Stop Hitting Yourself: A Brief Examination of the “Karen” Meme
It is often the case with a meme that what is new is not the idea, but the visuals, the signifiers, by which that idea is expressed. The Karen meme fits into the phenomenon of inventions made in order to anger the creator, with the secondary intent of sharing this invention so that a kind of collective irritation occurs. After all, the more traction a meme gets, the more power it acquires; and the more power it acquires, the more it integrates with the fabric of reality. On one level, this is comparable to the traditional function of “negative” stereotypes: allowing the stereotyper to cast blame everywhere but upon theirself and to pretend self-righteousness.
On another level, the Karen meme represents an intensifying of the cultural production of enemies which has no clear parallels in the past, perhaps because it is decentralized. It is the people forcing Psy Ops upon themselves and terming it forward-thinking. Human history has a long tradition of various cultures inventing other peoples and places to profess superiority (or inferiority!) or fearfully and curiously excite the imagination. Our age of social media has acquired an insatiable hunger for auto-angering caricatures. Chris Gabriel of the MemeAnalysis YouTube channel put it best: “It’s people getting mad at something they themselves produced.”
Thus described, the Karen meme is not so unlike the “OK, Boomer” meme, which reduces an entire global generation of people to a preemptively dismissable, and ubiquitously irritating, monolith; or the tetradic memes, such as the political compass, which steamroll over the varied, tedious subtleties of real-world politics to produce manageable cartoons. In this sense, we can historically understand Karen as a scapegoat: she becomes the object upon which we place our outrage and incredulity. Unintentionally, this self-implicates. Umberto Eco, in his essay Inventing the Enemy, writes, “Rather than a real threat highlighting the ways in which these enemies are different from us, the difference itself becomes a symbol of what we find threatening.”
The meme illustrated below is another recent example, wherein a specific interaction, perhaps a total fantasy, is starkly presented in the terms of a gender dichotomy: the curious, innocent woman who values the imagination and the aggressive, hypocritical man who adulates rationality. Because these memes invariably — and purposefully — contain a few popular signifiers of Us vs. Them, they can very easily, almost naturally, evolve into an ostensibly universal complaint, complete with the paranoia that “these people” — Them — are everywhere, waiting to ruin your day. With one’s thoughts infected, one can then come to algorithmically operate according to these pre-emotionalized suppositions. Anything can be taken as proof of confirmation of the enemy’s existence and zombie-like stupidity.
It ultimately does not really matter if these specific scenarios have or haven’t happened to the authors, or that one has or hasn’t encountered a person with these exact characteristics or beliefs. What matters upon the meme’s dissemination is that 1) people pick a side; 2) that those who are not “in” on the joke or on the “correct” side see it and recognize in themselves some broad aspect of the disparaged side(s), and can bring their own irritation to the mix and amplify the web of anger; and 3) that the author’s caricature can thus supposedly be legitimized. It is the meme as emotional plague.
The figure of Karen has all sorts of signifiers by which one might self-identify, such as her femininity, her whiteness, and/or her age. It is interesting to note that the ridiculing of some of these aspects constitutes blatant misogyny and ageism (e.g., “look at her clothing! look at her haircut! does she think she’s sexy?! lol!”), yet such prejudice is seen as permissible because Karen’s whiteness — “whiteness” as being essentially bland, entitled, and myopic — is implicitly her primary aspect. Of course, once one has self-identified and pushed against being labeled a Karen, this very resistance is interpreted as proof of her Karen-hood.
What then? Perhaps, given enough time, what once was resisted as a slur will be categorically accepted by a contingent out of spite. There may already be fertile ground for others to explore here relative to Nick Land’s concept of hyperstitionality. As an ex-indulger of social media looking in, this phenomenon appears as the outgrowth of an accelerating tendency among consolidated online cultures, regardless of political leanings, to be much more interested in manufacturing condemnation than in comprehension or subtlety. What is desired are landscapes where one’s enemies have been simply slain by caricature, their corpses strung up so one can remain perpetually irritated and perpetually ready to do battle.
If anyone wants to argue for the productiveness of the Karen meme and others like it, they are free to do so. In the idea of Karen as an archetype gone awry, one can detect deficiencies more keenly attributable to late capitalism: the ineffective individual who can only self-assert through the mode of incensed consumer — and who among us is outside of this ineffectuality? So far, though, it’s been one pseudo-reality, often founded on visual stereotypes, warring against another, each perpetuating suspicion and misery, as if the negative emotions themselves have become the guiding principles — “…the madness of an idea that knows no master” — so as to jolt one’s depressed body to etiolated life through self-antagonism.
