Esoteric Kekism
This newfound internet quasi-religion surrounds three symbols: Pepe the Frog – an internet meme originating from a Matt Furie comic –, Kek – a slang for the word ‘LOL’, and an ancient Egyptian deity –, and Donald J. Trump – at the time, a candidate in the Republican party, and now the current US President (The Truth About Pepe The Frog And The Cult Of Kek, 2016).
During the 2016 Presidential election, 4Chan imageboard, /pol/ – the playground of Betas and NEETs — NEET meaning ‘Not in Education, Employment, or Training— alike – adopted Pepe as their mascot, attempting to create something like a ‘Pepe Renaissance’, creating it so virulent to take it back from the ‘Normies’. /pol/, being a place for the ‘Red Pilled’ - the enlightened, free from the ‘Sheeple’ thinking morphed by the Mass media - , is a plethora of rampant posts - mostly right wing - and all sorts of differing, random content. It’s been labelled a place of ‘Chaos’ (ibid).
The word ‘Kek’ - slang for ‘LOL’ derived from Korean onomatopoeia - was completely independent from Pepe the Frog and President Trump - other than its being used as a reply to ‘GETS’ - until it was discovered that there was a frog-headed Ancient Egyptian deity named Kek - coincidentally also able to be written or pronounced as ‘Kuk’– Cuck being a commonly used insult among the Alt-Right and /pol/ (ibid). In Egyptian cosmogony, Kek is the deification of Darkness, and a bringer of light (Budge, 1904). Kek being a bringer of light, was then connected to Donald Trump - the bringer of light and protector of the White identity -, and then to Pepe through the Frog's head. On Amazon a statue was discovered; mislabelled as ‘Kek’ - correctly translated to Heqet 1, who is not, as has been mistaken, the Female incarnation of Kek, but is rather a god of fertility, though according to Mason Welles “it’s not […] inappropriate for Heqet to be […] an Alt-Right symbol” due to the fact they want to “increase the “fertility rates of Western women”, and create a “bountiful America” (Welles, 2016) - the hieroglyphics presented what appeared to be (1) a man or woman sitting in front of (2) a computer - a signifier of posting to image boards such as 4chan -, (3) a hieroglyph which appears to look like a form of DNA - this was seen as being a signifier of the internet (potentially seen as the copper inside of a wire twisting), or Memetic - Meme Magic (see Figure 2) - this will be elaborated on later. Kek also is connected to the synchronic; this is due to there being eight deities in the Ogdoad, these being separated into four male-female pairs (Budge, 1904). This was the beginning of the ‘Cult of Kek’.
After the discovery and connecting of the above stated entities, users on /pol/ began attributing gains of Trumps campaign to ‘GETS’, Kek, and Pepe. This was until September 11, 2016. On this day Hillary Clinton nearly fainted at the 9/11 memorial ceremony — this being due to a case of pneumonia she had contracted (Stefansky, 2016) —, Clinton declared Pepe as a hate symbol (Hillaryclinton.com, 2016) — and supposedly an ‘enemy of the state’ (The Truth About Pepe The Frog And The Cult Of Kek, 2016) - due to the ‘swastikas’ and various right wing imagery Pepe was memed with by /pol/ users, and the discovery of what would become ‘Kek/Pepe’s musical anthem’ (ibid); This self titled track from a band named P.E.P.E contained a frog holding a magic wand on the cover - which was also complemented with text saying ‘Magic Sound’ (see Figure 3) (ibid). The name of this band stands for ‘Point Emerging Probably Entering’, this was connected to ‘GETS’ being related to probability, then Point Emerging, and Entering to Kek ‘emerging’ and ‘entering’ at points of probability. This seemed like even a stretch even for the believers, until the cover of the full length vocal version’s cover was discovered, which depicts a clock and a fair haired person facing towards it, it was pointed out by a user that the clock depicted shares a similar design to the clock situated outside Trump Tower, and the fair hair can be a signifier of Trump himself (see Figures 4 & 5, note Post number in Figure 5) (ibid).
4Chan has had for a while - mostly on boards such as /b/ and /pol/ - a penchant for Jungian synchronicity *******add explanation of Jung’s theory**** related to the string number attributed to the posted content of the site; ‘Dubs’2; ‘Trips’3; ‘Quads’ 4 etc. It’s been commonplace - as users do not know the number their post will be attributed with - to bet on their number - whether that be the exact number they guess to receive or just ‘Dubs’ etc. Receiving a post with ‘Dubs’ etc. as the attributed number is colloquially called - and will be henceforth - ‘GETS’ (ibid).
Users of /pol/ noticed there was a repeated occurrence of ‘GETS’ on content surrounding Pepe the Frog, and the - then growing in popularity on /pol/ - presidential candidate, Donald Trump; the most famous post (see Figure 6) being a user predicting - stating, even - that ‘Trump will win’, the attributed number being ‘77777777’ (ibid).
7 is a number that has featured heavily in religious imagery, it is noted to be the number of “completeness and perfection”; it is the “foundation of Gods word”. This is juxtaposed with the number 6—and 666— being the devils number. This being said there have been a number of coincidences that have been related to numerology surrounding trump and world events in the past year or so, these being:
Further, this has led to the creation of a fake country named The People’s Republic of Kekistan. Kekistan is essentially an ‘Israel for Shitposters’; The Kekistani’s worship “Pepe the Prophet”, their founder is Kek—and their official religion is the Cult of Kek—, their main city is Kekstantinople, the flag is a parody of the Reichskriegsflagge (see Figure 11), maps have been made showing Kekistan and the surrounding countries (see Figure 12), the currency is named “Kekels”, their type of government is a Theocratic Memorcracy, and their Ideology is Kekonomics (Republic of Kekistan Wiki, 2017).
A video created by Aerthryn Prince of Spurgundy titled Kekenomics 101 – Heritage of #Kekistan - #Free Kekistan was released in early 2017 and presents the “four main types of kek 5 in the field of kekenomics, the study of meme production and distribution”. Our beautiful Prince donned in his signature green and purple robes (see Figure 13) states that kekenomics is based on “two principles” which are “excludable keks” (EK) and “rival keks” (RK). “RKs” being keks that have been used or are being used—used in this sense is to be read as “enjoyed”; if you enjoy a kek you have used it— by multiple people; this diminishes the value and enjoyment others gain of said kek. A kek is an EK if the controllers of a kek “have the ability” to control and “prevent” who becomes or is in control of the kek: private jokes, memes within a certain subgroup or clique for example.
Our Spurg Prince further elaborates on this wacky theoretical proposition with a table similar to that of Pascal’s Wager (see Table 1). Studying the table, we can come to a few conclusions:
The theoretic of “Memenomics” is further expounded by Reddit user /u/LongDatCrackerBoi who has created a formula to present the predicted value of a meme — a Meme Theory of Value if you will. Value is presented in the formula “Dank=(O(T+F-I))/A”. These signs mean the following:
Dank=Value
T=Topical value. This is determined by the relation to the meme and current events
A=Age. As most cultural artefacts, memes “die” with age. The newer the meme, the higher it’s value; though after a while of a meme being “dead” a meme renaissance may occur.
F=Fame. Self-explanatory, fame will increase value.
I=Infamy. Memes including “non-dank” characters or formats will decrease the value.
O=Originality. Completely new types of memes will increase the value of the meme.
Therefore, we can read this formula as the Value of a meme is the product of originality, and the sum of Topical Value and Fame, subtracting Infamy, divided by Age. (LongDatCrackerBoi, 2016)
Along with this there has been attempts to create some type of meme-stock market named “Nasdanq” 6.
This attempt to economise memes in the vein of an Adam Smith-esque Memeory of Value fails to realize the most important thing about digital distribution of images on the internet; due to the internet being a rhizomatic structure there is no way to stop people from acquiring the memes you have attempted to keep excludable, whether they are hacking through encryption, screencapping, copy-pasting etc. there is no way to stop the spread of memes and their formats. To quote Angela Nagle in Kill All Normies “left-cyberutopians claimed that […] the new public sphere was going to be based on leaderless user-generated social media” (NAGLE, 2017). The current state of internet memes is communistic, they are open for taking and anyone can use them; the attempt to economise memes is itself an attempt by proponents of capitalism — even insincerely — to co-opt a socialistic entity into a metaphorical "free market of memes". As of this the fact stands that the only memes that would be counted in the market are memes that are put into that market by people that engage in this market and thus meme trade; unfortunately for the AnCaps and alt-righters of the internet, the creation of a Capitalistic meme economy would be analogous to utopian socialists buying land and creating their own commune, they are creating a microcosm which is still subject to outside influences and will not be able to stand due to the current hegemonic nature of the internet.
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