Meme Wars is a book I was originally eager to lay into. The title alone made me scoff with a sceptical self-consciousness. It looked like a lame, hyped-up, hipster -manifesto: a book for those people who preach revolutionary messages about consumerism and popular culture and the injustices of the world on Facebook. What does “the creative destruction of neoclassical economics” even mean?
As it turns out “the creative destruction of neoclassical economics” is a pretty accurate and concise way of explaining what the book does. It doesn’t actually take a specialist to work out what it means. Meme Wars is a textbook, but a textbook unlike any you’ve studied from before. It is for students of economics, but the messages it contains, in its strikingly visual and unconventional presentation, are obviously aimed at every single person who exists in a consumer culture on this planet.
Meme Wars comes from Kalle Lasn, the founder and editor of the magazine Adbusters, one of the main forces to set the Occupy Movement in motion. Like Adbusters, Meme Wars subverts publically well-known images, forcing us to reconsider what we usually take for granted in our media-obsessed, constantly-consuming society. Meme Wars flips everyday assumptions about corporations and products on their heads, setting its sights instead on the assumptions made and propagated about economics.
The book criticises the way in which economics is taught as a concept in school and especially universities: with a lack of change and a lack of recognition in the gross inadequacy that conservative (or ‘neo-classical’) economics possesses. The message is this: Capitalism isn’t working. And it doesn’t take an Economics student to work that out. Meme Wars is peppered with dialogue boxes asking difficult, demanding questions like: ‘why is it easier to imagine a total catastrophe which ends all life in Earth than it is to imagine a real life change in capitalist relations’?
Cynicism such as mine is clearly a damaging and restricting force, and I won’t deny that much of it is down to apathy. Yet I know for a fact that I am not alone. Meme Wars shouts directly to our generation, the preface resonate in its, ‘Hey all you students out there’. It demands our attention, and refuses to let us place responsibility for the world anywhere but on our own shoulders.
It is by no means the first tome to contradict orthodox economic thinking, but the power and uniqueness of Meme Wars lies in its visual, visceral presentation. The images are sometimes shocking, sometimes familiar, sometimes both. It takes a double-page spread of Indian child labourers asleep amongst machinery to make you aware of how desensitised we have become to poverty. As a generation whose lives revolve around immediate, visual arts it is a clever, challenging and imaginative way to target attention.
What Meme Wars ultimately aims for is movement and it builds upon Occupy, which will sweep the campuses and universities and make us question what we are being told and taught. This book throws you out of your comfort zone and insists that we let go of the cynicism that barricades the truth. If you can drop the sarcastic scorn for a minute, have a look at its message, the future might just depend on it.
Meme Wars is available now from Penguin.
Words: Jennie Pritchard