You Can't Kill Meme

This film is as insightful as ripping salvia bong hits in a 17 year old Redditor's basement. The interview subjects are not experts, the narrative sounds like a high school student's poetry journal and there are so many uncited claims and the word "truth" is thrown around like a bouncy ball. The only reason I provided the second star is the use of Snapchat filters in the actual film with no sense of irony was HILARIOUS.

It is over an hour of bumbling rambled interviews. Given from fringe society basement goblins. While the interviewer is trying to ask actual questions. I feel bad for the interviewer who really did try to make a documentary on an interesting idea. However her subjects were just plain incoherent.

...Or rather attempt to watch.

You can't be serious. I still can't figure out if this is satire or not. It's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. This is a prank, right? This actually has to be a prank. It has to be satire. If it's satire then it would be funny. Reminds me of other satire mock-umentaries such as "clouds are satanic illuminati propaganda". This absolutely 100% has to be satire otherwise it makes zero effing sense.

Chaos magick? What!?!?!? Bro it's a meme. What language are these people even speaking. I really just felt like I was missing something. After momentarily being stunned by rapidly flashing black and white lights in the beginning that PROBABLY could give someone a seizure - for gods sake man. People have epilepsy. I hate those crappy effects.

Anyways, did you see Rick Astley in the beginning?

Yeah, we all just got rickrolled. This whole video was a prank for sure. It's fake. Definitely fake. The creators are laughing in their basements right now cuz we fell for it!

Ah, I'll play along... In conclusion to my review, I shall activate the ultimate sigil chant, now close your eyes and say it with me folks:

"Big big chungus big chungus big chungus!"

There, now the world will end and astral neo-fascists will return under Lord Zeemoog's reptilian agenda... Or something...

It's the internet folks. Should we really be suprised?

I'd give zero stars. Negative stars. ....black holes?

One star purely because I liked seeing the memes and hyperrealistic baby Pepe. That's a rare one.

I have mixed feelings about this documentary so my review may be relatively meandering and disjointed not unlike the documentary itself.

So first things first; the documentary starts off in a bad position with the misuse of the term meme as a stand in for what is really called image macro. Basically to understand this you need to go back to the early days of funny images with text on them and actually understand the terminology and we've gotten so far disconnected from that point these days that people will actually argue that a meme is an image. This is not correct. While image macros develop memetic response they themselves are not memes. What I have more of an issue with on this topic however is that there are times that the term meme is used correctly to identify the larger behavioral patterns that emerge from the usage of image macros. It's a confusing topic to discuss when the terminology is being used so interchangeably between the two separate yet connected things.

Now where this gets even more hairy is in the conversation of memes as magic. Where magic is functionally defined as either a level of technology or an applied concept that is so far outside of the understanding of the average individual in a society. However, memetics is a concept that is very well studied in sociology and can be replicated though various experiments and happens regardless of access to any substantial technology. Man of the people that are being interviewed are staggeringly correct in what they are saying about memes and how memes work and how memes are weaponized as a concept but they are attributing this phenomenon to something supernatural rather than something inherent and intrinsic to humans that lead to our development to what we have become today. Memetics have a tendency to drive social evolution and as such from the perspective of someone that is not studied in psychology or sociology it would definitely appear to be magic. Topics like confidence derived from self actualization are discussed as mystical and karmic. Interestingly these same people seem to have a certain understanding of the concept of chaos as a necessary factor and state towards developing order. There are some absolute nut jobs in this documentary that are doing far more harm than good, but there are people that have incredible minds and clearly weren't given the opportunities to explore their intellectual capacities and legitimize their theories.

The documentary was very difficult to get through, it dragged a lot especially with the shaman lady, but it was nice to see what I can only describe as the only rational anarchist that I've ever seen in a documentary.

I won't be revisiting this movie documentary and I definitely wouldn't recommend this to someone that isn't aware of the realities of chan history or social internet history at large. The documentary has a tendency to believe that memes are a new concept online, starting in roughly 2013 on 4chan. This is not the case. Meme culture online goes all the way back to the early 90s and more than likely before that with the advent of chain emails and comics sent in office communication systems. This trend would expand out to funny pictures that would be categorized on sites dedicated to funny pics. This would then become an image macro where a funny pic would then be overlayed with lettering and we have the modern iteration that we have today. The documentary explicitly links the usage of KEK to ancient Egyptian mythology when in reality it is rooted in WOW as a translation of LOL from an alliance player to a horde player.

Virtually every point about internet culture and history is incorrect and the most interesting part is that there are correct ideas with the wrong terminology being used about sociology with the label of magic(k).

Definitely don't recommend if you don't know history or sociology.

If you're with it then this watch will come clearly, with both familiarity and comfort. If you are still sleeping...then you'll also be rating this documentary a 1 if at all watching :)

While watching I'm nodding my head in agreement, taking names of people and locations down to further look into. Very satisfying for a fellow "wacko"

You have to listen beyond what your ears are hearing. Yeah yeah they should have thrown me in the interview too.

But seriously (!!!) watching this should make you wonder how/why those interviewed have such strong faith in something you cannot even fathom. Absorb more of the odd & please, ask more questions.

Awesome documentary. Thank you for the watch & the knowledge!