Party of one
Typically, when I see lots of people I follow jumping on a meme on Twitter, I experience an acute inflammation of my narcissism, a deeply disproportionate revulsion at the thought of playing along. I'm filled with a kind of pre-emptive shame, and if I'm caught especially off-guard, I'll project that back on everyone else and feel as though I am embarrassed for them instead of myself. Behind that is a feeling of having been somehow left behind, as if memes were a get-together that no one thought to invite me to.
But as much as I feel excluded by participatory memes, I do get a vicarious satisfaction from the backlash to them. Earlier today I saw a satisfying tweet from writer Mark O'Connell that read, "I simply do not want to see the four celebrities with their different kinds of clothes anymore. Please, I am appealing to you now, with respect and humility, to just say the four funny words to yourself."
I figure I can't have been the only person this week who has frantically searched for ways to mute a specific image (a feature that really should be standard for when potentially traumatizing images begin to circulate). And I'm glad to see that I'm not the only curmudgeon who is alienated by a seemingly broadly shared spirit of fun in which everyone tries to ply an inside joke that will appeal to their niche and confirm their membership in a club that gets it. In fact, I'm no doubt part of a largely silent majority of sorts, a Bartleby contingent that responds to every viral challenge or hashtag with refusal. The party of no has no gatekeepers.
The appeal of memes like the Wes Anderson one (and perhaps the appeal of his films too) is that it indulges the impulse to classify and schematize people by visual type, to indulge a kind of stereotyping by aesthetic without having to address the underlying socioeconomic implications of how people get sorted. It's similar to other common meme formats — the ones that map people and ideas into quadrants on a grid, or invite your to "choose your fighter" from among a set of disparate avatars — that offer a quasi-astrological way of viewing the world: There are an arbitrary number of possibilities for how people can be, and it's "fun" to pigeon-hole everyone on these circumscribed terms, erasing for a moment the reality of their ambiguity, the instability and ultimately inscrutability of character, even our own to ourselves.
In an essay about changing conceptions of "cool," Safy-Hallan Farrah argues that young people today are "unfamiliar with the concept of obscurity" and have no problems assembling a personal style out of "illegible or incoherent" reference points — a magpie tendency that used to be described as an aspect of postmodernism and its ahistorical flattening of everything into signs. The classification memes seem like both an expression of niche categorization and a comforting counter-tendency, an implicit reassurance that behind the seeming cacophony of "hyperreal individualism," as Farrah calls it, there are basically only four types of anything.