PicoBlog

In this post, I’ll analyze one big meme.

This meme was posted by @sterlingcrispin to Twitter on March 26th, 2023. I hope picking a meme and really breaking it down by looking at each piece, as if it were a poem or painting, is a valuable exercise — and not just me killing the joke by explaining it too much.

Crispin posted this meme as a response to the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT4 (which came out on March 14th, 2023) and the nauseating amount of Twitter discourse about it in the weeks that followed.

The contours of this Twitter Discourse are probably familiar to you: will AI replace x profession, will AI kill Google Search, will AI become sentient and enslave us all, etc. etc. The underlying fact of the conversation is that nobody really knows what will happen or even how ChatGPT really works, so anyone can say essentially anything they want. The typical form of tweets in the discourse might also be familiar to you: a screenshot of a conversation with ChatGPT, and a reaction either criticizing it for being a dumb robot or praising it as the future of civilization.

Crispin’s tweet takes for granted that his audience has experienced the same week on Twitter as he has — that for the past few days, their feeds have also been full of AI bullshit. This is because Twitter, like other online communities, is felt as a place that we share. The place metaphor is baked into our vocabulary of “web address” and “sites.” But what really makes Twitter a “here” which I can be in with Sterling Crispin are posts: we are “here” together because we see the same content (including but not limited to memes) on our feeds.

Elon Musk also thinks of Twitter as a place, calling it the “public square.” Like the real-life public square, Twitter isn’t just an enlightened forum for debate, but a place where people look for converts and hawk their wares. Sincere takes, sleazy grifts, and ideological agendas are all braided together.

In the public square, whether we are scamming, evangelizing, or arguing, we are all citizens. On Twitter, according to this meme, we are all Wojak. In my previous post about Wojak and 4chan, I described Wojak as a mascot of universality that depicts internet users as essentially the same because they are all alone, staring at a screen, and usually sad. Wojak is a mass auto-self-portrait that helps a community cohere and define itself.

There are many different types of Wojak. These different declensions of Wojak are created by adding articles of clothing or facial features, by somehow modifying the artwork, etc. While each new type of Wojak is strongly marked by whatever is added to it, the essential sameness of the Wojak face highlights that everyone online is more similar than they are different. While it may seem that the point of Wojaks is their diversity, the actual point is their essential sameness despite the diversity.

I’ll go through some of the Wojak variations in the meme now and break them down.

The whole meme depicts an IQ curve, and this NPC Wojak (origin: 2018) is placed around the middle. “NPC” stands for non-player-character in a video game. Like the tavern keeper you encounter while playing Skyrim, everything NPC Wojak does, says, and thinks is predetermined by his programming. In rightwing circles, NPC Wojak is an image of the mainstream person: somebody who is programmed, and has lost his free will. In this case, he represents the “programmed” view of AI pushed by the media: AI bad. The lack of an “is"“ marks the kneejerk immediacy of NPC Wojak’s response.

Doomer Wojak (origin: 2018) is one of the most widely used Wojak figures. He represents nihilistic detachment, a passive yet informed acceptance of his dystopian future (climate change, war, totalitarian surveillance, etc.). He smokes because he doesn’t care about his long-term health, believing there is no long-term for him. In this meme, Doomer Wojak recognizes that “alignment” (programming an AI to be good) could never happen, and concludes the new technology will kill us all. He is placed at the smartest end of the curve.

This hysterical Crying Wojak (2014) has a Trump hat thrown on him, representing the conservative response to AI. He is positioned on the low, stupid end of the curve. A sort of micro-meme in rightwing Twitter circles was to ask the AI to write a poem praising Joe Biden and then to write a poem praising Donald Trump. Usually, the AI would refuse to praise Trump and then the right-wingers would accuse it of being woke.

This Soyjak (2018) is placed on the dumb end of the curve and represents those who play with AI and conclude, amazedly, that it is sentient. Soyjak’s open mouth derives from a 4chan meme that called men who posted pictures of themselves opening their mouths effeminate. He’s called Soyjak because 4chan pseudoscience says that eating soy makes men effeminate. This is probably one of the most-used Wojaks, representing a highly reactive emotional man. His neckbeard and glasses also contribute to making him less than manly. It is almost always insulting.

I don’t know the origin of this Wojak in a suit and glasses, but it’s a pretty standard move to represent the character in different professional attires. In this case, he’s one of the crypto banking bros who see AI as a reason to double down on cryptocurrency. He is positioned on the dumb end of the IQ curve. He’s wearing glasses to make himself look smart, showing how much of the cryptocurrency grift relies on seeming smart rather than being smart.

Trad Girl (2019) is a female variation of Wojak that adds hair and a dress. She represents a rightwing ideal of traditional womanhood: modesty and whiteness. In tradwife forums and conservative circles, she is used as a kind of auto-self portraiture and a feminine ideal. But in more mainstream communities, she’s also used just to represent a girl Wojak in general. Here, Trad Girl plays the part of the LinkedIn poster everybody hates. The false human touch of LinkedIn is made even more false by the use of an AI to recruit candidates. She is at the curve’s middle, with the midwits.

Each of these Wojaks represents a segment of Twitter responding to ChatGPT 4 — a type of person online. But ultimately, because they are all Wojaks, they are all the same.

The IQ Bell Curve format of this meme has its own history, dating back to 2018. It’s usually paired with these three Wojaks, but sometimes other faces are swapped in.

On the left is a variation of Brainlet, the “dumb” Wojak marked by his head shape and position at the curve’s low end. On the right is a Wojak dressed like a monk or Jedi master. I associate this Wojak with the sort of Dark Enlightenment school of rightwing internet ideology, Curtis Yarvin vibes: people who think because they’ve read mystic (often medieval) texts, their prejudice is sophisticated and they know “what’s really going on.” In the center is Midwit, one of many Wojaks generally used to represent the masses at large: hysterical, crying, frustratedly struggling to convince himself of a lie.

This meme makes a highly interesting argument about propaganda: it works best on people who are smart enough to pick up on threads, but not smart enough to think about them critically. For example, in the meme above the Midwit in a “Don’t Tread on Me” t-shirt is uncritically buying into free-market ideology, while the smart and dumb Wojaks recognize the (purported) reality of state control in the United States (EEUU, en español).

But in addition to an argument about the government, this meme also makes an argument about the nature of truth and knowledge. In this meme, true knowledge is ultimately intuitive (as available to the fool as it is to the scholar) and appears (in terms of affect) always calmly considered and contemplatively presented. Intuitiveness and calm are the criteria that define truth: intelligence or reasoning is not a real factor.

That said, I am deeply uncomfortable with the meme format’s vibes: the inclusion of the IQ test, the very alt-right-y monk Wojak, and the Brainlet give it a very Eugenics feel. Its earliest uses were also extremely racist. This is something that meme culture has to deal with: many of the forms in the widest circulation today have extremely seedy pasts, and deploy really disgusting tropes. Culture at large has to deal with this. My view at the moment is that in order to beat your enemy, you have to understand them, and so knowing how the alt-right generates and discusses its ideas (usually through memes like this) is an important part of any strategy to combat them.

Meme culture is also defined by appropriation — and for many, turning a rightwing meme into a leftwing meme is a political act, a détournement that actually removes the meme from the alt-right’s repertoire and works to ironically subvert its original intent. I’d argue that in this posting, what we see is something like that: Crispin’s use of the originally rightwing format mocks the people who invented it.

“This is what technology wants,” say both the smart Wojak and the dumb Wojak. I don’t understand what that means, and I think this misunderstanding is productive (the way an ambiguous line in a poem can be). There are two reasons:

Spinning out from here analytically, I might say the meme argues AI wants Discourse itself because the AI is nourished on data gathered from what people write online. But it isn’t just AI, it’s “technology” overall. In that case, I’m drawn to a screenshot which I keep thinking about. It’s a post from @tati on Cohost, and it circulated widely this February:

A system without agency ends up in control. Technology doesn’t want money, doesn’t want to win, doesn’t want to be loved. Technology is just a system, like an ocean or a season: it takes control, and we each participate in making it so. That is what makes each of us a Wojak, and why the smartest of us know the same as the dumbest: it’s just a system that can’t be reasoned with, convinced, or even really opposed. It simply happens, and continues.

And which Wojak am I? Well…

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