Capiamoci

We live in a century where communication and “discourse” are omnipresent in everyday life—especially within the context of social media and digital platforms, spaces where silence is almost entirely absent (personally, I have yet to encounter a silent reel or a black screen). This is simply because social platforms weren’t designed to accommodate silence as content—unless that silence is forced by an app crash. The result is a state of hypercommunication, a constant background hum that keeps us glued to the screen, as if we were forever attending a futuristic, never-ending visual and sonic party. A party not necessarily attended by human beings.

In fact, it seems that influencers are beginning to lose their cultural weight and stability within the virtual social world (see the Ferragni scandal or cases of fake illnesses overseas), while on the other hand, characters, NPCs, and creatures born from the latest trends are gaining far more ground in that gigantic, perpetual carousel that increasingly resembles the parade of creatures in the film Paprika. One might wonder, then, if communication and dialogue themselves are becoming ever more inhuman, in favor of an interlocutory exchange that embraces post-human gutturality. And paradoxically, this trend seems to be leading us to a kind of misunderstanding full of meaning.

This article aims precisely to explore how memes that appear to be meaningless are, in fact, powerful vehicles of communication among users from different countries and cultures who meet on the same social platforms. A unifying medium that transcends the barriers of misunderstanding imposed by different languages. But first, I believe it’s necessary to revisit some basic principles of language pragmatics and communication. Keeping these pragmatic assumptions in mind—without pretending to exhaust their complexity in a piece of this length—I’d like to focus on a particular category of meme that has recently emerged on Instagram: the so-called brainrot or nonsense meme.

Nel 1962 uscii postumo How to Do Things with Words, uno dei lavori più importanti del linguista John Langshaw Austin. Il libro era incentrato sulla pragmatica del linguaggio e sul come sfruttare quest’ultimo per tenere una conversazione efficace e per raggiungere uno scopo comunicativo. A riguardo, Austin propose di scomporre un enunciato in tre atti: locutorio, illocutorio e perlocutorio. Con il primo, si intende l’atto di costruire l’enunciato attraverso le regole grammaticali e il lessico di una lingua di riferimento; con il secondo, si intende l’intenzione che coloro che producono il messaggio vogliono comunicare attraverso di esso; infine, con il terzo si intende l’effetto dell’enunciato, che può corrispondere all’intenzione dell’atto illocutorio o meno. 

In 1962, How to Do Things with Words, one of the most important works by linguist J.L. Austin, was published posthumously. The book focused on the pragmatics of language and on how language can be used to carry out effective conversations and fulfill communicative purposes. Austin proposed breaking down an utterance into three acts: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. The first refers to the act of producing the utterance using the grammar and vocabulary of a given language; the second refers to the speaker’s intention—what they aim to communicate through the utterance; the third concerns the effect the utterance has, which may or may not align with the speaker’s intent.

These foundational ideas were later taken up by linguist John Searle in 1969, who used them to classify speech acts further into:

• Representatives/Assertives: acts that convey or assert beliefs or knowledge;

• Directives: acts that request, advise, or command something of the listener;

• Commissives: acts that commit the speaker to a future action (promises, threats, offers);

• Expressives: acts that express the speaker’s psychological state (greetings, congratulations, complaints);

• Declarations: acts that enact something through speech (naming, baptizing, issuing a declaration in an institutional setting).

  
  

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Returning to memes: the latest to appear on Instagram and TikTok belong to what’s now called Italian brainrot, which has taken over feeds worldwide. While I believe this wave differs somewhat from previous nonsense trends—there’s often an embryonic sense of narrative and lore-building among its characters—its affinity with nonsense can already be seen in earlier formats like deep-fried memes (a meme editing style that layers effects upon effects) or the Pukeko bird meme (a bird with disproportionately long legs, often shown shrieking exaggerated, seemingly random words).

What’s particularly interesting about this kind of meme is that, while it remains a locutionary act, its illocutionary and perlocutionary functions seem to vanish: the morphosyntactic structure is intact, but these memes neither mean anything nor “serve” any purpose. And yet here lies the linguistic paradox. Even though their function is reduced to the surface level of the sign—the signifier—these memes still somehow fulfill an expressive function. Rather than asserting anything, they inform the viewer that sender and receiver belong—at least symbolically—to the same social group.

Certainly, this phenomenon is algorithmically driven. But the algorithm itself is shaped by our likes and comments—tools we use to express what we enjoy or what resonates with us. In real-world terms, it’s as if guests at a party were able to communicate their social status and group identity using nothing but guttural sounds or decontextualized words—as if the speaker and their intention no longer mattered, only the message itself. Transposed to the realm of social media, it’s as if a senseless, depersonalized piece of content could hold more value than the composed, targeted speech of an influencer. 

Of course, I’m not claiming this applies to all users—everyone has their preferences. However, we might reasonably suppose this modality rings true for a significant portion of Internet users. It’s striking that in a historical moment when misunderstanding and communicative breakdown seem to be the norm, understanding each other without actually doing so might become a new form of social cohesion. A bond expressed through baseless, often childish laughter—yet powerful and pervasive.

It brings to mind what Valentina Tanni writes, albeit from an artistic perspective:

“The internet has multiplied our encounters with nonsense—and our chances to produce it—encouraging drift and the free association of ideas and images. A form of resistance to a normalizing culture, but also a creative way to exorcise the contradictions of our time.” (Memestetica, p. 161)

In this view, nonsense language becomes a kind of anti-language in contrast to the “natural” language of content creators and influencers—a form of communication that only exists when communication itself ceases to exist. And perhaps this is true precisely as a form of protest against the communicative domination of those who rule social media through polished speech and opinion, made powerful by their human credibility—or at least its appearance.

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After all, many Instagram and TikTok users still believe much of what more visible, higher-status users say, making a verbal statement in the virtual world not only real but economically valuable and practically useful. For instance, consider the category of influencers who present the features of a product—or announce its weekly restock—to push us to buy it, even when we don’t need it. Recently, one TikTok user took this kind of marketing to the extreme, showcasing each product for just three seconds and earning millions of dollars in a week.

In this light, brainrot and nonsense memes are not just a general critique of social media behavior and deep scrolling—they’re also a schizoid, pragmatic counterweight to a communication that seems real and content-driven but ultimately serves no purpose beyond the capitalist. To quote Memestetica again, humor is viewed “as a political resource, emphasizing how nonsense—on which humor often relies—can destabilize the social order, subverting the very idea of what reality is acceptable” (Memestetica, p. 68).

In conclusion, this type of meme doesn’t aim to make us more credible, beautiful, or visible—but rather useless in relation to any specific goal. And in the absence of coherent content, the only real outcome it seems to seek is mutual recognition in our shared confusion. A confusion that—thanks to the “magic of the internet”—is transformed into coordinates that don’t aim to bring us back onto the right path, but instead lead us directly to the center of the labyrinth, where the Minotaur awaits: the beast in human form that embodies, in both its outward and inner senselessness, the most instinctive and irrational part of our nature. A part that, through reason and creativity, creates new monsters and mythologies within the memetic landscape of social media.

This pantheon of idiot gods doesn’t aim to teach us a moral or show us the way—but simply to remind us that in irrationality, we are all more alike, if only we stop trying to find meaning in a reality that has none.

Capiamoci (?)