In 2025, global conflict isn't just on the news — it's trending on TikTok. From "WWIII draft outfit hauls" to fancams of world leaders, this video explores how war has become a meme... and what that means for how we process fear, trauma, and power in the digital age.
We dive into:
📌 The evolution of memes — from absurdist humor to propaganda
📌 Why we joke about the end of the world (and whether it's helping)
📌 Meme warfare, state-sponsored cringe, and corporate co-optation
📌 The fine line between awareness and performance
📌 How memes offer comfort — and how they can desensitize
Download the BrandSnap app: https://brandsnap.app.link/elvi
Don't forget to use code ELVI30 for 30% off plans 100GB or larger for first-time users of Koofr. More about their privacy commitment and features here:
https://koofr.eu/privacy-matters/
https://koofr.eu/features/
Join my Members Only channel to get access to perks:
/ @elvicheva
🎵 Music: Canva, madstock from Pixabay, 9JackJack8 from Pixabay
✨ Support me on Patreon: patreon.com/ElviCheva
📩 Inquiries & Collabs: elvicheva@proton.me
📌 Find me here:
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/elvinanana.b...
Instagram: / elvicheva
We dive into:
📌 The evolution of memes — from absurdist humor to propaganda
📌 Why we joke about the end of the world (and whether it's helping)
📌 Meme warfare, state-sponsored cringe, and corporate co-optation
📌 The fine line between awareness and performance
📌 How memes offer comfort — and how they can desensitize
Download the BrandSnap app: https://brandsnap.app.link/elvi
Don't forget to use code ELVI30 for 30% off plans 100GB or larger for first-time users of Koofr. More about their privacy commitment and features here:
https://koofr.eu/privacy-matters/
https://koofr.eu/features/
Join my Members Only channel to get access to perks:
/ @elvicheva
🎵 Music: Canva, madstock from Pixabay, 9JackJack8 from Pixabay
✨ Support me on Patreon: patreon.com/ElviCheva
📩 Inquiries & Collabs: elvicheva@proton.me
📌 Find me here:
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/elvinanana.b...
Instagram: / elvicheva
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00There's a certain kind of silence that comes right before your phone buzzes with another headline,
00:06another war, another crisis, just another thing to worry about while you were trying to decide
00:11what to eat for dinner. And then you might like it to make sure that your friends are aware that
00:16you're well informed about the latest political topic. And then somehow you're watching a reel
00:21or a TikTok of someone doing a World War III draft haul that gets recommended on your For You page.
00:30From Final Home, this is their iconic gun. Or a fancam of a world leader set to hyperpop.
00:35In three days, I heard it from Putin.
00:40Because in 2025, even the news of a global conflict comes with a trending audio.
00:46War has become a meme. But how did we get here? Is it just the internet being the internet? Or
00:52is this how we cop now? By laughing at things that terrify us the most. We're not the first
00:58generation to live through global fear. But we might be the first to make it into TikToks or
01:03endless Instagram meme dumps.
01:08So today we're going to unpack the memification of the global conflict. Why we're joking about the
01:13end of the world. And whether that's actually helping or just making everything feel even more surreal.
01:19Before it became a protest tool or a form of passive aggressive government messaging,
01:28the word meme was coined by none other than evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Allegedly.
01:35In his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, he described a meme as the simplest way to put an idea in someone's
01:41head. Like a gene, but for culture. Infectious, replicable, and very sticky. Fast forward to the internet
01:48era and memes became jokes. Weird little images with captions inside jokes for niche corners of the
01:55web. Cats, rage comics, a frog that made everyone inexplicably emotional, a smiling old man that
02:02seemed in pain and conquered everybody's hearts. But over the past two decades memes have evolved into
02:07something much more powerful and sometimes much more unsettling. Now memes exist on a spectrum.
02:14Let me put my meme expert glasses on. On one hand of the current meme spectrum,
02:21we have pure brain rot. Bombardier. Crocodile. A freaking flying alligator that flies and bombs
02:28children in Gaza and Palestine. Doesn't believe in Allah and loves bombs. These are TikToks that make
02:35absolutely no sense. On purpose. Oh nein. Horizontal rotierender fish.
02:43They are absurd, chaotic, sometimes borderline incomprehensible. But as one researcher put it,
02:49they offer an oasis of calm amid the media chaos. A way to check out, scroll endlessly and quiet the
02:55part of your brain screaming everything is terrible. Think of it as an anti-copying mechanism that somehow
03:02works. On the other hand of the spectrum, we have Hopcore. This is the gentler cousin of doom posting.
03:08Pastel posts reminding you to drink water. Videos of strangers being kind. Memes that try to re-inject
03:14meaning and optimism into a landscape saturated with cynicism. A digital whisper that says
03:20Hey, it's bad. But maybe not all that bad. And somewhere in the middle, or maybe beyond the spectrum,
03:28there are memes created by governments, brands, and institutions. I'm sure you've seen them. The
03:34cringe TikToks from official accounts. The cutesy posts dropped in the middle of humanitarian crisis.
03:40They want to be relatable. They want to be part of the discourse. But sometimes they're just
03:46embarrassing. And even dangerous. Because when state actors use memes to sway public opinion, or when
03:53corporations meme through disaster to protect their image, we enter a space where propaganda wears a
04:00quirky little hat and does a little TikTok dance. As highlighted in the article called
04:05The Mimification of the Ukraine War, from cringe to dangerous, the mimification of international
04:11relations can contribute to diplomatic disasters. And when diplomacy turns into discourse and then
04:17discourse turns into memes, the line between entertainment and manipulation gets very,
04:23very blurry. But let's take a step back.
04:29Not all memes are made for manipulation or virality. Sometimes they're just how we survive.
04:36Psychologists call it cognitive reappraisal. It's just a fancy term for the very human tendency to take
04:42something terrifying and make it funny. To soften the blow, kind of. To laugh so we don't spiral.
04:49Clinical psychologist Carla Manley explains that by adding humor to heavy events, memes can downplay
04:55the severity of crisis. So it's an attempt not to make light of them, but to make them livable and to
05:00offer relief when everything feels unrelenting. Media psychologist Pamela Rutledge adds that memes
05:06can provide a kind of psychological comfort. Especially when the news cycle feels like a
05:11never-ending parade of worst-case scenarios. And as digital culture scholar Jamie Cohen puts it,
05:17we're posting through it, so to speak. In this way, memes are a kind of group therapy. A coping
05:23mechanism for the chronically online. And they don't serve only for individual catharsis. They're about
05:29connection. When we laugh at the same weird joke about World War 3 or climate collapse, we're not just
05:35laughing, we're connecting with a community of people. We're sharing the emotional weight of it all.
05:41Even if we're doing through shitposts or irony-poisoned captions. And this can be especially
05:46crucial for teens, Gen Z and Gen Alpha. A recent study on so-called brain rot content on TikTok
05:52found that these surreal, mind-numbing videos aren't just silly. They're a strategy. A way for young
05:58people to manage the uniquely specific anxiety of growing up in this moment in history. Where the
06:04planet is burning, the news never stops, and adulthood feels like a scam. And of course,
06:10none of this is exactly new. Throughout history, people have used humor, satire, and absurdity to
06:16cope with crisis. From political cartoons to wartime jokes, laughter has always been a form of resistance
06:23and a form of relief. As the author of a Substack article, A History of Loves, puts it,
06:29memes are crisis art, like all art. The difference now is that the stage is digital, the audience is
06:36global, and the scroll never ends. So the question becomes, is this how we heal, or is this how we
06:44dissociate? So we've established that memes can be a coping mechanism. But there are also weapons.
06:54Welcome to Mimetic Warfare, where front lines are Twitter threads, TikTok slides, or viral infographics.
07:02Where the goal isn't necessarily the truth, it's the dominance of the narrative. And the side that has
07:08the best memes, wins. As one Substack writer put it bluntly, memes are a form of propaganda,
07:16advertising, and mass manipulation. Many who create or share them don't know the power they hold.
07:22And we've been watching it play in real time with conflicts like Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine.
07:28The battleground isn't just the land anymore, it's the algorithm. Every post, every hashtag becomes a
07:33miniature weapon in the fight for hearts, likes, and ripostes. The editors at Modern Diplomacy note
07:41that meme warfare doesn't exist in a vacuum. Whether one narrative goes viral and the other vanishes
07:46depends not on justice, but on the aesthetics, proximity, platform rules, and the billionaires
07:52behind them. Take Kashmir, for example. Internet shutdowns and account bans effectively silenced
07:58online activism. There are no memes, no trending hashtags. I bet you didn't see any of your friends on
08:03Instagram report about the conflict. In contrast, the Israel-Palestine conflict flooded the digital
08:09space with pro-Palestinian voices gaining massive support and then facing shadow bans, algorithmic
08:16suspension, and platform censorship in response. In these cases, memes aren't just frivolous, they are
08:22not coping mechanisms, they are very strategic. They bypass traditional media and they manipulate
08:28attention. And most importantly, they shape the public opinion in ways that are very hard to undo.
08:35Just think about your grandma that claims to know everything about Putin's intentions after watching
08:40an expert video on Facebook. She's not going to change your mind as much as you argue with her.
08:46I'm sorry. And you might ask why does your grandma keep her posting and liking all those propaganda videos?
08:53Well, here's the uncomfortable part. Memes also give us a sense of participation without the burden of
08:59understanding. We repost, we react, we pick sites based on 15 second clips. The site that wins the meme
09:07war can dominate the public perception. And of course politicians have clocked it. Just remember the awkward
09:13memes from state departments. Israel, I'm looking at you. The weird brand post during international tragedies.
09:21There's always a digital meme campaign for everything. Some even wonder whether we're escalating
09:27conflicts for clout, for engagement metrics, for virality. So at their best, memes can be rallying
09:33cries. At their worst, they can be tools of manipulation by governments, brands, institutions,
09:39billionaires, and many other people. They flatten complex realities into shareable posts. War becomes content,
09:47suffering becomes a static and the algorithm keeps scrolling.
09:57Let's set a scene. It's Thursday night. You're having one of your doom scrolling sessions.
10:03And here it is. One of your friends reposted a video of a child suffering in Gaza. Oh, and here's
10:09another friend reposting the same video. You think to yourself, am I a bad person if I don't repost it as
10:15well? What happens when you post something about a word you don't fully understand? Are you spreading
10:21awareness or just performing care? You might encounter a lot of people on the internet that claim that
10:27those whose activism mostly consists of reposting outrage content are just performing care. It's harsh,
10:34but also fair because online nothing exists in isolation. Every post is public. Every reaction is
10:43watched. We're not just expressing ourselves. We're also curating our image. And that's where
10:49Michel Foucault comes in. Should I put on my smart glasses again? In discipline and punish, he warns,
10:56visibility is a trap. In other words, on the internet, we're all performing under surveillance,
11:04not by big brother, but by each other. Social media becomes a kind of digital,
11:08confessional booth. We post our sadness, our rage, our solidarity, not just to express ourselves,
11:15but to be seen doing it. To be seen as good, as informed, as on the right side of history.
11:22As this E.ON essay puts it, the digital crowd has come to fill in for the authority of the confessor.
11:28It acts as a substitute for Socrates' inner voice of moral conscience. So instead of asking ourselves what
11:35we believe, what we feel, we ask, what is the right thing to post right now? What will bring
11:41you the highest amount of likes and a feeling of satisfaction? Because if activism becomes performance
11:47and morality becomes just a game of likes, then solidarity risks becoming an aesthetic,
11:54a fleeting gesture, a curated brand of empathy. As another E.ON piece puts it,
11:59radical individualism facilitates a convenient forgetting of the ligaments that bind us to others.
12:05We think we're participating in the public discourse, but in reality, we're just reposting
12:12the same posts in eco-chambers. In our own little bubbles of like-minded followers, there's no discourse,
12:19there's no dialogue. Aristotle once wrote that humans are political animals, that to engage in a
12:25meaningful life, we must participate in the public realm. But when the public realm becomes a for you
12:31page, the act of care becomes just a performative caption. Foucault might say that this is power in
12:37its most subtle form, not coercion, but subtle pressure, a network of relations that induces
12:43acquiescence, not through violence but through likes. So we're left with this deeply uncomfortable
12:48question when we're posting memes about wars and conflicts, are we confronting reality or are we just
12:55performing the appearance of care and then moving on? Because we can't just convey a message through
13:01a meme, since memes can be very hollow. So where does this leave us? Memes are powerful, they can be so
13:08funny and comforting and they create solidarity even if it's fleeting, but they can also do harm. They can
13:14distort, they can desensitize, they can turn real human lives into passing trends in our endless doom scroll.
13:21Like all art born from crisis, memes are mirrors, but unlike traditional art, they have such properties
13:28as speed, virality and sometimes minimal depth. They rise and fall with trends and not with the
13:35resolution of the conflicts that are being reposted about. And that's the paradox, because memes do give
13:41us a sense of control in the hopeless times, but do they actually help us understand what's going on and
13:48engage meaningfully? Do they truly lead us towards action? Or are we, as Foucault might argue, stuck in
13:54an infinite feedback loop where the performance of care replaces the labor of it? Where the aesthetics
14:00of politics replaces the actual politics? So maybe the real question is how to share memes with more
14:07intention? How do we know that we've crossed the line from copying into complicity? And how do we use
14:13these tools without letting them use us? We owe it to ourselves to ask who is in on the joke and who
14:20is paying the price. And that's it for today's video. Hope you enjoyed it. Definitely let me know
14:26your thoughts in the comments. Do you agree with everything I said or do you have opposing opinions?
14:31It's definitely a controversial topic and there's a lot of discussion and truth is born through discussion,
14:36so I would really appreciate your thoughts. Thank you for watching and see you in the next one. Bye!