Last week, New York Times podcast host Mary Harrington spoke with author and columnist James Marriott about his new book “The New Dark Ages.” In it, Marriott argues that declining reading rates and the increasing use of social media is leading us into an era of post-literacy where rationality and context have been supplanted by emotional reaction. The result, he argues, is a society in which authoritarian politics thrives, building support through imagery and soundbites that drive emotions before thought can catch up.
Marriott’s observations about how post-literacy leaves a society vulnerable to authoritarian appeals are no doubt enlightening. What he’s missing, however, is that emotional malleability is not the only way post-literacy props up authoritarianism. Short-form content has also allowed us to create a meme culture that makes fun of authority without engaging in the rational thought needed to meaningfully challenge it, and that could be the much more worrying development.
A core piece of Marriott’s “post-literacy” characterization is that we are in some ways reverting to a time that resembles pre-literacy. Before literacy, he argues, the vast majority of cultural knowledge was passed down orally. These interpersonal stories lent themselves to emotion, but their short-form, oral medium did not have the capacity to extend deeper, rational thought. Only contained in the minds of those that carried these stories, the content tended to focus on what was immediately memorable — large figures like Cerberus or Achilles. Today, social media is facilitating the return to punchy, emotional content that centers around memorable figures. Donald Trump and strongmen like him are today’s Cerberus.
Marriott focuses in his interview on how this pseudo-oral transmission has allowed authoritarians to build political support. El Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, for example, has amassed nearly 14 million followers on his Instagram page, which is plastered with short-form videos of him interacting with ordinary people. This past week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced the U.S.’ first public execution in a century to be livestreamed this December — yet another way to use imagery to project strength. But as much as short-form content has allowed the spread of emotionally-driven appeals to authoritarian figures, it has also allowed the spread of content that criticizes and mocks authority. Surely, that should help bring truth to power, right?
Gen Z’s “oral tradition” has manifested as the widespread proliferation of memes through short-form content, and these memes seem to make fun of authority far more often than they bend to it. Whether it’s reaction memes mocking former South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol for attempting to impose martial law or that one picture of J.D. Vance’s face that gets more grotesque every time you see it, Gen Z isn’t afraid to take advantage of post-literate mediums to make fun of powerful figures. Rather than being fooled by emotional appeals into falling for dictatorship, many of us seem to be turning the punchy, emotional appeal of short-form content on its head in a way that makes clear that we are well aware of how bad our leaders are and that we aren’t on their side.
Engaging with and sharing these kinds of memes satisfies our desire to stand up to the authority we dislike. These memes are our way of reassuring ourselves that authoritarian figures still don’t have control over us. When J.D. Vance’s face is puffed beyond recognition, the power dynamic seems to be flipped. The authority can be stripped of all its intimidation and legitimacy at our will.
This kind of emotionally-driven imagery can be an incredibly effective tool against authority when it is actually accompanied by a more serious discourse that diagnoses exactly what is problematic about authority and what can be done about it. In such cases, imagery that mocks authority can be used as a way to empower people and draw them into an anti-authoritarian cause. But in our post-literate world, this kind of short-form content does not coexist with the long-form text that carries the context or rational ideas needed to establish a proper political movement, having instead supplanted these forms. It instead floats detached from any substance, feeding into our emotions and nothing more. We feel like we are standing up to authority, all the while not doing anything to actually threaten it.
This content helps us digest the intense political realities we would need to face to make any actual change by either making light of them or avoiding them altogether. Why bother trying to confront both Charlie Kirk’s problematic legacy and the catastrophic political environment in which he was killed when we can just chuckle at his face deepfaked onto every meme ever made? Why bother confronting the gravity of Pete Hegseth’s decision to livestream an execution when we can laugh at Colin Jost satirically impersonating him?
The end result is ironic: There is no illusion about how dire a political state we’re in. And yet, at the end of the day, the authoritarian figures have us in exactly the same place they have their supporters — in a state of complacency, the only difference being that we opponents are actually convinced we are not. That’s what makes this effect of post-literacy the most dangerous one. It disarms those who would have done more to fight power in a literate world. Just take a look at Gen Z’s voting statistics. Our generation represented by far the lowest turnout rate of any generation in the 2024 election.
To be clear, I can’t act like I don’t heavily engage in this meme culture myself. I, too, have had plenty of fun with Kirk-ified GIFs, both as a way to engage in a collective social experience and to cope with the weight of our modern political reality. Our political meme culture is not problematic on its own. It becomes problematic when we convince ourselves that it is all we need to engage in to confront power, and when we don’t bother with the long-form text that helps us think about how to do so.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
