This makes the latest twitterstorm rather fascinating to me.
It’s the one about the ‘Keep Calm and Rape A Lot’ t-shirts.
Basically, a company that makes designs for print-on-demand
t-shirts has used an algorithm to come up with variations for the “Keep Calm
and Carry On” design. There are hundreds of thousands of variations, including
a number of ‘and rape…’ ones. Now, the excuse that it was only an algorithm
doesn’t quite work (since it doesn’t include any examples of ‘rape him’ or ‘hit
him’, but it does include ‘rape her’ and ‘hit her’, suggesting that someone,
somewhere looked at these and made choices before they went up), but the
tedious attempts to make money from idiots by idiots doesn’t interest me.
What does interest me is that this was inevitable. If you
were to create a story about a meme like ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, this is
pretty much how you would end it. It’s the unpleasant logical conclusion.
It’s unfortunate, because I love the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’
design. It’s a beautiful design. The font, the colours, the spacing, the size -
it’s all particularly pleasing. Add on to that the idea that it was a design to
be printed and used for areas damaged during the war, and it says something
rather beautiful about Britain and the British. It sums up the blitz spirit and
puts it into a stunning piece of graphic design. Add onto that the idea that it
was lost as a design until relatively recently, and was unearthed in a
second-hand bookshop and it takes on an almost magical quality.
This led to commercialisation and parodies. I don’t need to
go into them in depth. We’ve all seen them, whether they’ve been able to take
on the basic design and use the spirit to sum up something else British (“Keep
Calm, I’m the Doctor”) or whether it was just subverting the idea completely (“Don’t
stay calm and freak out!”). Anything
that takes off, or is that well designed and has that simple a message is going
to end up being parodied. It’s inevitable.
It began as mildly amusing, and swiftly became tedious.
Keep Calm and Kill Zombies
Keep Calm and Eat Brains
Keep Calm and Exterminate
Keep Calm and Watch X-Factor
Keep Calm and Use the Force
Keep Calm and Have a Cupcake
Keep Calm and Call *INSERT SUPERHERO OR TV CHARACTER HERE*
Tedious, boring and annoying repetition. And the worst thing
about it was that it was inevitable. People have this tendency to keep going
with jokes, partially because you keep finding people who haven’t heard it
before, and you get to be the hilarious person introducing it.
And because it’s in the public domain, this means that
anyone can design anything using the basic template.
In fact, when I googled ‘Keep
Calm and…’ in order to verify that it was indeed found in a second-hand
bookshop, it auto-completed to ‘Keep calm and carry on maker’.
If the first few times you saw the design were well done, of
course people that think they’re funny are going to run the idea into the
ground. In the manner of an internet meme, it’s going to end up being used and
used and reused until only idiots find it hilarious.
It’s the ‘Garlic Bread’ moment. It’s the ‘I can has cheezburger?’
moment. It’s the planking moment. It’s Gangnam Style. It’s Harlem Shake. It’s
something that’s funny for five minutes, and then some people don’t realise
that the party is over and it’s time to stop going on about it.
Of course someone was going to automate it. Of course
someone was going to either intentionally be offensive or unintentionally avoid
quality control to this kind of point.
That’s what memes do. That’s what tedious repetition of them
does.
If you’d written this as a story, you’d use the ‘Keep Calm
and Carry On’ meme as representative of something like weapons or drugs. They’d
be used as tools or medicine first, before you delved into the other uses
people find for them, and it all becomes out of control. Eventually, you’d end
with the creator looking and seeing the worst depths that it has been used for,
silently weeping over what he has wrought upon this earth.
Keep calm and weep inwardly.
