Bokhari: Do You Support the Current Thing?

Not every meme deserves an article of its own, but for those of us who follow politics on social media closely, this one hits home. It’s a meme that could force even the most sheep-like adherents of official narratives to stop and think.

It’s the Current Thing:

If you spend enough time observing the liberal hivemind, you know there’s something that unites the #Resistence, Black Lives Matter, transgender bathrooms, masking, vaccine mandates, mail-in voting, Anthony Fauci, and Volodymyr Zelensky, but it’s difficult to put your finger on it.

Well, now we have a way to describe it. All of those were, at some point, “The Current Thing.”

We can’t expect liberals to give up their mindless devotion to the Current Thing. Sometimes it may even make sense to care about the Current Thing. But at the very least, this meme forces you to ask the question: why? Why do you care about the Current Thing? Is it just because you’ve been told to care about it? Is it because everyone else has suddenly started caring about it? Are there other things  — perhaps even more important things, that you aren’t paying attention to, because the Current Thing is all anyone is talking about?

You don’t have to be a Vladimir Putin fan to recognize that Ukraine is, of course, the Current Thing. But, one day, Ukraine will be the Previous Thing — just another country in Eastern Europe that you can safely ignore.  Don’t worry though, there will be a brand new Current Thing for you to support.

So long as CNN and the New York Times exist, there will always be a Current Thing. But like smartphone software that updates just often enough to be annoying, it changes frequently. You may have the latest Nike sneakers, you may have the latest iPhone, but are you up to date with the Current Thing? Make no mistake, it’s just as important to your status in society.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, whose Twitter feed has recently become rather excellent, has helped popularize the Current Thing.

“When a new current thing materializes, most adherents of the previous thing bridge cleanly without a second thought, but some don’t — they wander around the cultural landscape like spectral wraiths still gripping the previous thing, moaning softly,” wrote Andreessen.

Liberals continue to yell at passers-by in the grocery store to put their masks on, even though, in light of the Ukraine war, masking is very much the Previous Thing and not the Current Thing, could be an example of what Marc is talking about.

Andreessen even shared some scientific research about the Current Thing, a working paper from researchers at the University of Chicago analyzing how the mass formation of collective belief takes place in a population.

The researchers conclude that mass public uptake of a new belief is caused by a combination of information saturation (seeing the Current Thing everywhere you look) and social pressures (“all my friends and followers support the Current Thing!”).

Like most internet memes, the creator of I Support The Current Thing is hard to pinpoint. According to Know Your Meme, a website that keeps tabs on the fast-moving world of online memes, a version of it first went viral through a post by @empty_banks, a Bitcoin-themed account on Twitter.

Like coronavirus, many memes tend to be variants of variants, and the Current Thing is no exception. Its central character is the NPC meme, which is itself a variant of Wojak. The NPC is a reference to the “Non Playable Characters” (NPCs) in video games, AI-controlled automatons with no agency. Real-life NPCs have a similar lack of agency, slavishly following the rules of whatever external media signals happen to be programming them today.

Andrew Breitbart (watch the 10 year tribute video here) famously said politics is downstream from culture. Ever since then, conservatives have lamented the tightening progressive grip over culture, from Hollywood to New York.

The internet is a different place, though. Virtually every meme used by millennials and generation Z, including socialists, liberals, and the non-political, probably started with a post by an anonymous right-winger on a festering internet message board like 4chan. For at least a decade, the chaotic engine of online culture has been right-wing, and as evidenced by the Current Thing, it continues to produce bangers.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.