Christ against trolling

To be fair, it's been a long time since I read H. Richard Niebuhr's classic Christ and Culture, and perhaps I didn't fully absorb it at the time. But I am reasonably confident that Niebuhr never had to wrestle with the idea of ironic memes, or the ways in which they can be weaponized, as they were by the alleged shooter in the March 15 attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, which killed 50 people.

Anyone who's spent a lot of time online, especially at places like Reddit, 4Chan, or 8Chan, instantly recognized in the shooter's manifesto any number of inside jokes, references, and activities drawn directly from the seamier side of that culture.

If you don't understand any of this, consider yourself a fortunate normie. Here's what you need to know: a meme is most commonly a joke created by slapping text over an image. But it can be a video, a cartoon, even a chunk of text. The common thread of memes is that they're intended to go viral—spread through internet culture like a virus. In hardcore online culture, memes are traded—either intact or with slight, often ironic, variations.  The result is called shitposting.