Jeremy Tellier

Both major political parties have turned meme culture into a precision instrument — flooding social feeds with imagery, language, and narrative frames engineered not to inform, but to rewire. What looks like a joke is often a carefully designed cognitive payload: it spreads through humor, bypasses critical thinking, and deposits a belief before the viewer realizes they've received one.

This talk examines the design mechanics behind political meme campaigns — how visual language, emotional triggers, and platform algorithms are deliberately exploited to fragment shared reality. The goal isn't to assign blame. It's to make the invisible visible: to show how these techniques work so that people can recognize them when they encounter them.

The most troubling part isn't that adults fall for it — it's that we hand teenagers unfiltered access to these influence systems with no framework to understand what they're experiencing. Media literacy and information design should be taught in middle school at minimum, and treated as a core competency by high school. Understanding how images and narratives are constructed to manipulate is as essential today as reading and writing.