The New Cycle

Oh look, just a normal thing journalists get emailed upon news that they’ve been laid off. pic.twitter.com/tA8I57s7lK

— Nick Wing (@nickpwing) January 24, 2019

1.

In the beginning there is the object. The viewer sits down, plugs in, jacks online, and consumes. Content pours hot and sweet down the rusted-out corroded pipes into the trough for the viewer. Ready to consume, the viewer moans in pleasure. This content means something - something is fulfilled with it. A machine working is able to latch onto this object’s properties and its methods are tuned to the rhythms of the viewer’s mind. Something beautiful is known and a new fetish is birthed into the mind of the viewer.

2.

Lurking in the darkness, another viewer lurks in the shadows. One with a different variety of machines, plugs into the identical object and in doing so melds with the object. The viewer encounters this new object, which acts not only as an object but a machine, one in which the original-object is twisted and warped and moved around in the world of the viewer. If the original-object is minimally touched, life goes on, a connection is formed with the alternate viewer and nothing changes. The cycle is escaped. In a case when the object is warped in an extreme, when “my childhood is ruined” to quote the refrain, the counter-viewer (corrupter) becomes a new object of hate inextricable from their corrupted copy of the original, having desiccated the original-object and turned it into a withered husk, the original-object is made lifeless by the mere existence of the corrupter-object and corrupted-object seeming to, by its mere existence, affront and disprove any connection made with the original-object.

3.

At this point, a template is created from which to generate an infinite variety of memes. The corrupter-object, the ruined object, the original-object’s ghostly spectre, all form the basic templates from which memes can be infinitely generated in the animalistic fits of photoshop and posting from which memes are born. These are mixed and matched in ways that over and over reiterate the archetypes from various angles - an eternal reiteration of motion against the objects laying before the original viewer.
We come to a level wherein the cycle can either return or become hyperreal. The internet is based on content (collections of objects) and the platforms putting viewers in proximity. This final phase of basic internet dynamics, wherein viewers throw memes at objects is one which can self-loop due to being in the confined and smooth space of a platform, with communities of viewers forming territories among themselves by their relations to objects. With the fact of corrupter-object and corrupted-objects, it becomes an obvious retribution to make an object which is the supposed source of the memes upon which to unleash the same meme-creation processes, thus repeating the cycle in an infinitely spiraling cycle of attack-attack, both sides recognizing in some way that defense is impossible and instead scattering out to all ends of the plane, united by orbital motions back to their home on lonely nightriding assaults out for the objects of which to unleash meme-creation machines.

4.

When analyzing memes, the greatest mistake is to assume the content of a meme speaks without context and for-itself. A meme is by its very nature not a sovereign work of art which can be divorced from the paths of its creation. A meme only exists in context of its template, the true analyzable text if any reading should be gleaned from it. The template of course requires the reading of several memes, their mode of transmission, creation, and context of creators and targets, in order to discern, all of which must be pieced together in other to discern the template and thus the true text of the meme. To do anything else is to make oneself vertical and personified, to accept the memes and make them stick to you - in effect accepting your position as the object and from there, the template auto-completes and you have accomplished nothing except solidifying the strength of you as their object.