can't wait for an AI to go completely insane because researchers try to get it to understand memes

My most low-effort but strongly held take on memes is that they are neither historically unique nor semiotically remarkable, & the reason for this, & the reason there isn't much interesting research on memes that isn't just over-hyped semiology, is that "memes" are just jokes.

And of course jokes & humor are notoriously resistant to conceptual analysis because their basic premise is propositional vagueness+semantic slippage+interpretive reversal. A joke is like a trap for the mind, a technical form whose nature is to defeat expectations & capture.

"Memes", in the sense of a multimodal rebus-like sign, take advantage of all kinds of semiotic affordance, from index to icon to symbol, & render it in the form of contemporary satire. The really challenging part is analyzing the humor, not the signifying process.

They're something like political-satirical cartoons that have absorbed the semantic procedures of conceptual art (which escaped the body of art as it lay dying, mortally wounded by the emergence of the internet).

If they are unique & typically of our time it's because they follow the pattern of most (Western) media, which is to increasingly tend towards a unitary form through functional synthesis of modalities, eg the way we keep combining discrete media into single instruments/platforms.

The semantic density of memes often seems to impress people so much that they interpret it as a singularity, a break with previous forms & modes, but really it is perfectly consistent with the historical process of increased semiotic/comm density through multimodal combinations.

With memes people have simply discovered a way to tell several kinds jokes at the same time. This is fasciating from every direction you look at it, but it's hardly some anomalous & unprecedented form of semiosis unique to the 21st C. It's just more jokes, faster, and all at once

I'm not trying to pull a historicist deflation of memes à la "nothing new under the sun", because recombination often entails emergence, I just feel like before people start to hype the idea that we're dealing with totally novel phenomena we could just try normal semiotics idk.

And which school of semiotics would be best suited for studying memes, I hear you ask? Well, the one that I like the most, obviously.