Know Your Meme: America ending

There's a maxim that all wars are wars of technology. The tech at the forefront of America's civil war in 2026 is cellphones which allow their users to record, to be tracked, to communicate and to distribute propaganda. Democratic Party communications strategist Lis Smith unpacks the Trump regime's shitposting for The Verge:

The meme format is more likely to spread quickly. It’s something that a specific audience is going to understand immediately, and it really simplifies a political argument. The problem with that, though, is, one, it’s very audience specific. Not everyone is going to understand a Family Guy meme, not everyone is going to understand a Patriots meme, or whatever the meme du jour is. 

Another problem with the meme format is that you lose a lot of context and you lose a lot of humanity in it. So when you see the administration posting sort-of-funny memes about deportations or ICE, you lose a lot of the empathy and compassion that most people have when it comes to the immigration debate. Most people think that illegal immigration is bad and that we should do something about it. But most people also understand that there are real people who are involved in all of these situations and don’t think it’s funny to make light of, say, school pickups getting raided, or families getting separated, or parents crying as they’re being dragged away from their kids.

… or being shot in the face or permanently blinded. The Unicode Consortium must be considering emojis for those.