I think we tend to overplay the weirdness of the way internet meme culture intersects with post-neoliberal politics, because we see history from the inside, which produces extreme dissonance between our familiarity with a meme in one context and its appropriation by another.
This produced a bunch of hysterical overreactions to the appropriation of Pepe by the alt-right, and the memetic war machine of the Boogaloo Bois, when historically they’re pretty normal. Grass roots movements use any symbolic resources to hand when building social networks.
This is one way in which a counter-culture bootstraps itself, by creating systems for authenticating in group speech for passing information amd organising. This is what makes it cohere as a platform for action. Divergence from the mainstream culture is a feature not a bug.
This means it looks weird from the outside by necessity, rather than by accident. The issue is that most attempts at kludge for together existing symbols fail and don’t enter the main trunk of the historical record. The successful ones are normalised in retrospect.
(This reminds me of @Aelkus’s thoughts on the ‘weird Japan’ cottage industry that’s been a fixture of journalism for the last few decades. This amplifies weirdness to project in group homogeneity.)
But to make my point with an example, as weird as #coupanon feels, this feeling is an effect of the unprecedented cultural and communicative homogeneity manufactured by mass media in the age of the end of history. Capitalist realism is still shaping the way you see this present.
If you think the spectacle of a guy wearing furs, horns, and body paint leading a (fairly modest) riot through a the halls of institutional symbolic power holding a sign about Q is incomprehensible weird, I’ve got an Oscar bait screenplay to sell you about a guy called Ned Ludd.
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