I used to love 9gag.

I used to REALLY love 9gag. I used to tell people about the warm, civil, and fun discourse that took place in their comment sections. I used to think that it was a nascent world culture. A culture that could be truly universal – for, how better to begin building a global identity than with common ground for laughter?

Memes are the perfect medium, a self-contained unit of meaning that can be used to build a common language.

I stopped browsing for whatever reason, started getting into heated arguments with right wing nutcases who tried to pass racist, homophobic, or xenophobic jokes as harmless.

That was a few years ago. A few days ago I was a tad bored and I thought I might check how things were going. I expected buckets of Trump memes ridiculing the memeable dictator wannabe. I was horrified.

Popping up between lovely pictures of brilliant Lego sets and fun stuff burglarized from other sites were thousands of “Deus Vult” memes. If you are unfamiliar, they are a blatant way of expressing that foreigners of different beliefs or culture need to stop “polluting” the lovely Christian and white cities of the OPs.

I wanted to see if it was simply one side of the coin. I tried searching for “antifa” in the site. I reasoned that some sort of meme going the other way had to exist, something about antifa fighting the good fight or similar. After all, I was really hoping at the very least for there to be balance in the violent jokes. Nope. The Nazis simply took over 9gag.

I’m really digging Reddit. However, I must say – the /r structure, makes it so that the discourse is completely walled. The reason I used to love 9gag was because there were no walls, and people from what at the time seemed to be all over the world were welcome, and communicating with one another, having fun together, realizing that they aren’t so different after all.

Now, something similar happens… The neo-Nazis from Europe find common cause with those of the US.

And even though I love the level of discourse I find in Reddit, I understand completely that I’m only seeing that which I want to see. That if I happen to turn the wrong corner at any given time, I’m going to be met by the same low life scum of the internet which, if given half a chance, would gladly goose step over everything the free world has been building for more than half a century.