The Memes Made Us Do It

This week, Cy and I talk with Giorgio Angelini, award-winning filmmaker and architectural designer whose documentaries have a way of making you feel like you’ve been staring into the abyss, and then somehow leaving you with a little hope anyway. Angelini is the director and producer of OWNED: A Tale of Two Americas, which traced how postwar housing policy divided the country along racial lines; producer of Feels Good Man, the Sundance-celebrated documentary about cartoonist Matt Fury and the slow-motion alt-right hijacking of his beloved Pepe the Frog; and co-director of The Anti-Social Network, his 2024 deep dive into the platform machinery that birthed QAnon, Pizzagate, and the January 6th insurrection. He also scored the video game Red Dead Redemption, which is both extremely cool and, as you’ll hear, kind of relevant.

We discuss:

* How Pepe the Frog went from a lovable indie comic character to a designated hate symbol, and what his trajectory tells us about how meaning gets made (and stolen) on the internet

* The Epstein files and their surprising intersections with 4chan, hacker culture, and the absolute spectacular dumbness of powerful men who think they understand technology

* Meme magic: why the occultist John Michael Greer might be the most compelling theorist of how internet culture actually works

* Clavicular, incels, and the aestheticization of nihilism—a container with no content

* What the return of punk rock, the ICE protests, and a generation unashamed to give a s**t might actually mean for where we go from here

* And the only note we’re willing to end on: hardcore happiness.

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