Saleem Alhabash told me in a phone interview when I asked him if he’d seen the World War III memes. “They’re not very exciting to look at, to tell you frankly,” Dr. The memes are helping to shape a narrative about the war - and it’s not always a great look Typically, the WW3 memes on Reddit are much darker, more political, and edgier than other platforms. But there’s probably a simpler reason behind the ambivalence: When we make these jokes, we’re not thinking too deeply about what they all mean. The apocryphal nature of the next “world war” might help explain why so many of the memes are ambivalent about whether the war itself would be a good or bad thing for the country. And as the Atlantic’s Ian Bogost pointed out, the idea of World War III itself has been a looming specter since the Cold War, along with its threat of impending nuclear disaster.
It’s rare to see any TikToks of the meme that say something serious about the war - they do exist, but they’re far outnumbered by attempts to represent WWIII as a party.Īs CNN’s Fernando Alfonso III pointed out, World War III memes have been a thing on the internet for a while, particularly as conflict escalated between Trump and North Korea in 2017. This humorous anxiety took the form of jokes framing normal millennials and Gen Z-ers showing up to the war just to party, or approaching it like a typical game of Fortnite or Call of Duty: glee?Īgain and again, the predominant theme associated with the World War III memes was the idea of Gen Z’s general unpreparedness to fight in a war of any kind. What was that about? Meanwhile, the other predominant emotion was.
One thing that immediately struck me about the World War III memes on both Twitter and TikTok was how lighthearted their tone was despite the seriousness of the subject matter. That ironic sense of merriment was a crucial component in all the memes. In other words, despite fears of a possible draft temporarily crashing the Selective Service website, the meme makers probably weren’t proliferating the idea that the draft still exists out of ignorance, but out of a sense of anxiety about the country fighting another war. Me laughing at #WorldWarThree memes even though I'm eligible for the draft /TYpbtzCE56- Kallix January 3, 2020 And they may already be part of a larger tonal shift away from the wholesome meme toward something a bit more suited to an era of apocalypse: a determination to party through the hard times to come.
There are definite gaps in the tone and subject of the memes from platform to platform. In fact, the overall tone of the memes boiled down to a kind of cheerful ambivalence about the prospect of war. Surprisingly, many of them seem to demonstrate far less fear than you might expect. So what were the memes telling us, if anything, about how teenage meme makers are perceiving the Iranian conflict and the larger, more abstract idea of a third World War? The collectivism of memes, too, is a crucial part of their popularity, because their rapid and visible spread helps us all figure out how we’re feeling about some news trend or other issue. Memes frequently operate as exemplars of larger trends, as well as stand-ins for cultural anxieties and ways to express and alleviate fears or other emotions through humor.
You might think this type of reaction is juvenile or dismissive, but it’s really just human. A member of the subreddit r/ww3memes, created over two years ago, announced on January 3, “It’s time for this sub to rise.” It’s currently got over 43,000 subscribers. They especially proliferated on TikTok and Twitter, where hashtags like #WW3 drove major trends for several days. Jokes about the possible fallout of Soleimani’s death were instantly everywhere. After the news broke the first week of January that President Trump had ordered the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, one of the most rapid reactions to emerge amid the surprise and confusion was the memes.
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