Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? Memes, Design and Politics

An essay by the Amsterdam design studio Metahaven on how protest works when the stated position of government is that there is no alternative.

The book starts from the question of how one dissents in that situation. It proposes that protest now has new strategies, beginning with the internet meme, and treats jokes as an open-source weapon of politics. The essay addresses the austerity politics of Europe and the forms of resistance against them. It was published by Strelka Press (listed as Strelka Institute), as an 82-page paperback in 2014. The cover is a red silhouette of a cat washing itself.

Metahaven was founded in 2007 by the graphic designers Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden, and describes itself as a strategic graphic design agency. Its work spans publications and digital projects, including the visual identity for WikiLeaks, the Sealand Identity Project and the books Uncorporate Identity (2010) and Black Transparency: The Right to Know in the Age of Mass Surveillance (2015).