The days where memes were plain image macros (an image that consists out of an imagecombined with text) are long behind us. New meme formats, some more obscure than others,are popping up like weeds. Memetic logics are also moving beyond the image into ‘the realworld’ (whatever that may be), but that’s a story for another time.In January 2022, when I was a participant in the Digital Methods Winter School of theUniversity of Amsterdam, my teammates and I came to an interesting conclusion. Inspired bythe forthcoming paper by Richard Rogers and Giulia Giorgi, called ‘What is a Meme TechnicallySpeaking’, we analyzed various meme collections taken from different software environments.1After a close reading of the dominant types of images, their ontology and epistemology, one ofthe most interesting findings, at least for me, was that our meme datasets were full of tweetscreenshots – which felt rather counterintuitive at first. However, once I started thinking aboutit, I realized that I have been noticing meme admins posting tweet screenshots on their pagesfor months now. One of my meme muses even told me that she did not know what her memepage has become, seeing all the tweets and other content she has been sharing lately. It hadme wondering. When leaving the technical and data driven context aside for a minute, has thetweet in its screenshot form become a viral image? Has the tweet become an actualmeme?
When everything is destined to be designed, design disappears into the everyday. We simply don’t see it anymore because it’s everywhere. This is the vanishing act of design. At this moment design registers its redundancy: our products, environments and services have been comprehensively improved. Everything has been designed to perfection and is under a permanent upgrade regime. Within such a paradigm, design is enmeshed with the capitalist logic of reproduction. But this does not come without conflicts, struggles and tensions. Chief among these is the situation of design in a planetary procession toward decay. Our dispense culture prompts a yearning for longevity. The computational compulsion to delete brings alive a desire to retrieve objects, ideas and experiences that refuse obsolescence. Society is growing more aware of sustainability and alert to the depletion of this world. For the ambitious designer, it’s time to take the next step: designing the future as a collective relation attuned to life.
MULTIFILE
