Seizing the Memes of Extraction A Latin American Intervention

Political humor is a cultural form through which a collectivity can provisionally and explicitly address itself by means of a critical representation of its experience of the present. Memes are an essential site of the digital remediation of political humor; as such, memes about the mining industry...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inRepresentations (Berkeley, Calif.) Vol. 168; no. 1; pp. 88 - 94
Main Author Duong, Paloma
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Berkeley University of California Press Books Division 01.11.2024
Subjects
Capitalism
Collectivity
Culture
Data mining
Humor
Information retrieval
Mining industry
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Summary:Political humor is a cultural form through which a collectivity can provisionally and explicitly address itself by means of a critical representation of its experience of the present. Memes are an essential site of the digital remediation of political humor; as such, memes about the mining industry hold a crucial frontline in the struggle over the cultural representation of capitalist ruin.1 But any meme is also a mine-in-waiting: the networked infrastructures that sustain memetic production and circulation employ our labor and gaze, capitalizing on imaginaries of participatory digital democracy to render profitable participatory digital servitudes. Mining memes index, then, ironically, how memetic circulation becomes another extractivist circuit within the expanding sites of data mining that exploit our social species-being in communicative capitalism.2 As cultural objects linked to a broader set of practices, artifacts, agencies, and imaginaries, however, memes cannot be reduced to their techno-material infrastructures alone. Formal questions
ISSN:0734-6018
1533-855X
DOI:10.1525/rep.2024.168.5.88