Memes are 'inside-outside jokes': The class war in East Asia and the digital surveillance state of big data

 

            For a remark to be an ‘inside joke’, two conditions must be met:

1. It is repeated again and again, each time the joke is said, the previous times are indirectly referenced

2. It successfully divides the people who hear it into an inside and an outside group, only the people who are in the ‘in-group’ are able to get the joke

            Memes share the first condition with inside-jokes but very poorly satisfy the second one. A meme is also a pattern that repeats itself again and again, each time under a different form, hence with each new iteration, the past is ‘referenced’. But they usually do a very poor job at separating the world into an “in-group” and an “out-group” depending on the people who get it, unless it’s a very specific fandom. If Slavoj Zizek is right in how capitalism de-essentializes the ‘main’ part of each product (coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, sugar without calories), then memes are, quite paradoxically, inside jokes without an inside-group. They are the inside-outside jokes.

            This is part of a larger trend in the 21^st century of the disintegration and blurring of the lines between private and public (or between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ in general). Our “public-public” self and our “private-private” selves are both slowly eroding away under the regime of transparency, giving rise to the third type of identity: the private-public self³. The private-public self is when our private lives become a public performance.

            Hans-Georg Moller and Paul J. D’Ambrossio, in their recent book “You And Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity”, distinguish between three types of identity across the history of capitalism. Late-feudalism and mercantilism were marked by sincerity. After the French revolution, the primary form of identity was authenticity. Now, with the rise of social media and other forms of alienating long-distance communication, the primary form of identity is what they call profilicity. They summarize them like this:

 

“Sincerity demands commitment to roles. The outside is real, and the inside must back it up honestly, otherwise it is considered a dishonest fake.

Authenticity demands the pursuit of originality. The inside is real, and the outside must be an accurate representation of it, otherwise it is considered a hypocritical facade.

Profilicity demands the curation of profiles. The outside is real, and the inside must be truly invested in it, otherwise it is considered a deceptive fraud.”¹

 

            In other words, a public profile can range from anything like a social media profile, to an academic’s Google Scholar profile, to a politician’s social status in an ongoing campaign, but what marks profilicity is that authenticity itself is staged (ex: think of “daily vlogs”, Instagram stories, etc.). So the very relationship between the inside “self” and the outside “mask” of the person are dialectically reversed insofar as authenticity itself is staged.

The inside does not conform to the outside roles imposed by society on you, like in the case of sincerity (this is how a “proper” man/woman/husband/wife/politician/worker/boss/etc. should behave and you must conform to that role and devote yourself to it sincerely). But neither does the outside ‘mask’ we wear in public have to conform to our ‘inner true self’, like in the case of authenticity. Profilicity is a new blend of the two in which each profile is relevant only under its own context, where each of the various contexts in which a person holds a profile communicates with all the other ones “at a distance”, through a function that translates the messages from one to the next. In other words, the contexts are not separated, but alienated, where alienation is distance in closeness and closeness in distance (the primary effect of the internet). An academic’s Google Scholar rating has nothing to do inherently with their Facebook profile, each follows its own radically different logic and structure, and yet, the two are still connected “at a distance” and indirectly influencing each other. All your different profiles are connected rhizomatically².

What Moller and Ambrossio call “profilicity” is almost identical to what I call the “private-public self”³. They correctly identify that what characterizes this form of identity the most is second-order observation:

 

“This means, in line with sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s usage of the term, we do not simply look at people or issues directly but rather at how they are seen publicly by others. To judge a restaurant, we look first at its reviews on Yelp!— and later judge our experience in reference to what we read. We have developed the ability to judge products in terms of brands, and people in terms of their profiles. We observe first how things are seen. Learning to see in this way, we also learn to show ourselves in this very same manner. We form identity through curating profiles. Profiles are images of ourselves presented for second-order observation. By looking at them, others can see how we like to be seen as being seen.”⁴

 

We no longer judge paintings based on how accurately they represent reality, instead we judge the reality of the place we travel to depending on how well it matches the pictures that we’ve seen from it before, just like how well real-life people match their Tinder profiles or how well McDonald’s hamburgers match what we’ve seen “in the pictures”. This is also the same as Naomi Klein’s observation, who extrapolated from Marx’s notion of symbolic consumption, accurately noticing how we no longer judge a company’s brand based on the quality of their products, but instead we judge the quality/value of the product based on its brand (A MacBook has monetary value not because its inherently useful, but because it’s sold by Apple, therefore I buy an entire identity with it).

 This emergence of second-order observation in society fits perfectly well with Baudrillard’s observation of a hyperreal order, a reality which is judged by its simulation rather than the other way around: “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory.”⁵ Just as with Naomi Klein’s analysis of symbolic consumption, where the lines between private and public are destroyed, so is the border between Marx’s use-value and exchange-value. Baudrillard’s genius lies in noticing very early on how in late-capitalism, use-value itself is determined by exchange-value rather than the other way around: what we consider “useful” in a good is itself a social construct determined by its exchange-value.

            The parallel with Zizek’s sublime object of ideology should be immediately remarked: what is so sublime about ideology lately is precisely this blurring of the lines between private and public through the very way we believe. The meme is the sublime object of ideology. If memes are “inside-outside jokes” then ideology today is a “private-public belief”. We no longer live in the era of Soviet-style authoritarianism where you pretend to believe in the regime in public while disavowing it in private. Instead, the increase in transparency gives rise to an ‘ecstasy of communication’⁶ – we voluntarily give up our privacy in constant sharing and profiling. “Smart power operates in seductive and permissive ways. Because it parades itself as freedom, it is less obvious than repressive disciplinary power. Surveillance also takes on a smart form. We are constantly asked to communicate our needs, wishes and preferences – to tell our life stories. Total communication, total surveillance, pornographic exposure and panoptic surveillance coincide. Freedom and surveillance become indistinguishable.”⁷. Phenomena usually labelled as “cancel culture” or “political correctness” could have only occurred in such an epoch of total surveillance capitalism. If the population can be seduced into voluntarily giving up their privacy and freedom, they no longer need to be spied on nor directly coerced.

In the virtue-signaling of political correctness, “authentic, true” belief is publicly staged. It’s a private-public belief. “Cancel culture” is itself a manifestation not only of the division between classes but more predominantly of the division within classes. The proper Marxist analysis of capitalism should not turn it into another form of populist identity politics in which all the faults of society are blamed on a group identity of “the rich” – capitalism itself is a structure that is, in a way, invisible. You have no one to blame since you voluntarily give up your freedom, you are indirectly coerced not by a specific individual or group, but by “the circumstances”, the lack of alternatives, etc. Hence, capitalism as a structure works poorly even for the capitalists. The problem with capitalists is not that they are too greedy, it is that they are not greedy enough. If the capitalists were truly selfish, they would stop once their needs are satisfied. But in the 21^st century of neoliberal “hustle culture”, both the workers and the capitalists exploit themselves until burnout and even suicide. This is why ‘cancel culture’ affects both the workers and the capitalists equally, but equally in different ways, as paradoxical as it sounds. Remember here  my latest article about why difference precedes identity⁸: both the bourgeoise and the proletariat are marked by the same tension/difference between the two opposite poles, but of different poles (same with sexual difference, in the case of the male and female positions⁹). The inner division within the classes is the same division, but it divides different pairs of opposites in each case.

To analyze an extreme example of hyper-capitalism today, look at South Korea. Four companies make up most of their economy - Samsung, Hyundai, SK Group, and LG Group:

 

“Significant market resources into these conglomerates puts the economic stability of South Korea at risk should they fail. Samsung, for example, on its own has grown to represent some 20% of the gross domestic product (GDP). Chaebols are often accused of hoarding profits and expanding their operations and factories overseas rather than reinvesting in the domestic economy. This is contrasted by about 90% of workers in the country working for small and medium-sized businesses, meaning a small portion of the overall population is employed by conglomerates that hold considerable sway over the country’s economy. The concentration of market power and reliance on chaebols has made South Korea dependent on these conglomerates to the point where the government has to support these entities during financial crises. This is also problematic as smaller, more nimble businesses from other countries offer more competition.”¹⁰

 

            This is another perfect example of our “private-public” meme society. The line between privately-owned and publicly-owned companies is itself blurred in Korea (and to an extent, China as well). While the West is occupied with turning their private lives into a public performance, the East is occupied with turning their private companies into a public service. While the West is occupied with comparing reality based on how well it matches the pictures, the East is occupied with comparing the state’s performance based on how well it matches the private companies. In other words, the state itself is forced to support those multinational neo-feudal lords, because if they just let those companies fail, the entire economy would collapse.

            You can now see how the class war is not only a divide (“difference”) between the classes, but also a division within each class. On one hand, you can argue that workers have it harder and need more protection, because if a worker is fired, it is harder for them to find work, and hence, cancel culture affects them more. On the other hand, you can argue that capitalists need more protection than workers, because if a capitalist is “cancelled”, the entire company might fall and the workers will also lose their job (and in the case of East Asia, the state and the entire economy as well). This is the sado-masochistic irony of late-capitalism: workers have it hard, so if we don’t want the workers to suffer, we must protect the capitalists. Hegel knew this very well: each identity hides its own negation/contradiction that is inscribed with it. In the master-slave dialectic: the master ends up enslaved by their own slaves because they depend on them, while the slaves end up mastering their own master for the sake of their own survival.

            Is this the predicament of global capitalism? A system that started as “mercantilism” in the 18^th century, before the French Revolution, in which the state tightly controlled the corporations under the regime of protectionism (anti-globalization), is slowly turning into a system in which the private companies tightly control the state, under the regime of complete globalization of capital, information and full transparency. This logic has an inherent twist – we know very well that memes are a constant “return of the past” (each time you say an inside-joke, you reference the first time it was said, it is the ‘eternal return’ as Nietzsche would’ve said); so what if in our meme society today, in a very “meta” way, the past of feudalism is itself returning in capitalism to take its revenge? What the future will hold will largely depend on who will own the technologies that accelerate the growth of capital. The problem is that the means of production are becoming more and more immaterial, we deal less and less with the factories and machinery in Marx’s era, and instead capital is turning into cloud capital: artificial intelligence, intellectual propriety and copyright, patents, ownership of big data, social capital on social media. Who has power today is whoever owns a “non-thing”. Even money is becoming less and less material and loses its touch with reality: from the gold-standard, to fiat money, to the blockchain of cryptocurrencies and to NFTs, the latter which are the ultimate meme. “Meme society” is the perfect descriptor of our condition today, since exchange-value itself is becoming a meme¹¹. The means of production have turned into the memes of production: exchange-value endlessly referencing itself.. Yanis Varoufakis describes this contradiction of technological unemployment like this:

 

“First, the automation of production pushes costs down. Second, the ruthless competition between producers stops them from charging prices above their (falling) costs. This has the effect of squeezing profits to a bare minimum. Third, the robots that have replaced human workers do not spend money on the products that they help produce. This has the effect of reducing demand. According to Marx, these three forces eventually lead prices to drop below the level necessary to cover costs and keep the whole thing going. That’s the moment when, like Icarus, market society finds its wings melting. With automation happening at the furious pace that it is today, the likelihood of prices plunging more quickly than companies can cope with is all the greater. In practice it unfolds like this. Faced with collapsing prices, entrepreneurs who have been forced by their competitors to borrow value from the future in order to invest in the latest machines discover that the profits on which they had been counting are disappearing. When the prices of many products fall below costs at the same time, some entrepreneurs, the weakest and least efficient, make the largest losses and go broke. They call their bankers with the awful news that they will not be able to meet their loan repayments and this sparks the cascade of consequences we discussed earlier: the economy crashes and the crisis hits.

The crisis forces both humans and machines into idleness: redundancy. It is at this point that any entrepreneurs who have managed to stay in business realize two things. One is that, with many of their competitors having closed down, competition has diminished. This allows them to raise prices a bit above costs, giving them a little boost. The other is that it is now cheaper to hire workers than to employ machines – possibly because of humans’ problematic habit of needing to eat, which leads them to accept, at some point, any price for their labour. The result is that in the midst of the slump human workers regain some of their lost appeal in the eyes of employers and so recover some of the ground previously lost to machines.”¹²

 

Today, our fate is decided based on whether we find some sort of way into collectively owning the new, immaterial memes-of-production: the technological advancements in artificial intelligence, big data and even the social capital used in advertisement (society seducing itself). We are at a point of divergence where the line between private and public in general is so blurred that we are at a cross-road: we can choose whether we want to publicly own the private or to privately own the public. This is a moment of radical change, hence, what we know for sure is that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. What we don’t know is whether it’s another train approaching us.

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NOTES:

1: Hans-Georg Moller and Paul J. D’Ambrossio, “You And Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity”, Chapter 7: Conclusion

2: Rhizome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizome_(philosophy)

3: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-private-public-self-inside-out.html

4: Hans-Georg Moller and Paul J. D’Ambrossio, “You And Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity”, Chapter 1: The Bigger Picture

5: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Chapter 1: The precession of simulacra

6: See: Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy Of Communication

7: Byung-Chul Han, The Palliative Society, Chapter 2: The Compulsion of Happiness

8: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/06/how-difference-precedes-identity.html

9: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Km-JQnebWt0&t=1s&ab_channel=ToddMcGowan

10: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/chaebol-structure.asp

11: Memes are Jacques Lacan’s “objet petit a”: a ghost, a silhouette, a form without content.

12: Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to my daughter about the economy, Chapter 6: The Haunted Machines