![]() Will your friends put in the five seconds of work it would take to discover that, or is that too much of a lift for them? Now you can finally know for sure. I call them “Stalin’s Minions,” because each one features a picture of an adorable Minion glancing mischievously at a phrase that is actually a quote from genocidal Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin. What if there were Minion images paired with words that seemed at surface level to be innocuous, but, when Googled, turned out to be linked to one of history’s greatest monsters? Would they spread just as well as the banal, unchallenging ones? Would anyone who saw them actually bother to Google the words, or would they just see the Minion and start hammering the “Share” button so hard their computer table breaks in two?īelow are eight images, posted in high-res and ready for you to share far and wide. Which got me thinking about a way to test this hypothesis. Putting it in your Facebook timeline or Pinterest pinboard or whatever is a way to announce to the world that you belong to this tribe of the clueless. It serves as a kind of icon, a logo that says “I am not intellectually curious.” The words reinforce that, but it’s the image that sends the message. What matters is the use of the Minion image itself. In fact, I think that to a certain degree, the words that are put next to the Minion image no longer really matter much. ![]() They are completely unchallenging, and as such, they are perfectly tuned to spread virally. Nobody who holds these opinions reached them after struggling through a long night of the soul. Like the Calvin-peeing decals, Minion memes have become a sort of visual shorthand that a certain type of opinion is about to be expressed - an opinion that is rooted more in knee-jerk reaction than deep thought. I would submit that the closest thing to them are the “Calvin peeing” decals, featuring the human half of the much-missed comic strip duo peeing on something or other, that have become ubiquitous on the nation’s truck cabs and motor homes. I don’t, however, think either of author Brian Feldman’s analogies (Target t-shirts, emoji) really captures what these Minion memes are like. So I read this piece with great interest. I’ve noticed these images popping up more and more myself, especially on Facebook, where they’ve become a sort of plague. (This is an emerging area of academic study.) Okay, so… Minions are emoji with arms, legs, and goggles. Like, do you know what the nail art emoji means? It means a million different things. They’re yellow, they run the emotional spectrum, they function as a malleable shorthand for almost indescribable feelings. Minions are the Target graphic tees of the internet. ![]() In fact, I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to find the right analogy, and I think that’s it. Minions can be paired with many of the same phrases that appear on graphic tees at Target. Their central core of mischief applies to many of the feelings that people like to vent through memes: anger, joke-y threats, the idea that whoever’s posting is smarter than everyone else around them. This makes Minions uniquely exploitable on the memescape. Their whole gestalt is faux-brutal honesty the sort of call-it-like-I-see-it posturing that thrives on social media. There’s an interesting story up at The Awl today, titled “ How Minions Destroyed the Internet: The Horrible Story of the Perfect Meme,” about the exploding popularity of images juxtaposing banal sentiments with pictures of the animated “minion” characters from the Despicable Me movies: Stalin’s minions: an experiment in virality
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