Scrolling on X, I find a picture of US presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ face, expertly photoshopped onto an outtake from Lana Del Rey’s Lust for Life album cover shoot, while a reverbed version of her viral coconut tree soundbite plays over the intro to 13 Beaches. Following Joe Biden’s gaffes in which he mistakenly called Ukrainian president Zelensky “Putin” and referred to Harris as “Vice President Trump”, tweets like the one posted by internet personality @blizzy_mcguire, which reads ‘Joe Biden just called me Bella hadid omg..’, gained millions of views and thousands of retweets. This summer, anyone still using X and under the age of 60 found their feed turned into a smorgasbord of memes about the American election (which, I’ll admit, undeniably lent itself to ridicule). While a few of the jokes could be considered plain old political satire, the majority were completely absurd, almost detached from reality. Are we dissociated from politics?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not above the memes. My friends and I spent days exchanging screenshots of the official document shared by Biden to announce he was dropping out of the race edited to read excerpts from Azealia Banks’ infamous Instagram stories. We say ‘it’s Joever’ at every minor inconvenience. We might break into Carrie Bradshaw-inspired monologue to make every new piece of information more palatable. “So when they missed the shot aimed at Trump’s head I couldn’t help but wonder… had I missed my shot with Big?” (wistfully take a drag from a Marlboro Light and look out your window). There is, however, something sinister to this brand of political humour, in the nihilism it seems to face major world events with.

Constantly making light of a dire situation can help the wrong people, potentially dismissing the threat to democracy that someone like Trump poses. In our day and age of Tik-Tok brain-rot, this might look like politicians becoming virtually indistinguishable from celebrities and being held less to account as a result. Once the internet turns a political figure into a meme, it’s hard to revert to ever taking them seriously again – this has been the case for Harris. When an edit of various clips of Harris laughing and dancing to Charli XCX’s hit Von Dutch went viral, an inextricable link was created between her and the singer’s chart-topping album Brat. This was further solidified when Charli herself tweeted ‘kamala IS brat’ on July 22nd, accumulating over fifty-four million views. Noticing how much attention this was attracting on social media platforms, Harris’ team were quick to jump on the bandwagon and rebrand their official accounts to be Brat-themed in an attempt to garner support from young voters. On X, the campaign page photo is a minimalist ‘kamala hq’ in lowercase Arial over a lime-green background, just like the album cover, and the bio simply reads ‘Providing context’: another reference to her coconut tree meme. The equivalent Instagram page has a pinned carousel post which includes a screenshot of Charli’s tweet and is captioned ‘And when we put this to bed, the internet will go crazy’, a lyric from one of the album’s most popular songs. Though it is less than ideal for Harris to have to piggyback off memes and a techno-pop album to win the election, if this is what it takes to beat Trump, so be it. It is disconcerting, however, how this meme-ification inevitably leads to a familiarised image of a down-to-earth, ultimately likeable character (Harris has secured affectionate nicknames such as ‘Momala’ and ‘auntie’ among her supporters) who will be often mistaken as progressive, when some of Harris’ policies leave a lot to be desired – her national security adviser recently reiterated that she would not support an arms embargo on Israel, for example.

Even more dystopian the popularisation of misleading caricatures of political figures (which isn’t new), is the total apathy of these memes’ tone. In a 2019 essay published in BuzzFeed News, Emmeline Clein poignantly identified this ironic, deadpan attitude in the context of feminism, but I think it applicable to our relationship to politics at large. According to Clein, we have come to interiorise “our existential aches and angst, smirking knowingly at them, and numbing ourselves to maintain our nonchalance”, with platforms like X or TikTok providing the perfect avenues to do so. Perhaps the inexorable rise of the far right across the world or the relentless flow of graphic images of political violence in our feeds have left us desensitised. Why care when voting is almost always a matter of picking the lesser evil? When we don’t feel appropriately represented by any candidate with a chance of winning? The urge to sit back and tweet as the world burns is, in the current political climate, understandable, but it also means taking the easy route.

While it might once have been convenient to use social media platforms to keep in the loop with current events, nowadays algorithms are so fast-paced and oversaturated that having them as our primary source of information could only alienate us. They have become too overwhelming and dispersive to allow space for meaningful political discussion. Turning to different sources would not only mean restricting the quantity of information to a digestible amount (and most likely increasing the quality), but also getting a better sense of what we as individuals have the power to do. Especially when there have recently been such inspirational examples of seemingly hopeless situations where the tide was turned by young people’s collective action. In June, extreme right party Rassemblement National was set to win France’s snap elections after the first round of votes but, thanks to the creation of a broad coalition of the left-wing parties and voters turning out in full force to defeat the far right, the Nouveau Front Populaire was the shock winner, with 48% of 18–24-year-olds’ votes.

We needn’t look further than our own campus to find similarly impactful examples: after College hit the TCDSU with a €214k fee for financial losses caused by their blockades of the Book of Kells back in May, the SU refused to be intimidated, and the fee was dropped. They had been protesting against Trinity’s failure to divest from Israeli companies on the UN Blacklist as well as proposed fee hikes for master’s students – a right which they reiterated in response to the college’s threats of disciplinary proceedings. An even more extensive operation was carried out with the Trinity BDS (Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions) encampment, which followed similar initiatives by students across the US and saw pro-Palestinian protesters set up tents in Fellows’ Square. The encampment continued for five days, until an agreement was reached with college’s senior management and Trinity announced the cutting of its ties with Israeli companies that have activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as well as plans to support Palestinian scholars. It also received international attention, support, and praise.

Taking to social media platforms to better understand political issues feels like looking into a black hole. Well-meaning sentiments of wanting to stay engaged easily wane in the face of genuinely disheartening news; but if untreated, disillusionment can curdle into a numbness that is perhaps more dangerous and isolating than misplaced hope. Political satire is only useful so long as it spurs people to push their governments for what they deserve, not if it becomes an outlet for us to detach from reality when it gets too uncomfortable. In the same way, social media is also a double-edged sword: it can amplify the impact of initiatives like the BDS encampment but also allow entire joke candidacies for important positions in the SU, if we’re looking at Trinity for examples. It’s important to be mindful about when and how we choose to use either when it comes to politics. If you ask me, I would encourage holding on to your hope till the last possible second. If it doesn’t work out, you’ll always have your cynicism to fall back on.