by: Max Negbaur, Haverford ’28; Image from SpongeBob
Today, Gen Z, more nonviolent than past generations, has taken to the streets to protest against repressive regimes, climate change policy, racial injustice, and just about every conceivable issue; UNICEF says they are living through ‘polycrisis.’ Modern protests are overwhelmingly youth-dominated, much more so than previous generations of protest, more likely to be found in relatively free states, and often concerned with inequalities in quality of life or wellbeing. More excitingly, a few of them have worked: Nepal and Madagascar both underwent regime change after youth protests. Like youth protest, popular culture (as in, movies n’ stuff) has long been a staple of protest movements, to varying reception. The relationship between protest and popular culture, however, is not constant. The way protest movements use popular symbols typically reflects the kinds of media people consume, and the role that media plays in that era’s culture.
It’s not exactly a revelation that protests use pop culture symbols. The way they are using pop culture symbols, however, has shifted, and the nature of those symbols has itself evolved as the media landscape becomes more transnational (like the protests themselves). Increasingly, there has come to be a global cultural milieu, generated on and distributed by the internet. The rise of neoliberalism facilitated the ever-expanding interconnection of global economies and now global cultures via telecommunications. Protests have, in essence, become memes: embodied, ever-evolving, super-linguistic informational units jumping between cultural spaces. The meme, in other words, is now the primary cultural unit of youth politics, and perhaps of politics itself: the White House posting AI-generated images of immigrants getting deported, Zohran Mandani’s commercials made by Melting Solids, Instagram video clips of politicians, cultural commentators, influencers, and whatever species of slime mold Nick Fuentes is.
As telecommunications technology advances and media becomes cheaper, people consume more and more media, and it has a greater and greater effect on their experience of the world and their social connections to each other. The anti-slavery movement was characterized by novels, many of which James Baldwin found crass and self-serving. The Civil Rights movement and youth counterculture of the 1960s had protest songs, which became hip-hop as the anti-racism movement evolved in the US. Gen Z has One Piece (also the Hunger Games, the Handmaid’s Tale, Les Misérables, V for Vendetta, Black Panther, Star Wars, Winnie the Pooh, Pepe the Frog, and most certainly many more). There is a certain irony in the properties that have come to represent revolution, freedom, and the unwritten political future for states like the Philippines and Indonesia: most are American, almost all the rest Japanese.
Of course, youth protest is far from a modern phenomenon; the earliest record (that I could find) of youth protest dates back to the 1870s, when Black students organized against racial inequality. The Civil Rights movement in the US had a strong youth contingent from its outset. Similarly, the counterculture was led in no small part by college students (and the folks who sold them weed and shrooms). One Piece first entered print in 1997 (coincidentally, the beginning of Gen Z itself) and has since become perhaps the most influential and transnational media property of the 21st century. It has spawned an anime adaptation, several animated movies, a number of video games, a live-action Netflix series, a card game, and the most iconic protest symbol of the last decade. One Piece’s Jolly Roger, the icon for its ragtag team of pirate protagonists, has adorned protest movements in Nepal, the Philippines, France, England, India, Korea, and especially Indonesia, for issues ranging from government corruption to the Israel-Palestine conflict. When youth protestors stormed and set aflame the Nepalese parliament, they hung the Jolly Roger on its gold-wrought gates. The Indonesian government treats the Jolly Roger as a threat to national security; one lawmaker labeled it treasonous.
Indonesia’s relationship to imported popular culture is especially striking. In Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Art of Killing, Indonesia’s genocidaires explain and reenact their gruesome killings with oft-anachronistic Hollywood tropes. Anwar Congo, imitating American movies he saw in the early 50s, liked to kill his victims with piano wire. Film distribution was a crucial tool of American diplomacy in the 1940s (and arguably still is), but the explosion of streaming media in the 1990s has increasingly placed symbolic power in the hands of media distribution companies and vast, international consumer bases. Anime has become incredibly popular in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Philippines, distributed along fiber-optic cables. When they wanted to protest government corruption on the 80th anniversary of Indonesia’s independence, Indonesians displayed on their houses, and carried with them in their protests, not only their own flag but the Jolly Roger too. So did Moroccans. And Thai protestors. And British protestors. Almost all of them, actually. Before One Piece, the symbol of protest, especially in Asia, was The Hunger Games, and before that, it was V for Vendetta. The Hunger Games first became a protest symbol in Thailand, when protestors raised the three-fingered salute to their new military government, and quickly spread to Indonesia and Myanmar. The fact that both are American properties is not a coincidence. The US absolutely dominates the global film market, as well as the physical and digital infrastructure that distributes film, social media, and the internet itself. US dominance in global film has been a deliberate policy position since the 1940s, driven partly by domestic interest groups but mostly by respect for soft cultural power.
Why do these symbols matter? Jonathan Jones, writing an op-ed for the Guardian, reveals the powerful and subtle role of mass-media symbols in protest movements by crassly and confidently misunderstanding it. He complains, “The Hunger Games is mass entertainment, not a manual for changing the world,” not realizing the fact of its being mass entertainment is exactly why it allows activists to galvanize a movement and communicate with each other, even across linguistic and national borders. Rachel Vandagriff, examining the evolution of the 60s protest movement into hip-hop, identifies that true protest songs, which embody protest, portray some specific political reality and a sense of moral urgency, in contrast to songs that merely express protest. Protestors in Thailand began using the three-finger salute, along with images from Orwell’s 1984, in 2014. They were protesting against government corruption, the monarchy, and military rule. The three-finger salute was banned not long after. In Myanmar, protestors not only used the three-finger salute, but also reenacted plot beats from the story to mock (and critique) police officers. In the US, protestors invoked The Hunger Games while agitating for higher wages.
The symbology here is not particularly subtle, but it is more elastic than, say, the symbolism of 60s protest songs. Narrative media allows protest movements to project themselves into thematic struggles and project those themes back onto themselves. Protest songs, novels, and so on, are less flexible because they tend to embody either the most general dissatisfaction possible (such as the Sex Pistols) and so just diffuse revolutionary energy, or specific movements, so they are harder to repurpose. The culture around symbols itself has also changed, likely due to the rise of memes as a form of communication. The value of a meme is its ability to change without losing the core of its meaning, and so meme-users are likely more inclined to see symbols as vessels for several possible meanings, which can be repurposed and riffed on as needed.
The Hunger Games for example, is a dystopia, in the tradition of Orwell’s 1984, rife with government oppression and economic exploitation. What protestors use it for varies, but the invocation is consistent: protestors identify themselves as the protagonists of the story, and their opponents as the antagonists. It’s not exactly rocket science. One Piece works the same way: the protagonists fight against an oppressive World Government, though they are not themselves revolutionaries. One Piece is thematically fixated on freedom and self-determination, which appear at every level of the narrative. The Handmaid’s Tale in the US mirrors this pattern, with reproductive freedom in place of military dictatorship. In this sense, Gen Z protest hasn’t changed much since youth protest in the 60s, being oriented primarily on autonomy, justice, and anti-hegemonism.
Anti-dictatorship narrative media as the symbol of revolution makes a lot of sense, especially considering how prevalent media itself has become in everyone’s lives. The relationship between protests and symbols is by no means the same as it was: Uncle Tom’s Cabin may have inspired support for anti-slavery movements in the American North (while ultimately assuaging its readers’ guilt at the same time), but it did not become a practical symbol (a symbol that people literally use while protesting), and protest hip-hip came out of protest movements and their cultural undercurrents, but it did not seem to shape real-world protest behavior. Modern media properties, even the ones that have less to do with protests or the values involved (Star Wars, Black Panther), appear to have taken on a new role somewhere between the two. Meme culture’s role in protests is much more varied, and harder to pin down, but undoubtedly springs in good part from the strong trends of humor in Gen Z protests.
The meme culture in, say, Thailand, is much more arcane, though it likewise showcases Jones’s critical and laughable misunderstanding: Thai protestors use meme symbols (for example, Pepe the Frog, where there is an anti-dictatorship pro-democracy symbol and in the US a neo-Nazi symbol) to strike cultural blows against the regime and build the movement. Humor, especially internet-based and referential humor, is critical to Gen Z protest in a way that seems novel and difficult to understand for those outside the particular cultural context. While confusing from a detached, abstract perspective, Gen Z protest humor excels at removing the glowering mystique from the forces and people against whom they protest (such as Donald Trump). Nothing can be that scary if you’re wearing an inflatable frog suit; nothing can be that tough if you can make fun of it with an image of Winnie the Pooh (or Pepe the frog). It’s not an accident that one of Putin’s first acts when he took power was to shut down a comedy puppet show that mocked the Russian government (and especially him). Dictatorships just can’t help it if they have a stupid face; really, he was just defending himself from those cruel, cruel television personalities!
The No Kings protests in the US played protest music from both Les Misérables and real-life protest movements, but also wore absurd inflatable costumes, to mock Trump’s dismal characterization of American cities. Of course, humor is another staple of protest and anti-government sentiment, often sublimated and or sanitized in televised comedy and the medieval role of the Jester, but sometimes subject to government crackdown. Protestors in the 60s and 70s used pop-up improv troupes (the horror, I know) to protest the war and racial oppression. The three-finger salute and Guy Fawkes mask are deadly serious, but the Jolly Roger is a bit more in the middle. One Piece is not a breathy teenage dystopia, nor a bad adaptation of Alan Moore grimly riffing on British history; it’s a shonen battle anime (that’s a technical term), roughly similar to your summer blockbuster or superhero series, but with, you know, good writing.
The Jolly Roger is a silly symbol, in the sense that it’s a grinning cartoon skull, but for the protestors in Indonesia, Nepal, and Myanmar, many of whom are anime fans, it is serious and sober as anything else. Luffy, One Piece’s protagonist, is a boy made out of rubber who dreams of becoming the Pirate King, but the World Government he fights is far from fantastical for these protestors: it dominates the global economy with shady institutions and pretends not to, manipulates people with propaganda, brutally represses all dissent, and presents itself as paternalistically beneficent. The ideas that Luffy represents, both in his world and ours, are no laughing matter. Freedom never is. The proliferation of pop culture symbols in youth protest since the 1990s ultimately represents just how powerful the media industry has become, and yet paradoxically how the consumers can use that power to their advantage when combating oppression. The global distributor of the One Piece anime is Crunchyroll, a streaming platform that specializes in exporting Japanese animation. Crunchyroll is owned by Sony, one of the largest media conglomerates in human history. Sony is owned by a number of trading companies, mostly American. Indonesian teenagers are fighting a military dictatorship with, indirectly, the power of, in part, Goldman Sachs and Vanguard. Memes distributed on Facebook and Discord now smirk out at cops from picket lines. In other words, Gen Z is repurposing the transnational media sold to it, which, to be clear, it adores consuming, to galvanize dissent against national governments, a significant shift from previous generations of protest.
