Tracking the Joke
iFunny, the rise of alt-right memes, and me
“A few years ago, when it suddenly occurred to us that the internet was a place we could never leave, I began to keep a diary of what it felt like to be there in the days of its snowy white disintegration, which felt also like the disintegration of my own mind. My interest was not academic.”
– Patricia Lockwood, The Communal Mind
It’s no longer raining when we get home from the teen psych ward. On the drive, the rain struck staccato across the roof of the silent car. But by the time Dad rolls to a stop in front of our apartment building, it is dry and dark and quiet. Mom helps me with my bag.
My bedroom is different. Books from the floor on the bedside table, the closet door and desk drawers ajar. The shaggy rug lying on the hardwood like a deflated Komondor is folded over at the corner. I’d recently learned to not care about these sorts of intrusions, so I don’t. I take my first good shower—with truly hot water, and nobody watching you through the curtain—in a week. I say goodnight to my parents, huddled at the kitchen table. It’s quiet again, and the dog sleeps in fits by the front door. I brush and spit, get into bed, and download iFunny.
In August, 2019, the FBI raided the house of Ohio man Eric Olsen. Agents seized 15 rifles, 10 semiautomatic pistols, and 10,000 rounds of ammunition, all of which belonged to Mr. Olsen’s 18-year-old son, Justin.
If the scale of this arsenal took law enforcement by surprise, its actual existence almost certainly did not. Using his iFunny account ArmyofChrist, Justin Olsen had for months been threatening violence against his perceived enemies, including Planned Parenthood, homosexuals, Muslims, feminists, and federal agents.
Even with Olsen swept aside, over the next year ArmyofChrist-esque material continued to flourish on iFunny. Embedded in comedic memes to be consumed by the app’s young and impressionable user base, ideological scourges like white nationalism and homophobia mutate and adapt, taking on primer, more resilient appeal.
Sophomore year of high school was hard. I bounced around several outpatient and inpatient psychiatric care facilities with what was deemed, at various turns, bipolar disorder, aggravated ADHD, body dysmorphia, and depression. My smorgasbord of diagnoses, frequent extended absences, and general moodiness isolated me from my classmates at a school I’d only attended two years. In the absence of a local peer group, I turned online.
I’d heard about iFunny at the first inpatient facility I went to—a teen psych ward upstate. A patient with a long, blonde braid told me about it. Her boyfriend had downloaded the app for her, and when her parents had decided to take her to the hospital for suicidal ideation, he promised to save every meme she missed so that she could see them all when she was released. She said that like it was the sweetest thing he could do for her, and given the red warmth lighting up her cheeks, I believed her.
When I downloaded the app the night I returned home from that facility, I quickly discovered the thrills of its anti-establishment, anti-authority content. Back then, authority on iFunny wasn’t represented by the New York Times or Anthony Fauci or vague notions of “the left” that usually just mean women and non-white people. Instead, authority meant teachers and parents, standardized tests and summer jobs, and anyone or anything else challenging the limits of your erupting autonomy. As a teen, any authority can control you, your actions, your whereabouts—yet iFunny seemed to represent the concession that no one could control your thoughts. As a teen also undergoing a struggle for control over their own thoughts, that concession had immense appeal.
iFunny is owned and operated by a Cyprus-based, Moscow-headquartered tech company called FunCorp. Launched in 2011, the iFunny app typically ranks in the 40s for entertainment apps in the app store, where it greets users with a yellow smiley face logo. Despite its relatively low profile, iFunny averages about 10 million monthly users—most of whom are, in my experience, teenage males.
Aside from the comment threads, the three most significant of the app’s realms are Features, Subscriptions, and Collective. Features is a selection of posts from Collective chosen by community moderators. Appearing every few hours, featured memes are meant to appeal to a wide array of iFunny users, who get notified whenever a new batch of features is posted. Features also set the bar for success; if you want to be featured, you make memes similar to or riffing on those that have been featured before.
Subscriptions collect the posts by the users that you have followed, allowing you to stay up to date with accounts whose particular brand of humor or commentary you (literally) subscribe to. Individual accounts rise to prominence by collecting subscribers, an ascendance often aided by getting a feature or two.
And Collective is everything else. Star Wars memes, food TikToks, solicitations for anonymous sex, dogs eating weed brownies, Legend of Zelda fan art, pleas for religious morality, and furry porn. Every post on iFunny starts in collective, anticipating its moment in the backlit sun.
In my early explorations of iFunny, sexist and racist posts did appear on my feed, but these were largely confined to Collective. Any truly off-putting memes that slipped through into Features seemed like outliers or, I imagined, curatorial accidents.
In retrospect, I probably wasn’t ready to grapple with the severe flaws of one of my few sources of comfort during this difficult time. And iFunny offered so much more! Beyond its surreal, bafflingly esoteric humor, iFunny was where I found some of the first uncurated queer content I’d ever seen, far more boundless and vibrant than the corporate-friendly queerness readily available elsewhere. In Collective, I knew if I kept scrolling through everything that hurt me or attacked others, I would come to some Hannibal fan art of Mads Mikkelsen tonguing Hugh Dancy. Presumably, this was not sanctioned by NBC.
Like the cuts along my arms that I hid at school under hockey jerseys, iFunny made me aware of a life outside of my own. Suddenly, somewhere beyond my pre-calc teacher’s rasping, reedy voice, there was another frequency into which I could tap. As one long-time iFunnyer put it to me in a chat, “It’s fun to be a different person sometimes.” On iFunny, I wasn’t the crazy kid, the quiet one, the difficult one, or anyone else I didn’t want to be. I was kingtroy17.
“Part of the ship, part of the crew,” a line borrowed from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, is a common refrain on iFunny. It’s not only indicative of how the scraps of 2000s pop culture sometimes ossify into online gospel, but also of the dynamics of iFunny’s community. In Pirates of the Caribbean, the Flying Dutchman subsumes its motley crew into the architecture of the ship itself, demanding the sacrifice of one’s autonomous body to fully belong. In short, the promise of seafaring freedom has its own limitations.
As I moved through high school, my need for iFunny decreased and so did my understanding of it. I’d grown out of touch with its day-to-day trends, the younger users, and the rivers of antecedent memes one had to understand to understand each subsequent meme. Soon, I only looked at iFunny occasionally before bed. By the time I was in college, I checked iFunny about once a week, and less during exam periods. At college, I had found more of a community than I had ever known before in my real life, and iFunny gradually shrank into the background.
Last March when COVID-19 forced us all online, I rediscovered iFunny and, with it, the new surge in right-wing memery. Those beset with a sense of conservative victimhood could always find self-righteous bigoted content on iFunny. But in 2020, you didn’t even have to try. Reposts of anti-Islamic webcomics or memes about Jews benefitting financially from the pandemic or quotes from alt-right Twitter philosophers were front and center, comprising sometimes as many as half of the day’s Features. A zero-sum “us” vs. “them” mentality announced itself with urgency. Rather than merely pointing out a perceived hypocrisy in gender theory or complaining about “cancel culture,” these memes expressly invited engagement and action.
In one, a skeleton in U.S. military regalia detailed all the reasons it was okay to hate the left, ending with because “they hate you”; another meme featured a doctored headline about how hydroxychloroquine was an effective solution against COVID-19, but the liberal media didn’t want you to know the truth. The comment sections followed suit: On a particularly hateful meme mocking the accidental death of trans artist SOPHIE, who famously said “God is trans,” you can find comment after comment to the effect of “Glad God set the record straight.”
As this smattering of fringe conservativism become the dominant ideological focus of the iFunny’s userbase, FunCorp CIO Denis Litvinov denied responsibility. “What is happening online is a reflection of our society,” he wrote on Medium. “Tech companies—and content moderators in particular—cannot magically fix the evil found within humanity, nor can we prevent it from finding its way online.”
I’d hoped to use iFunny’s memes as a balm for early pandemic anxieties. But as bigoted content continued to increase in frequency and intensity over the following months, instead I found myself wondering what had happened to the platform.
The relationship between iFunny’s content creators and the content they create can be easily misunderstood. While one might assume an iFunnyer’s ideology would cleanly align with their content and profile, users I spoke with tended to actively resist or rebuff political classification.
“I believe that every form of government is sinful in some way, that God and the Word is the only true form of political ideology a person needs,” Bearpaw told me in a chat.
“I don’t really stand anywhere on the political compass,” wrote another iFunny user, who requested anonymity. “I don’t really align hard anywhere, and the idea of categorizing people by beliefs depresses me.”
“I’m a heavy environmentalist, an economic populist, and an ethnic nationalist,” Cruhngle told me. “I don’t know what affiliation summarizes that.”
Political memes on iFunny aren’t meant to be statements of political intent; they’re meant to be funny. Many of the iFunnyers that I spoke to see their content first and foremost as the means to a reaction, be it one of laughter or disgust. And when the content featured in iFunny’s front window laments the downfall of traditional masculinity and promotes petitions to ban “WAP” from the radio, you get a sense of what sells.
“Politics is an entire shit storm, constantly shooting out one stupid thing after another,” said an iFunny user with over eight thousand followers, who requested anonymity. “Because it is so constant, it’s a stable market, hence all the political memes. I post political memes from all sides, even if I disagree.”
Given the upcoming election and the grim spectacle of the Trump administration, 2020’s memes were always going to have overwhelmingly political inflections. But the pandemic, which trimmed away the other topics that usually get rolled through the meme factory—television shows, sports, celebrity drama, video games, blockbuster movies—sharpened the year’s memery. By mid-April, a scroll through the features section would probably expose you to memes regarding Tiger King, or Animal Crossing, or how masks were slowly turning the American public into feminist drones.
In this new context, the same dynamics that drew me to iFunny years earlier now encouraged its worst tendencies. The old thrill of a featured meme being endlessly riffed on over the course of a week until it had changed, almost imperceptibly at first, into an entirely different meme—that was still there. But featured memes were no longer about archetypal authority figures like unfair teachers or pushy parents. They targeted ethnic and religious groups, gender identities. More immediately and viscerally exciting than Gab or Parler could ever be to younger users, iFunny had become a visual chatroom for the alt-right.
In the early afternoon of January 6th, I got a haircut. After I almost gave myself premature male-pattern baldness in my previous self-administered attempt, it was time for my first professional haircut since the beginning of the pandemic. The “short cut” would cost $25, but I would no longer look 37.
When I checked my phone after the haircut, sometime around 2 p.m., CNN was already reporting the first acts of violence at the Capitol riots. I ran home, turned on the television, and watched the grim events unfold for the rest of the afternoon.
How the Capitol riots would affect iFunny was the furthest question from my mind. And yet, the riots did change the app with surprising rapidity. Almost immediately, featured political content appeared with less fervor and frequency. By February, a featured political meme generally promoted broadly agreeable, often anodyne ideas, such as respecting veterans for their service or offering paid leave for all employees. I can only describe this change as I experienced it, as all my requests to talk to those involved with iFunny on a management level have been rebuffed, but it seemed like there was an active awareness now amongst moderators that content demanding that loyal Americans stop the steal was no longer quite as online-only as it may have once appeared. You could still find the memes saying to never give up, to wait on Q for signs, to get Trump back on Twitter, but these no longer took center stage.
Not long ago, iFunny changed its logo. They’d done this before—once, around Halloween, the smiley face had been a Jack-o’-Lantern for a few weeks, on several other occasions—but this time felt different.
The new masked-up logo may well anger iFunnyers like MasksMakeUsSlaves. It also seems like a distinctly—and bizarrely—belated rhetorical maneuver. The patriotic face covering would have made more sense last July when mask mandates were at their strictest and the resistance to those mandates at their most intense. Now, it seems like an empty gesture at best.
FunCorp, and other tech companies that run social media platforms with user-generated content, cannot eliminate all that is wrong with the world. But they can control what is wrong with their platforms. They can recognize the power that they have to shape an environment that, as it stands, doesn’t just tolerate radical users like Justin Olsen but actively empowers them by promoting their content and by indulging their central fantasy: To be seen and unseen at the same time.
This past year, unable to tear my eyes away from the day’s featured horrors, I used iFunny more than I had in the previous four combined. In that perverse way, during the doldrums of the pandemic, iFunny became a refuge for me once again. But seeing their logo don a mask as I start to use mine less, I get the feeling that iFunny is no longer the place for me. ▩