Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication - Online First

Internet memes – images and GIFs – have become part of internet pop culture and are here to stay. Memes’ success as an online communication phenomenon is due, to some extent, to the fact that memes are self-explanatory. Indeed, messages conveyed in memes, however complex, are instantaneously grasped. The themes that memes cover can be casual or serious, but the humour and wit they radiate diffuse the tension of most sombre topics. However, it is unclear what makes a particular meme popular or, as they say, viral. Notably, when using the word viral to refer to a meme, internet users inadvertently uphold the take on memes as gene-like units of information that evolve as quasi-biological entities. In this article, the authors intend to move away from this approach and investigate memes from a semiotic and logical perspective. To do that, the authors deploy Peircean terminology that helps position memes in the sphere of signs and analyse meme structure using both ‘icon–index–symbol’ and ‘token-type’ classifications, as well as ‘the habit of inference’ concept. This analysis allows them to describe the mechanics of meme transformation and define the boundaries that memes do not cross.

Accelerationism offers a theoretical stance towards capitalism that takes shape in various rhetorical guises. In general, these writings attempt to push through the boundaries imposed by capital while speeding off into unknown possible futures. While some articulations of this philosophy rely on traditional scholarly argumentation, others proceed along more obscure paths to envision a post-capitalist (and usually post-human) future. In this article, I focus on the latter approach by examining how some accelerationist works embrace occult poetics and subsequently align with what Brad Baumgartner identifies as a communicative praxis of Weird Mysticism. In contrast to more pragmatic approaches, Weird Mysticism provides a worthwhile rhetorical perspective for contemplating accelerationist works that embrace a nihilistic inclination to imagine a world without us.