The Memes You Need, Vol. 10: A Farewell to Twitter
The “President Musk” memes that have angered Donald Trump to no end are just the beginning.
To access 250 more Retro articles for a full week, try Retro for free! Just click the button below.
Introduction
It seems like everyone is leaving Twitter—extremely dubious statistics offered up by its controversial owner, Elon Musk, notwithstanding.
Just since the November presidential election, the Twitter feed connected to Retro has lost a staggering 74,000 followers—not a typo—even as a new Bluesky feed connected to Retro has gained 300,000 followers (again, not a typo). It’s abundantly clear that not just meaningful discussion and debate but meaningful audience growth on Twitter is a specter of what it once was, even as being on Twitter at all is significantly more work than it used to be because of the need to wade through endless digital clutter the site (a) does nothing to protect you from, or worse (b) actively promotes and throws at you.
The reasons for the mass exodus from Twitter are well-enough known that they need not be rehashed here. Suffice to say that there will always be a large number of people on Twitter in absolute terms, but at a certain point they simply aren’t the sort of people one wants to spend any time around. Neo-Nazis, incels, MAGA trolls, foreign bots, crypto scammers, porn advertisers, Elongelicals, disinformation merchants, foreign chaos agents, automated feeds, propagandists, misogynists, racists, shitposters, far-right influencers, edgelords, guerilla marketers, 4channers, Gamergaters, Musk-paid “journalists”…
…at some point, enough is enough. Even the memes on Twitter are getting so nasty and gleefully bigoted that sifting through them to find bits of gold is truly exhausting.
So while Retro will occasionally post notices of new content on Twitter, the new home for Retro is Bluesky. This also means most new memes for this series will come from that infinitely preferable social media platform—one that already (even with just 25.8 million users as of this posting) puts Twitter to shame in the saddest way possible (for Twitter) : by recreating Twitter in its peak years, and then improving upon it with welcome quality-of-life features that were unavailable on social media a decade ago.
Below is a final batch of largely Twitter-born memes, many of which are about either Twitter, its owner, the man its owner just bought a presidency for, some combination of these, or simply the enshittification of Twitter writ large. Some others are the good, old-fashioned meme fun we used to find everywhere on Twitter and no longer can.
As most Retro readers know, I’ve written many articles about memes on Substack—e.g., this one over at Proof—and Retro of course has the Memes section you’re reading right now in which I discuss the subject, so this series probably needs little additional introduction. It’s exactly what it says it is: a series of archives of memes from different categories that are eminently usable by anyone who likes to instrumentalize memes as part of their discourse practice. Candidly, we should all do so: memes are a shorthand for dealing with the many idiosyncratic situations we encounter online, which often become, sans memes, far more arduous to navigate. High-quality memes save time.
Info Box: All Past Editions of the Retro Meme Archive
Volume 10: A Farewell to Twitter (see below)
I studied and taught memes when I was a professor at University of New Hampshire—yes, really—so I curate an archive series like this one very mindfully. The very best memes, whatever their general theme, are ones that have high production values, are easy to read and understand, and make a point that one doesn’t need much or perhaps even any specialized knowledge to empathize with. They act as effective vehicles for trolling and pleasing and commiserating in equal measure, and moreover offer the sort of iconic visual aesthetic that allows them to be instantly recognizable every time they appear anywhere and, just as importantly, be readily remembered. A meme is far more likely to be used and responded to if it’s one an internet user has seen before (up to a point, of course; the “law of diminishing returns” certainly does also apply here).
With all this in mind, I do hope you the enjoy the piping hot memes compiled below!
The Memes You Need, Vol. 10: A Farewell to Twitter
Pictured above: Courtroom art of a deranged Rudy Giuliani at one of his many court hearings.
