Baudrillard Predicted "Lowkirkenuinely"

2025-12-26

I'm not on tiktok, but I've gathered through osmosis that there is a new meme term going around on there, "lowkirkenuinely". This is a portmanteau of "lowkenuinely" and "Charlie Kirk". Lowkenuinely is itself a portmanteau of "lowkey" and "genuinely", which was a meme of it's own. The Charlie Kirk connection requires a bit more explanation, I'll try to be brief. Kirk's assassination prompted a slew of kind of cringe responses from across the political spectrum, with a notable example being this laughably terrible AI generated song which I'm not going to link here by the name "we are Charlie Kirk". That song, being so bad, was the first Kirk meme to spread outside of just the edgier corners of the internet into mainstream memedom. Alongside that came "kirkification", a meme trend of face swapping Kirk's face onto other popular memes, and onto celebrities and influencers. Then the word "Kirk" started to be verbed, "getting kirked" could mean getting shot or killed, but then it was swapped out for other phrases as a euphemism, for example "kirking my shit" meaning jacking off, a pretty common memetic pattern. All of this combined with the already existing "lowkenuinely" trendy phrase to produce the masterpiece of brainrot "lowkirkenuinely".

What does this have to do with french philosopher Jean Baudrillard? He precisely talks about this kind of phenomenon at length in his book In The Shadow Of The Silent Majority. In said book, Baudrillard goes over his theory of The Masses. I won't go into too much detail regarding the precise definition, well, it doesn't have one to begin with, but What's relevant to us here is his theory on the Mass's strategy. See Baudrillard is responding to the failure of the Marxist movement, and he takes issue with Marxist's view on the role of the masses. Simplifying a bit, Marxists believe(d) that the working class have immense potential power, but they they lack "class consciousness", are under the spell of "ideology", and are disorganised, so that potential needs to be unlocked by some sort of Marxist movement. "One day they will wake up and become the protagonist of history"

Baudrillard says no, the masses have no "virtual energies" to release:

"their strength is actual, in the present, and sufficient unto itself. It consists in their silence, in their capacity to absorb and neutralise, already superior to any power acting upon them"

The Masses are not mystified, the have "an explicit and positive counter-strategy", which is their complete destruction of meaning. Power is endlessly trying to impose meaning upon the masses, constantly baffled by their irrationality and incredulity in the face of what seems important, reasonable, meaningful. It's constantly giving The Mass information, trying to get it to do something, anything, that makes sense. The media tries to "inform", economists try to rationalise consumption, academics try to theorize, politicians try to legislate, always an attempt to keep The Mass within reason, to moralise, to inform, to give them meaning. But they do not care, they immediately neutralise all meaning that is given to them, by turning into a meaningless, irrational game of signs. "They are given meaning, they want spectacle".

The more information The Masses are fed, the more irrational it becomes. But their strategy is not ignorance, it's not absence, it's the opposite. They totally accept and engulf whatever they are given, but the instant it enters their horizon, it is transformed from something meaningful to a pure interplay of signs, exchanging among the mass interplay of signs. Within this system, each sign is not negated dialectically by it's opposite, but rather pushed absolutely as far as it will go and beyond.

"A system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization. 'You want us to consume - O.K., let's consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose.' "

Power has been desperately trying to imbue meaning to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, every media figure, left, right, centre, mainstream, niche, internet, TV, news, it's nothing but attempts to corral, to moralise, to desperately throw out as much information as possible and beg for anything to stick. But The Mass, of course, immediately neutralised this. What political position does "lowkirkenuinely" take? Is it mocking him from a left wing perspective? Mocking him from a further right perspective? A post-ironic endorsement of Kirk? What is the meaning of sticking his face on ishowspeed? It has none, no deeper, hidden truth. It is completely transparent, it represents precisely nothing. It is the ironic strategy of the masses, "oh, you want us to care about Charlie Kirk? You want us to talk about him? OK, we will, we will put his name and his face everywhere, attach it to everything, in extreme excess, with no discretion or differentiation. We will push it into hyperlogic, until it loses all ties to it's signified." And then what happens, after a meme reaches the mainstream? It stops being funny. The meme dies. The same joke gets old fast. And, just as quickly as it appeared, it disappears, The Mass moves on to something else, and strips it's meaning too. This is how The Mass neutralises power. This cycle happens so fast and unpredictably, I bet the "lowkirkenuinely" meme is probably already dead by the time I've gotten around to writing this. Theory is always already behind action.

"Implosion is inevitable, and every effort to save the principles of reality, of accumulation, of universality, the principles of evolution which extol expanding systems, is archaic, regressive or nostalgic."