Interview with OrganizerMemes
I sat down (virtually) with the folks behind the popular Twitter account: we talked about the role of memes in '22, the need for online spaces for political staff, & the future of digital organizing.
OrganizerMemes is a Twitter account with over 30k followers. The account is a mixture of calls to action for progressive campaigns, a space for anonymous submissions (many of which are venting sessions) about working in the organizing space, a campaign job posting board, and of course, memes. Lots of memes.
1/3 of their anonymous account admins sat down with me to talk about how it all started, what it’s become, and where it fits in the larger world of digital organizing. To preserve their anonymity, we didn’t record our call. This article is written based off detailed notes from our call, some direct quotes, and a lot of paraphrasing. OrganizerMemes will be referred to as “Memes” throughout the article.
What is an organizer?
Memes: My answer is two pronged:
An organizer in the job description terms is usually the lowest-level and lowest paid person on a campaign and do the real boots-on-the-ground stuff. Making phone calls, planning events, knocking on doors. They raise awareness about a campaign and bring volunteers to staff events for the cause. They’re the first level of defense between a campaign’s headquarters and “the field”1.
For me, I think of them as people working in the movement (here, the progressive movement) or any group that are working toward a goal of political or social change. Most volunteers, working for explicitly political causes or not, are organizing in some way.
What got you into the intersection of memes and organizing?
Memes: I haven’t been knocking on doors really since the pandemic started but I still identify as an organizer. Organizing is advocacy—and it can be “done” in the field or online. What it means to be part of a movement is changing due to digital. (More on that later)
I, like many of us, grew up shitposting. IFunny raised us. What is RuneScape and Club Penguin if not organizing? People gravitate towards fun and campaigns don’t tend to understand that or apply that. People want to smile and laugh and make a difference without the demureness. Memes accomplish that.
A meme from OrganizerMemes. Phonebanking scripts are given to volunteers when making calls on behalf of a campaign, they can be pretty detailed and confusing.
When you started OrganizerMemes, who were you trying to reach?
Memes: We didn’t start off as an influencer account. It really started out to as a space for me at a moment of: “I’m very stressed working on a campaign and need an outlet”—a sort of counter-cultural political column, I guess.
In the beginning, it was me documenting the transition of being an organizer in a pandemic, when many campaigns went “remote”. I wanted to debrief about what the change in organizing looked like around that time. We took over the account in its early stages, when it had just a few hundred followers.
It’s easy to become disenfranchised in campaign work because organizers quickly become bureaucratic cogs. You can’t really complain or offload in valid ways and this continues to be a problem. Now, besides posts I make and think are funny, it’s a space for anonymously complaining about BS in Democratic organizing without losing career prospects.
I think there’s a lot of anxiety and seriousness in our progressive campaign culture, and us workers have operated in that culture of scaredness. But, joy and community are sustainable. I think OrganizerMemes serves as a breaking up of that culture and injects joy and community — that’s the heart of what it means to be an organizer anyway.
One of OrganizerMeme’s most highly engaged posts was an anonymous submission call asking “What’s the most fucked up thing that happened to you while working on a campaign?”.
Hundreds of submissions came in, and it was this sort of moment for me and for others like: “Oh, I didn’t realize this happened to other people”. Campaigns are such deeply insular bubbles and with the threat of blacklisting, we stay quiet. These [progressive campaigns] are deeply systemically flawed systems and if we don’t talk about it, we’re not being honest.
Can you tell me a little more about what you were up to in 2022?
Memes: Something cool about this last cycle was that leaders started to understand the power of the meme. TikTok started to be a useful meme and story telling vehicle and campaigns would message us with content and we’d to crosspost the TikTok to our Twitter. Those became some of our top performing pieces of all time. The stuff that did really well on Twitter and TikTok would get cross posted to candidates’ official accounts.
Memes: “OrganizerMemes was a meme “mule” of sorts in the craziness that was the midterms”. This is where OrganizerMemes falls in a unique place: if you’re in Alaska and someone else is in Georgia, its almost as far away as you can get. Being able to connect with someone like that is pretty hard, and OrganizerMemes closes those gaps. If organizing was a town, we’d be the community bulletin board at the coffee shop.
What role did memes play in the 2022 election?
Memes: The Dr. Oz vs now-Senator John Fetterman race is my favorite case. Like Crudité Gate. I think the fact that a campaign was able to be so timely with meme-ing moments (like when Oz put his foot in his mouth any number of times), it really put memes on the map. The Fetterman campaign had a ton of young people at the helm and knew they were at a disadvantage, being that Fetterman wasn’t a highly known candidate at the time. John Fetterman had a near-fatal stroke in early 2022, and this required a pivot away from traditional retail politics (like local events and other local voter contact) to one that focused more heavily on digital.
Who did my apolitical friends know about? Not Barnes (former Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin Mandela Barnes), it wasn’t Beasley (former North Carolina State Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley). They were the candidates with campaigns doing digital well, like Fetterman’s. Memes are rooted deeply in authenticity, and young people are really good at sniffing out bullshit. I think that’s why Bernie speaks to so many of us, he just feels like a real human being among establishment Democrats. That’s a big deal for young people. We sniff out bullshit from 1,000 miles away. We like the feeling of connection and seek relatability with our leaders, our influencers, our politicians. I think that’s why it’s such a bummer that the influencer marketing space is deeply neglected in the Democratic party machine. It’s starting to get better, but we need trusted voices in young people communities to hand us off the real content. We’re (the Democratic Party/progressive movement) behind when it comes to young people. Memes were a litmus test for legitimacy and also was where people got information about candidates. Fetterman isn’t better known than Dr. Oz, but he memes better, his content overall on digital was better.
A meme from John Fetterman’s account.
Why do you think the left has been dubbed “unable to meme”?
Memes: Well, I think there are two main reasons:
One, because people listen to the Right, probably because they’ve been so much more organized on digital. The Left establishment hasn’t invested in that way, and maybe feel like they have’t had to? The average TikTok or meme account isn’t right-wing, they’re lefty… but, they’re not being funded for what they say, they’re not working for the Democratic National Committee.
Two, a lot of Democrat/Leftist politicians aren’t willing to take risks. Everything needs 12 layers of vetting and approvals and if you say one thing wrong it risks shutting down the entire content program. Once a piece has hurled its way through 12 different eyes with 12 different senses of humor, it just hurts your ability to make the kind of memes that hit. OrganizerMemes is impactful because its just a small group of us, and we don’t have to approve each others work. I can make whatever I want and hit a moment. Rapid response and memes could be a great mix, but the people with rapid response posting clearance in an organization are often not young people.
Think Bernie and the mittens–if you made a meme about it and needed someone to check it, by the time it went through approval the meme moment would’ve been over. The fact that someone posted it so quickly is why it went viral. The Left holds itself to a higher standard of content, for better or for worse. If you don’t have to worry about cancellation like the Right, that gives you a lot of clearance.
What role do you see memes playing in future election cycles?
Memes: A large one. Where we make memes will shift. TikTok may go away, for example. They keep trying to get rid of it domestically.
Gen Z and younger millennials are also going to become a larger share of the electorate. If we can’t engage them authentically we’re going to have a really bad time. Congressman Maxwell Frost’s channels are a great example of where I think this digital thing is at its best and where I hope it’s going. He doesn’t meme everyday and when he does, him and his team realize it doesn’t have to be something cheesy. The cultural knowledge is delivered well is extremely effective. Being visible and being where he needs to be is extremely crucial.
But also, it depends on how much we invest in programming on the Left. We’re losing the online battle if we keep dumping money into TV ads and email fundraising strategies alone. This is where the cost difference is so insane. You can pay for an entire digital organizing department with that funding. You only get what you pay for on TV, which is where we miss a lot of our crucial audiences, like younger, first-time voters.
When you make online content, it’s a better way to build sustainable engagement: you get more followers for the next time, who then see your content in the future organically, and you have the opportunity to get millions of views without paying a cent for them. If you do want to pay for views, you can put money behind good ones that have already gone viral. You wont know what will go viral from TV, you just have to hope for the best. There’s a flexibility that digital allows for. Hopefully, young people are given more reigns to do this digital work.
A meme from OrganizerMemes.
What was the last meme that made you laugh out loud?
Memes: I don’t laugh at memes as much anymore. I think it’s because I’ve had to make money off of them, which can have a tendency to suck fun out of things. The Pedro Pascal laughing then crying react video is a good one.
Anything you want to uplift?
Memes: Hire OrganizerMemes to promote, advertise, and help you staff your team in progressive work. I have the Organizer-verse at my finger tips so pay me and I’ll make it worth your while. DM OrganizerMemes for a good time.
“The field” refers to the natural environment where organizers conduct their campaign work. Usually refers to the area (city, town, neighborhood) where voters in the candidate’s jurisdiction live.