Midway through July 2019 a Facebook shitpost (literally posted by a group called “Shitposting cause im in shambles [sic]) gained national media attention. An event, “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us” scheduled for Friday, September 20, 2019 at 3AM-6AM was planned and gained over 500,000 profiles who “planned on going”. This quickly became a meme that was spammed nonstop for about a week, but has since lost traction. Here are some fantastic, high quality examples:
Clearly divinely inspired.
I posit that this meme is a sublimation of a control fantasy in a battle fought entirely within some hyperreality. That’s to say, people feel powerless and look to gain control over life and the narratives that guide it, so they make up new stories. There is an interesting mix of legitimacy and illegitimacy that makes this meme so juicy, though. People don’t know if anyone will actually show up to this event. It’s a popular, democratic impulse, entirely generated and followed online, which actually intersects with reality. It is legal to post such a thing, and illegal to carry it out, however wouldn’t mass participation suggest a legitimacy of action against the government? Justifications to this action are buried deep in the American psyche, and this leads to an excited participation, as long as that participation, so far, is low-effort.
What makes Area 51 so popular a target?
Part of the popular discontent with governance is the government’s tendency to state that it is acting for the public, in the public’s interest, while also claiming a need for secrecy and thus removing the ability of the public to verify that anything is, in fact, occurring in our benefit. Or that anything is or isn’t occurring at all. This is doubled by a distance between the average individual and the institutions that enact change, so that people feel they haven’t any power.
Area 51 has remained near the core of the public psyche for decades due to the government’s long public insistence that it does not exist, despite obvious evidence to the contrary: intense secrecy around an area of the Nevada desert that is barren but for a fucking military installation paired with many sightings of strange areal phenomena that lead people to believe in aliens’ presence on or near the base. It was first publically acknowledged by the CIA in 2013. That’s almost 60 years’ denial of an open secret with an incredible mythology of UFO sightings built around it.
It seems that striking back at the amorphous governmental apparatus through the popular instantiation off a grassroots democratic motion for popular enlightenment and benefit is a perfect, if slight, release valve for the present era, and that Area 51 is a perfect venue for just such an action.
The action need not even take place. It’s a fun way to strike back at an institution that nobody knows how to interact with outside of the simulation of the internet by simulating a movement. It is difficult to translate digital interaction into “real” change. People often realize that an individual’s chances of effecting meaningful change within the systems designed as the channels for revolutionary energy are close-to-nil, and that their own chances are meaningless when faced with a wall of bureaucracy designed to petrify errant popular impulse as it arises. That’s what makes the meme so fun: it’s a way to act out against a half-fictional entity (“THE GOVERNMENT”) within a fantasy without sanction or maybe even consequence. (This conveniently ignores Facebook’s, Google’s, and Reddit’s [as well as the others’] ability to shape and control thought under the purview of American law and the shareholders’ preferences, as well as the Overton Window created by simple use of the technology utilized, but that dispels the meme, so continue ignoring it…) This is a pseudo-war conducted so far entirely in hyperreality, which might have effect on reality. It will, of course, accomplish nothing. But it might. But it won’t. But it might.
The Area 51 meme is, at its core, a control fantasy of a people who find themselves entirely under the thumbs of others sublimated through shitposting and a mediocre Facebook page with a purely American idea: even our plutocrats can’t stop democracy, more accurately mob rule, in its purest, rowdiest form. Which is a farce, because the mob stops democracy itself with its headlessness and poor focus. But seriously, I hope this meme succeeds in gathering a few thousand to charge that fucking facility, so I can watch and cheer from a distance. Because I certainly won’t.
Hear that, NSA?
Of course you do.
- 07.23.2019
