How memes and humor are fueling Gen Z’s global uprisings

This article How memes and humor are fueling Gen Z’s global uprisings was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Over the course of 2024 and 2025, Gen Z has shaken the globe. Organizing large-scale anti-authoritarian protests — and in the cases of Nepal, Madagascar, Bangladesh and Peru, ousting heads of state — Gen Z-ers showed that they are anything but the disenchanted, anemic age group Boomers have dismissed as apathetic about “real-world” problems.

Aside from the extraordinary bouts of youth mass mobilization across seven countries and counting, one element uniting these movements has been the sharing of memes and playful images. 

On their surface, these elements may appear to be nothing more than this generation’s expressive medium, or perhaps another potential marker of a lack of seriousness. But humor is, in fact, a large part of how young people have always engaged in moral and systemic critique. Like generations before them who used satire and jokes to speak out when formal political channels were closed, Gen Z uses music, dance, playful facial and bodily expressions, and images of funny encounters with police and other authoritative bodies to defy systems of power. 

For example, a common trope of the recent Gen Z 212 movement in Morocco was seeing young people passively defiant during arrest — raising peace signs or smiling for the camera while being detained.

Not to be confused with attempts to signal peaceful protest, such gestures convey youth rebelliousness. They infuse tightly controlled public spaces with disobedience, sarcasm and fun — values authoritarian governments often seek to suppress as incompatible with their tight-fisted rule. 

Last year, during Kenya’s Gen Z protests against proposed tax hikes, videos circulated showing young Kenyans dancing in front of armed riot police. In one, a young boy shakes his bottom in the face of soldiers walking toward him with guns. In another a young woman dances and twerks in front of two officers who are standing with rifles, seemingly unsure of how to handle the situation. 

These images are strikingly parallel to those of German youth during the Third Reich who participated in swing dancing as a rejection of fascist military-style discipline. By flaunting and moving their bodies in ways that went against the regime’s “clean” image of Nazi youth, young people ridiculed attempts to indoctrinate them.

Dancing, smiling and having fun shakes the cloak of authoritarianism by revealing the misplaced priorities of state leaders and the limits of their control. As the guerrilla theater activist Reverend Billy once said, “Once we understand we are controlled by clowns, you can be a clown yourself.” 

Humor as resistance

Scholars of resistance have long shown the importance of sarcasm and satire for nourishing defiance in oppressed communities. Backhanded comments, subversive attire, subtle jabs and jokes act as “weapons of the weak” against the elite to express opinions otherwise suppressed in public. Authoritarian power in particular rests on totalizing control. Therefore, humorous songs, stunts, parodies, cartoons and posters can be covert forms of resistance, making it acceptable to discuss taboo topics in civic spaces.

In many cases, these civic-comedic interplays precede or emerge alongside mass movements. For example, from 1998 to 2000, participants in the Serbian movement Otpor used performative tactics, such as donating blood to hospitals to symbolically beat bloodthirsty leaders to the punch and sarcastically “give them” what sustained their rule. The protests eventually led to the downfall of President Slobodan Milosevic’s authoritarian regime.

During recent anti-corruption uprisings in Peru and the Philippines, social media users shared pictures of state leaders and their cabals flaunting expensive jewelry, luxury vehicles and lavish properties. Such images are frequently set alongside images of the majority of the population living in dire socio-economic conditions — and, in the Philippines, of ordinary Filipinos dealing with dangerous flood conditions, which the country’s leaders have failed to address in recent years.

Juxtaposing people’s everyday realities with the unattainable lifestyles of the rich and the famous is facilitating what scholar Majken Jul Sørensen calls a “culture of resistance.” In the Philippines, this nascent culture overcame political apathy to mobilize street protests calling out corrupt politicians for their mismanagement of public funds. In Peru, such images similarly fueled mass critique and protests that prompted former President Dina Boluarte to step down.

Who are the weak and what are their weapons?

The Philippines and Peru are glaring examples of the paradox many members of Gen Z find themselves in. They are told that they are at the height of economic progress, innovation and global wealth, however they don’t feel the positive impacts. 

There are more millionaires now than at any other time in the past. Artificial intelligence is opening a trove of new opportunities that can be leveraged to maximize human capacity. Compared to past generations, young people have more access to education, work and leisure. The only thing supposedly setting the “have-nots” apart from the “haves” is the effort they put in to take advantage of such opportunities.

But as the last year of protests has certainly shown, the reality on the ground is much different. Stagnant job markets and a constant state of economic precarity, even for those with advanced degrees, runs counter to such faulty narratives of “progress.” The global impacts of climate change, racial capitalism and endless conflicts are felt more in the day-to-day experience of those who have least contributed to them, while these same people are denied the benefits of technological innovation. If anything, technology has only strengthened authoritarianism as young people witness social media and messaging apps aiding the erosion of democratic rights and the expansion of police states. 

Gen Z uses humor to point out such inconsistencies. For example, in social media content leading up to last month’s Gen Z-led protests in Mexico, young people sarcastically compared their economic reality to that of past generations, mocking their own lack of stability and long-term job prospects.

Such videos reject the ideals of progress, development and innovation which, for years, have justified squeezing the workforce in pursuit of corporate profits. They contrast such capitalist ideals with the lived experiences of young people, drawing on a longtime practice in Mexican culture of using humor as a platform for political participation.

Playfulness as political critique 

Such content also makes protest and social change seem fun and inviting. Politics becomes about pleasure and play. One TikTok video from the Gen Z uprising in Nepal shows protesters taking a break to play UNO as a crowd around them laughs and cheers. In other videos, young Nepalese protesters dance in front of government buildings, drive tractors or play instruments against the backdrop of Taylor Swift’s, “Shake It Off,” in stark contrast to the chants and marches that define traditional protest. 

Images center on leisure and its centrality to a normal quality of life — one that has been chipped away by the exploitative capitalist practices driving young people to protest in the first place. They envision an alternative system inclusive of joy and fun as values to aspire to.

What some dismiss as this generation’s attempts at driving the attention economy on social media has real social and political weight. Like generations before them, Gen Z wields humor to engage in social and political debate. They use sly digital content to demonstrate the limits of state power, denounce exploitative capitalist practices and imagine an alternative system conducive to a meaningful life.

The use of humor and sarcasm is a moral and systemic critique of all that’s failed them. But it is also an exercise in learning from those failures to replace them with something better, or at least more fun.

This article How memes and humor are fueling Gen Z’s global uprisings was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2025/12/memes-fueling-gen-uprisings/