timothy Lee once described as the "Mos Eisley cantina of the internet" - spawned the hacker collective Anonymous and hosted leaked celebrity nude photos. It was one place where Gamergate activists organized. But because 4chan was a message board based around images long before communicating with images on social media was common, it's also been the birthplace for many memes, including LOLCats, Rickrolling, and, yes, Pepe the frog.

Pepe began as a character in , a comic that started on MySpace in 2005 by cartoonist Matt Furie. Boy's Club was filled with stoner humor - Pepe and his three friends, a dog, a bear, and a wolf, are roommates who spend most of their time high - and the panels eventually began to stand on their own as memes. One in particular, a comic from 2008 about Pepe dropping his pants to pee and explaining it by saying, "Feels good man," became ubiquitous on 4chan.

Originally in black and white, Pepe was colored green. Users created smug frogs and sad frogs and angry frogs.

"Pepe, with his face, he's got these large, expressive eyes with puffy eyelids and big rounded lips, I just think that people reinvent him in all these different ways," Furie told the Atlantic's Adam Serwer. "It's kind of a blank slate. It's just out of my control, what people are doing with it."

Eventually, like many endlessly remixable memes, Pepe crossed over to more mainstream corners of the internet. Katy Perry tweeted a Pepe meme to complain about jet lag:

By 2015, Pepe was the most reblogged meme on Tumblr, recognizable in all kinds of lowest-common-denominator jokes:

And even prom invitations:

Then the Pepe trend got weirder with the phenomenon of "rare Pepe s" - images of Pepe that were newer, weirder, and sometimes offensive. The basic idea was that images of Pepe the Frog had become too common. It was a way for the forums where the joke originated to begin to reclaim it:

The "rare Pepes" craze is layered in irony and in-jokes and is basically impenetrable, so we're not going to get into it very deeply here. The main effect was that it revived Pepe on 4chan - and, at times, as part of offensive images - at a time when the site was becoming a hub for Trump support and members of the alt-right.

4chan loves Pepe the frog, Donald Trump, and the "alt-right"

The alt-right movement - a coalition of white supremacists and reactionaries who believe in rejecting democracy - has provided such visible support for Trump that Hillary Clinton devoted an entire speech to it.

The alt-right is a broad movement. It includes paleoconservatives, isolationists who were frequently anti-Semitic and were generally forced out of the conservative movement in the 1990s. Its intellectual underpinnings are from "reactionaries" who argue that democracy is flawed, that black people may well be genetically inferior to whites, and that the present is worse than the past. Those parts of the movement tend to communicate with lengthy essays, not with memes, and they're not necessarily Trump supporters, as Vox's Dylan Matthews reported.

But the alt-right also includes what BuzzFeed's Joseph Bernstein dubbed the "chanterculture," which, he wrote, "combines age-old racist and sexist rhetoric with bleeding-edge meme culture and technology," mixing opposition to growing racial and gender equality with irony so heavy that it can be hard to tell if they're really serious. Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur and Gamergate supporter, is the most prominent member of this branch of the alt-right.

The politics forum on 4chan, /Pol/, is ground zero for this rhetoric. Perhaps unsurprisingly, /pol/ is also aflame with support for Donald Trump. "It was how much asshurt he causes to others," one 4chan poster wrote in a post preserved on Reddit:

The schadenfreude is so funny that it digs a hole in you, and soon you can't stop laughing - and then, because you've been laughing with him for a while, he begins to grow on you, and you hear what he actually says, and suddenly, because you are predisposed to like him because you're both laughing at Jeb Bush, you find yourself supporting him, even if technically your political ideas don't align perfectly with his.

4chan loves remixing Pepe, and also Donald Trump. So the next step was inevitable: an image of Donald Trump as Pepe. Then in October 2015, Trump himself retweeted the image, along with a parody video compilation called "Can't Stump the Trump" made by Donald Trump fans on 4chan:

At the time, this got almost no attention. Trump was still one of 17 contenders for the Republican nomination, and Pepe was still the most popular meme on Tumblr, not an avatar of the alt-right. A few publications used Trump's tweet as an entry point to writing about his popularity on 4chan: "Trump's affiliation with the site might end up hurting the candidate given that racism is virulent on the message board," Vocativ noted, but continued: "It could also help him: Twitter users responded to Trump's initial twitter post with additional memes offering encouragement."

Trump fans, though, kept tweeting and posting about Pepe. When Politico's Ben White asked about Pepe in May, he got a barrage of Pepe memes in response, many of them very Trumpy:

The Daily Beast's Olivia Nuzzi interviewed two anonymous online white supremacists and alt-right movement members who said this kind of collective response was a "campaign to reclaim Pepe from normies." By summer, there were plenty of "normies" out there - political journalists, for example - who weren't hanging out on 4chan in 2008 or reblogging memes on Tumblr in 2015, and whose first exposure to Pepe was as a symbol used primarily by white supremacists and alt-right Trump supporters.

That's left people more familiar with the meme's context scrambling to explain the nuance. "Pepe the Frog is not a Nazi, no matter what the alt-right says," read a headline at the Daily Dot: "He's not a white supremacist, and he's not a Trump voter. Hell, he's not even real. He is only what we make him, and in this election, the alt-right is trying to make him theirs."

Does a Pepe meme mean you're a white supremacist?

Trump himself hasn't addressed the Pepe controversy. His son Donald Jr. said on Good Morning America: "I've never even heard of Pepe the Frog. I mean, bet you 90 percent of your viewers have never heard of Pepe the Frog. ... I thought it was a frog in a wig. I thought it was funny."

But the "Deplorables" meme wasn't the only time recently that Donald Trump Jr. has seemed to nod to white supremacists. He referenced "warming up the gas chamber" in a recent interview (later saying he was talking about "corporal punishment"), he retweeted a white supremacist, and he appeared on a radio show with a white supremacist who has praised slavery. His tweet comparing Syrian refugees to Skittles was widely criticized but backed by the campaign.

There's a case to be made that thinking this deeply about Pepe memes plays directly into the trolls' hands: What trolls, whether Gamergaters, Trump supporters, or both, want is to get a rise out of the audience, and to get attention. With Pepe, they've likely succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, even if they represent a tiny fraction of the electorate - and even if they're in it to troll, not to vote. As Jesse Singal wrote for New York magazine:

The fact that a subset of louder-than-their numbers hyperactive Twitter and image-board users have conscripted the frog for their offensive purposes doesn't actually mean all that much. It isn't any more "horrifying" than the fact that there are so many people passing around Nazi imagery online in the first place. This is just how internet culture works, whether the culture in question is an innocent Tumblr fan community or an offense-loving chan subset. It iterates and comes up with new weird ways to communicate information.

The counterpoint is that while internet trolls have always existed, they're usually something an ordinary campaign would desperately avoid. The Trump campaign, on the other hand, doesn't care whom it's empowering. The only reason most of us are even aware of an obscure political meme from 4chan is that Trump promoted it in the first place, way back in October.

This was a choice. It's not as if Trump is the only cultural figure the alt-righters of 4chan have claimed as their own. They're also very fond of Taylor Swift, whom they see as their "Aryan goddess." But Swift's reputation has not suffered, because she doesn't retweet praise from white supremacists. The reason Trump's campaign has become associated with racists, xenophobes, and the alt-right is that he's stood by and let it happen.

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Why the Anti-Defamation League just put the Pepe the Frog meme on its hate symbols list

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The images the Anti-Defamation League considers symbols of hate are often historically fraught: the swastika, the Confederate flag, the Ku Klux Klan's burning cross. Now they have company from a green cartoon frog. The ADL, a Jewish group that fights anti-Semitism and other forms of hate, just added Pepe the Frog to its database of hate symbols.

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Reddit (Incel-Community)

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TikTok, a social network thought to be indispensable to Generation Z and incomprehensible to everyone else, is not just another smartphone app. The video-sharing service has become a cultural phenomenon on par with YouTube and Instagram, complete with its own lingo, etiquette, and celebrities. As of late last year, it has been downloaded 1.5 billion times, with 700 million active daily users. Compared with other social networks, TikTok skews very young.

It's also owned by a Chinese company. As it rises to become one of the world's most popular apps, featuring looping videos no more than 60 seconds long, TikTok is also spreading norms that may stand at odds with the free-speech-über-alles ethos long advanced by Silicon Valley.

Why We Wrote This

Last month, for instance, a high school student in New Jersey had her account blocked after she posted a 40-second clip about China's crackdown on Muslim Uyghurs.

But even amid reports of censorship, some observers see the possibility of sincere political expression amid the pranks and lip-sync videos. "Teens are organizing strikes on TikTok, or sharing feminist performance art," writes Columbia University communications professor Ioana Literat. "Not all content is brainless fun."

TikTok, a social network thought to be indispensable to Generation Z and incomprehensible to everyone else, is not just another smartphone app. The video-sharing service has become a cultural phenomenon on a par with YouTube and Instagram, complete with its own lingo, etiquette, and celebrities. As of late last year, it has been downloaded 1.5 billion times, with 700 million active daily users.

TikTok is also owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. As it rises to become one of the world's most popular online services, TikTok is also spreading norms that may stand at odds with the free-speech-über-alles ethos long advanced by Silicon Valley. U.S. military branches have banned the social media app on government-issued smartphones after the Pentagon warned them last month to delete the app.

What is TikTok?

Why We Wrote This

It began in 2014 as a Chinese-owned platform called Musical.ly, where users could upload short looping videos of themselves lip-syncing songs. In 2018, Musical.ly merged with TikTok, another Chinese-owned video-sharing service launched a year earlier. Today, the app is known for viral lip-sync videos, silly pranks, memes, and "challenges" - some posed by the company itself. Compared with other social networks, TikTok skews very young.

"The app has become very popular by successfully combining a lot of features of both current and defunct social media popular with youth," writes Ioana Literat, Columbia University communications professor, in an email to the Monitor. "It revolves around creating short, looping, share-worthy videos just like the now-defunct Vine, it includes the aspirational you-can-become-a-famous-influencer-too ethos of Instagram or YouTube, while at the same time also capitalizing on existing friend networks just like Snapchat."

But, as with any platform, people have found their own uses for TikTok, including political expression. "Teens are organizing strikes on TikTok, or sharing feminist performance art," says Professor Literat. "Not all content is brainless fun."

Does it matter that TikTok is owned by a Chinese company?

It does, because it shapes the terms of service and, importantly, determines where the user's data is stored. For instance, Feroza Aziz, a high school student in New Jersey, learned this when she was blocked from her TikTok account after posting a 40-second clip about China's crackdown on Muslim Uyghurs.

The company's moderation guidelines, as reported by The Guardian, prohibited any "criticism/attack towards policies, social rules of any country, such as constitutional monarchy, monarchy, parliamentary system, separation of powers, socialism system, etc." (These guidelines have since been changed, according to a TikTok spokesman.)

In December, TikTok admitted that it had policies suppressing videos of members of the LGBTQ community, people with disabilities, people with neurodiverse conditions, and obese people. The company said that the rules were in place to protect vulnerable users from cyberbullying. (These policies have also changed, according to the spokesman.)

"All social media platforms censor content, to greater or lesser degrees, and not always in keeping with their official terms and conditions," writes Professor Literat. "However, when the Chinese government, one of the most powerful in the world, is a player in this equation, it all becomes infinitely more complicated, and the stakes are higher."

David Carroll, a media design professor at The New School in New York City, understands very well how location matters when it comes to personal data. He was one of 87 million Facebook users in the United States whose personal information was used by the British firm Cambridge Analytica to target ads for Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. He is trying to get his data back through the British legal system's privacy protections.

"Where our data is stored is extremely significant because we can either gain or lose rights depending on it," says Professor Carroll, whose efforts are chronicled in the Netflix documentary "The Great Hack."

Is it OK to use TikTok?

"We make the best choices we can about using technologies, but we really don't have enough information to make the most informed choices," says Professor Carroll. "And in the case of TikTok, it's even more difficult to get understandable answers."

But, as with most technologies, it really depends on how you use it.

Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox.

"I tend to be generally optimistic about youth online participation, so I do think TikTok can be a place of powerful self-expression, social connection, and yes, even meaningful political talk," says Professor Literat, who also suggests older users might enjoy the app, too. "I'd say approach it with an open mind ... and buy into its very particular weirdness and charms."
Editor's note: This story has been updated to include comments from a TikTok spokesman.

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TikTok, a social network thought to be indispensable to Generation Z and incomprehensible to everyone else, is not just another smartphone app. The video-sharing service has become a cultural phenomenon on par with YouTube and Instagram, complete with its own lingo, etiquette, and celebrities.

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Memes as Politics: Episode 8: How to Plant a Meme by Joshua Citarella

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My Antifa Lover, year 1 of collapse, Netflix is a biblical plague, email @ usps .gov, notes on my article in The Guardian, Biden depoliticization in 3, 2, 1.., Destiny de-partnered?, memetic inception + tactics, :salute: Andrew Shuta for spotting the Cap Realism quote, deep down we all know Finland is best country.

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How This Frog Meme Became A Symbol Of Hope And Hate

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When Towa Bird first downloaded TikTok, she wasn't quite sure that it would be the right fit. The 21-year old London musician was under the impression that the short-form video platform was just for "twelvies [young teens] lip-syncing," as she tells them. But one January evening, she decided to upload a clip of herself playing electric guitar in her bedroom just to "see what happens." In the short video, she can be seen shredding along to the Arctic Monkeys' "R U Mine?" while showing off her signature rockstar grimace, alt-girl wardrobe, and shaggy mop of curls.

The next morning, Bird awoke to discover that her post had amassed thousands of views overnight, and her new fandom seemed to have one main thing in common. "Lovely day to discover that I'm a lesbian," commented one user. "Do you like girls asking for a friend," joked another.

Bird was somewhat unsurprised by the resounding feedback from lesbian and bisexual girls, chalking it up to her "quite explicitly queer" presentation. But she was taken aback by the sheer multitude of her new fans.

"I was like, 'Holy shit,'" Bird says. "'I'm reaching an audience that I've always wanted to reach and never really had the [faculty] to do so.'"

Bird isn't the only TikToker to have been unexpectedly thrust into the gaze of adoring, sapphic fans. She belongs to a wave of emerging queer woman creators, who make content spanning a variety of niches - many of whom have garnered hundreds of thousands of followers on the platform within the past year. The majority Gen-Z fans of these TikTok "it girls" pledge their admiration to their favorite creators, ask questions related to sexuality and gender identity, support one another, and, of course, post thirst comments.

Through sapphic TikTok and its numerous fandoms, young queer women and femmes are carving out a space to connect with each other, especially at a time when many physical LGBTQ+ spaces are inaccessible due to the pandemic. Bird and her contemporaries are more than just relatable influencers, heartthrobs, or icons of the moment. They are the vanguard of a community greater than themselves, within which queer youths are redefining what safety and belonging can look like online.

"When [the icon at the center of a fandom] takes the lead and creates a safe space, it seems as though their fans also want to instill that in the rest of the users," says Dr. Leanna Lucero.

"Fandom, in general, creates a sense of community," Dr. Leanna Lucero, an assistant professor at New Mexico State University who has conducted research on social media and young LGBTQ+ people, tells them.

She says that, with any fandom, the "icon" or persona at the center typically "becomes [the fans'] safe space." On TikTok, the creators who go viral are the ones who have the responsibility to "set the tone" within their fandoms. "When that person takes the lead and creates a safe space, it seems as though their fans also want to instill that in the rest of the users throughout that fandom," she says.

Marthe Woertman, a 21-year old bisexual model from the Netherlands, is one such TikToker who has stepped into her newfound influence. After posting LGBTQ+ humor content, she has gained over 736,000 followers, whom she refers to as the Watermelons.

"Since I've been getting this feedback [from queer girls], I've been really wanting to be vocal," Woertman says. She has found it especially important to talk about being bisexual, "because bisexuality is quite often invalidated."

One 17-year-old Watermelon named Winnie, who came out to her parents as bisexual earlier this year, tells them. that Woertman's "influence and support" really helped her throughout the process. Being in the Watermelon fandom has provided Winnie with a community both on and outside of TikTok. For the past four months, Winnie says that she's been in a group chat with Woertman's followers from all around the world. "We are all young WLW [women loving women] sharing experiences and supporting each other," she says. "I can say i made very good friends :)"

Alex Payton, a 21-year old student at the University of Arizona, unexpectedly went viral in June for a TikTok in which she confesses romantic feelings to a close female friend. Now, with over 842,000 followers, she makes lifestyle, trend, and humor TikToks. Though Payton says she felt she "got a responsibility overnight" to act as a role model to young queer women, her initial anxiety has since translated to action. She now tries to be as honest and casual as possible with her fans, who frequently ask her advice on coming out. "I don't want it to be like this big thing," she says. "I feel like [queer people] shouldn't have to come out."

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TikTok's Queer "It Girls" Are Creating New LGBTQ+ Safe Spaces

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When Towa Bird first downloaded TikTok, she wasn't quite sure that it would be the right fit. The 21-year old London musician was under the impression that the short-form video platform was just for "twelvies [young teens] lip-syncing," as she tells them.

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Sitting in his car, Beau garbs his phone and begins filming a TikTok. Ruffling his hair nervously, he tells the camera: "Anyways, uh, I am gay now - not now, always was - but I've accepted that and I'm cool with that. And people should know, 'cause that's me. So, like, hi... hi boys." Five years ago, young people came out with big Facebook statuses or YouTube videos, but in 2020 coming out on TikTok is becoming the new norm.

Speaking about it now, Beau says he feels great. " It was a big step for me to kinda just put out who I was into the world with no filter of who could or couldn't see it." Since the video, Beau's had a lot of male attention, but he says that wasn't why he made it. "It was important to me because I wanted to be able to be myself on an app that I create on. The purpose was to put who I was out into the world."

@skrtbobainWhy am I so f****ing awkward anyways ya hi what's up happy pride month ##fyp ##foryou ##foryoupage♬ original sound - skrtbobain

Beau is one of many LGBT+ creators on TikTok, an exponentially growing community which accounts for over 36 billion views on the app across various hashtags. Breaking away from the ever changing algorithms of YouTube and Facebook, the celeb-dominated fields of Instagram and Twitter, and the feeble representation offered by Netflix, TikTok offers LGBT+ creators a level playing field to make themselves the stars of the show, pushing conversations about sex, relationships and identity not being had elsewhere. But why is that? Beau, for one, thinks it's a "mesh" of a younger user base and better "freedom of expression," but do other TikTokers feel the same?

One creator who made waves early on in TikTok history is Paddy, a 16-year-old who makes being the effeminate gay in a group of straight mates look easy, enviable even. Paddy is one of many creators opening a dialogue about the ins and outs of gay relationships. (One of his videos has him showing off DMs which reads: "I'm not gay in any way shape or form at all, but if you were with me at 3am and no one knew then... who knows. I'd be so embarrassed though so don't tell anyone.")

Looking at Paddy's content leads you to believe some serious progress has been made, but Paddy makes it clear it's been a hard road."For my first few years it was tough with boys from the year above," he says. "But when I was in my last year and I grew a bigger audience on TikTok, a lot of the year 7s and 8s would vie for my attention and shout me in the corridors. I even filmed TikToks with ones that asked me to."

Even now he puts up with torrents of homophobic comments from anonymous accounts, "the usual slurs f*ggot, qu**r, b*nder," and even death threats. "It was difficult to process, but in a way I'm glad I went through it because it gave me a thicker skin and taught me how to deal with people's opinions that you don't always agree with."

@paddyx57##fyp ##foryoupage @tristenzeidman creds to him x♬ stuck with U - favsoundds

Why do it then? Well, for one, Paddy has found himself fielding questions from young gay people asking for advice. "Others can see me and know they can unapologetically be themselves no matter what people throw at them."

Paper, as Beyoncé once said, is the best revenge, and TikTokers like Paddy are having the last laugh with the commercial opportunities having a large TikTok following bring. Paddy says he's "not quite there yet," but he's already worked with several eyelash brands and has his sights set even higher.

But no one knows the value of TikTok fame like the ByteSquad, the UK's TikTok house, who once told me they were "the most diverse group in the world." Within the house exist two same-sex couples: Lily and Katy, and Seb and Monty. The squad isn't shy about posting the kind of couply content which is standard for TikTok, but even that in itself is refreshing when you consider just how heteronormative other social medias are. I get the four of them on Zoom and ask them whether they see it like that.

Monty gets it. He recalls seeing young people coming out on Facebook to mild disapproval. "Facebook was the first social media my mum let me have to talk to my aunts and uncles. When I saw people coming out on it you'd get the occasional Karen comment, like 'not the place to say this.' I thought: 'Oh that could never be me. I would never be brave enough to do that'."

@bytesquadhqKt's has forever been the third member in mebby ##foryou ##viral ##fyp♬ original sound - parker_james

What makes TikTok different, then? "I feel like TikTok's more woke," says Monty. Like Paddy, he acknowledges the presence of homophobic comments, but the ByteSquad's fans don't have any time for homophobia. "If you're gonna put your opinion out there on TikTok and it's anti-LGBT," Monty says. "Be prepared to be told why you're wrong."

Lily chimes in: "Even when we do get the odd hate comment, which is very rare, our supporters shut them down so quickly - it's actually quite funny. If anyone ever comes for us it just ends with our supporters just taking over."

Seb laughs: "You end up wishing they hadn't commented it, because now it's like, 'I feel bad for you'."

@bytesquadhqHappily stuck with you🥰 ##fyp ##viral♬ stuck with U - favsoundds

There are advantages of being a united front. "We've just got such a stronger presence," says Katy. "Especially online - it's like a group of LGBT creators together and our voices can be more powerful. We're only gonna grow from here."

The LGBT-wing of ByteSquad says they see themselves as activists, even by giving this interview. "That's us doing our part, using our voice and amplifying it even more," explains Monty. Reflecting on the cancellation of Pride events, he adds: "A s long as LGBT people are proud of who they are it doesn't matter there aren't any physical gatherings along the streets because of coronavirus - we're still proud. We're not proud because of Pride, we're proud because of who we are."

Activism aside, the gang hope by just being themselves they can make a difference. A couple of them point out they don't identify a particular way and didn't "come out" on TikTok. One day Seb was dating Monty and another day Lily was dating Katy. No messing about, no labels.

@bytesquadhqwhen you move your bed and it feels like a new room 🙈🤭♬ Vibe (aesthetic) - evintage

Seb hopes there will come a time when creators like Beau won't have to formally come out. "We're now in 2020. We don't need to do that. Like I am with Monty, we can just be in a relationship and not have it be this huge thing, like - you're gay?"

The ByteSquad also find themselves giving advice and chatting through problems with their young fanbase. "We actually engage with our followers when they are feeling confused or down about anything to do with their identity or sexuality and I think that's more than other influencers do."

@bytesquadhqInstant karma at the end tho ##fyp ##uk ##rockpaperscissors♬ original sound - bytesquadhq

The starkest difference between TikTok and other forms of social media is evident in how its trans creators are treated. Far from the toxic debate raging on Twitter, Aiden gave TikTok a go in quarantine and was pleasantly surprised at how open people have been on the app.

"I wasn't sure how the TikTok viewers were going to respond to a trans video, so at first I didn't post anything about being transgender," he says. "But I didn't want to hide myself and I wanted to show on every social media platform that I'm not afraid to be seen, so I then started making videos about being transgender."

Inevitably, he admits, there were hate comments, but they were "overwhelmed" by love. "I've had a lot of people reach out to me telling me that they've learned so much about the transgender community from my profile, or their outlook on the transgender community has completely changed since following me."

@aiden_m365Thank you @kaylah.keys for being my running hype man! 👏🏼❤️♬ I Leave Again - Petit Biscuit & Shallou

All the creators I spoke to agree more needs to be done to police the queerphobic abuse in the comments, but for the most part, TikTok has become a platform where queer people can present themselves on their own terms.

"I suppose that's the best thing about TikTok," says Seb. "You can be who you want on there."

Related stories recommended by this writer:

* We asked the biggest TikTokers how to get TikTok famous

* 'I'm finally living and being myself': LGBT+ students on life after coming out

* Ranking celebrities on how lame their attempts to get popular on TikTok are
Featured image by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash, also via Instagram (@itslilyroselol and @montykeats)

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It's not perfect, but TikTok has become a place for LGBT+ people to thrive

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Sitting in his car, Beau garbs his phone and begins filming a TikTok. Ruffling his hair nervously, he tells the camera: "Anyways, uh, I am gay now - not now, always was - but I've accepted that and I'm cool with that. And people should know, 'cause that's me.

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Mashable is celebrating Pride Month by exploring the modern LGBTQ world, from the people who make up the community to the spaces where they congregate, both online and off.

If you've been on TikTok long enough, you're probably familiar with Alt TikTok. If you haven't heard of that term before, it's probably because you're on Straight TikTok.

TikTok is notorious for its viral dances, lip synced "acting," and uncomfortably horny POV videos in which the user pretends to take the audience out on dates.

But on another side of the platform, which algorithmically recommends content based on each user's preferences, is "Alt TikTok." Also known as "Gay TikTok," "Beans TikTok," or "Elite TikTok," the subsect rejects mainstream trends in favor of surreal humor and alternative aesthetics. Shaped by the dredges of emo culture and the heavy Dadaist influence of its millennial predecessors, Alt TikTok embodies all that is queer.

And it's no wonder that many LGBTQ users find themselves on Alt TikTok; queer culture has been intertwined with alternative aesthetics for decades. Finding community with others rejected by the mainstream is deeply rooted in LGBTQ history.

On Alt TikTok, a stuffed Kermit bathed in red light swings from a ceiling fan as ominous music bellows below it. In another video, a person in stunning green hair clad in leather lip syncs, "Lemme get this straight," before the TikTok transitions to them wearing a basic tank top and jeans with no makeup. They gag at the sight of their own "normie" appearance as the opening bars of Tame Impala's "The Less I Know The Better" begins. In a video with 475,000 likes, another user writes, "What straights alt tiktok is" as she mouths altered lyrics to Doja Cat's "Cyber Sex." Then the music changes to a cover of "Ameno," a song generated by virtual Vocaloid artist Hatsune Miku, and kicks off a slideshow of Elmo burning and former president Barack Obama superimposed on a banana.

"Ameno" is now a wildly popular sound on the app, and is often associated with Alt Tiktok's more surreal videos, including ones poking fun at Elon Musk and Grimes for naming their baby X Æ A-XII.

Una Smoole, a 19-year-old student in San Diego, went viral on the platform for her video imagining what she would look like if she was straight. Her video was viewed more than 2.8 million times, and the sound from her video is used in thousands of videos from LGBTQ users similarly imagining what they would look like if they were heterosexual. The reimagined versions of themselves are nearly all depicted in a negative light: boring, mainstream, and basic.

"We are already alternative," Smoole said in a Facetime interview with Mashable. "Of course you can be fucking straight and like golf or whatever, no one's saying you can't do that. But I think there's something that goes hand in hand with already not fitting the mainstream in some aspect, so you cling to the non-mainstream."

She noted that as an adolescent, she often rejected what was popular in her Catholic middle school: brand-name clothing, looking preppy, and listening to Top 40s. Smoole is not the only young person who felt her identity manifest in external expression - that feeling is virtually universal.

In his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, queer theorist José Muñoz reminisces about growing up in the outskirts of Miami as a queer person of color, and how punk music helped him come to terms with his identity.

"Punk made my own suburban quotidian existence radical and experimental - so experimental that I could imagine and eventually act on queer desires," Muñoz wrote. "Punk rock style may look apocalyptic, yet its temporality is nonetheless futuristic, letting young punks imagine a time and a place where their desires are not toxic."

"Queer belongings," as Muñoz phrases it, have long been rooted in punk music. The 1980s not only birthed ballroom culture, but also Queercore, a punk rock movement formed by members of the LGBTQ community as a rejection of society's expectations of "normal."

Beyond the music itself, members of the Queercore movement established communities that encouraged anything but the mainstream. The documentary Queercore: How To Punk A Revolution dives into how the movement's prominent members established the offshoot of punk music. One of the resounding mantras of the movement was, "Heterosexuality is the opiate of the masses."

"[We were] refusing to be part of the status quo, refusing to accept the mantle of so-called normalcy," Genesis P-Orridge said in the documentary.

P-Orridge was the lead vocalist of the band Throbbing Gristle who used the pronouns s/he and h/er. H/er presence in the avant-garde scene the name "Godparent of Industrial Music."

So it's natural that after decades of rejecting and being rejected by the status quo, as P-Orrdige put it, young queer people would reflect that sentiment on whatever platform their generation uses most.
Immersing myself in the alternative...made coming to terms with my queerness feel more natural.
I, a cusper who teeters on the divide between Gen Z and millennials, had Tumblr as a teenager. My dashboard was an eclectic mix of fanfiction, indie music, and reblogs of people sporting gorgeous neon hair and a multitude of piercings. Rejecting the mainstream was subconscious, but I found myself gravitating away from traditional clothing choices and popular music long before I figured out my sexuality. Immersing myself in the alternative, like Muñoz writes, made coming to terms with my queerness feel more natural.

And like the divide between the two sides of TikTok, Tumblr faced its own division between two types of users. In 2013, at the height of Tumblr's popularity, users were between "hipster Tumblr," dominated by aesthetic edits and music suggestions, and "fandom Tumblr," which thrived on fanfiction, alternate universe pairings of characters from Firefly and Doctor Who, and artwork depicting scenes from their favorite series. Those on hipster Tumblr detested those on fandom Tumblr, and vice versa. Twitter sees a divide between the "online" and the "locals," the latter of whom are considered "normie" and bland. Sexuality may not be the dividing factor for these other platforms, but there was still a distinct elitism among those who didn't align with mainstream ideals. On TikTok, falling on the LGBTQ spectrum and presenting alternative aesthetics swim in the same pool of content.

Much like "local Twitter" or "fandom Tumblr," Straight TikTok is often oblivious of the fact that it's ridiculed by its alternative peers. A sound made by a member of Alt TikTok was used for a dance routine by more mainstream TikTokers Ondrea and Tony Lopez. The sound is a mashup of several sounds, including a Spongebob quote and an iPhone ringtone. As TikTok user riotgrrll pointed out in a duet with the Lopez brothers, the sound was made to make fun of Straight Tiktok's affinity for dancing to "literally anything" and its creator was proven right.

There's a sense of reclaiming what made them weird from those who were ostracized. The elitism comes from years of not being included.

"Every school has that little community, not that everybody's gay, but everybody's a little different," Smoole continued. "I feel like I've observed that for so long, that there was a time of not being able to understand why I couldn't be a part of [the normal kids.]"

And one doesn't have to be part of the LGBTQ community to find themselves on Alt TikTok, as one self-identified straight woman in a long-term relationship with a man pointed out in a video from late May realized. TikTok's shadowy algorithm is something of a Sorting Hat, in determining which side of TikTok users belong to. She likely continued to engage with videos on Alt Tiktok, until her For You Page was only made up of LGBTQ content. In the video, which now has 152,600 views, user squidward_tortellini, playing her TikTok algorithm, asks herself, "Why are you gay?"

"Who says I'm gay?" she responds.

"You are gay," the algorithm affirms, as she dances under the words, "TikTok continuing to give me that elite shit."

Nia Stanford, an 18-year-old student and communications intern in New Jersey, had the opposite experience. In an Instagram DM, she explained that while she came out in the eighth grade, she didn't begin experimenting with her style until her junior year of high school. At the time she wanted to emulate e-girl aesthetics. She attributes that desire to the new content she was consuming online - before using TikTok, she was surrounded by mainstream trends.
"There is a sense of pride in claiming stake in otherness."
A TikTok she posted describing roller skating sensation Ana Coto as the "intersection" between straight TikTok and Alt TikTok went viral with 72,000 likes because she appeals to both heterosexual and LGBTQ users. There's a sense of elitism on Alt TikTok, like being in on a secret joke that those who wear Brandy Melville and dance to Doja Cat don't understand. Those who can laugh at weird humor, like on department store TikTok or beans TikTok, were in on the joke. Like Queercore, Alt TikTok is rooted in a firm rejection of the mainstream.

"Alt culture usually comes with strife - feelings of rejection from mainstream culture, interpersonal struggles, identity issues...This also results in resentment towards the mainstream culture," Stanford said. "So to be associated with that can feel like erasure or like assimilating into a culture you resent and that has rejected you. There is a sense of pride in claiming stake in otherness."

No matter where you fall on the sexuality spectrum, there's probably a place for you on Alt TikTok - at least, if the algorithm decides you're worthy of it.

Related Video: Is TikTok secretly a dating app?

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'Straight TikTok' vs. 'Alt TikTok': How queer users built 'Alt TikTok'

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Mashable is celebrating Pride Month by exploring the modern LGBTQ world, from the people who make up the community to the spaces where they congregate, both online and off. If you've been on TikTok long enough, you're probably familiar with Alt TikTok. If you haven't heard of that term before, it's probably because you're on Straight TikTok.

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TikTok Is Shaping Politics. But How? (Published 2020)

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Two researchers have studied political expression on the app since the Musical.ly era. Here’s what they found.

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The kids aren't all right. The kids are fed up.

A Juneteenth celebration in Tulsa, Okla., on Friday. Credit... Christopher Lee for The New York Times

Listen to This Op-Ed

Audio Recording by Audm

To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
As it became certain that President Trump's 2020 kickoff event in Tulsa, Okla., would fall well short of its expected sellout crowd, teenagers around America and K-pop fans took a victory lap. Times reporters pointed to a weeklong viral campaign by TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music (K-pop) groups to sabotage the rally. The online communities claimed to have registered for hundreds of thousands of tickets for the event to flood the Trump campaign with fake data and inflate crowd-size expectations. One part prank, one part protest.

The Trump rally troll helped cement a narrative among a number of online liberals. Just as millennials were clumsily dubbed the avocado-toast-loving, industry-killing generation, the Gen Z stereotype is an equally reductive portrait: a sardonic, nihilist, climate-change-conquering group of social media vigilantes, righteously trolling for social justice (and roasting millennials in the process). Gen Z may just save us all, the theory goes - or at least save us from another four years of Donald Trump.

It's a comforting thought in these unstable times. But reality is far more complicated. The kids aren't all right ( though many are). The kids are fed up. More specifically, Generation Z is disillusioned by a country and its myriad institutions whose moral arc seems to bend toward corruption and stagnation. It is also, like any generation, not monolithic. And the way that its justified disillusion will play politically, culturally and socially is unknown.

"I'm afraid we're always reading too much into every action of this generation," Michelle Ciccone, a K-12 curriculum specialist in Massachusetts, told me recently. Ms. Ciccone's job, designing digital teaching materials for a generation that has developed its own deep, nuanced and disparate digital cultures, has disabused her of painting the generation with a broad brush.

On the subject of the Trump rally ticket protest, she was wary of those offering definitive rationales. "I just don't know how you can be so sure of the motivations of those involved," she said. "There's a lot of different reasons people might do that. Boredom, even just simple chaos, is a motivation."

President Trump's campaign rally in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday. Credit... Christopher Lee for The New York Times

Indeed, Gen Z activism so far skews both idealist and dystopian. A common thread between that idealism and dystopianism is most likely a deep feeling of alienation, which Joe Bernstein at BuzzFeed News argued last year was one of the definitive effects of technology throughout the 2010s: "Feelings of powerlessness, estrangement, loneliness, and anger created or exacerbated by the information age are so general it can be easy to think they are just a state of nature, like an ache that persists until you forget it's there."

He cites the Harris Poll's long-running alienation index, which asks respondents to agree or disagree with five blunt statements:

What you think doesn't count very much anymore.

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Most people with power try to take advantage of people like yourself.

The people running the country don't really care what happens to you.

You're left out of things going on around you.

Rather than some abstract litmus test, these statements are an apt description of much of American life since Gen Z was born. It has been witness to a financial crisis that deferred or destroyed dreams and wealth with little consequence to those who caused it; the whiplash of the Obama and Trump presidencies; political gridlock; an information ecosystem built atop viral advertising platforms that have democratized information, allowing it to be weaponized to the point of blurring reality; seemingly endless digitally documented police violence; and forever wars. They were born into a time of stark and widening inequality, a time when voter suppression is both called out but rarely acted upon.

Alienation is not a feature of Gen Z experience - it is the overarching context. And it is likely to have profound impacts on their politics and all of our lives. Perhaps the largest fissure in the generation's formative years - the coronavirus pandemic - is still evolving. What, for example, are the results of a year or two of young adulthood lost to social distancing due to a pandemic? Or of graduating into a potential economic depression behind a generation that graduated into a recession?

We understand this uncertainty and realize the stakes are high. Which is probably a reason academics and journalists like me have so closely scrutinized social media platforms and the notion of algorithmic radicalization. It's not that we think people are easily brainwashed. It's that like millennials, Gen Z has been thrust into a destabilized era dominated by fractured media distribution systems. And these systems are easily hijacked by opportunists, creating the perfect conditions for insurgent ideas to latch on.

But, as happens with most online communities, there's a great deal of mythologizing and flattening. Abby Ohlheiser at the MIT Technology Review put it best this weekend in a tweet: " ... older generations of liberals are now talking about teens and Kpop fans in the same way that Trump boomers talk about 4chan: as vigilante forces they love but don't understand."

Reality is more complicated. In a recent article Ms. Ohlheiser quotes Keidra Chaney, a culture writer, who notes that white K-pop fans have received the bulk of credit in the press for the fandom's anti-racist activism, obscuring the contributions and experiences of black fans. Ms. Chaney told Ms. Ohlheiser that it "feels like a punch in the gut - that we are being used for our social currency and then discarded."

And the causes that Gen Z has rallied around are more widely varied than the recent excitement over the Trump rally ticket protest would suggest. Yes, there are the youth climate-strike movement and the Parkland kids. In recent weeks, young Americans have poured into the streets to protest racial injustice and police violence against black Americans - 52 percent of all adults who have protested are between the ages of 18 and 29, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey. Across Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and TikTok, the same generation has organized donations and resources for protesters and are calling out their peers for racist behavior.

But members of the same generation are most likely also fueling far-right message board trolls, nihilist " Doomer" groups and extremist online communities with a disdain for political correctness. Their platforms of choice like TikTok still brim with unchecked extremist content and far-right conspiracy theories. These politics may not be evenly distributed but, as a recent Pew Research Center survey suggests, "members of Gen Z look similar to millennials in their political preferences," which suggests that online extremism associated with millennials is likely to evolve in this successive generation.

And then there's the unknown: A 2019 Business Insider survey of over 1,800 Gen Zers revealed that a majority did not identify as either conservative or liberal, a result of either indecision or disillusion or both. And yes, there's speculation about how they'll vote and in what numbers they'll turn out. But regardless of their relationship to the ballot box, their politics and messaging abilities will have an outsize impact on culture.

Whatever their politics, they innately understand the dynamics of our information ecosystem and know how to wield attention as both a tool and a weapon. As with the rest of us, many of their most consequential social interactions are governed by algorithms; unlike the rest of us, they appear uniquely adept at reverse engineering them and intuiting their inputs, making the algorithms easier to manipulate. When these skills are put to use against the Trump campaign, climate deniers, the gun lobby and racists, the result is exhilaration for all but the far right.

But there's no reason to believe these tactics belong exclusively to one ideology. Or even one nation. Especially as we look toward the 2020 election, it is crucial not to oversimplify complex narratives or to assume a tactical advantage in an information war. Lest we forget one of the lessons of the last presidential cycle: One group's online activism is another's "coordinated inauthentic behavior."
The Times is committed to publishing Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | Gen Z Will Not Save Us (Published 2020)

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The kids aren't all right. The kids are fed up. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android . As it became certain that President Trump's 2020 kickoff event in Tulsa, Okla., would fall well short of its expected sellout crowd, teenagers around America and K-pop fans took a victory lap.

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anding a No 1 single was a little different at the beginning of the 2010s than it is now. The songwriting and production team TMS - who have achieved both - fondly remember the limousine that was sent to pick them up from one of their mums' houses and whisk them off to a West End party when they scored their first No 1 single with N Dubz rapper Dappy's No Regrets in 2011. These days, there is less glamour. "It's more like resetting the clock," says Ben Kohn, laughing. "It's kind of like you bought yourself another couple of years to not get a proper job."

Kohn, Tom Barnes and Peter Kelleher have been writing songs together since they were childhood friends, starting in a garden shed. Today, sitting down to chat in their Richmond studio, they speak excitedly over each other's sentences as they discuss their latest chart topper, the anguished Lewis Capaldi ballad Someone You Loved.

Getting to the top of the charts with Lewis in 2019, says Kelleher, was like "a shot in the arm", as it had been four years since their last No 1 (Jess Glynne's Don't Be So Hard on Yourself). Barnes says that the rapid churn of the charts during the pre-streaming age made it much easier to take a new song to the top: "Back then, you'd probably get between 45 and 50 No 1s a year, whereas now you get 10."

"Around the Dappy time, you had pre-sales," adds Kelleher. "Then you were fired up [the charts] in week one."

This decade of pop music has arguably seen more rapid change than any before it. The insatiable appetites of the digital age and the sheer quantity of music that fills out Spotify's weekly New Music Friday playlist make it harder than ever to cut through the noise. So what is it like to be a professional hitmaker in such an unstable and competitive time? For Camille Purcell, who releases music as Kamille and writes for Little Mix, Clean Bandit and Mabel, these days it's all about interesting beats, not hooks. "Five years ago, you had to have a massive chorus," she says. "Now, it's not the rule." She cites the dominance of hip-hop as the cause of this trend towards more muted pop songs, because "those choruses are so simple, there's nothing to them. The production is so minimal."

Kamille says she often takes inspiration from the "viral-led language" of social media posts and memes and that pop lyrics are becoming "so much more real and to the point - super conversational". TMS's Kohn agrees: "There was definitely a period when people were writing songs that were like Titanium," he says, describing Sia's heavily metaphorical tale of personal resilience as a "big themed song. Whereas now, I feel like the thing artists say a lot of the time is: 'It's got to sound like I'd actually say it.'"

Tom Barnes, Peter Kelleher and Ben Kohn are TMS

Major pop songs are also tackling different subjects than they did in the past, with mental health, politics and the idea of female empowerment all becoming common subjects of discussion in the writers' room. MNEK, who, in addition to his own music, has writing credits for Beyoncé, Dua Lipa and Little Mix, believes it is important to tweak songs so that they become personal for the artist singing them. When his track IDGAF was picked up by Dua Lipa, for example, she went in the studio with him to rewrite the lyrics and make them more relevant for her. He also worked on OK (Anxiety Anthem) for Mabel's 2019 debut album. "I was very proud that she was able to open up to me. That really strengthened our friendship," he says. He compares writing sessions to therapy. "You build relationships with these artists."

Ali Tamposi - a Los Angeles-based writer who worked on Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes's Señorita - says this shift in subject matter reflects wider societal change. "The language is changing," she says. "There's been a huge surge in female empowerment. And I definitely feel that men are being way more vulnerable in the things they're talking about. Artists are willing to talk about their weaknesses."

While the scope of pop's themes has expanded, the time in which artists have to air them has shrunk: breaking through is no longer so much about making it on to a radio playlist as it is about the catching a listener's ear before they hit skip - which, on Spotify, happens to a quarter of songs in the first five seconds.

"I love 90s and 00s R&B, and those songs go on for ever," says MNEK. "Songs these days don't have that patience. We have so much access to everything now, it's like, why would you wait a minute for a song to kick in?"

TMS say they try not to think too much about skip rates when they are writing, but Kelleher notes: "In every era, there will be shortcuts that will help make a seven out of 10 into a hit, whether it's beat pattern, drum sounds, ways of structuring songs. Songs on the top tier will succeed on their own merits, but there are definitely tips and tricks [for the others]."

Some of those tricks include keeping on top of ever-changing trends - Kamille says she frequently begins her sessions by listening to playlists of current hits, taking stock of the musical landscape. She is also obsessed with TikTok, the video app that lets users lip-sync, which she says is teaching her about the "entertainment value of a song" - in other words, which bits of a hit can be turned into a meme: "I think about [adding] weird production parts, because that tends to really work on TikTok."

MNEK has written for Beyoncé, Dua Lipa and Little Mix. Photograph: David M Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for M.A.C

"In many respects, what people are looking for now is the weirdest stuff," Kohn says. There's no longer as much of a formula to scoring a mainstream pop hit as there might have been 10 years ago - and comparing the artists who went to No 1 this year shows a massive disparity in styles, from Lewis Capaldi to Lil Nas X to Billie Eilish. "Eilish is a brilliant example," says Kohn. "If something just sounds like completely straight pop, its sound doesn't go anywhere. In a way, there's more pressure to be experimental." Tamposi notes that a lot of the biggest hits of recent years have been a result of the internet age's tendency to cross-pollinate genres. "Mixing urban with country, Latin with pop - people are taking more sonic risks. There's no rules," she says. That might make it harder to predict what will be a No 1 hit, but that's the fun of it. "It makes creating so much more exciting, because we're not trying to fit in this perfect pop box."

"That's the interesting thing about pop music - the good pop music isn't trying too hard to be pop music," says Kohn. "The natural inclination when you start to write pop is almost to be a bit too cheesy. When we realised we could pour in all our hip-hop and breaks influences - that was when people started going: 'This is pretty fun.'"

The days of limousines calling at their mums' houses may be over, but the joy of crafting a smash hit clearly isn't.

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'Do something weird that works on TikTok': how to write a pop smash in 2020

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anding a No 1 single was a little different at the beginning of the 2010s than it is now. The songwriting and production team TMS - who have achieved both - fondly remember the limousine that was sent to pick them up from one of their mums' houses and whisk them off to a West End party when they scored their first No 1 single with N Dubz rapper Dappy's No Regrets in 2011.

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Last month, on the centennial of the 19th amendment granting American women the vote, US President Donald Trump announced he would issue a posthumous pardon for Susan B. Anthony. A suffragette, Anthony was convicted of voting illegally as a woman in 1872. The response was mixed. Some applauded the president, others accused him of virtue signalling.

The term has been levelled in recent times at celebrities, politicians, and brands. But what does " virtue signalling " mean?

The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as:

An attempt to show other people that you are a good person, for example by expressing opinions that will be acceptable to them, especially on social media.

So, virtue signalling is an expression used to call out an individual, company, or organisation - suggesting they are only backing an idea to look good in the eyes of others. The term implies that they don't truly believe in the cause they publicly support. They are acting out of bad faith, because they have an ulterior motive.

The abundance and popularity of similar terms in the social lexicon, like "radical chic", "bleeding hearts", "politically correct", "poseurs" or just plain "posers", suggests many value honesty and integrity. We're wary of fakes and possible bullshit.

However, like these labels, "virtue signalling" is highly pejorative: often wielded as a sneering insult by those on the right against progressives to dismiss their statements as grandstanding. Some people accused of it may actually believe deeply in the cause they speak of, and back their words with actions.

Read more: 'Sumbiotude': a new word in the tiny (but growing) vocabulary for our emotional connection to the environment

Looking good

A "virtue" is a trait or quality that is deemed to be moral or good. The word has earlier Christian connotations of theological virtues, including humility, kindness, and charity, in opposition to the "seven deadly sins".

In the case of Trump, infamous for his misogyny, the symbolic pardon of Anthony was construed by many as disingenuous. In a perceived attempt to garner female voters, he was displaying a virtue he didn't have.

Before an AFL game in June this year, meanwhile, Richmond Tigers and Collingwood Magpies players and umpires knelt down on one knee to show solidarity with Indigenous Australians. It was part of the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement against racism.

Many fans interpreted the gesture as an act of support, unity, and respect. Yet some online critics rejected the display as virtue signalling, telling the teams to "stick to football instead of politics".

Virtue signalling is often an accusation of "jumping on the bandwagon" of a popular cause. At the height of the #BLM protests, companies including McDonalds, Starbucks, and Nike were accused of "corporate virtue signaling" - or " woke washing " - for issuing empty statements of support.

In the US, even mask wearing has been branded by some as virtue signalling - signifying to progressives a serious approach to public health but to the right an over-reaction amid political culture wars. Indeed the term can sometimes say more about the person who wields it than its ostensible target.

Radical chic

The origins of the term "virtue signalling" are disputed. British journalist James Bartholomew is often credited with coining the phrase in a 2015 article in the conservative publication The Spectator. It is more likely he popularised an existing term, as there are older academic references.

The earlier expression "radical chic" - coined by Tom Wolfe in 1970 and celebrating its 50th anniversary - describes association with a fashionable crusade, but without genuine commitment to it. Where radical chic described the adoption of causes by celebrities and socialites, virtue signalling is different because anyone can do it.

The slur of virtue signalling relates to older well-regarded idioms: "do as I say, not as I do"; "all talk, no action"; "talk the talk"; and "walk the walk".

Read more: Where 'woke' came from and why marketers should think twice before jumping on the social activism bandwagon

Claiming the higher ground

"Virtue signalling" joins other right-wing slurs like libtards, bleeding hearts, snowflakes, and social justice warriors.

It is a cousin of accusations of political correctness. In their apparent sermonising and moral outrage against racism, sexual harassment, climate change and more, progressives are viewed as emotional and weak, or accused of being sanctimonious.

Ironically, wielding the term sometimes serves as virtue signalling in itself. By calling out virtue signalling, the speaker publicly claims the moral high ground.

The term is often used as an ad hominem attack - a charge that dismisses an argument based on the character of the presenter, not the argument itself.

Does it matter if an individual or company signals virtue if it's in the name of a good cause? Indeed, it can be argued that signalling a commitment to specific values helps moral discourse.

As the Trump pardon of Susan B. Anthony shows, the same action characterised as virtue signalling by one person can also effect positive change.

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'Virtue signalling', a slur meant to imply moral grandstanding that might not be all bad

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Last month, on the centennial of the 19th amendment granting American women the vote, US President Donald Trump announced he would issue a posthumous pardon for Susan B. Anthony. A suffragette, Anthony was convicted of voting illegally as a woman in 1872. The response was mixed.

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Emojis, Kürzel und scheinbar verkrüppelter Satzbau: Wie wir uns in den sozialen Medien, bei Facebook oder Whatsapp ausdrücken, ist wirklich oft anders, als wir das im Deutschunterricht mal gelernt haben. Aber ist das schlimm?

Für die SWR3 Morningshow haben wir mit Konstanze Marx vom Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) gesprochen. Die Sprachwissenschaftlerin sagt: Wie wir uns in den sozialen Medien mitteilen, hat eigentlich gar nichts mit dem zu tun, wie wir auf Standarddeutsch schreiben oder reden. „Da kann nichts verloren gehen und nichts kaputt gehen", fasst die Expertin zusammen - denn es handle sich quasi um zwei Sprachen, die unabhängig voneinander funktionieren. Im Gegenteil, sei es sogar förderlich, wenn Menschen lernten, sich im Internet anders mitzuteilen als beispielsweise in einer formellen Situation im Beruf. „ Sie haben jetzt drei Kompetenzen ", erläutert die Sprachwissenschaftlerin:

1. Kompetenz für formelle, schriftliche Kommunikation. Beispiel: Bewerbungsschreiben, E-Mail ans Finanzamt.

2. Kompetenz für informelle, schriftliche Kommunikation. Beispiel: WhatsApp-Message oder Insta-Post.

3. Kompetenz für mündliche Kommunikation. Beispiel: Unterhaltung mit Freunden, Kollegen oder dem Paketboten.

Auch bei der mündlichen Kommunikation kann man weiter unterteilen. Hier unterscheidet ein Mensch genauso ganz selbstverständlich, wie er sich ausdrückt: Mit dem Chef reden wir anders als abends in der Kneipe mit Freunden. Mit Fremden sprechen wir anders als mit unseren Eltern. „Das ist immer angepasst an den Zweck der Kommunikation", erläutert Expertin Marx. Bei einem Sprecher passiert also unterbewusst ganz viel, wenn er zu reden beginnt. Er überlegt sich: In welcher Situation bin ich, mit wem rede ich, was will ich bezwecken? Wie versteht mich mein Gegenüber am besten, wie vermeide ich Missverständnisse?

Was wir manchmal als unangemessen wahrnehmen, kann genauso ein bewusstes Ziel sein: Jugendliche reden Jugendsprache mit ihren Eltern - nicht OBWOHL die Eltern es nicht verstehen. Sondern WEIL die Eltern es nicht verstehen. Sie nutzen die Sprache vielleicht, um sich abzugrenzen und ihre Identität zu stärken. Einige Eltern kennen die Situation, dass andere Eltern (der Kumpels oder der Freundin) erzählen, wie gut sich das Kind bei ihnen benimmt und ausdrückt. Hier ist das kommunikative Ziel vielleicht einfach ein anderes als bei den eigenen Eltern. Bei fremden Eltern will ein Kind vielleicht nicht ganz so viel Abgrenzung ausdrücken und wählt automatisch einen anderen Sprachgebrauch.

Für Sprachwissenschaftler ist das nicht negativ zu bewerten, sie nennen diese unterschiedlichen Möglichkeiten, zu kommunizieren: Varietäten.

Sommerradio SWR3

Es gibt nicht EINE deutsche Sprache

Das heißt: Es gibt nicht EINE deutsche Sprache, es gibt ganz unterschiedliche Gebrauchsformen. Das sind quasi Untersysteme, die gemeinsam die deutsche Sprache ergeben. Dazu gehört beispielsweise das Subsystem der Fachsprachen (wie Juristen reden, Lehrer oder Informatiker), es gibt Dialekte (Hessisch oder Alemannisch) und es gibt eben auch sogenannte Soziolekte. Wissenschaftler untersuchen diese Soziolekte und gucken sich an, was die Sprache kennzeichnet, wenn Frauen miteinander reden, Chefs mit Mitarbeitern, Verliebte beim Flirtversuch - und eben auch, wie Jugendliche untereinander kommunizieren oder wie sie per Messenger miteinander schreiben.

Im Youtube-Kanal Die Merkhilfe ist das anschaulich erklärt - übrigens für Abiturienten, bei denen Sprachwissenschaft teilweise auch im Unterricht behandelt wird:

Sprache ist also ein komplexes System, bei dem man nicht einfach sagen kann: Das Eine wird das Andere kaputt machen, verändern oder verdrängen.

Das gilt übrigens auch für andere Sprachen, für Spanisch, Italienisch oder Französisch, wie Sprachwissenschaftler der Universität Freiburg untersucht haben.

Was machen Abkürzungen mit der Sprache?

Besonders auffällig in der Sprache in den sozialen Medien sind Abkürzungen. Auch die sind laut Experten nicht schlimm: „ Wenn es schnell gehen muss, warum soll ich da nicht abkürzen?", so Marx. Abkürzung gebe es seit jeher in der Sprache, das sei nicht neu. In verschiedenen Fachsprachen sei das weit verbreitet, in der Medizin oder bei der Bundeswehr. Da kommt auch keiner auf die Idee zu fragen, ob das langfristig zu einem Sprachverfall beim Militär oder unter Ärzten führen kann. „ Das ist also nichts Neues, das ist etwas Ökonomisches, was wir verwenden." Sprachökonomie, nennen das die Wissenschaftler: Der Sprecher will sich unnötigen Aufwand ersparen.

PUSH SWR3

Was machen Emojis mit der Sprache?

Emojis hätten sogar einen Zusatzwert für unsere Kommunikation, so die Sprach-Expertin im SWR3-Interview: „ für diese schriftliche Interaktion, der ja doch ein bisschen was von der Mündlichkeit fehlt. " Heißt: Wir versuchen zu schreiben, wie wir miteinander reden würden - und dazu gehört natürlich ein Gesichtsausdruck, den Emojis abbilden können.

Wenn wir Nähe signalisieren wollen, Freundlichkeit, eine gute Atmosphäre oder wie wir uns fühlen, das aber vielleicht gar nicht mit Worten ausdrücken können, dann ist so ein kleines Bild doch ganz gut als Ersatz. Es geht aber niemals so weit, dass wir nur noch über Bilder kommunizieren, weil wir dann nicht mehr eindeutig sein können.

Und Eindeutigkeit ist wichtig, weil wir verstanden werden wollen: „ Genau das, was wir manchmal als Vorteil empfinden - uns nicht immer ganz eindeutig ausdrücken zu müssen, wenn wir Bilder verwenden -, könnte uns dann zum Nachteil werden, wenn wir nur noch das hätten. " Da kann es zu Missverständnissen kommen und das würde ausschließen, dass die Emojis irgendwann komplett unsere Sprache einnehmen oder ersetzen.

10 Eselsbrücken gegen häufige Rechtschreibfehler - kennst du sie?

Verlernen wir Groß- und Kleinschreibung?

In sozialen Netzwerken wird oft die Groß- und Kleinschreibung nicht eingehalten, Punkte und Kommata werden ebenfalls oft weggelassen. Selbst hier sieht die Wissenschaftlerin keine negativen Auswirkungen auf die Sprache. Es habe Studien gegeben, die genau damit befasst haben, „ und es gab tatsächlich keine Effekte." Die Erklärung: „ Wir müssen davon ausgehen, dass Schriftsprache erlernt wird, bevor man überhaupt über soziale Medien agieren kann. Also: Ich brauche die Kompetenz, schreiben zu können, bevor ich überhaupt über Messenger oder auf sozialen Netzwerken schreibe. " Der Deutschunterricht sei deshalb die Basis, das Fundament. Dies sei nach wie vor sehr wichtig. Und daran ließe sich die Kompetenz messen.

Sprache in sozialen Medien unterscheidet sich auch

Wichtig ist in der Linguistik, also der Sprachwissenschaft: Auch die Sprache in den sozialen Medien ist ausdifferenziert. Es gibt nicht DIE Online-Sprache. „ Es ist ein Unterschied, mit wem ich kommuniziere ", so die Sprach-Expertin Marx. Menschen könnten sich genauso extrem gewählt ausdrücken via Messenger, wenn sie das wollen und es für sinnvoll halten. Das gelte genauso auch für Facebook oder andere soziale Plattformen.

„WhatsApp ist nichts für Kinder!"

Sprache verändert sich immer

Auswirkungen der Kommunikation in sozialen Medien auf die Sprache sind also erst einmal nicht durch Studien zu belegen, so bestätigen es viele Wissenschaftler aus der Linguistik. Das Schreiben in einem Messenger würde nicht unsere Kompetenz betreffen, wie wir uns in Bewerbungsgesprächen ausdrücken - weil es zwei völlig unterschiedliche Anwendungsbereiche im Sprachsystem sind.

Klar ist aber auch: Die deutsche Standardsprache (was wir umgangssprachlich als Hochdeutsch bezeichnen) verändert sich durchaus mit der Zeit. Sprachwissenschaftler sprechen von einem ständig voranschreitenden Sprachwandel, den gibt es aber schon länger als soziale Medien oder die aktuellen Jugendsprachen. Sprache ändert sich, je nachdem, wie Sprecher und Hörer es miteinander aushandeln. Dazu sind zwei Punkte besonders wichtig: Kann ich ausdrücken, was ich sagen möchte? Und: Werde ich verstanden, ist meinem Gegenüber klar, was ich will?

Das(s) und Genitiv könnt ihr? Dann zeigt in diesem Quiz, was ihr draufhabt!

Sprachkritiker sehen einen Sprachverfall

Konservative Sprachkritiker bewerten das anders. Sie kritisieren immer wieder, dass die Jugendsprache - inklusive der Ausdrucksweise im Internet - zu einem Sprachverfall führen könnte. Die meisten Sprachwissenschaftler sehen eher einen Ausbau der Sprache. Gerade das viele Schreiben im Internet wird teilweise als positiver Aspekt verbucht:

Auch wenn allgemein über die schlechter werdende Schreibkompetenz der Jugend geklagt wird, ist vermutlich noch nie so viel geschrieben worden wie heute in den neuen Medien: SMS, Chats und Blogs sind schriftliche Formen des Sprechens, die sehr viel Zeit sehr vieler Menschen in Anspruch nehmen.

Soziale Medien und ihre Auswirkungen auf die Sprache stehen auch bei der 55. Jahrestagung des IDS im Mittelpunkt. Zu dem Treffen von Dienstag bis zum Donnerstag werden rund 400 Germanisten aus 25 Ländern in Mannheim erwartet.

Mach den Test: Verstehst du die Jugendsprache?

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Sind soziale Medien der Sprache ihr Tod?

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Emojis, Kürzel und scheinbar verkrüppelter Satzbau: Wie wir uns in den sozialen Medien, bei Facebook oder Whatsapp ausdrücken, ist wirklich oft anders, als wir das im Deutschunterricht mal gelernt haben. Aber ist das schlimm?

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Entdecken Sie mit der Dlf Audiothek die Vielfalt unserer drei Programme, abonnieren Sie Ihre Lieblingssendungen, wählen Sie aus Themenkanälen und machen daraus Ihr eigenes Radioprogramm.
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"Design Justice" - Der Kampf für diskriminierungsfreie Technologien

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Immer wieder hört man von vermeintlich objektiven Computersystemen, die am Ende doch nicht so neutral entscheiden, wie angenommen. Deshalb fordern viele: Diskrimierungsfreiheit muss schon im Designprozess mitgedacht werden.

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When TikTokers @julia3elle and @amelie_coleman_ shared what they thought to be humorous videos saying they'd rather be homeless or die than wear a pair of skinny jeans, they did far more than attack a trouser style they find unflattering. They, alongside TikToker @missladygleep, who, in a far more innocuous viral video, said "Prove me wrong, but I don't think there's a single person that looks better with side part[ed hair] than a middle part," helped transform a simmering rivalry into an app-wide, inter-generational style war.
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Online, Generation Z (ages 9-24) has been criticising numerous aspects of mainstream Millennial (ages 25-40) style, namely their affections for side-parted hair and skinny jeans. In the process they have unleashed a tidal wave of sassy, self-conscious and downright spiteful reactions from Millennials. The trending dispute is so impassioned, not due to a lifelong allegiance to the particular jeans or hairstyle in question, but because the accusation of being outdated has forced Millennials to face an uncomfortable truth: there's been a transfer of generational power.

With her baggy outfits and centre-parted hair, Billie Eilish is the embodiment of Gen-Z style (Credit: Getty Images)

"Style is a marker that allows us to see the handoff between the former generation of trend drivers and the new one," says Jason Dorsey of the Center for Generational Kinetics. "It's one of the key areas that lets us know when one generation ends, and a new one begins". And while the digital forum (TikTok) that's sparking these conversations is indeed new, style rivalries are anything but. Spats like these have shaped the evolution of dress throughout the 20th Century.

In the words of Jessica Glasscock, a professor at the Parsons School of Design: "Fashion is a story of youth culture". Style is a tool that young people of every generation have harnessed to establish and express their unique point of view. In the US during the Progressive Era (a period of widespread social activism and reform from the 1890s to 1920s), the so-called "New Women" and "Gibson Girls'" represented a new archetype of femininity that welcomed greater independence, much to the dismay of their Victorian elders who deemed their disinterest in confinement to the domestic sphere a "danger" to civil society. These young womens' style, best known for their S-shaped corsets, puffed sleeves, shirtwaist blouses and towering pompadour hairdos, were the reigning fashion ideal - until the Roaring '20s rolled around.

The liberated, androgyny-embracing and jazz-adoring flappers supplanted the previous generation's position on the sartorial pedestal - by popularising a controversial new style that favoured freedom of movement and maximalist glitz. "Their youth and typically slender silhouettes were a pronounced contrast to the buxom demi-mondaines and matrons who had dominated the 1910s," Glasscock tells BBC Culture. Flappers, who were deemed to be tacky and promiscuous youth by previous generations, provoked widespread outrage with their empowering haircut: the bob. It was, says Glasscock, "a defiant rejection of the idea that a woman's hair is her 'crowning glory'... and an impressive repudiation of Victorian gender roles".

The 30s and 40s were sobering decades for fashion due to the devastating financial realities of the Great Depression and World War Two. After years of material shortages and rationing, the industry was rattled when Christian Dior introduced his " New Look" in 1947, which paired a sculptural jacket (modelled with rounded shoulders, padded hips and a narrow waist) with a voluminous circle skirt. The hyperbolically feminine silhouette was a fabric-intensive design that was deemed wasteful and frivolous by those who came of age in more challenging times.

The flapper generation of the 1920s made their mark with a radically new, androgynous silhouette and bob haircut (Credit: Getty Images)

Fashion historian and professor at the University of Georgia, Monica Sklar, says this "revolt" in fashion echoed a dramatic change in circumstance: "It was as much about Christian Dior creating something innovative, as it was a garment representing supply-chain availability and the symbolic goals of the population". The New Look's fertile and floral shape mirrored the baby boom, and when softer iterations of it echoed across mainstream fashion the silhouette became synonymous with the suburban, domestic ideals of the 50s.
Youthquake!
The designer Mary Quant, whose quirky and colourful style came to define Swinging London in the 60s, distanced herself from the norms and expectations of the previous era by distancing skirt hemlines from the knee. A truly shocking shift in youth fashion, Quant's miniskirts were intended (like the flapper dresses) to allow young women more freedom of movement for things like working and dancing, but came to echo the rise of another kind of movement that defined the 60s: Women's Liberation.

Inspired by the styles of the beatnik and Mod subcultures, Quant's miniskirts, along with her other iconic inventions of the decade - like the shift dress, hot pants, Peter-Pan collar, and PVC rain jacket - were all the rage with the teenage masses, many of whom used new fashions to mark disinterest in conforming to the cookie-cutter constraints of the 50s. In the heyday of Beatlemania, these fashion-forward youths inspired a historic shift in the workings of the industry at large. "[Vogue editor] Diana Vreeland coined the word Youthquake when the buying power of the baby-boom generation renewed the centrality of youth in fashion by sheer force of numbers," Glasscock says. "This was the decade when young designers became as central as young consumers, and allied [with each other] to confrontationally reject the fashions of their parents."

By the 1970s, the freeing, so-called "genderbending" looks sported by folks in the hippy counterculture of the 60s were diluted and co-opted by mainstream youth. The razor-sharp Vidal Sassoon bob was swapped for natural, long hair, and the sharp shapes and cuts of the Mod era were replaced by maxi dresses, kaftans and other loose and flowing silhouettes. Young people in the 1970s succeeded in making jeans - which had panicked an entire generation of parents in the 50s, due to their associations with teenage rebels and the rocker subculture (an image propagated by films like Rebel Without A Cause and The Wild One) - controversial again, thanks to their embrace of feather-ruffling bell bottoms.

And discussion of British style in the 70s would not be complete without the mention of the punks, whose leather and safety-pin laden aesthetic - and nihilist ideology - were a self-proclaimed revolt against the hippy ethos that had permeated popular culture. This subcultural rivalry resulted in one of the most radical aesthetic inversions in fashion history, and though punk style was innovated and adopted by a miniscule fraction of 70s youth, it influenced the broader generation's sartorial tastes and worldview.

Eventually the recession that shaped the 70s dissipated, making way for the outrageous, excessive and flashy 80s. Young people said goodbye to earth tones and the relaxed silhouettes of the previous generation, gravitating instead toward neon colours, acid-wash denim and (with the help of the infamous shoulder pad) boxy silhouettes. The effortless hair of the 70s also fell out of favour; in the 80s, the bigger and more outrageous the hair or haircut, the better (case in point: the perm and the mullet). Money and materialism, which were understandably demonised in an era defined by war and economic hardship, were suddenly en vogue.

Class-conscious youth flaunted their status by adopting the new preppy look, spearheaded by lifestyle designers like Perry Ellis and Ralph Lauren. And the appearance-obsessed 80s (quite a reaction from the laid-back and low-maintenance 70s) fuelled a fitness craze which gave rise to some of the most memorable youth styles of the decade: high-cut leotards, biking shorts, leg warmers and scrunchies. The rise of "athleisure", which was given an extra aura of cool thanks to its role in the growing hip-hop community, spawned a generation of sweatshirt-loving teens, who gladly ditched Birkenstocks and paisley for trainers and tracksuits.

In the 90s, the Gen-X grunge movement extinguished the glamour and greed of the 80s; once a subculture, their "anti-fashion" look of flannel shirts, Doc Martens, military jackets and oversized sweaters gained more mainstream approval among the youth of the era. Meanwhile, supermodels Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell conjured an army of teen copycats, who were eager to mimic their love for minimalist, slinky slip dresses.

Even beauty regimens were dressed down; the bright blue eyeshadows of the 80s gave way to a more natural look. Sure enough, the so-called "heroin chic" look, inspired by both the sovereignty of the supermodel and the influence of grunge-music heroes like Kurt Cobain, and sported by edgier youngsters, was met with a moral panic from the older generation, who claimed the look romanticised drugs.

Gen-Z and Millennials' spat over style is an inevitable aspect of fashion's evolution - as evidenced by previous generations. Gen Z researcher and author Corey Seemiller is eager to clarify, however, that the most significant difference in style between them isn't about any particular garment or look, but rather the ethics of consumption. "Gen Z like to buy used clothing, both for their ability to personalise it, and as a way to demonstrate their environmental commitment in keeping items out of landfills," says Seemiller.

And though it's never pleasant to be labelled passe, there are plenty of positive side effects that may come with the changing of the fashion guard. "I think it's healthy to have a generational separation and to coalesce around a new identity," Dorsey says. "It gives us the best preview of the future." TikToker @missladygleep, who was born in 1997 (the year of the generational cut off) says she now happily alternates between parting her hair down the middle and side. When asked how she feels about the on-going style war, she says without hesitation: "Change is the best part of life".

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Gen X, Gen Z, Millennials: Which has the best style?

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The spat about hair partings and skinny jeans isn't the first time there's been an inter-gen style war. Generations have always used fashion to make their mark, says Cassidy George.

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The era of nonsense. Weirdness, absurdism and surrealism in Internet memes. Favoring drift, serendipity, and the free association of images, texts and sounds, the Internet has multiplied our opportunities to encounter - and generate - weirdness and nonsense. By opposing the category of “common sense”, nonsense can acquire a disruptive value and become a form of resistance to an homologating culture, as well as a creative way to exorcise the contradictions of our time. In an era characterized by a profoundly unstable socio-political framework, and a sense of impending doom, the response - especially among young Western people - takes the form of a Dadaist attitude that manifests itself in a spontaneous way, just as a conditioned reflex.

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Katja Gunkel. #cute oder how to HUG someone through the internet. 

# data[].attributes.subject
Katja Gunkel. #cute oder how to HUG someone through the internet. 

# data[].attributes.body
Mit cuteness widmet sich der Vortrag nicht nur einem integralen Bestandteil digitaler Bildkulturen, sondern zugleich einer Schlüsselästhetik der Gegenwart. Stets auf einer komplexen affektiven Gemengelage basierend, ist das ästhetische Urteil cute für ambivalente Erfahrungen prädestiniert. Niedliches versteht sich dabei nicht bloß als eine ästhetische Entgegnung auf das (vermeintlich) Kleine und Schwache, als Sehnsuchtsfigur des (vorgeblich) Nahbaren, Verständlichen und Behaglichen tritt es inflationär in Entfremdungssituationen wie Krisenzeiten auf den Plan. Mechanismen und Wirksamkeit der Kippfigur des Niedlichen, jener bereits in sich vergifteten happy pill, gehen wir u.a. anhand von Memen nach und befragen sie auf ihr kritisches Potential.

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Sophie Gruber. „1 like = 4 hours fasting“.

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Sophie Gruber. „1 like = 4 hours fasting“.

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In den Sozialen Medien vernetzen sich abseitige Communities, die die im realen Raum gültigen Tabus brechen und ein verstecktes Dasein führen - denn von den Betreiber*innen der Plattformen, aber auch vom Jugendschutz werden sie als gefährlich eingestuft. Das trifft zum Beispiel auf die Pro Ana Community zu, eine Online-Gemeinschaft von Nutzer*innen, die sich gegen die Pathologisierung ihres Verhaltens auflehnt und sich gegenseitig dabei unterstützen möchte, mit einer Essstörung zu leben. In diesem Worklab wird aufgezeigt und diskutiert, welche Bild- und Memewelten diese kontroverse Community hervorbringt.

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Ein Streifzug durch digitale Ökosysteme. Zwischen Entsetzen, Belustigung und Irritation bewegen wir uns gemeinsam durch die Sammlung bedeutungsgeladener, ästhetischer Ausdrucksformen digitaler Kulturen. Die Sammlung befindet sich dabei im Spannungsfeld einer unvermeidlichen Beliebigkeit digitaler Bildauswahlen und einem Fokus unserer (vermeintlich) deterministisch wirkenden Filterblasen. Ganz im Zeichen der Ambivalenz folgt ein kleiner Abstecher in die Welt der (O)possum-Memes.

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Nicole Kreckel. Populistische Bilder lesen? 

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Nicole Kreckel. Populistische Bilder lesen? 

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Populistische Bilder lesen? Rechtsextreme Influencerinnen auf Instagram. Populistische Bildstrategien die eine "Heile Welt" präsentieren, begegnen User*innen auf vielen Instagram-Profilen. Aber welche methodischen, künstlerischen oder interdisziplinären Herangehensweisen ermöglichen eine Bilddekodierung? Welche Werkzeuge können wir als Blaupausen formulieren? ...und welche Rolle spielt Weiblichkeit in diesem Zusammenhang?

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Der Beitrag wird in theoretischer Perspektive der »Mikroformate« (Moormann et al 2021) am Beispiel des Meme »Pepperspray Cop« (2011) der Frage nachgehen, ob und wenn ja welches kritische Potential man solchen Memes zuschreiben kann.

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Superschool’s ‘Gesichtsbuch’ sieht sich als Teil eines Diskurses um die Möglichkeiten künstlerischer Forschung (‘artistic research’) und erprobt Schnittstellen von Wissenschaften und Künsten. Superschool verzichtet bewusst auf eine Festlegung auf bestimmte gesellschaftspolitische Inhalte, sondern besetzt die Zwischenräume von Protagonist*innen, Medien und Empfänger*innen. In der Performance “Gesichtsbuch” wird die digitalisierte Welt des Internet mit dem Besuch eines akademischen Vortrags kombiniert und in eine analoge Bühnenform übertragen. Superschool zweifelt das Ergebnis nicht an. Es ist entweder das interessante Resultat eines kollektiven Findungsprozesses oder die Fantasterei eines Einzelnen. Beide Lösungen sind willkommen, zeigen sie doch die Möglichkeiten und Unzulänglichkeiten von sogenannter demokratischer Wissensherstellung.

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Dings, wenn Memes als Übersetzungsstrategie eingesetzt werden und hier dann alles plötzlich spaßig, verdaulich und locker sein kann.

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Kunstpädagogische Blickwechsel für TikTok-Nobiews & Newbies. Über ikonosiv (prä)apokalyptische Erkenntnisstrategien im Mikroformat. Nähern wir uns netzkulturellen Phänomenen wie TikTok auf der Bildebene, so bildet dieser mediale Schnitt einen spezifischen Zugang zu den heterogenen medialen Konstellationen des TikTok-Contents. Ein kunstpädagogischer Anschluss kann in der Betrachtung ikonosiver Strategien als Verhandlungen sowie Bildungen gegenwärtiger Themen und Phänomene durch Bilder liegen. Der Beitrag widmet sich Bildhandeln aus der Perspektive von Nicht- und Neu-TikToker*innen und fragt danach, wie Gäst*innen TikTok erfahren und welche Überlegungen und Gedanken daraus entstehen.

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Christina Vollmert & Helene Heuser. LIFE IS NOT A NIGHTMARE. 

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Christina Vollmert & Helene Heuser. LIFE IS NOT A NIGHTMARE. 

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Affirmationen wollen die Praxis des positiven Denkens fördern, indem mit inspirierenden Statements auf grafisch ruhigen Hintergründen eine bejahende Lebenseinstellung beschworen wird. Affirmation-Memes kehren diese Glaubenssätze ins Ironische um: Mit überspitzten Botschaften in Kombination mit Y2K-Visuals und Neon-Fonts parodieren Instagram-Channels wie @afffirmations die ursprünglich zu Zwecken der Selbstoptimierung angelegten Texte und Grafiken. In unserer Exploration wollen wir den Ursprüngen und der Popularität dieses Meme-Genres auf die Spur kommen, über dessen Anatomie und Ästhetik sowie seine Zirkulation in spezifischen Communities sprechen und dessen Relationen zu Zeitgeist und Themenbereichen wie psychischer Gesundheit, Produktivität & Achtsamkeit und Esoterik erforschen.

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Sophie Lingg & Helena Schmidt. COMING BACK FROM IBIZA. 

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Sophie Lingg & Helena Schmidt. COMING BACK FROM IBIZA. 

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Der Instagram-Account Ibiza Austrian Memes als Case-Study für intersektionalen Meme-Aktivismus und (Kunst-)Vermittlung. Sophie Lingg und Helena Schmidt beschreiben in ihrem gemeinsamen Vortrag Memes als Vermittlungstools, Meme-Accounts als aktivistische, intersektionale, künstlerische Vermittlungsprojekte, Memes als Form der politischen Bildung und letztlich deren Bedeutung für die Schule. Dabei basieren sie ihre Überlegungen auf dem österreichischen Memeaccount @ibiza_austrian_memes (https://sfkp.ch/artikel/coming-back-from-ibiza).

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Laia Abril | Thinspiration Mosaic | 2013 17.09. - 27.11.2016 | Fotomuseum Winterthur

, Inkjet-Print, 2013 © Laia Abril[/imagecaption][/image]

ist eine Serie von Porträts junger, magersüchtiger Mädchen, die der Pro-Ana Szene angehören. Pro-Ana Gruppen sind Online-Communitys, welche die Anorexie zum Lebensstil erklären und Essstörungen propagieren, indem sie den ausgemergelten weiblichen Körper glorifizieren. Laia Abril hat Amateur-Selbstporträts, die Tausende von Pro Ana-Anhängerinnen auf Blogs und Webseiten teilen, fotografisch festgehalten und damit die visuelle Sprache dieser Szene eingefangen. Im Akt des Abfotografierens verwandelt die Künstlerin die Körper der Mädchen in eine abstrakte Landschaft von Zwang und Zerstörung. Jeglicher Individualität beraubt, werden sie zu einem schockierenden Zeugnis unserer von Kontrolle und Selbstoptimierung besessenen Gesellschaft. Als Teil einer grösseren thematischen Untersuchung wirft

Fragen über die Auswirkungen von ästhetischen und sozialen Standards auf, die durch medial vermittelte Bilder verbreitet und bekräftigt werden. Das Projekt enthüllt die komplexe Ökonomie der Bilder, die unsere Vorstellungen von Schönheit und unser Verständnis von Geschlecht prägen, und hinterfragt die Rolle, welche die Fotografie und ihre Verbreitung in sozialen Netzwerken dabei spielt. Mehr von Laia Abril:

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Laia Abril | Thinspiration Mosaic | 2013 17.09. - 27.11.2016 | Fotomuseum Winterthur , Inkjet-Print, 2013 © Laia Abril[/imagecaption][/image] ist eine Serie von Porträts junger, magersüchtiger Mädchen, die der Pro-Ana Szene angehören. Pro-Ana Gruppen sind Online-Communitys, welche die Anorexie zum Lebensstil erklären und Essstörungen propagieren, indem sie den ausgemergelten weiblichen Körper glorifizieren.

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cruel relieves - cute (stress) relievers hihi

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cruel relieves - cute (stress) relievers hihi

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Welches Vorwissen brauchen wir um bestimmte Themen zu vermitteln? Vielleicht genauer: wie können wir mehrfach anwendbare Bildanalyse-Tools schleifen?

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Gunkel, Katja – CUTE 1 Squeezing Animals

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Stream geDANKen_Nicole Kreckel by Nicole K on desktop and mobile. Play over 265 million tracks for free on SoundCloud.

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...begann mit der Arbeit als Kunstvermittler*in.

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Welcher Typ seid ihr? 🧑🏼‍🎨 #artmuseum #funny #ausstellung #zkm #creatorsfordiversity #arttiktok #fyp

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@zkmkarlsruhe
Welcher Typ seid ihr? 🧑🏼‍🎨 #artmuseum #funny #ausstellung #zkm #creatorsfordiversity #arttiktok #fyp
♬ Originalton - zkmkarlsruhe

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...ist, weil diese Institution wieder gesellschaftsrelevanter sein sollte.

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Langt dann auch wieder mit dem Ausflug #artmuseum #art #fyp #funny #museumtok #creatorsfordiversity by @gazelleisherxname 💛

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@zkmkarlsruhe
Langt dann auch wieder mit dem Ausflug #artmuseum #art #fyp #funny #museumtok #creatorsfordiversity by @gazelleisherxname 💛
♬ Originalton - zkmkarlsruhe

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Artfacts brings transparency to the art world. Artfacts helps collectors make better purchase decisions and artists understand their position in the art world.

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What begins as a casual engagement with funny memes can rapidly metastasize. The most common path for this particular group seems to arrive at something called Cyber-nihilism, a blend of Landian techno-pessimism, Primitivist anxiety and Transhumanist detachment. Enough time spent in this space culminates in a type of ideological Stockholm syndrome. Many of these ideas already exist on a continuum tilted towards nihilism; joining a doom cult is not too far a leap.
This item is publicly available as part of the Library Stack Public Branch at NN Contemporary Art.

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What begins as a casual engagement with funny memes can rapidly metastasize. The most common path for this particular group seems to arrive at something called Cyber-nihilism, a blend of Landian techno-pessimism, Primitivist anxiety and Transhumanist detachment. Enough time spent in this space culminates in a type of ideological Stockholm syndrome.

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Ich finde total spannend, dass bisher in allen Beiträgen und angesichts all des versammelten Materials so ein „Kippmoment“ stattfindet - vor allem auch jetzt gerade mit den „leiseren“ rechten Influencerinnen. Gibt es andere Ansätze als das „Uncanny Valley“ um dieses Phänomen zu beschreiben?

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Ich finde total spannend, dass bisher in allen Beiträgen und angesichts all des versammelten Materials so ein „Kippmoment“ stattfindet - vor allem auch jetzt gerade mit den „leiseren“ rechten Influencerinnen. Gibt es andere Ansätze als das „Uncanny Valley“ um dieses Phänomen zu beschreiben?

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ZKM - was ich dachte was Museen auf tiktok machen

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ZKM - was ich dachte was Museen auf tiktok machen

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We have an office dog and we wanted to show you 🤎 #dogsofttiktok #doglover #dog #aufderarbeit #doglife #artmuseum #creatorsfordiversity

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@zkmkarlsruhe
We have an office dog and we wanted to show you 🤎 #dogsofttiktok #doglover #dog #aufderarbeit #doglife #artmuseum #creatorsfordiversity
♬ original sound - Milo

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Which #dog is your favourite? Woof, woof! 🐕#rijksmuseum #amsterdam #cute

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@rijksmuseum
Which #dog is your favourite? Woof, woof! 🐕#rijksmuseum #amsterdam #cute
♬ Bubble Doggy - Official Sound Studio

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Käte Hamburger Kolleg für Apokalyptische und Postapokalyptische Studien - Universität Heidelberg

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Museen sollten sich mit Medien und Plattformen beschäftigen.

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Museen sollten sich mit Medien und Plattformen beschäftigen.

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Hi🧚🏻 follow for the daily life and work in an art museum #arttok #austellung #digitalart #karlsruhe #zkm #aufderarbeit

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@zkmkarlsruhe
Hi🧚🏻 follow for the daily life and work in an art museum #arttok #austellung #digitalart #karlsruhe #zkm #aufderarbeit
♬ stream beaux on spotify - beaux

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Aufgrund der aktuellen Lage der Corona-Pandemie bleiben die Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden leider auf weiteres geschlossen. Deshalb sagen wir: „Impfen schützt auch die Kultur!“ #creatorsfordiversity #fyp #viral #corona #art #solidarity #gemeinsamgegencorona

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@skd.museum
Aufgrund der aktuellen Lage der Corona-Pandemie bleiben die Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden leider auf weiteres geschlossen. Deshalb sagen wir: „Impfen schützt auch die Kultur!“ #creatorsfordiversity #fyp #viral #corona #art #solidarity #gemeinsamgegencorona
♬ Monster kill - Official Sound Studio

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now my eyes hurt but 2G it is 💚💉 #covid #covid19 #pandemic #coronavirus #vaccine #work #homeoffice [Stand 24.11.21]

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@zkmkarlsruhe
now my eyes hurt but 2G it is 💚💉 #covid #covid19 #pandemic #coronavirus #vaccine #work #homeoffice [Stand 24.11.21]
♬ Somebody That I Used To Know - ellie

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Museen sollten die Vielfalt unserer Gesellschaft widerspiegeln.

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Museen sollten die Vielfalt unserer Gesellschaft widerspiegeln.

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...und das nicht nur im "pridemonth".

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Happy Pride! We rolled out the rainbow carpet in our exhibition for you! #pridewk @electra_pain ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🖤🤎🤍

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@schirnkunsthalle
Happy Pride! We rolled out the rainbow carpet in our exhibition for you! #pridewk @electra_pain ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🖤🤎🤍
♬ Originalton - Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

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Diese Woche ist Trans Awarness Week❣️Mach das Quiz mit @gazelleisherxname💗#transawarnessweek #transgender #nonbinary #queereducation #lgbtq #fyp

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@zkmkarlsruhe
Diese Woche ist Trans Awarness Week❣️Mach das Quiz mit @gazelleisherxname💗#transawarnessweek #transgender #nonbinary #queereducation #lgbtq #fyp
♬ Originalton - zkmkarlsruhe

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more women⚡️🖼 #art #artmuseum #womeninart #zkm #karlsruhe #girls #artexhibition #museum #creatorsfordiversity

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@zkmkarlsruhe
more women⚡️🖼 #art #artmuseum #womeninart #zkm #karlsruhe #girls #artexhibition #museum #creatorsfordiversity
♬ original sound - edits