“Those who control the memes control the world”

“Who controls the memes, controls the Universe”

-Elon musk via X (jun 26,2020)

In 2019 Pakistan’s biggest sporting event “Pakistan Super league” was to officially release its new anthem. Previously the duty was done by a famous singer for three consecutive years. Within the first few minutes of the release the song took social media by storm but not for good reasons. Apparently, the song received massive backlash and became a laughingstock for people on social media. The memes and roast videos related to the event were trending higher than the song itself. A perspective was already made for people before even checking out how it really was. Almost everyone was not impressed with it even if they didn’t hate it. The whole event was massively criticized for hiring an actor for the anthem instead of a proper musician or the same singer who had been doing it the previous years.

A year went by and the event was about to take place again, this time arguably the greatest pop singer of Asia was going to sing the anthem. Just like the previous year the audience seemed not to be impressed with the anthem and this time the backlash was even worse. At that time what looked like the opinion of the mass and a normal criticism turned out to be more than that when the singer accused the previous singer of running trends against his version of the anthem. On a sports program the singer said that many of his fellow singers are trying to defame and make his anthem fail by hiring influencers and making sponsored posts about it on meme pages. This accusation remained just an accusation as the singer did not bother dealing with the issue in a more official and legal way. It remained a feud between both singers.

These types of things are seen occasionally in the music or entertainment industry and are seeming unharmful to the audience and even enjoyed by people for people enjoy watching two famous people accusing and discussing each other's personal life on social media before massive audiences.

Similarly, since the rise of social media political parties and individual politician have used the platform to get attention of the masses and attempting to destroy the reputation of their rivals completely for the sake of appearing as a better candidate during elections or just a better person to satisfy their own egos. X, previously known as Twitter stands notorious in this regard for providing a platform for this specific purpose. Trending on X is the new “headline of the evening”. But how do people who control the memes control the universe? The very small and rather unimportant story of the anthem previously mentioned was a classic case of “the bandwagon effect”. Going through the opinions about a subject before the subject itself subconsciously makes a person adjust himself to the opinion of the masses and takes from him his own critic. People often take the word of the masses or someone they look upto as more intelligent than them just so that they don’t feel like a rebel. So much so that they adjust even the most personal things like what someone likes, what they find funny, what they enjoy listening to according to the public's eye.

A very rapidly growing and interesting genre of memes is Dark humor or dark memes. Although people are supposed to take and treat them as a joke but constant exposure to the subjects of dark meme including people death, mocking the deaths of a people in history, slavery of the African race, making fun of physical aspects of others breeds insensitivity considering that the consumers are young children and teenagers. If something like that is the cause of release of dopamine it does constantly increase the threshold level of a person causing one to investigate more and more aspects of that thing and so the cycle continues.

Who would have thought that something that was supposed to be a picture with some funny text can be so powerful that it can bankrupt or surge economies. A cryptocurrency based on a meme known as Dogecoin skyrocketed in sept 2018 and became the fourth biggest cryptocurrency by volume valued at 80 billion US dollars in its peak. The personality that played an important role in this whole process was none other than Elon musk himself.

So, for him to say ‘those who control the memes control the universe’ wouldn’t be wrong.

-Moin Ud Din Qadir