Memes About AI as Sociotechnical Narratives: Vernacular Criticism and the Imaginary Institution of Society

This article examines how internet memes contribute to the sociotechnical imaginaries surrounding artificial intelligence (AI). Drawing on Castoriadis’s distinction between instituted and instituting imaginaries, we understand memes as narratives that symbolically construct AI in everyday culture. In the first section, we review research on sociotechnical imaginaries of AI across textual and visual domains, and show that memes that speak about AI have received comparatively little scholarly attention. We then introduce the notion of sociotechnical narratives to frame these imaginaries as contested and provisional rather than coherent or hegemonic. In the second section, we conceptualize memes as narratives that intervene in the symbolic institution of social reality, showing that they can reinforce dominant meanings through repetition and normalization, but also subvert or reframe them. The third section presents a mixed-methods empirical study of 560 memes collected from Imgflip.com (2016–2025). After building the corpus through manual filtering, we coded memes by topic and conducted a fine-grained qualitative analysis of four main categories: AI takeover, generative AI, art, and AI social impact. Our findings show that most memes reiterate rather than subvert dominant representations of AI. Humor tends to flatten disagreement rather than intensify it, producing what we describe as dormant agonism.