From memes to movements | The politics of justice in virtual spaces

The youth are politicised, organised, and online, and they’re not waiting for permission

While writing an academic paper about seeking ‘justice’ on social media and on the Internet, my friend and I found ourselves discussing the difference between what happens ‘irl’ — in real life (physical, present, embodied, not online, etc) and what happens in a virtual space (online, on social media, curated, glossed up, etc).

My friend referred to this brilliant exchange that took place in a Swedish court, as shown in the 2013 documentary TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard, where the founders of The Pirate Bay are asked how they met ‘irl’. Peter Sunde, one of the three founders, smiles wryly and says that he prefers the term ‘afk’. He argues that ‘irl’ for him was ‘Internet is real life’, and preferred the term ‘afk’, meaning ‘away from keyboard’, to talk about the non-online world.

It is this belief that what is online is as real as anything in the physical world that captures the many social movements that have been unfolding across the world since the events of the early 2010s known as the ‘Arab Spring’.

More recently, India’s neighbourhood has seen several popular uprisings: Sri Lanka in 2022, Bangladesh in 2024, and Nepal earlier this month. One of the common threads in most of these movements is that these have largely been leaderless, the large body of participants has been young people, and they have mobilised mostly on social media and messaging platforms.

In fact, it was the recent ban on these platforms that proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back in Nepal. The ban pushed the prevailing unrest over the boiling point, and led to yet another student-led people’s movement that ended with the head of government resigning and leaving the country.

Social movements that grow through the online realm have the distinction of being deeply influenced by the ‘trends’ of that online space — this makes memes and other popular culture references an important way through which these movements grow. Take, for instance, the Straw Hat Pirates’ Jolly Roger flag from the Japanese manga One Piece. It became a symbol of the protests in Nepal; and was also seen in the massive anti-government protests in Indonesia in August. The flag has also been seen in pro-Palestine protests everywhere from the United Kingdom to the United States to draw attention to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. This kind of symbolism drawn from popular culture is pretty much the glue that binds these networks together. As memes and pop culture references go viral, a whole new patois takes shape on social media, transmitted quickly through messaging apps, temporary ‘stories’, and social media posts.

Using popular media and memes as symbols to replace actual terms to describe what is causing discontent can be a great way to escape detection. Since many of these terms, memes, words, and posts are unlikely replacements of terms that social media watchers both inside and outside governments look out for, they easily escape the attention of those they are targeting. Gen Z (as they have come to be known) famously speak in a manner that many older people (at this point, anyone above 35!) can barely understand. The generations after Gen Z — Gen Alpha and Beta — are making this even harder for the rest of us. This ever-changing, quick-evolving, deeply ironic, and sharply satirical mode of online communication and critique is hard to catch and harder yet to subdue.

It now seems that young people, often considered too busy doomscrolling to be political, are imbibing as much politics as doom through their social media feeds. Governments around the world should take note that it is at their own peril that they assume that the younger generation is oblivious to politics. Even as more and more politicians are embracing social media as a medium to get their message across, and the problems of fake news and disinformation become ever larger problems that must be dealt with, there is something to be said for the power that young people online possess.

However, the online space is also fraught with the same sort of social divisions that the offline world is — one needs some felicity with the language of the Internet to engage fruitfully with its discourse, one also needs some amount of technological literacy to navigate social media effectively, and many times the narrative can get hijacked by more powerful players. This makes the online space a more accessible space for elites in any society, and marginalises the voices of many of those who may not have access to similar resources.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that there is a clear disconnect between the people and their governments, when it comes to governments that do not want to be held accountable for their own missteps. Governments and social media companies, with their extensive data collection and algorithm-driven feeds, may think they know what their Gen Z citizens and customers want, but it is now also becoming clear that even the small defiant acts of subversion and dissent that take place every day within these apps, hiding in plain sight, can stoke a major revolution.

We’ve known for a few years that the world we’ve built is standing on a foundation of quicksand. Income inequality and economic precarity are at an all-time high, global instabilities are deepening, opinion polarisation is extreme, and trust in established institutions that were supposed to safeguard our rights is waning. It is impossible to know how many more societies may well be sitting on a powder keg of disaffection, discontent, and disillusionment among the young people of the world.

Make no mistake. There is an undercurrent of disillusionment and disenchantment that is rumbling beneath the surface of silly reels and pointless meme-making. When it bubbles up out of the Internet and onto the streets — afk — governments may collapse, leaders may go into exile, and empires may fall.

Vidya Subramanian is associate professor at Jindal Global Law School (JGLS). X: @ vidyas42. Mastodon: [e-mail]. Bluesky: @vidyasubramanian.bsky.social.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH)