![]() "You can sanitize and popularize the images by releasing them among the normies" "So the question actually is, are you versed enough in the subcultures you're drawing this material from to know what they mean and not be intentionally or unintentionally deceived? This is up to you." "The first risk you run is inadvertently endorsing or promoting an image with a subcultural meaning that you wouldn't endorse if you know it was there," she said. "You've decided that sharing the deliciousness of the dish outweighs your respect for their principles." "This seems a bit like intentionally not telling your vegetarian friend that there's chicken in the super delicious dish you just handed them and then watching them eat it," she said. Unmarked memes that hide the source of origin, on the other hand, raise their own problems. Johnson, it should be noted, is " investigating what happens when online parody is taken too seriously," which makes her uniquely qualified to discuss my seemingly ridiculous ethical quandary. If it is or does, then sharing it serves to advertise the site, and in a positive way. "To answer this, we'd need to know if the meme is branded or otherwise indicates its original site. "What environmental impact, broadly construed, does sharing a dank meme from an extremist site have?," she said. In sourcing memes from Nazis, there are questions and concerns about decontextualization, the separation of comedy and politics, self-indoctrination, hidden meaning, and so-on.Īmy Johnson, a PhD student at MIT and a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society told me that, in general, it's useful to consider "ethical sourcing" as a way to examine the labor practices and environmental impact of producing and consuming a product. I suspected that the answer was a hard "no," but what I learned is that the ethical sourcing of memes has close parallels to a series of ongoing and contentious debates in comedic, academic, artistic, and philosophical circles. So I was faced with a dilemma: Is it ethical to source dank memes from Nazi mines, if the memes you take are not offensive?įeeling ridiculous and incredibly privileged, I took this question to MIT professors and people with PhDs in memes. It's just that these Nazis, apparently, create both horribly offensive and disgusting memes and memes that you'd feel comfortable sharing with your mom or boss and have probably shared on Facebook or seen on Twitter or Reddit. To be clear, the memes I was in search of and enjoy are not "edgy" or overtly offensive or political at all. As I spiraled deeper and deeper into Discord-first through "The Portal" (accessed by DMing the administrator of the nationalist Donald Trump channel in search of "free-er speech"), then through chasing meme miners into ever more esoteric and specialized channels-the memes grew increasingly dank, perfect for sharing with my less intrepid and adventurous friends.īut I also immediately noticed something that I had long suspected: Many of the dankest memes are created by and shared among Nazis well before they make it to the rest of the internet.
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