(2024-04-24) The Dada Era Of Internet Memes Glycine

The Dada Era of Internet Memes. Last December, a factory in the Chinese province of Hebei called Donghua Jinlong posted a marketing video to TikTok showing aerial clips of its campus set to a jaunty tune. A caption proudly declared, in English, “Since 1979, Glycine comes from here.”

In the past few months, Donghua Jinlong’s videos have spiralled into an online joke. A TikTok from early March, explaining the uses of industrial-grade glycine and boasting of the company’s thirty-one patents, collected more than three hundred thousand views and many hundreds of ironically enthusiastic responses

As with, say, LOLcats in the mid-two-thousands, the appeal of the glycine memes is inextricable from their randomness; the fun lies in developing a trivial fixation and digging in to the point of absurdity. But there are also new forces at work in today’s online culture that give the Donghua Jinlong memes chaotic and borderline nihilistic undercurrents

Most blatant is the influence of generative-A.I. tools, which allow users to create and remix content in an instant.

Some of the Donghua Jinlong videos on TikTok are marked with the hashtag #corecore, which is one name for the emerging aesthetic of twenty-twenties online culture

“Corecore” is a style that gazes directly into the Internet’s navel, and serves as a litmus test for how far down the Internet rabbit hole you’ve gone.

Their goal is an elaborate meaninglessness.

Corecore has been compared to Dada, the early-twentieth-century art movement that used collage to reflect the world’s chaos and unfathomability in the wake of the First World War.

In 1918, the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara wrote a “Dada Manifesto” that described the movement’s rebellion of incoherence: “All pictorial or plastic work is useless: let it then be a monstrosity that frightens servile minds, and not sweetening to decorate the refectories of animals in human costume, illustrating the sad fable of mankind.” Dadaism was not an escape from society through absurdity but, rather, an attempt to reach its twitching heart.

What's With All The Videos Advertising Industrial Grade Glycine? The Meme Explained

If you've seen a surreal TikTok video showing Red Scare's Dasha Nekrasova twirling around a red ribbon as she advertises a random amino acid created in a Chinese factory, you're not alone.

Sometime in late March 2024, TikToker @gangstasportivik posted an AI voice parody of Donghua Jinlong's videos using Red Scare podcaster Dasha Nekrasova, adding a video of her twirling a red ribbon over footage of the glycine factory.

A few weeks later, the same account posted another AI voice parody clip using the likeness of Nick Mullen. He can be seen following the same script about Donghua Jinlong and their production practices.

High Quality Industrial Grade Glycine From Donghua Jinlong

Various Examples