Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? Memes, Design and Politics. Quotes

“graphic design has only one thing left to do, which is posting itself on the internet?”
― Metahaven, Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? Memes, Design and Politics.

“Designers and non-designers (that means everyone), now is the time for jokes. A time for ridicule and laughter and protest and screaming and general strikes. A time to publicise, on a gut level, what we feel about those in power; a time to show them our deepest, cat-like instincts. Our messages will be seen, shared and remembered. Loathe the austerity elites, deface and unmask the technocratic superstructure’s lifeless avatars. Spraypaint, overload, bombard, name and shame austerity’s guilty overlords with jokes that pass through each and every riot shield. Jokes are a continuation of politics by other memes.”
― Metahaven, Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? Memes, Design and Politics.

“Lewis-Kraus traces why cats are so successful as internet symbols; he cites research about the relation between depression in humans and domestic cats. Indeed, your cat will like you best if you pretend that you don’t desperately want to play with it all the time. ... The more neurotic the cat owner – the more desperate for fuzzy comfort and nuzzly security and unconditional affection – the briefer the interactions that damn cat would allow. And so, What we do on the internet is mostly “like” things, and while liking them we wait for our own content to be liked. We check our analytics as we await retweets. This is where the cats come in. A cat will not retrieve some dumb object so that you can throw it yet again ... That goes against everything cats stand for. Or more often sit. It’s not just that cats are unable to be anything but real; it’s that cats both know they are performing and couldn’t possibly care less about how their performance is received ... What an internet cat does is thus confront us with how cravenly we ourselves court approval. A cat, if it decides to love you, will do so only on its own terms ... and the less you need it, the better loved you are going to be. The reason the lolcat says “oh hai” is because he only just noticed, and certainly doesn’t care. ... He doesn’t worry about you or what you think. ... Thus is the internet cat the realest cat of all.”
― Metahaven, Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? Memes, Design and Politics.