"I am become meme" - Ovvero: Come ho imparato a non preoccuparmi e ad amare le piattaforme

This article examines the relationship between political power, memetic communication, and platform societies through a critical-memet-ic montage centered on Elon Musk’s statement “I am become meme”. The first paragraph, “Braccio teso all’apocalisse. Revival della bomba,” interprets the memetic overlap between Musk and Dr. Strangelove to conceptualize digital platforms as “informatic bombs”. Drawing on Baudrillard, Virilio, and platform studies, the article theorizes the transformation of users into fractal, image-based subjects within environments of viral pressure and informational violence. The second paragrapf, “Trump-Troll, Alt-Right e viralità memetica. Il caso Pepe The Frog” situates Musk’s memetic self-iden-tification within the historical genealogy of memetic warfare during Donald Trump’s rise to American presidency. Through the case of Pepe the Frog and the role of 4chan, the article reconstructs the emergence of memes as political weapons, highlighting the convergence between anon-ymous online subcultures, alt-right radicalization, and the transforma-tion of political actors into viral meme. This section argues that political memefication enables the conversion of irony, anonymity, and nihilism into tools of ideological mobilization. The third paragraph, “X: il volto dell’anonimato”, focuses on the transformation of Twitter into X as the emblematic platform of contemporary memetic power. It analyzes ano-nymity, viral antagonism, and platform-driven polarization as structural conditions for “ironic fascism” as post-representational politics. The arti-cle concludes that the memetic politics functions to short-circuit univocal meaning, predating critical discourse itself, and facilitating the erosion of democratic rational mediation within pubblic and political speech, set-ting any communication as instant trigger withouth alterity.