Aya Gawdat: The term is shitposting, right? I used to shitpost a lot more and it feels like an indication of the person’s mental state. When you’re manic and haven’t slept, the posts are really good. It’s definitely a direct link to your psyche. What you post or share is vulnerable. It’s intimate. When my page started to attract more people, it made me feel responsible, and I couldn't shitpost in that same way. Now that you’re calling this intuition, I’m like, yes, the stream just needs to be open. Maybe that’s the truest way to share yourself online.

Aya: I see Patia giving advice about truths people don’t say out loud. You post hard truths. I feel like it’s so real. You can see the people you’re posting about on the New York streets. Is that weird to say?

Aya: It’s about being fed up with the clout-o-sphere. There’s no more just chilling online. Everything is branded. It’s annoying. Especially as a woman online, you get to say riskier things as a meme page.
Vanessa, you said earlier that screenshots feel like photography. They’re snapshots of a moment of witnessing, not just content.
I think meme-making has made the internet way more fluent in nuance, not just noise. A lot of people underestimate what these so-called ‘chaotic’ images do. But if you think about the function of a screen, it’s literally designed to pull you in, to make you believe in the reality it presents. When a meme is blurry, pixelated, weirdly cropped, reposted five times with layers of distortion, it actually breaks that illusion. It reminds you that this is a screen. That you’re viewing something, not inside it. It creates a moment of awareness, a kind of dimensional flicker where you’re suddenly conscious of both your reality and the one the image is from.
That awareness can be grounding. The internet isn’t new anymore. We’ve lived inside it long enough that we need to start thinking about how to actually balance these two realities. We can’t just escape into one or the other. These distorted, messy posts are one way to anchor ourselves. They don’t let the screen fully seduce you. They keep you slightly aware, slightly detached. And I think that’s healthy. It might look like noise to someone who doesn’t speak the language, but it’s actually a deeply evolved form of communication. It’s about tone, reference, rhythm and intention.

Aya: It’s so different. Growing up in Dubai, we were watching you guys [America] on Tumblr, you had yourT-Mobile Sidekicks. We didn’t have that tech in the Middle East yet.The way you were all connecting online, and even the “influencers”—it was so different.

Aya: Social media was around for us, we were connecting locally, but from some reason we were also just watching you all. We weren't given part of the global stage to perform or act.
There were a lot of restrictions and censorship. Even now, we can’t FaceTime people. It’s blocked outside of the country. No one posted themselves online like that until 2016. We did have MySpace and all of that, but it felt very one-sided. We saw the United States, but you guys didn’t see us.
Maybe there was censorship on your part too? Did you ever come across stuff from the UAE back then?

Aya: It’s like that for us too. We see Americans a certain way, and some of it is partly true, but there’s so much you don’t see. In the same way America’s horribly destructive, it’s brought a lot of innovation to the world. It’s good for us to see each other clearly.
I’ll post something which feels super specific to my experience – something about being Arab or something niche to the politics of a region I grew up in – and it ends up blowing up in a place I’ve never even been to like Brazil or the Philippines. That’s when you really see the power of the algorithm and how much human experience overlaps, even when the cultural references don’t.
I consciously see my page as a kind of bridge. A bridge between me and Patia, between cultures and between local and global perspectives. Memes have evolved into a kind of universal language. Even if the meme isn’t in your language—if the template is familiar, the meaning often still lands. That shared recognition – that feeling of overlap – is where I think global humanity quietly reveals itself. That’s what I want my page to hold space for.
I had a friend who grew up in Washington who came to visit me while I was in London and he was showing me dances from all the different states. He was like, “This is how they do it in Jersey.” I thought, wow, these are tribes.
(Both laughing)

Aya: It only seems like we know them because privacy is decreasing.

Aya: It’s nice to be a pirate online. Do whatever the fuck you want, say whatever the fuck you want. It’s amazing. Anyone who has a meme page—if you’re not pro-Palestine, that just means the page is mind control and in the hands of someone evil. That should be the requirement for a meme page. That you’re human.
Patia, your following is so different from mine. I went from 300 to 3,000 followers. I can’t imagine hitting the ‘K’.

Aya: It’s hard to grasp the reality of this censorship. You think, this can’t be true, I’m going to say Gaza. Then you notice—two views on this post…

Aya: The more you participate in the system, the more you owe them to act a certain way.
If we’re actually talking about the origin of memes, you could argue the root energy was trolling. The original troll or jester energy is still underneath it all. That’s why memes feel so natural when they’re subversive or poking fun. It’s in their DNA.
What’s interesting now is how different cultures remix that core energy without losing it. The format might shift, the references might change, but the underlying role – the one that disrupts, reflects and plays with power – stays intact.
That trickster or jester role is always there.

Aya: People are quite literally deciding to sell their freedom.