“Resident Evil. Internet” | @ MGLC Švicarija, Ljubljana
By Enea Kavčič
Transcription
Maks: Thank you all for joining us for this second day. It's really nice to see you all here. Today we have four presentations from Enea Kavčič, Tisa Troha and Lea Sande, Alessandro Sbordoni and Stefan Kafidov. The first speaker, Enea Kavčič, is a philosopher, gamer and excellent culture theorist. Her work has been published in Šum Journal, Razpotja magazine, and she wrote quite a few accompanying texts for different artists.
Enea: I will be talking about the internet, and specifically internet language. So let's just start right away: it's summer 2024 and you open your Instagram page, you suspect nothing, and you go to your For You page in your search tab because the people you're following are either shitposting or campaigning for something you don't really care about. And then you get hit by a million green squares, because it is brat summer after all, so you're used to it, you're not surprised. But then something catches your eye — and everyone else's — because NATO is also posting brat memes like the one you see behind me. Kind of perplexed, you're looking at this green square that seamlessly fits with the rest of the brat posts. It's kind of funny, in a way, at least as much as other brat posts are funny, but at the same time it is deeply, deeply unsettling. So you ask yourself, "why is NATO posting brat memes?" Memes co-exist with other memes so seamlessly that we can't even label them as satire or cringe, or some kind of weird corporate attempt to meme — the "how do you do, fellow kids?" move. This post is completely fluent in "internet language," and it's basically a corporation that has finished its adaptation. But at the same time, it is distinguished from all other ordinary internet users, or from bots.
So instead of asking ourselves — like people in the comment section did — "why is NATO cringe-posting," or "what is the goal," or "why do they seem to lack self-awareness," we should look at the format itself, because the meme here archives something that other media couldn't: this meme format negates contradiction in advance, and that's really important. Not long ago, we were asking ourselves "why can't the left meme," or we had this forgotten age of "woke capital." But now we've arrived at the point where memes are something everyone is relentlessly doing, from incels to corporations, from gooners to looksmaxxers, from bots to government officials, from podcasters to the state — everyone is meme-ing. If you ask me, the left still can't meme, and one example is behind me: the Democrats put out an edit of Donald Trump, clearly trying to criticize him, set to the sound of Satoru Gojo's "Hollow Purple" awakening — and that's a positive figure. So how can it be a criticism of Trump, if Gojo is a positive figure? We'll return to this pending question later, because maybe I am a boomer at this point and I don't understand memes anymore. But then again, I did find it funny, so I don't know what to think about that.
Yet it doesn't stop here. They aren't just posting memes, they're participating in the comment sections. They're using phrases, GIFs and clips used by ordinary users. Those phrases used to give the impression of having an insight, or reflecting some sense of participation in an inside-joke or knowledge of something others didn't know about — something that represented your own bubble, your own little corner of the internet that you carefully constructed. So what used to feel like an inside-joke is now commonly used by everyone in every context, and we even developed a social response to this, again in the form of a meme: "this intern has to get a raise," or "protect this intern at all costs." We invented this persona of an "intern" so that we can relate to these companies, because we're coping with the fact that we're pleased that all these big companies or big accounts or celebrities are interacting with us as if they're our friends — as if they're in our little bubble. This creates a specific atmosphere in which every interaction on the internet feels both personalized and generalized at the same time. It paints this landscape that feels imploded, desubjectivized and overstimulating all at once — maybe Mark Fisher would put it that way. So it also functions as fluctuating feedback loops, and the actions of users are inflated and feel world-historical, while at the same time being negligible; they change nothing.
The artist Brina Kavčič noticed this phenomenon of overstimulation, this behavior that's making users increasingly emotionally unstable and therefore reactive to anything and everything. And she encapsulated this feeling with an Evil Pepe, or the devil. Her exhibition involved a recurring Evil Pepe spawning on her Instagram profile as a tracker, a devil showing itself periodically. This devil acted like the feed itself: circular, repetitive, self-intensifying and organized around fractal pleasures. It appears and reappears like a shadow attached to scrolling. You see it, then it's gone, then it re-emerges. This produces a specific dreamlike paranoia — "did I really see him?" or "did the feed hallucinate him into place?" And this uncertainty mirrors our participation online: what we engage with, comment on, get triggered by, ignore. But why the devil? What is it about social media, or all this behavior, that invokes the devil? We can see that he's laughing, enjoying himself. And this should make us ask ourselves why he's having such a grand time.
To answer this, I was thinking about the film The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999). Late in the film, when Joan is captured and imprisoned, there is this hooded visitor concealing himself, who can be read as God, or as the Devil, or maybe even as a hallucination. He doesn't tempt her with pleasure, comfort or bargain, but does something much worse: he interrogates the basis of her certainty. He takes all the sublime messages she received from God and instead confronts them with rationality. He pushes her toward a collapse, where the only remaining question is: what if your certainty was never guaranteed by God at all? In my interpretation, this hooded figure is the devil because he does everything in his power to make her believe that she, in her pursuit of glory or revenge, uses God selfishly for her own cause. He tries to make her face herself and revalue her experiences, commanding her to take responsibility and not to hide under God's veil. In other words, he arises as a procedure, like an inner audit with a very particular aim: he tries to detach the act from its transcendent guarantee and reattach it to something explainable, like trauma, vanity, enjoyment, guilt, or a desire for recognition. He doesn't say explicitly "do evil," but instead says: your good was never pure, your certainty was never warranted, and so on. That's also why he could be interpreted as God. But the difference is the wager: God's demand can still preserve a stake, something you can lose, something you can sacrifice, something that costs you, as we see at the end of Joan's story. The devil's demand, however, turns the entire thing into endless justification — it replaces the wager with an infinite loop.
So let's go back to the internet and ask what kind of looping is happening there. When can we recognize this endless justification? Mark Fisher writes that cybernetic media intensify a schizophrenic implosion of subjectivity, emphasizing closed loops, reproduction, and exhausted repetition. If we look at internet activity, it's precisely that: everyone is participating in and reacting to things and events via memes and this internet language. Companies and individuals alike are expressing "their" opinions in the same context as everyone else. This is why it's completely normal to like and repost, say, a P. Diddy hate-post and a meme of Stephen Hawking on Epstein Island in the same scrolling session — it's not contradictory, it kind of makes sense; the first is a content-event, the second a joke-object, or a cultural token. So the platform doesn't punish this contradiction — contradiction is just another generator of engagement. And I'm not here to say "people are inherently evil" or "people are immoral by nature" or "people can't tell good from bad" — the point is that the platform trains a different orientation. What matters is what produces the most satisfying outcome right now. Everything can be satisfying: righteousness, cruelty, irony, disgust, hype — it doesn't really matter which one you enjoy most. If most people are making fun of, say, Amber Heard's rape testimony, your reaction isn't to listen to the testimony and form your own opinion — even if you do that, your opinion is already pre-made — but instead to make another soft rape joke. Even companies did this: the make-up company Milani joined in making fun of her, like the rest of the normal users.
Let's think about it further. Antón Barba-Kay points out that on the internet, no one is responsible, because everyone contributes these tiny inputs. Meme language now serves as a perfect tool for this type of low-level contribution: it compresses information to a generally readable level that can be applied to everything, regardless of context. In the past, memes served as a kind of compression that required knowing the references, details and context, but that's no longer the case. "Meme is the message," as Bogna Konior formulates it — to the extent that knowing how to speak this meme language automatically means you can post, form, and gather opinions about everything. The medium pushes towards reduced resistance, reduced delay, reduced seriousness, reduced cost. And this is the most important part: at the same time, this satisfaction-chasing collapses the boundary between real and fictional in a very specific way. Not "everything is fake," not even "everything is AI," but more like lying becomes an operative mode of action. And when this happens, evil no longer appears as a hidden, transcendent sign, but more like an interface effect — an atmosphere you participate in more than a position you hold.
So, to put it differently, Mark Fisher describes this in Flatline Constructs: cyberspace is both simulating the world and continuous with it. You become schizophrenic in this sense, because you convince yourself you watched a popular anime that popped up on your For You page, or a popular series. You're outraged about its ending because that's the current consensus, even though you never read the manga or watched the series — you can form an opinion about it because language allows you to. You can even be a fan of a particular character, like Gojo, and spend hours making edits of him without ever watching the actual anime, because the structure allows it. This, of course, means people occasionally get caught out — "oh my God, you didn't really read it?" — but the risk is low and non-consequential. Meme language basically camouflages everything and allows everything to be yours. To take a funny example: were you having a sexual awakening watching Aragorn open the doors of Helm's Deep in The Two Towers? Probably not — maybe at the time you were thinking about Legolas, or weren't watching Lord of the Rings at all — but someone else was, and they posted it and made a viral video, and now you've "watched" it too. How else would you understand the meme, or why it popped up on your feed? It really makes you feel that same emotion. You know what they're talking about, or you think you know. You understand it, so you think it's real. It's that simple.
From here, lashing out becomes very transparent too, because people on the internet are extremely reactive to things: when something new comes up, they first have to break with their own old image, their old belief system. A funny example of this is Robert Pattinson, who has a very specific, loyal fanbase going back a long time. Now, with his popularity surging again, the new fans — meaning basically everyone online — have simply "adopted" him, along with the idea of him being famous for not being a classic celebrity, "hating" Twilight, and so on. So then he does this promotional video with Zendaya, and he says he'd find it very sexy if a woman secretly paid for a date. At that moment, hyperstition self-triggers, because what he says causes a miscommunication between the hype around him and the values that supposedly belong to that same hype. The inconsistency became so jarring that people in the comment section reacted with disapproval — given the current internet atmosphere, saying something like that is a no-go, especially with Zendaya sitting across from him. This happens because none of these people are actually his fans, in the OG sense. I'm not saying the new fans are posers trying to fit in or trick people into thinking they know what they're talking about — it's that these fans just have the language ready-made for them to be fans. If you were really his fan, you probably expected him to say something like that, and maybe even got a chuckle out of it — but not the people on the internet. So this was a perfect example for this presentation.
The Devil represents this outside-in dynamic, and Antón Barba-Kay states that digital technology reshapes people "outside our notice" — he even calls this digital technology "natural," because the revolution doesn't just happen on the platforms but within each of us. The "flatline," in Fisherian terms, is not simply an endpoint but a zone where identity is produced and dismantled — where forms of subjectivity break down and recompose. This is where the endless loop of enjoyment, misunderstanding, exclusion, violence and pseudo-inclusion comes from. This kind of fragmentation, this abandoning of the empirical, could in principle be progressive, producing communities that are less gatekeeping and more imaginative. But instead we got a level of compression and satisfaction-chasing that jumped ahead, resulting in momentary emotional and violent outbursts that are barely in touch with reality. It also explains why violence, as in Amber Heard's case, produces the most engagement.
Another example — please don't cancel me — comes from fandoms, because fandoms are very transparent; they're not hiding anything. This one comes from the game Love and Deepspace, a Chinese mobile otome video game where you basically date five guys at the same time, and these guys are not morally perfect subjects. One of them, named Caleb, is your brother. In the English version of the game there was some low-level censorship around this, because in English we can't call lovers our own brothers, whereas in Japanese there's a word — "gege" — where this is completely normal. English and Western players were still pretending this wasn't happening, and then they had a very big crash-out when the event behind me happened, because they were pretending to be playing the game when they were actually only watching viral clips of it. If you were actually playing the game, you'd immediately know he's your brother and wouldn't be surprised by it — but that's not what happened. So the Western fandom had a complete meltdown and tried to cancel the character entirely, pushing for the complete cancellation and deletion of the game. This didn't happen — why would a Chinese game listen to the Western audience? And when it happened again a few months later, with this same "brother" incident, they lost their minds all over again. People never learn — they just want to enjoy things; it's enjoyable trying to cancel something, it's enjoyable to react to these things, regardless of whether it actually matters. That's the paradox: the platform moralizes everything while making judgment itself impossible, because the verdict would end the loop, and the loop itself is the actual product.
So the Devil that we talked about appears precisely when he can be shown without punishment. The lack of punishment and consequence shows us not only that nothing really matters, but also that everything that happens in narrative and discourse is void. That's why the Devil is having such a great time on the internet: he doesn't even have to question your beliefs, because you can't, and won't, have any. The devil is that internal voice that says "you are rational, you are moderate, you are telling the truth, you are doing the good thing" — while you're just feeding a machine that rewards any output whatsoever. So the devil here doesn't need to persuade you to do evil. He just needs to persuade you that your participation is morally meaningful while keeping it consequence-free. He turns ethics into an interrogation that never becomes action. That's also why dialectics collapse into a kind of death syntax online — when someone is in an argument, they say: "Oh, I was just joking." "Oh, imagine caring so much." "Bro thinks I'm actually serious." "Actually, let me hold your hand when I say this." The Devil doesn't have to hide, because he's everywhere, and yet he becomes unintelligible because he's compressed inside language as the smallest transferable unit of attention. And when everything is content, nothing is legible as a decisive act. And where there's no act, there's no judgment. So — sorry for this Hegelian turn — discussions are starting to look like the famous 2017 Facebook chatbot exchange between Alice and Bob: very similar, because we don't even know why the compression happens. We just know we're meme-ing, and having fun, and every comment section is funny, and that's it. This kind of language is making participants look increasingly like paper-clippers instead of classical AGIs, and therefore making people look like bots.
So we can return now to that Gojo meme I can't let go of, and think about it. What's wrong with it? Actually, nothing, because when you're producing memes without knowing the context, this will sometimes happen — you'll put a hero with a villain and not even realize you did that, thinking it's fine. And not to just single out the Democrats — the Republicans do exactly the same thing. If you're chronically online, like me, you've probably seen Alysa Liu, the gold-medal-winning ice skater, and that famous line of hers when she said "I would mog" — and suddenly both the left and the right were using her "mog" phrase to prove their own point. It doesn't matter at all whether she's Democrat, Liberal or Republican — they'll use it because it's content, because it's funny, and that's all that matters. I would say that Democrat intern just never watched Jujutsu Kaisen — and that's it.
©2026, Berlin/Nicosia
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