We Need to Talk about Elon Musk's Memes
The terminally online billionaire is bringing his awful memes into the government and the media has NO idea how to cover it. Here's some New Media Homework for Thanksgiving. And some cute Hyraxes.
The world’s richest man won’t leave Mar-a-Lago. The billionaire not only seems to be a permanent guest to the RePresident, but he’s also the internet’s biggest menace/anti-hero. In a world where young men and grustle bros would rather have dinner with [alleged sex traffickers] Andrew Tate and Tristan Tate than take a million bucks, it’s no wonder Elon has millions of sycophantic followers leaning on each of his posts in excitement.
I’m not a big fan of using the word “unprecedented” because history rhymes and nearly everything has happened before in another modality. But in this case, the term is applicable because there’s never been a billionaire multi-ceo, pro-natalist internet troll who owns his own social network with 200 million followers who happens to be pilled-to-the-gills and in direct, everyday contact with a reality tv star president who used grievance politics to be president again.
That’s a first.
And yet, in many ways, the public is unaware of the ways Elon is engaged in what many could argue as a direct erosion of both democracy and civil society. The news and mainstream media systems continue to treat him as the hegemonic system would: a success story… in progress.
Musk’s tactics are in the open. He eschews regulations and has managed to get a busy work job in a future administration dismantling them. He purposely used the term DoGE (as I explained in the last newsletter) because it 1.) enables him to pump-up a shitty memecoin cryptocurrency (of which he likely owns the most) and 2.) enables him to uplift internet terminology into the mainstream, giving him some weird clout among the denizens of X and reddit.
But there’s something far more insidious and dangerous about his tactics that continues to go unreported in news media, especially those in the business of propping Musk up, which is Musk’s continuous participation with Qanon memes and far-right propaganda. On his platform, he’s able to share these dangerous shitposts right in the open.
I don’t use the term dangerous here lightly: Qanon is cult that has caused family estrangement in the best cases and murders, kidnappings, and a literal insurrection in the worst. And Elon has pumped up Qanon on more than one occasion. Last week, following John Bolton’s denouncement of [alleged sex trafficker] Matt Gaetz to run the DoJ, Musk tweeted a literal Qanon meme. As of today, it’s been seen 32 million times and liked 163,000 times. Not good.
The problem of course is the dissonance between the idea of Musk in the mainstream and his views. As I wrote in my upcoming book, the far-right uses memes to uplift dangerous propaganda directly into the mainstream by making the content so odd and so quirky, there’s no way to report on it clearly without alienating the audience — who, made up of mostly middle of the road consumers, do not have the bandwidth to learn about internet media and its layers of nuance and referential material.
The danger here is that Elon continually opens up rabbit holes over and over and over again. Trying to find meaning in a meme like the one above contains features of deep (and I mean deep) conspiratorial lore, connected directly to several Qanon themes. But it’s not silly.
We need to talk about internet media in a serious manner. It’s been a decade since #gamergate and Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” media model and we’re still reading about how Elon is an aspirational story. It’s bad enough most stories elide his extremely privileged upbringing and opportunistic bully business acquisition style, but now we’ve entered the post-media phase and Elon knows exactly what the fuck he’s doing.
I’m not going to decode the meme for you, but you can see the Pepe, you can see the infantile “non fren” of the sad chans, you can see the mug with the doom slogan “where we go one we go all.” Qanon is a mishmash of memes and messages designed to hide from the mainstream while appearing in plain sight. The groypers do this too. Nick Fuentes’s group of misogynist antisemites use this term exactly because it sounds too weird to talk about. Unless you’re watching a special report, the odds of you hearing the term “groyper” are really low. And as a result, we’re all worse for it.
In fact, Elon may use Qanon memes to confuse his followers enabling him to share more hateful content in his feed. Mehdi Hasan noted that it is “difficult to describe what a dangerous moment we are in” after Musk recently shared an anti-muslim post where he agrees with a hate-filled poster about a Tommy Robinson documentary. Again, not good.
Not talking about Elon’s memes and posts allows either the corporate media to define him (success man!) or people like Joe Rogan to define him (brilliant guy!) but in any case, Elon is also a dangerous man aiming to enrich himself at the cost of literally everyone. For a man who calls for “temporary hardships for everyone,” be sure that doesn’t include himself. After giving Trump over 100 million dollars he gained billions. Egg prices don’t matter to this man.
But what does matter is the erosion of the system and a conversion to a trickle up economy and rabbit hole culture. If the topic of Elon Musk comes up this Thanksgiving, it’s actually in our best interest to talk about his weird internet antics and take them seriously. Avoiding the topic or “sanewashing” the whole thing is what got us here. We don’t need to pretend it happens online anymore — it’s everywhere.
If you get a chance, listen to Ep 302 “Springtime for Qanon” of the QAA podcast to hear the team go in depth about these memes. It’s worth it.
Easily the best article I’ve ever read about this whole thing
Tressie McMillam Cottom wrote an op-ed for the NYTimes that completely encapsulates all I’ve been talking about/presenting/writing about for several years in the most distilled, clear eyed way possible. Cottom writes of the false reality presented by tradwife culture, of podcast bros filling the media gap, and the wellness influencers who have capitalized on the engagement trained internet to optimize far-right ideologies.
In her article, titled “How an Empty Internet Gave Us Tradwives and Trump,” Cottom writes:
Starting with the Obama campaign’s digital strategy in 2008, elected officials mostly engaged with online communities as sincere places, bringing a straightforward approach to political messaging. But the 2024 internet is not the 2008 internet. In 2024, online communities are mostly places where aesthetics of influencing value cheap, shiny branding and reactionary personalities. A candidate like Kamala Harris had little chance of breaking through the noisy online ecosystem.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, is uniquely gifted for this media moment. By all accounts he is extremely online, as young people say. He consumes a lot of digital cultures and news. His instincts for what kind of disinformation and misinformation would resonate with overlapping edges of digital communities plugged him into a diverse audience.
His message may have sounded incoherent to a lot of liberals, but it managed to assemble a constituency of overlapping online communities that, in particular, are listening for archetypes and aesthetics, not policy. Trump gives them plenty. The sexist, racist notions about who belongs in the home, who should have a voice in public and who should be excluded from the state were ready-made to appeal to these communities.
Highly recommend you read this as well before Thanksgiving.
A Good Take on jaGuar’s rebranding
And some “baby Hyrax core” (Hyraxes now fill my entire IG explore page for some reason)
Happy Thanksgiving to those in the US! Hope it’s a meaningful day. Don’t forget to share your internet literacies.
Until next time, be curious, be vigilant, and persist.