As we prepare to take our annual publishing break, the question on everyone’s minds is: what should we make of 2024? In this moment of global certainty, it is a human impulse to search for historical parallels. This is a fraught exercise. On the one hand, drawing analogies to the past can put into sharp view all the lessons that human civilization ought to have internalized by now. On the other, comparisons which are too quick, can obscure what is discontinuous about our conjuncture. But, as Hegel warned us—“The owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk”—we will only know in retrospect.

In the latest New Left Review, Matthew Karp writes of probably the most decisive event of 2024, i.e., the US’ decisive election  last November: “In substance as in form, the 2024 election reconstituted the essential features of 2016.”  Once again,  Trump successfully positioned himself as a challenger to the political establishment despite his prior tenure as president. Once again, the Democrats failed to mobilize key portions of their coalition, and are, in fact, alienating the working-class votership which once formed a key constituency of their base. Hegel’s successor—Marx—remarked somewhere, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” But in our moment, historical repetition could just as well go the other way. Phenomena that are initially dismissed as laughable and absurd can escalate into tragedy, with catastrophic consequences, because we failed to take them seriously. This is where we are now.

I wrote in last week’s newsletter (subscribe!) that Luigi Mangione’s assassination of Brian Thompson and the political debate it has ignited risks collapsing into ironic, apolitical content if predominantly refracted through the idiom of memes. But memes are not simply viral flashes of humor that come and go, thereafter consigned to the dustbin of history and the internet. Instead, they are powerful carriers of mimetic desire (the theory by René Girard that humans imitate others in determining what to desire, as our wants are not inherent but shaped by models we observe). As digital expressions of imitation, memes act as compact models of behavior, beliefs, or desires, inviting replication and adaptation by others. Memes create a shorthand for shared aspirations, fears, or critiques, creating models of desire that influence behavior on a mass scale.

It is, in part, difficult to fully exorcise the specter of the culture wars from modern politics because their predominance reflects a more fundamental dynamic shaping the contemporary: the memeification of politics. Consider  how different demographics receive Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione. In Zack Beauchamp’s analysis at Vox, conservatives celebrate Penny as a defender of “order” while condemning Mangione as a force of “anarchy.” And, as Beauchamp points out, right-wing defenders of Penny are even resorting to comic book analogies to elaborate this perceived distinction (for Christian Schneider in National Review, Penny is Batman, and Mangione is the Joker).

What we call “identity politics” or the “culture wars” may just be what politics is now, where ideas, figures, and movements are reduced to simplified, shareable, and emotionally charged symbols that spread rapidly online. This has been in the offing for some time. Already in 1981, with remarkable prescience, Jean Baudrillard saw how postmodern society was becoming a place where the real is produced through media, advertising, and other forms of symbolic representation, so much so that it becomes impossible to distinguish reality from its simulation. In fact, what is “real” is preceded and determined by its symbolic representation.

The memeification of politics extends beyond traditional political figures and arenas, spilling into the cultural domain where artists and entertainers increasingly embody societal tensions. Boima Tucker’s analysis of the Kendrick Lamar and Drake beef underscores this, noting how their public conflict became a proxy for deeper societal crises. Kendrick’s accusations against Drake—ranging from cultural appropriation to symbolic emasculation—tapped into anxieties around identity, power, and authenticity that resonate far beyond the world of hip-hop. As Tucker pointed out, the symbolic weight carried by such figures reveals the “illiberal mood” underpinning a crisis of democratic liberalism, where reactionary ideas and sentiments find fertile ground in popular culture. These moments of cultural spectacle, Tucker argues, are not mere distractions but symptoms of a deeper malaise, with Kendrick and Drake serving as avatars for broader struggles over race, gender, and power.

Still, the material conditions that underpin society—class inequality, economic precarity, climate catastrophe—have not disappeared (despite the fact that it is in severe crisis, and whether we are in a “post-neoliberal” world or not, capitalism is still the only game in town). But they are increasingly mediated and refracted through symbolic representations, rendering politics less coherent and more performative. This disjuncture between embodied reality and symbolic reality creates fertile ground for contradiction. For instance, how has the world’s richest man—Elon Musk—become the figurehead of a new ethnonationalist, “pro-worker” populism (he is also, lest we forget, an immigrant from Africa). How does a leader whose program includes slashing taxes for the wealthy and dismantling the welfare state position themselves as a champion of the working class? These paradoxes are not just rhetorical sleights of hand; they reflect the deeper logic of a political moment where perception increasingly supplants substance. The memeification of politics is not just a byproduct of online culture but a structural transformation in how political meaning is constructed and contested, resulting in a fragmented public sphere where shared understanding is increasingly difficult to achieve.

This dynamic is only compounded by what the sociologist Paolo Gerbaodo recently describes as “Tiktokficiation.” Second-generation social media, like TikTok, differ from earlier platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which were based on explicit interpersonal connections. Instead, TikTok uses algorithmic curation to form “clustered publics”—groups organized around shared interests rather than direct user connections.  As more platforms mimic TikTok’s algorithmic design, “a danger of clustered publics,” Gerbaodo writes, “ is that they exacerbate the fragmentation of the contemporary public sphere, further fueling political polarization and making it more difficult for citizens to find common ground.” This, coupled with social media’s Balkanization—which Elon Musk is accelerating by flooding Twitter with right-wing and OnlyFans content—means that there will no longer be any single platform that can approximate being a unified public sphere.

Is it really all that bad though? In 2024, two things stand out. From June to August, nationwide protests erupted in Kenya against the government’s controversial tax hike proposals in the 2024 Finance Bill, which outlined its fiscal plans. Led predominantly by Gen Z and millennials, the demonstrations were met with a brutal police crackdown, killing at least 60 protesters. However, the sustained pressure forced President William Ruto to withdraw the Finance Bill and pledge substantial reforms. Social media platforms like X, TikTok, and WhatsApp were pivotal in mobilizing protesters, disseminating information, and coordinating actions, such as spamming MPs with messages to oppose the bill. As Naila Aroni summarized on Africa Is a Country earlier this year, “Digital activism played a significant role in amplifying the impact of the #RejectFinanceBill2024 and #RutoMustGo protests—not because we had anything to prove to politicians, but for the sake of Kenya’s democratic future. While the government underestimated online mobilization, these efforts exposed the illegitimate political class and raised civic awareness, proving that the revolution will be digitized.”

But in a world of memefied politics, how far can online mobilization go? Months later, as Achan Muga chronicles, the Kenyan government has infiltrated and suppressed protests, co-opted activists, and stealthily reintroduced unpopular policies. (For another treatment of these questions, Ruth Mudingayi’s analysis of the hashtagification of the ongoing catastrophe in the DRC is also helpful).At their peak, hashtags like #RejectFinanceBill2024 and #RutoMustGo crystallized widespread discontent into digestible, shareable symbols of resistance. Memes, videos, and slogans spread like wildfire, collapsing complex grievances—ranging from economic precarity to disillusionment with governance—into compelling narratives that could be consumed, replicated, and amplified within seconds. In this way, digital activism illustrated its greatest strength: the ability to rapidly mobilize diverse publics around a single, symbolic cause.

Yet therein lies the paradox of digital-era mobilizations: they can appear immense, dynamic, and effective in the moment—yet rapidly dissipate. Kenyan protestors, having tasted a symbolic victory against the Finance Bill in June, found by December that the same or similar measures were quietly being reintroduced under different names and rationales, while police infiltration and government co-optation hampered new forms of organizing. Muga’s account is telling: in social media circles, hashtags, and viral memes had once provided collective momentum, but now those channels are riddled with trolls, disinformation, and stoked infighting, making it harder for activists to coordinate or even trust one another.

Kenya is but one example in a long line of what Vincent Bevins dubs “the mass protest decade,” where movements across the globe—from Brazil to Lebanon, Chile to Sudan—have exploded in response to systemic inequality, corruption, and the failures of neoliberal governance. These uprisings have become a defining feature of the contemporary political landscape. Yet, they often share a troubling trajectory: spectacular moments of mobilization followed by rapid demobilization, repression, or co-optation. By 2025, the anniversaries of pivotal movements like #EndSARS in Nigeria and #RhodesMustFall in South Africa will serve as poignant reminders of the power and limitations of digital activism. Some questions we want to ask next year include: what has become of Africa’s long decade of mass protest, and what could become of future ones? What similarities do they share regarding their organizational modes, character, and focus, and how are they different? Do they augur a new mode of African political organization, or are they symptomatic of broader, inconclusive historical processes? Are internationalist inflections visible or are they representative of predominantly nationalist sentiments? Is generation, and specifically generational discontent, a principle organizing logic or is there a broader political displeasure that convenes wider constellations of people?

The second event that stands out in 2024 is Israel’s ongoing genocidal war against Palestinians and the enormous outpouring of global solidarity it has prompted. What is hard to square is the fact that we all have access to a genocide being live-streamed before our very eyes, and yet the response from global power structures has been one of relative apathy, if not outright complicity. Social media has allowed ordinary citizens to bear witness in unprecedented ways, with videos, images, and firsthand accounts flooding platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and X. This has fueled an upsurge in global protests, with scores of people rallying in cities from New York to Nairobi to demand an end to the violence. But even as solidarity grows, it seems unable to stem the tide of destruction.

There is something profoundly unsettling—perhaps even Baudrillardian—about the simultaneous immediacy and impotence of this moment. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard wrote about how the hyperreal—the endless reproduction of images and symbols—can obscure the reality it purports to represent. The live-streamed genocide in Gaza exemplifies this dynamic in a horrifying way. On the one hand, the constant flow of content has made the violence undeniable, confronting viewers with its visceral reality. On the other hand, the normalization of this imagery—its ubiquity in our feeds, alongside memes, advertisements, and banal updates about daily life—renders it almost surreal. We can witness atrocities in real time and then scroll to a video of a cat or a cooking tutorial, as if the two were part of the same continuum.

This duality points to a deeper crisis in contemporary politics: the disjunction between visibility and action. Never before have atrocities been so widely documented and disseminated, yet the mechanisms of accountability and intervention remain as elusive as ever. This raises urgent questions about the role of witnessing in a digital age. What does it mean to “bear witness” when the act of viewing is mediated through platforms designed for distraction and commodification? And how can solidarity transcend the symbolic realm to effect material change?

Perhaps what haunts me most as we near the close of 2024 is the last commentary Immanuel Wallerstein wrote before his passing in 2019, just before the convulsions and atomization wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. In it, Wallerstein reflected:

So, the world might go down further by-paths. Or it may not. I have indicated in the past that I thought the crucial struggle was a class struggle, using class in a very broadly defined sense. What those who will be alive in the future can do is to struggle with themselves so this change may be a real one. I still think that, and therefore I think there is a 50-50 chance that we’ll make it to transformatory change, but only 50-50.

Four years into this turbulent decade, those odds feel even dimmer—perhaps something closer to 70-30, stacked against the possibility of genuine transformative change.

This pessimism is not borne of despair but of a sober reckoning with how profoundly the material conditions that structure our lives remain obscured and distorted by the symbolic terrain in which we operate. Once again, the conditions of class inequality, economic precarity, and ecological collapse have not disappeared, but they have been rendered increasingly inarticulable, leaving us unable to fully express or make sense of our experiences, values, or beliefs. This growing inarticulacy emerges as the gap between societal expectations and material reality continues to widen. As life gets worse—while technological advancements and symbolic spectacle mask this decline—we default to simplistic scapegoating, projecting blame onto convenient “others” rather than diagnosing the structural forces at play.

Much like conspiracy theories, these misdiagnoses are grounded in a partial truth: that the world is indeed structured by unequal power relations, and that the powerful act overwhelmingly in their own interests, often to the detriment of the majority. But the diagnosis goes astray when it targets the wrong powerful people: “woke” college students in the US, climate justice activists, or the left more broadly. These distortions become memefied explanations for systemic problems, reinforcing existing grievances while deepening polarization. They offer neither clarity nor solutions, only a compounding sense of alienation and distrust. This alienation is exacerbated by a digital environment that thrives on reducing complexity into binaries, feeding algorithms that reward emotional outrage over critical thought. In such a world, the tools we use to articulate and organize around material struggles are increasingly blunted by the spectacle.

So where does that leave us? Wallerstein’s final reflection is as much a challenge as it is a lament: “What those who will be alive in the future can do is to struggle with themselves so this change may be a real one.” The struggle is not only external—against the systems of power that perpetuate exploitation and inequality—but also internal: to rediscover the language, frameworks, and concepts that allow us to articulate a shared vision of transformation. Without this, the risk is not merely stagnation but regression into an increasingly fragmented and incoherent politics, where the forces of reaction consolidate power while the rest of us fight over symbolic scraps.

What is the responsibility of a publication like Africa Is a Country in this moment of crisis and transformation? It is a question we are actively grappling with, as we navigate a landscape where the tools of communication are simultaneously vital and fraught. At Africa Is a Country, we see ourselves engaging in what Antonio Gramsci called a “war of position”—building a counter-hegemonic force by meeting our audience where they are, while maintaining the critical rigor and depth that are essential for meaningful analysis. This dual strategy is at the heart of how we approach our mission in an era of memefied politics and fractured public spheres.

While we continue to produce in-depth, thoughtful essays, we are also expanding into short-form and audio-visual content to reach wider and more diverse audiences. Our new TikTok presence, for instance, is not a concession to the fleeting nature of online attention but a deliberate attempt to craft meaningful narratives in spaces where millions now consume and share ideas. In the New Year, we will release our first feature-length documentary, After Oil, which examines the promises and pitfalls of the green energy transition and its impact on communities in Amadiba (South Africa), Mathare (Kenya), and Tindouf (Algeria). Through a deep analysis of past and present developments, the documentary interrogates the notion of a “just transition,” challenging its assumptions and highlighting the lived realities of those on the frontlines of environmental and economic change.

Beyond our online and audio-visual content, we remain committed to building an alternative public sphere—one that fosters democratic ideas and nurtures collective imagination. This commitment is inspired by the legacy of historic African radical anti-colonial and leftist magazines, which served not only as platforms for critique but as spaces for envisioning and organizing a better future (see the “Revolutionary Papers” series which showcases the enduring influence of these publications and the lessons they offer for contemporary struggles.)

In doing this work, we aim to counter the inarticulacy that defines much of our present conjuncture, where the language to describe systemic inequality and articulate transformative visions is eroded by the spectacle of daily crises and memefied discourse. We believe it is possible—and necessary—to reconnect the symbolic and the material, to translate visibility into action, and to build solidarities that are not only broad but deep.

Fortunately, we are not alone, and belong to a broader ecosystem of thinkers, writers, organizers, and readers who share a commitment to imagining and creating a more just future. So, as we end 2024 and prepare for the year ahead, we do so with clarity and purpose. In a world fractured by inequality, distraction, and despair, our role is to insist on connection, substance, and hope. The work of reclaiming our political imagination and expanding the horizons of possibility continues, and Africa Is a Country will remain a space where those horizons are explored, challenged, and made real. Together, we press on.