A while ago, a regular round-robin emailer, Hassan (big-up to him), sent me a link to a Palestinian “Gangnam Style” video on YouTube. In this, a group of young men living in the Gaza Strip do all of the things that the South Korean rich kids do in the original Psy pop promo. That they’re confined in what is – to all intents and purposes – a giant concentration camp soon becomes painfully clear: they have to push their car in to the petrol station; they have no money to hang out in stylish bars – and there are no stylish bars anyway; nor, for self-evident reasons, are there a lot of scantily clad young women around agitating their booties, so instead our posse is reduced to single-sex dancing on the scabrous strip that passes for a beach.
Superficially, internet memes are an obvious subject for this column: they are examples of collective hysteria causing people to do nonsensical things. When “Harlem Shake” got going in February, I, like thousands of others, spent many happy moments watching groups of office workers and army officers dressed up in idiotic costumes (or often nearly naked) and dancing to Baauer’s absurdly catchy electro ditty.
Most commentators on “Harlem Shake” and “Gangnam Style” emphasise the creativity of the meme video makers: how, within a preconceived format, individuals are free to express themselves and command a vast audience for their gyrations. The satiric subtext of the videos is also pretty apparent. In the case of a typical “Harlem Shake”, first, a bored office worker begins to dance while others go about their mundane business. It’s as if the dancer were listening to Baauer on earphones and attempting to transport himself from hateful, open-plan imprisonment as a Sufi might spin his way out of reality altogether. Then, when the bass line suddenly drops and the single, locked-on frame jump-cuts to the entire workforce jigging and dipping while the beat pounds out triumphantly, the message is clear – the lunatics have taken over the asylum; you can put our minds on the payroll but our bodies remain free.
Or are they? A rather more bitter take on “Harlem Shake” and “Gangnam Style” is that, far from expressing the will to freedom of the wage slave under late capitalism, they are straightforward reportage. Anyone who has worked in a large organisation for any length of time knows this: that only a small percentage of the workforce is engaged in productive labour at all; another, slightly larger moiety is politicking for all it’s worth; and a third part is doing little more than stylishly shaking pieces of paper – analogue or electronic – from “In” to “Pending” to “Out”.
Since the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, the zombie-like quality of the economy has become still more pronounced. Now, as Danny Dorling’s excellent piece on European youth unemployment in the last issue of the New Statesman spelled out, there are some six million 18-to-24-year-olds across Europe who would kill for an opportunity to become stylish paper-shakers.
Instead, if they come from affluent enough families, their wealthy parents fund internships for them and, if they don’t, they may be lucky enough to be enrolled on government schemes that offer the same opportunity to be uselessly occupied. Looked at in this way, the production of these internet memes is the purest expression of the pseudonymous character of “production”, in an economy where consumption is universally understood to be the true desideratum and the prime engine of “growth”.
What the memes thus show us is a system in which a few bored jigglers can entertain millions at no apparent cost to anyone. One self-starter shakes; a few others ape that shake and many millions more look on tittering as they pop open another bag of nachos. Meanwhile, in another, wealthier suburb of the global village, the bourgeois young while away their time filming each other dancing through various acts of conspicuous consumption and, in due course, these ephemera acquire a strange, marketable durability.
Pity, then, the poor Palestinians, for not only is their version of “Gangnam Style” not in the least satiric; it articulates perhaps better than any documentary film about Gaza the terms of their economic existence as a subject population, dependent on food aid from UNRWA, subsidies from the EU and the US, and Qatari “investment”.
