The Memeing of Life

 

GQ - "The Memeing of Life"
By Will Welch (Global Editorial Director)

Back in June, I was sitting at a dinner event next to a young writer friend. This was during that extraordinary moment in American politics when President Joe Biden was still on the Democratic ticket but facing mounting pressure to step aside.

The writer friend is wickedly smart, funny, and popular. Plugged-in. The kind of cutting-edge young person who's in all the cutting-edge group chats with all the other cutting-edge kids.

We were talking about the increasingly plausible possibility that Biden might drop out of the race.

"It's gotta be Kamala," my friend said. "I think she can do it." He paused. "And just imagine the memes."

Something about that statement hit my brain like a bolt of lightning. This young person was doing things at once: expressing an earnest and very serious political perspective and expressing a deliriously craven lust for LOLs.

You see, in 2024, the two need not be at odds.

In fact, for a political idea to connect, it very much has to meme.

For whatever reason, this exchange finally made me accept a hard and very modern truth: Right now, the meme is the primary mode of transmission, and the most important currency of our time.

The implications of this are far-reaching. They affect politics, business, news, fashion, every form of culture. Basically, all public-facing communication at scale.

Just a couple weeks after the conversation with the writer that galaxy-brain-memed my mind, I was having dinner with another friend, this time a musician.

He told me that his latest album had yielded disappointing results, and he'd just returned from a tour on which he'd lost money.

He was frustrated because, with the new album, he'd made a rich and complex work of art that he was unwilling and perhaps unable to reimagine as "content."

He resisted cutting his headphone masterpiece up into chunks and pushing it through the social media pipelines.

As a result, the album did not meme. Which means it did not travel. And it did not accrue currency.

Now, it's important to acknowledge here that the concept of the internet meme is some three decades old. But all this is very much new. To be honest, most people still haven't caught on.

Which is why the long-simmering conversation about Joe Biden's age didn't get serious until after the president's infamously disastrous debate with Trump, despite a whole genre of "Joe Biden freeze" memes that had been racking up views and LOLs (yes, memes are unsparingly cruel) for months.

Until the debate we weren't quite ready to think like my writer friend and accept that the freeze memes were showing us the truth and delivering the laughs at the same time.

Once you go galaxy-brain you start realizing that all the biggest cultural juggernauts of the last 12 months or so have been meme machines: Zach Bryan. Elon Musk. Dune: Part 2. The Drake-Kendrick beef.

And, of course, nobody memes as effortlessly and instinctively as Donald Trump himself—although Kamala Harris is a formidable meme machine herself, which suggests the Dems might be competitive in November after all.

Despite all the daily ridiculousness on TikTok, X, IG Reels, and all of our group chats, I don't think the grave importance of this election is lost on America's citizenry. Every news hit and campaign ad makes it extraordinarily clear that the future of the global economy, several wars, the climate, women's reproductive rights, fundamental LGBTQ issues, and much more are all on the ballot. Every day we hear—from both sides, for different reasons—that democracy itself is at stake. This one matters a lot.

Yet in 2024 each day's battle will be won or lost in the meme trenches, with dumb-funny user-generated social videos that make the internet laugh-cry. What a time to be alive.

Meanwhile, I have been grappling with what all this means for me personally, and for GQ. Honestly, on the personal side, at age 43, the thought of mastering CapCut so I can throw myself on the sword of the TikTok algorithm feels equal parts exhausting and demeaning.

But here in the relevance economy, you can't succeed if you're too cool to meme. Dignity is a forgotten virtue and clout is king.

As far as GQ goes, I think we're in good shape.

George Clooney and Brad Pitt have stayed at the center of culture for four decades now, and when we asked them to put on white suits, hop in Brad's pool, and mug for the camera they didn't hesitate.

I think it's a classic magazine cover. I also think it's a good meme. Right now, it's gotta be both to make a splash.