Meme collective phenomenon

Memes have become one of the most powerful expressive forms of our time. Memissima, the first Italian festival dedicated to memetic culture, conceived by Max Magaldi, explores its boundaries, transformations, and impact on the present. In an era where everything seems ready to go viral, memes no longer merely reflect reality: they anticipate and shape it.

Collective symbols and aesthetic expressions born from a subversion of digital culture, memes defy traditional definitions: they do not belong to comics, graphic design, or advertising. According to writer Alessandro Lolli, author of La guerra dei meme (Effequ, 2020), they constitute a valid “eleventh art”¹ that thrives on relationships, recognition, and transformation. Memes like Wojak, Pepe the Frog, or Hide the Pain Harold have created new myths of our time, surviving solely through their collective reproduction as narrative units that continuously evolve and renew themselves.

But what happens when reality itself takes on memetic forms? Artist and musician Max Magaldi describes his encounter with memes as a form of reconciliation with the contemporary world: “a fascination with chaos” that led him to create Memissima in 2021, the first Italian festival entirely dedicated to meme culture. Not merely a self-serving celebration but a critical laboratory examining the aesthetic, communicative, and political power of these digital objects. The 2025 edition will focus on the death of memes in a time when events are so paradoxical that they no longer need to be parodied because “they are born already memed”.

What is a meme?

«Memes are the most powerful form of communication of our time. Precisely because everyone thinks they are just nonsense».

This is how Magaldi, the creator of Memissima, which has been investigating contemporary thought through memes since 2021, explains their disruptive power: content that infiltrates communication flows without resistance, bypassing the critical filter of the average user and operating beneath the surface. Not just jokes or funny images, but carriers of meaning.

Max Magaldi, musician and artist, has performed across Europe with various musical projects. Since 2018, he has been experimenting with digital performance actions that intertwine music, contemporary art, and social media hacking. He has created soundscapes and installations in Italy, France, Greece, and Saudi Arabia, both independently and in collaboration with artists such as Edoardo Tresoldi, Gonzalo Borondo, Studio Azzurro, Andrea Villa, and Alberonero. Since 2021, he has been the creator and artistic director of Memissima, the Festival of Memetic Culture.

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A meme is typically composed of an image and a short text, merging written and visual elements: from reaction memes that encapsulate precise emotions, such as Success Kid, to deep-fried memes, saturated and distorted to critique excessive digital manipulation. Every year, new memes emerge and old ones resurface: in 2024, for instance, there were Symphony Dolphins, psychedelic dolphins set to music that mock Generation Z’s emotions, or Chill Guy, an anthropomorphic dog who appears relaxed in the face of chaos, alongside those born from the Olympics or political controversies².

The difference between a meme and a viral content lies precisely here: memes are not created to spread but to be reinvented. They adapt like a living language because, as Magaldi himself states, «they are never finished but always evolving; what makes a meme is its manipulability, its hybridity».

Memetic culture indeed originates and thrives in the heart of the attention economy³ but «it is never a single meme that goes viral; it is the continuous swarming around it that makes it so».

A 2015 stock photo, for example, showing a man walking hand in hand with his (presumed) girlfriend while turning to look at another woman (Distracted Boyfriend), continues to be reinterpreted in thousands of versions with different labels. Dank memes, too, are a product of this constant manipulation: images so extensively reworked by users that the original meme becomes incomprehensible.The creation of a meme is, in fact, a rhizomatic process, with each user adding their own contribution and meaning⁴. However, according to Magaldi, the underlying factor is always the ability to recognise the inherent narrative or emotional potential of a given element: «a sensitivity that captures the spirit, the genius loci⁵ of digital content, reminiscent of Salvador Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method», in which the artist surrenders to a form of “controlled delirium” and subconscious vision to perceive multiple meanings within a single image and convey them to the viewer.

A shared psychedelic experience

From the second edition of the festival, the Meme Awards were introduced—not to honour the “best meme” but the one that best embodied the cultural spirit of the year. «They are a communication experiment», Magaldi states, «very different from awarding an Oscar because they acquire a positive or negative connotation depending on the sentiment that memes about that character have evoked and continue to evoke».

«How a meme is perceived and spreads is pure anarchy, indeterminacy, and that is what fascinates me most about this world».

Perhaps because memes actually tell us something profound about ourselves since we create, share, and recognise them. «They connect us in a shared psychedelic experience», says Max Magaldi, evoking the idea that a brilliant caption on a grainy image can spark a collective sense⁶, of meaning, making us laugh, cry, or get angry together. 

«Memes work because they activate a deep, almost magical resonance», Magaldi continues—an immediate understanding that requires no explanation: we are all, in some way, already “initiated” into their language within the cultural niches defined by age, background, and community.

«Because of my age, I have never watched Dragon Ball, which is a huge reservoir of memetic material, so I do not have access to that particular type of humour», Magaldi notes. «In this sense, memes are both a collective phenomenon and profoundly esoteric: accessible only to those who possess the keys to decipher them». For a meme to arise and spread, then, a sufficient number of people must recognise something significant, profound, and collective in it—something that precedes rational explanation. Of course, the algorithm can help disseminate memes: «it can recreate viewing numbers in vitro», Magaldi says, «but it cannot create that spark. The moment you try to tame a meme and sponsor it, it loses its brilliance; it becomes a message for the normies⁷ which is why companies are often reluctant to use this language».

Attempting to harness a language born from the grassroots, spontaneous and chaotic, with the top-down, controlled logic of advertising, risks producing the opposite effect: «a case in point is the Open to Meraviglia campaign by advertising agency Armando Testa, designed to maximise its memetic potential, but ultimately used by the community in an entirely different way. That is why Memissima has dedicated a festival section, Meme per gli Acquisti, to exploring the boundary between strategy and spontaneity».

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Reality overcoming the meme

Memissima was born from an ambivalence, as often happens with things one truly loves. When asked whether the festival is an act of love or a critique of memetic culture, Max Magaldi replies that it is both. «Loving something does not mean ignoring its apocalyptic side, which, from a creative standpoint, is always the most fascinating».

Memes are catalysts: they accelerate processes that would otherwise take time to mature, or conversely, they numb them entirely. And in this rapid, invasive culture, where «after eight hours there is already another situation to meme», Magaldi’s central, still unresolved question is whether memes facilitate collective debate and public reflection—or render them impossible. When an entire community moves in unison around a viral phenomenon (wave), the focus risks shifting to form, to the race for content, rather than the substance of the issue itself.

Magaldi states it bluntly: «Perhaps memes, in most cases, obscure rather than clarify».

Not due to a lack of potential but because of a widespread inability to handle them with awareness.

Meme culture thus runs the risk of emptying every narrative of its depth, laying the groundwork for a fast-paced consumption of reality itself—where the meme ceases to be a digital language and instead becomes a living entity beyond the screen. When Elon Musk proclaimed, «I’m becoming meme», playfully nodding to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s⁸, famous quote during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February 2025, he was not being ironic: he was engaging in a phenomenon where reality itself shapes itself according to the codes of virality. «This is the apocalyptic side», Magaldi asserts, «where the death of memes takes form»: an expression that does not signify an end, but rather a profound mutation in which every public act takes on the appearance of shareable content.

«Things are happening that are so absurd there is no need to meme them», Magaldi explains, «because they are born memed».

«At that moment, the relationship between representation and reality is reversed. The meme dies». But never entirely, because «it releases spores, which take root in reality and continue to act», altering the way we communicate, think, and even vote.

And this is where Memissima reveals its true nature: not a parade of viral content but a collective exercise in awareness, pausing to reflect on when, what, and why we have memed, on the spores of memes that circulate, and on how they change us. Because today, sharing a meme means narrating the world in real time. And every meme, in the end, is an open question about truth, imagination, and power.

 

1. The “ten arts” are architecture, music, painting, sculpture, poetry, dance, film, theater, radio-television, and comics. The last two were added by French critic Claude Beylie in 1964. ↩︎
2. Kinnard, M., & Price, M. L. (2024, June 18). The politics of memes: How Biden and Trump are fighting each other on the internet | AP News. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/biden-trump-dark-brandon-memes-2024-election-2e31e2347d1045babf1229fe210dddf5 ↩︎
3. Attention warfare is a concept that describes the competition among companies, digital platforms, media, and content to gain and hold people’s attention. In an environment where information is abundant but human attention is limited, this becomes a valuable and contested resource. See Williams, J. (2023b). Scansatevi dalla luce: Libertà e resistenza digitale. effequ. ↩︎
4. We now talk about layers of irony. Memes are divided into pre-ironic, ironic, meta-ironic, and post-ironic memes; these categories differ mainly in the way they use the “memetic frame” (the template): the pre-ironic meme uses the frame to build the story, to address the joke; all others (also called “reflexive memes”) make the frame something to be reevaluated and challenged, taking it to the absurd. See Lolli, A. (2020b). La guerra dei meme: Fenomenologia di uno scherzo infinito. effequ. ↩︎
5. The genius loci is the spirit or deep identity of a place. It represents the unique atmosphere associated with its history, culture, and nature. In architecture, respecting it means designing in harmony with that context. ↩︎
6. Ibarz, V., & Villegas, M. (2007). El método paranoico-crítico de Salvador Dalí. Revista De Historia De La Psicología, 28(2), 107–112. ↩︎
7. The meme community is divided into two zones: autists and normies. Autists are those who take into account the evolution of a meme and are able to decode and evolve it in turn. Normies do not know the memetic process, but they take the products of autists and trivialize them, vulgarize them, destroying any humorous capacity. To counter the “normification” of their memes, autistics continue to modify and evolve their humor by adding more and more layers of irony, making their memes harder to understand. See Lolli, A. (2020b). La guerra dei meme: Fenomenologia di uno scherzo infinito. effequ. ↩︎
8. During the testing of the first atomic bomb in 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita, saying: «Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds», expressing the moral weight of creating such a destructive weapon. This phrase symbolizes the moment when science touches the ethical limits of humanity ↩︎