There are few things in this world more insufferable than a rich person trying to force their shitty ideas on everyone else. And in 2025, there are very few things that feel more forced than “Generative AI.”
Like Gretchen Wieners from the classic Y2K teen comedy Mean Girls, the tech industry is desperately trying to make ‘Fetch’ happen—contorting itself in cartoon-like fashion to carry the mountains of investor capital that keep the AI hype train chugging. In the first half of 2025 alone, AI startups raised over $104 billion, just shy of the amount that all startups had raised the previous year. The resulting AI bubble is now 17 times bigger than the infamous dot-com boom, ensnaring chip manufacturers like Nvidia and AMD in a chaotic tangle of business deals like some kind of late-capitalist katamari.
This multi trillion-dollar ouroboros is backed by an unrelenting campaign to convince us normal folk that GenAI will transform society for the better, and therefore should receive infinity dollars. Companies like OpenAI and Google have spared no expense, hiring lobbyists and running Superbowl ads in an attempt to sell their still-unproven technology as both useful and inevitable. Unfortunately for them, this plan has a major roadblock: the growing number of normal, non-techpilled people who are calling bullshit.
The derisive label of Forced Meme is essentially the internet calling bullshit.
By now you’re probably familiar with the long list of sins the tech industry is committing with the machine learning models it insists on calling “Artificial Intelligence.” These tools regularly hallucinate made-up nonsense, plagiarize peoples’ art, pollute the internet with disinformation and low-quality content-slop, use multiple cities worth of electricity, consume a preposterous amount of fresh water, and have also started to induce novel forms of psychosis in the people who use them. But beyond all this, perhaps the most maddening aspect of the AI trend is that it’s being forced on us.
While trying to describe this recently, I remembered the concept of the “Forced Meme,” which gained popularity on forums like 4chan and Something Awful in the mid-00s. If you’ve had the good fortune to avoid those particular cesspools of internet culture, the derisive label of Forced Meme is essentially the internet calling bullshit—usually in response to someone trying to seed an unpopular idea or unfunny joke into the online zeitgeist.
According to the long-running meme encyclopedia KnowYourMeme, a Forced Meme is any meme “made with the intent of becoming a meme” and which is “aggressively promoted by their creators, small dedicated groups, or companies attempting to use them for viral marketing or astroturfing.” In other words, it was internet shorthand for Regina George’s response to Gretchen: stop trying to make “fetch” happen, it’s not going to happen. Calling something a Forced Meme was a way of mocking others for their sad attempts to make something a Thing in the days before algorithmic social media and influencer-driven content.
With that definition in mind, here is an incomplete list of the ways tech companies have been trying to get people to adopt AI tools over the past year:
- Microsoft sent a memo instructing its employees to either use the company’s AI tools or be fired.
- YouTube is now testing AI “hosts” that interrupt your music listening with trivia and ads.
- Google told its employees to give their health information to an AI tool or they’d lose their healthcare benefits.
- Companies like Coca-Cola are desperately trying to normalize AI slop in ads. The soda giant said it plans to release another AI-generated holiday ad this year, despite everyone hating the last one.
- “AI summaries” have become ubiquitous at the top of search engine results, compelling users to find loopholes to turn them off.
- Companies are embedding AI tools into the core functionality of operating systems. Downloads for Windows 7 jumped after Microsoft announced the end of support for Windows 10, as some users sought to avoid upgrading to the AI-centric Windows 11.
There’s a pattern here. Unlike previous tech trends like crypto and NFTs, AI boosters aren’t just making goofy attempts to convince people Generative AI is cool and useful. They’ve decided that if people aren’t going to adopt these tools willingly, they will simply bake them into things people already use and create so much friction that the average person will effectively be forced to. The end result—like so many things these days—is a tiny clique of billionaires and monied executives enriching themselves by injecting everything with over-hyped crap that most people don’t want.
There’s plenty of data to support this. Recent polls have shown that relatively few Americans—in one survey, as little as 26 percent—believe AI tools will have mostly positive impacts on society. A recent study also found that the people who are most optimistic about the technology are overwhelmingly the ones who understand it the least. This holds true within the industry itself, at least anecdotally. As countless conversations I’ve had with tech workers over the past year can attest, the average engineer doesn’t buy into the AI hype. They are simply being forced to play along with the cult-like, AI-maximalist delusions of tech billionaires and their cheerleaders in order to remain employed.
The Forced Meme is a useful concept not just for understanding the tech industry and its AI obsession, but as a mirror of global fascism as a whole. As a political ideology, fascism by definition depends on the use of force. Fascists seek to impose their warped reality by “flooding the zone”—overwhelming a populace both through the physical manifestation of violence and the nonstop dissemination of propaganda. Heavily-armed ICE agents kidnapping people and racist AI-generated videos depicting fake Black women complaining about losing SNAP benefits work toward this same end. The goal is to destabilize and disorient political opposition by short-circuiting our ability to discern fact from fiction, which just happens to be the one thing “AI” is very good at.
But it’s not going as planned. Communities in cities across the country have mobilized to sabotage and confront ICE. Artists and workers have rejected AI tools and built new platforms that combat the vulgar slop they produce. It’s proof of the political shift that has defined our post-information era: The old playbooks of social control are simply no longer effective at making people like things that suck ass.
This is good news if you’re someone who hates bullshit as much as I do. The gap between our lived experience and the narratives that have been sold to us about how to live and what to believe have grown into an un-crossable chasm, ever-widened by the ubiquity of mass-communication platforms.
Whether it’s the AI bubble, the genocide in Gaza, or Andrew Cuomo’s 0-for-2 loss to Zohran Mamdani in the NYC mayoral race, it’s clear that the infrastructure of consent-manufacturing the powers that be have relied on for decades has broken down. Governments and institutions also realize this. It’s why their default response has shifted to overwhelming people with disinformation and imposing their mythologies on us by force. Two years after Israel escalated its ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, polls show a complete reversal of public opinion on all sides of the political spectrum. The data shows that Democrats’ near-uniform and unquestioning support for Israel has fallen completely out of sync with their voters, as livestreamed atrocities and on-the-ground reporting from Palestinian journalists contradicts the “official” narrative again and again and again.
Everything about the “AI” trend feels fake, forced, and depraved in a way that threatens to unwind our social fabric in the name of short-term gains.
Mainstream media, governments, and academic institutions have responded not by including these facts and perspectives, but by doubling down on orthodoxy and purging their ranks of anyone who won’t play along. We saw this clearly in the violent response to campus protests against the genocide, which saw students expelled by school administrations, beaten by police, and slandered by the media as “antisemitic.” We saw it again in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder, where anyone who presented the fact of Kirk’s bigotry or merely quoted the numerous racist and misogynist things he’d said was targeted, doxxed, and fired by the same people who once pearl-clutched about ‘cancel culture.’ And it’s the same force driving the censorious, US-led corporate takeover of Tiktok—where queer and pro-Palestine Gen-Zers seem to trigger every right-wing moral panic du jour—by Oracle, the software giant owned by pro-Trump and pro-Israel billionaire Larry Ellison.
In all of these cases, the Forced Memers have laid bare the aims of those in power—not to persuade people but to command them, in classic Orwellian fashion, to deny the evidence of their own eyes and ears under threat of expulsion, termination, and blacklisting.
Silicon Valley’s GenAI pushers are following this same authoritarian blueprint. Over and over, we are told that AI chatbots can solve social problems, make art, replace therapists and doctors, and even revive our dead loved ones with zombie-like digital simulacra. And time and again, the reality of these experiments has not only utterly failed to measure up to their claims, but actively threatened to make life worse for everyone. We’ve seen the grisly results of forcing sycophantic chatbots to replace specialized care and human empathy. And we’ve seen the backlash to GenAI in Hollywood and the games industry, where it became a major focus of labor strikes as bosses seek to replace skilled workers with Silicon Valley slop machines.
Everything about the “AI” trend feels fake, forced, and depraved in a way that threatens to unwind our social fabric in the name of short-term gains. It all feels like a massive social experiment nobody asked for, imposed on us by casino speculators taking a few final lever-pulls on the slot machine of capitalism before the whole thing comes tumbling down.
Still, I don’t think this is cause for despair. The clarity of these actions gives us an opportunity not only to reject the cruel future that tech companies and politicians claim is inevitable, but to organize and build the kind of world we actually want. Whether it’s voters rejecting the false idea that Democrats must abandon trans people to gain political ground, or artists and fans leaving AI-infested Spotify to join new co-operatively-owned music platforms, the cognitive rupture of the Forced Meme shows us that the old tools of control are no longer working. It shows that we’re no longer buying what the people upstairs are selling, and that we can pursue our own ideas about how we want to live.
History shows that when the machinery of soft power breaks down, authoritarians always return to the ancient language of force. The more that this façade slips away, the more we realize our power to collectively reject the realities that are forced on us and create something better.
