PicoBlog

when your eyes first fall on the post, you read “Evolution can you give me…” left to right. Then, you read the four panels from top to bottom. These two kinds of reading, width and length, are clear enough.

But a third kind of reading also happens, which goes from shallow to deep. You see the photograph in the fourth panel, which isn’t quite aligned, and the text in the first panel, which is in a different font. Each of these elements has been added on top of something that was already there. You see the original and you see the new additions, the riffs on the basic form, and the reinterpretations of an older theme.

This third kind of reading, which moves between layers of interpretation and reinterpretation, is what memes really bring to the table that is different and fresh.

The bottom layer of the “pattern-seeking brain” meme — the cross which creates four panels — calls back to Rage Comics, the 2000s and 2010s early meme tradition which saw memers posting like this:

Posted to Know Your Meme in 2011, this meme uses the four-panel structure to introduce two characters in dialogue and then insert some kind of ironic surprise or reversal of fortunes in the fourth panel. Often, you’ll find the two characters in conflict with each other.

The four-panel meme structure was inspired by the daily newspaper comic strip, and the four panels remind me of how jokes in four-panel comic strips are structured: the first three are set-up, the fourth is a punchline. Rage Comics are memes, but they are also comics.

Placing the third and fourth panels beneath the first and second, rather than side-by-side, happens because the meme is encountered on a scroll which reads up-to-down.

The meme above was posted to Know Your Meme in 2018, and originally came from Tumblr. There are many examples of this kind of meme featuring a child deceiving a mother character by buying something unexpected. The format, according to the Know Your Meme entry dates back to 2012.

The format precedes the “evolution” meme format by several years, and is arguably its mother. There's the long “Yeees” in the third panel, as well as the copy-and-pasted-in element in the fourth panel. Unlike early Rage Comics, which usually make an effort to show themselves as the work of an artist’s pencil, later memes go for visual effects (like the copy-and-pasted Communist Manifesto here) that are clearly only possible on a computer.

These elements are placed on top of the four-panel format, referencing the Rage Comics tradition.

Around 2018, according to Know Your Meme entries, the “Mom can you give me” meme format evolved: the mother was replaced by a DNA strand representing biological evolution and the child by an organism asking for a specific trait. Often, these memes would add a fifth panel on the bottom (which is also done a lot on Rage Comics) that would expand on the punchline in the fourth — but not always. The meme above was posted in 2018 on Facebook.

In the fourth panel of the “Mom, can you give me ice cream?” meme, the Communist Manifesto is placed on top of the other elements in the meme, and you can see something like a dinosaur poking out from behind it.

In memes, the use of perspective (placing one thing in front of another) does not represent a relationship between things in the space of the picture (the way it does in most pictures, paintings, photographs) but a relationship between things in the moment of memeing.

In a comic strip, Calvin might appear bigger and closer than Hobbes to show that Hobbes is standing far away within the world of the comic. But in a meme, the Communist Manifesto or the Littleman Time dog are bigger and closer than other things because they are more recent additions to the meme, and more recent decisions made by the creators. Things in memes are layered in front of or behind each other according to their position in our real-life space and thoughts, not to their position within the represented space of the image.

Returning to the meme I started with, was posted by the Instagram account @donotresearch_reloaded on December 1st, 2022:

When I encountered it on my scroll, I was at a café with my mom and dad, who both entered adulthood in a time before personal computing.

When I showed it to my dad, he thought the pillars in the final panel were a photograph of 9/11 and the whole meme was in extremely bad taste. My mom thought it was a picture of a power plant’s smokestacks and a commentary on climate change.

I’d recognized the fourth panel as a Greek temple, and thought to myself, “the early hominid-type monkey is asking evolution for a ‘pattern-seeking brain’ to avoid predators, but the eventual result of the pattern-seeking brain is civilization, which creates intricately patterned architectural forms like a Greek temple.” I did not see 9/11 or smokestacks at all.

Then, I realized: maybe the entire point of the meme, and the weird shadow of the fourth photo, was to make us think we see 9/11 or smokestacks because, like the monkey in the meme, we possess a “pattern-seeking brain.”

Now, when I look back on this meme, I always see 9/11, a Greek Temple, and smokestacks in the fourth image. The layers of past experience — my first innocent reading of the meme, and then later readings colored by my parents’ reactions — are as much a part of this meme for me as the content of the meme itself.

My reaction became a part of the meme for others in the form of the like I gave to it (which, along with the likes of others, appeared below the image on Instagram) and my sharing it with my family.

So, in the space of the meme itself we see layers that can be tied to physical things we can point to: the misalignment of a picture, an obvious copy-paste job, etc. But the layers also exist in the social world: if we read deeper into a meme, we read both into the past (layers which came before the one we’re currently in) and into different social situations (the ways other people have reacted to content, and reacted to other peoples’ reactions).

Each layer is a moment where something was meant, and each carries with it all the conditions which allowed that meaning to be meant and understood (or misunderstood). The meme plays with the ways these different sets of layered meanings jostle against each other.

There are two conversations going on in the “Pattern-seeking brain” meme, taking place perpendicular to each other. The first conversation, between the ape and the DNA strand, takes place from left to right (width) and, also, up and down (height). The second conversation is held through the layers, taking place between the viewer’s eye and their hand holding the back of the phone (depth).

Expanding this theory, I would argue that other layers exist on this meme: as you see it now, it exists on Substack (layer #4). Substack, in turn, exists on a windowed web browser with other tabs (layer # 5, I’m imagining you on a laptop but a phone will be a similar situation). That window, in turn, is framed in layer #6: your device itself. Perhaps, layer #7 is just physical space (although, maybe that’s going a bit too far down the rabbit hole).

Going in the other direction, the layers become less tangible: layer #8 could be my sharing of the meme with my parents, layer #9 the way my interpretation changed after they commented on it.

At each layer, some human or some machine has made a decision to present information to you in a particular way. A meme plays with these layers to create beauty, just like how a song plays with the notes in a musical key or a poem plays with the words in a language.

Layers are present not just in memes, but in other kinds of posts. Twitter, with its way of framing quote tweets and photos, presents it most strikingly. In this post by Lil Nas X, three different pragmatic moments are represented, and each responds to the ones below it.

At the lowest layer, a homophobic Instagram post by Pastor Troy @pastortroydsgb stands next to a picture of Lil Nas X. The middle layer is Twitter user @yoyotrav (Ronald Isley) posting a photo of that Instagram post with his own comment defending Lil Nas X and criticizing Pastor Troy. The top layer is @LilNasX himself joking about the whole situation and saying he looks good.

The lowest-down layer happened before the other ones, so there’s a beginning, middle, and end. There are also three different speakers, each represented in their own layer. Further, there are three different moments of reception: the first is Ronald Isley’s interpretation of Pastor Troy’s Instagram post. The second is Lil Nas X’s interpretation of Isley’s interpretation. The third is the interpretation of the 616,000 fans who liked the Lil Nas X post.

Archaeologists discover traces of ancient civilizations by digging through sedimented layers of soil and stone. If you dig a hole in Paris, you’ll find first more recent stuff, then the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the Roman Empire and, further down, eventually dinosaurs. Each of these layers has something to say about how the city works today.

You can and should dig memes, such as this one originally from Reddit's Troll Fave v2 in 2018, in the same way. Understanding memes as just one message, the way we might understand a page of written text (which has one layer, maybe two if you count a the back cover) won’t work. Memes demand digging.

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