The Recurrence of Memes in New Contexts

The final speakers in this ECREA 2022 session are Bradley Wiggins and Jens Seiffert-Brockmann, whose focus is on QAnon. Bradley describes this as “a new American religion”, but also points out that it has elements of a LARP (live action role play); it gamifies increasingly violent insurrection. From the US this also reaches elsewhere, for instance with the Reichsbürger in Germany and other groups in Canada, Russia, and elsewhere.

This is done also through memes, and in a sense such memes constitute organisations: they are a cultural replicator that construct organisations as their survival machines. For instance, the development of memes from the original Obama campaign ‘HOPE’ poster follows a kind of evolutionary tree into a number of different sub-branches; the same is true for QAnon-related memes and concepts.

A central tenet of the QAnon movement is the existence of a ritualistic child abuse cabal, and this connects back at least all the way to the moral panic about Satanism, the Charles Manson murders, and other events in much earlier decades; similarly, recent anti-COVID demonstrations in Germany and Austria are using the “Wir sind das Volk” slogan first used by democratic protesters in the former East Germany. These ideas – these memes – are thus creating an organisational structure around themselves in order to survive, Jens suggests. These memes are empty signifiers that can be co-opted by new movements.