The Memeing of Joris Bohnson
You Call That Radio welcomes a special guest writer Bram Gieben aka Texture to present an article to you about the memeing of Boris Johnson. Bram is a poet and rapper under the name Texture and also hosts an insightful podcast called Strange Exiles.
Joris Bohnson Got Memes
You have to know a little bit about memes, and the history of memes, to understand the power wielded by Joris Bohnson. Throughout this article, I will refer to the sitting prime minister by this spoonerism to avoid his elevation in the algorithm via keyword analysis of the text. As I hope to demonstrate, mocking and sharing right-wing memes, images and content only serve to elevate them in the algorithm - and this is one of the biggest challenges that currently face online activists on the left-wing and in the liberal centre.
Memes have defined Bohnson’s tenure as prime minister and London mayor, his career as a journalist, and the enduring image of him in the public eye. This studied but shambolic image has been cultivated through photo ops, planned leaks of images and documents and ‘scandals’ via his media team, and appearances on ‘Have I Got News For You’. It is a carefully curated performance. The last example is a good one - while the HIGNFY team may have hoped to use his appearance as an opportunity to ridicule Bohnson, it instead served to propel him to the dizzy heights of the Conservative Party, and the corridors of power. His incompetence, his shabbiness and his cavalier approach have made him more popular, not less. How did we allow this to happen?
A brief history of memes
The term ‘meme’ was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book ’The Selfish Gene’. He defined a meme as a unit of transmissible cultural information, from a memorable tune or catchphrase, all the way up to a religion. According to Dawkins’ theory, all human cultural information is both memetic, and transmissible. Religions provide the best example because they illustrate how memes can cluster together to increase their chances of survival. In Catholicism for example, the vertical transmission of christian memes such as ‘hell’ and ‘original sin’ or even ‘go forth and procreate (but only when married)’ become a form of evolutionary armour, ensuring the religion continues. Like a disease or a virus, religious ideas can be transmitted vertically (parent to child), or horizontally (christian to heathen, heretic, apostate or infidel).
The theory of memes is considered by many philosophers and scientists to be both unworkable and unscientific - it may be a useful analogy for how ideas are transmitted in human culture, but there is scant scientific evidence that can offer proof that ‘memes’, as such, really exist. Despite the work of theorists like Susan Blackmore, whose 1999 book ‘The Meme Machine’ built on and expanded Dawkins definition, the theory was somewhat dead in the water until the term began to gain currency on the internet in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Of course on the internet, we are all familiar with memes - not in the strict Dawkinsian sense, but as captioned pictures, usually satirical, expressing a cultural idea in the form of a joke, an image or a juxtaposition of an image with text. There is an internet meme database, sites that collect moving image memes or GIFs (often with an API added to allow the sharing of GIFs via sites like Twitter, or platforms like WhatsApp). There are custom meme-making sites, where users can generate their own memes using popular or common templates, or create their own new memes using their own or stolen imagery.
In our visually-oriented, extremely online culture, communication via memes is all but accepted as standard. The sharing of cool (or ‘dank’) memes with our friends is one of our favourite time-wasting activities. ‘Meme culture’ has given us LOLcats, our favourite subreddits, and the wild west of the internet - the ‘chan’ message boards where memes are created, traded and debated. On these boards you can also find every other transmissible meme, as Dawkins and Blackmore would see them - from misogyny and transphobia to racism and facism; to fandoms of various kinds; religious or medical quackery of every shade, and the real-time emergence of micro-trends in fashion and music.
As Dawkins and Blackmore presciently anticipated, in our weightless, data-driven culture, the fact you cannot physically touch a meme, or observe it in laboratory conditions does not mean that memes do not exist - and furthermore, that they shape us and our cultural attitudes in ways that are sometimes conscious, and sometimes subconscious.
The human meme
Online memes are a visual language, so first, let’s consider Joris Bohnson visually. From the tousled, buffoonish clown’s hair to the overlong tie and flapping shirt tails, he presents a rumpled, disorganised image in public. He’s able to quote ancient wisdom in Greek or Latin, and speaks a great many languages, but is nonetheless able to communicate an air of shabby disinterest in the trappings of public image. His image is an anti-public image, and that is carefully calculated. In an era where nobody trusts politicians, it is best to look as little like one as possible. This anti-public image ties into an anti-public discourse that mocks and disdains both tradition and accepted moralities - but rather than making this connection on the surface, the image of the clown serves to conceal the malignancy of the politics behind the mask.
This is a calculated visual performance, designed for its ‘memeability’ and nothing more. Bohnson is an ideological piranha, steeped in the vicious codes of public school and the elite. There is nothing careless about this figure, nothing out of place that is not planned to be there. He is a perfect product of Britain’s highest institutions. The visual performance of shabbiness or slack is just that - a performance.
Picture one of the most sustained and enduring images of Joris in the public eye. The first shows him dangling on a zipline, legs and shirt tails akimbo, giving a hapless thumbs up. Taken at an event promoting the 2012 Olympics, his shambolic failure to slide down a wire was roundly mocked and covered extensively throughout the news media, from the nightly bulletins right on through to the comedy panel shows. This is the key to the memeability of Joris Bohnson - his carefully stage-managed ‘failures’ and ‘errors’ are a pantomime, an effort to portray this piranha as relatable. Hapless, silly, maybe even unreliable - but crucially, a normal, fallible human being. Just like you and me. This is a lie. Joris Bohnson is not like you or me. He is far more calculating.
This gift for creating fake moments of failure, silliness and shambolic appearance serves to mask the places where Conservative policies are actively harmful to the voters they claim to serve, from the long march of austerity to the nakedly fascistic approach to border control. The Joris Bohnson show is a spectacle. It is intentionally designed to conceal the worst excesses of a government peopled by crony and disaster capitalists seeking to asset-strip the country of all of its goods, services, infrastructure and human feeling.
Joris Bohnson and his cabinet and advisers have long cultivated the idea of themselves as shambolic everyman, prone to the odd gaffe. Sometimes the mask slips, and something patently obvious can show you the memetic play they are attempting here. This tweet from their 2019 Brexit campaign demonstrates the premise. The tweet is ‘Make no mistake.’ The graphic says ‘Get Berxit Done’. The mistake is intentional. What is more, the left fell for it in droves, subtweeting this until it had surely been seen by voters of all persuasion.
This was the strategic genius of Cominic Dummings (although it’s no great revelation to anyone who understands social media algorithms). He recognised that it didn’t matter who amplified the signal, or what they thought about it. All that counted was the amplification. The right create the tweets and memes, but the left, with their outrage clicks and responses, arguably cause it to go viral. As it stands, the activist and party political left are just Joris Bohnson’s useful idiots.
Even Bohnson’s roots as a journalist show what should be a completely unsurprising level of sophistication in terms of his approach to memetic warfare. In his original Telegraph columns, he delighted in making up untrue but very meme-able stories, such as the myth about straight bananas mandated by EU policy wonks. The untruth did not matter - once these memorable images stuck in voters’ minds as Dawkinsian memes, they became unquestioned motivations for voting for Brexit. The comparatively boring, dry, complicated business of EU politics was a much harder sell than the simplistic idea of ‘taking back control’, but Bohnson had also seeded the memetic landscape with lies and farcical imagery about the EU over the course of decades. His columns were a form of click-bait, designed to draw you in and stick in the mind. The ‘facts’ become immaterial when the meme is presented cleverly enough. Brexit was a memetic campaign decades in the making, and a lot of its myths and memes originated in Bohnson’s flights of fancy.
In light of the recent ‘partygate’ scandal it’s worth mentioning that the pint-drinking, ‘laddish’ image cultivated by right-wing politicians from Bohnson to Figel Narage is another memetic mask. Bohnson’s drink-addled associates at number ten won’t be held to account because their bad behaviour is in itself relatable to millions of people in the UK. Every time Gove is pictured larging it up on the dance floor, or Joris is seen necking chardonnay on the terrace, a slew of memes are generated to mock them or express outrage. The opposite effect is achieved - Bohnson and co. are suddenly like us, just wanting to “large it” and “get on one.” Anyone criticising them comes to seem like a churl by comparison. A disregard for facts, institutions, and norms of behaviour may not be the hallmark, traditionally, of the conservative. In some ways, it is the opposite. What it does tell us is that while the left weren’t looking, the right learned to meme.
Radical Resistance
How do we fight back? Not just leftists, but people of any kind who want to protest against or fight the rhetoric and substance of Tory policies, without unwittingly contributing to their ascendance and triumph at the ballot box? This is a question to which the left and liberal sections of the internet desperately need to find an answer.
In America, whose fever-dream, post-truth politics undoubtedly influence and inspire Bohnson and his grim crew, the right have entirely captured the meme-o-sphere. From Covid denialism, to the Trumpist ‘big lie’ about the 2016 election, to the elaborate meta-conspiracy-meets-massively-multiplayer-online-augmented-reality-game known as Q-Anon, the right and its champions are consistently able to draw on, invoke and create new myths, images and narratives that fuel their cause and entice new recruits. They can rely on simple messages like ‘Make America Great Again’ or ‘Get Brexit Done’ to stick in the public mind, not despite but because of the factual distortions which they conceal.
What the left has to offer in terms of resistance to these memes is a combination of outrage, satire and sarcasm, or earnest activism - all of which play into the self-serious, condescending, over-educated caricature of the leftist on which right-wing propaganda plays. There is no amount of politically correct interaction with right-wing memes that can do anything but prove the point and boost the signal of those memes - the whole point of most right-wing meme culture is to “trigger the libtards.”
Any argument these days which appeals to facts, history, statistics or mainstream institutions is similarly doomed to fail - the populist right wing, which drives this facet of meme culture, has a million tools to dismantle, disregard or simply mock a serious argument. The reasons for the decline of trust in politicians, official data and state narratives is explored in the excellent book ‘Nervous States’ by William Davies: ”Under the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were those people who got rich, and there were those who claimed to know things. Today, however, the privilege of knowledge and that of wealth reinforce each other: highly educated consultants, lawyers and investment analysts are the main beneficiaries of capitalism.” (p.86).
The right appeals to people on the level of emotion, not objectivity. It appeals to the feeling that the experts, the scientists and those in charge are ripping us off and lying to us - that they cannot be trusted. Right-wing memes have become adept at tapping into the currents of anti-public and anti-mainstream feeling. They present themselves as insurgent, despite the right being the main stakeholders in crony capitalism, and in power in the majority of democratic countries in the west. This is why their memes are superior. Joris Bohnson is a highly educated member of the expert class - but he role plays a relatable rogue.
On Episode 11 of my podcast Strange Exiles, I interviewed cultural critic and theorist Mike Watson, author of ‘The Memeing of Mark Fisher’ and ‘Can the Left Learn to Meme?’. Using the work of Mark Fisher, Walter Benjamin and others, Mike attempts to map out why the right’s memetic approach is more successful, where the left fails, and what it can do to produce more compelling narratives than Q-Anon, or Joris Bohnson’s aggressive brand of faux-libertarian populism. In his latest book, he offers some hope for the left, in terms of approaches that could drive a new and popular series of left narratives, imagery and aesthetics.
Better than any other writer I have encountered, Watson diagnoses the problem: “Internet corporations don’t care what you do, so long as you give them data - and the online left is simply one niche identity that achieves this. For young women producing selfies, the internet plays on their insecurity at their own appearance. For young leftist meme-producers of a certain age, social media companies play on threats to their identity by right-wing imagery, or by leftists of other factions. None of this builds a coherent left-of-center movement, even if there is a growing communist, socialist and anarchist presence online.” (Zero Books, 2021, p13)
The worst thing leftists can do online, besides amplifying Joris Bohnson, is to fight each other. As Watson writes: “The very grievances which lead so many people to express themselves politically online - which amounts in short to a lack of agency felt on the part of internet users in their daily life - in turn lead leftists to attack each other instead of the capitalist system.” (p51)
The algorithm thrives on our conflict, it feeds it, because ultimately the corporations gain, and we all lose. Our atomisation further drives that conflict, which drives atomisation, all of which drives the easy categorisation of human beings into identities that can be targeted, marketed to, and ultimately manipulated. This is the goal of algorithmic data collection, and the left starts from a disadvantage. The left has no coherent response to the divisions that social media, and the effects upon psychology it produces, has sown among its ranks and within society at large.
Watson is also able to offer some possible routes out of the memetic trap, whereby the response and resistance to right-wing memes can transcend outrage and sarcasm - he believes that the left can learn to meme, and that the dominance of right-wing narratives can be challenged with collective effort and creativity. In particular, Watson suggests that activists and protestors on the left could build on Fisher’s legacy, working with some of the ideas in his unfinished work ‘Acid Communism’ (printed in the anthology ‘k-punk: The Collected Works’ by Repeater Books). Seeing promising currents in hedonistic movements of the past such as the hippies, the punks, and free party ravers, and in the creative potential unleashed by altered mental states, with Acid Communism Fisher sought to offer a way out of the dilemma he posed in his seminal work ‘Capitalist Realism’ - that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
Memes as magic(k)
Another writer who understood the power of memes, and the way that creative, free-thinking, empowered and confident activists and culture-producers could use them, is the Scottish comics creator Grant Morrison. In the 1990s, they wrote The Invisibles, a sprawling conspiracy adventure involving malign covert government agencies, anarchist sleeper cells, ancient gods and arcane rituals. In the back pages, Morrison answered letters from their readers, and would discuss everything from the occult to politics and psychology. It was through these letter pages that I found ‘The Meme Machine’ and countless other books. This was also where I began to understand the power of memes as a kind of ‘magic’ - a way of presenting information and ideas in a form that could be both powerful and persuasive, and perhaps even shape reality.
The basics of sigil magic, as set out by Austin Osman Spare, offer a way to symbolise, articulate and thereby influence the world with ideas and desires, much in the same way a meme can seek to do. Morrison was a great believer in this process, and the refinements to it that were developed by magic(k)al practitioners like Phil Hine and others. To Morrison, sigils and memes were similar concepts - ways of articulating ideas and influencing reality. As he said in his famous (and very memetic) Disinfocon speech from 1999: “Magick is accessible to everyone. The means of altering reality are accessible to everyone.” The question is simply, how do you learn the technique? How do you apply it? To understand the similarity between a story, a meme and a sigil, you might want to start by exploring the so-called ‘occult’.
In Episode 3 of Strange Exiles, occult expert Cat Vincent discussed chaos magic(k) and ritual, and how he uses narrative, imagery, cultural patterns and other ‘memetic’ aspects of reality in his practice to shape the world around him. This may sound far-fetched to you, but consider this - using symbols, images, and narratives, Joris Bohnson and his gang of rabid vultures, and the legions of Tories before him, have held sway over the English electorate’s imaginary for the better part of the past half century. To have any chance of defeating their toxic ideology at the ballot box and in the public’s mind, we must learn to tell better stories, and to use more powerful symbols, sigils and memes. Cat and his friends The Indelicates did just that in 2019 with their ‘Hexit’ ritual, fusing art, performance and magick in a co-ordinated effort to sabotage Joris Bohnson and the Brexit memeplex. Perhaps the effects of that spell are now being seen in his fall from public grace, and perhaps not - but by bringing symbols and patterns of resistance into culture via live participation in a magical ritual, they claimed back a measure of their own identity, independence and joy from the mundane reality of life under Bohnson’s punitive, authoritarian regime.
Morrison tells us what will happen if we don’t learn to tell our own stories, and make our own cultural narratives: “Coca-Cola have got the secret. What you do is you create a sigil. Coca-Cola is a sigil. The McDonalds ‘M’ is a sigil. These people are basically turning the world into themselves, using sigils. And if we don’t reverse that process, and turn the world into us using sigils, we’re going to be living in fucking McDonalds.” The same is true of memes. Tweet by tweet, scandal by scandal, Joris Bohnson and his coterie of memetic advisers are turning ‘us’ into ‘them’. The evidence is at the ballot box, and in the analytics. How long until we come up with a better story?
If you enjoyed this then you will enjoy Bram’s Podcast ‘Strange Exiles’ over here : 'Strange Exiles'
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