Now and again a commercial, charitable or governmental organisation will make a publicity faux pas. In Government a minister can go ‘off script’ and end up accidentally countering or overshadowing a particular government message, or a commercial organisation might fail to deal properly with a reputational crisis. Sometimes these errors can be overcome but sometimes they can be financially or politically costly or even somewhat terminal for the organisation concerned or public trust in said organisation which can have serious impacts on society. The mixed and sometimes false messaging during the Covid period by British governments for example has for example, killed off a great deal of trust in governmental messaging probably for a generation or more.

There can also be cases where a senior executive who makes a flippant comment that has dire implications and consequences. In Britain we saw this in the famous case of the British retail jeweller Gerald Ratner of Ratners Jewellers – how an executive can discredit their company with just a few words. Mr Ratner’s off the cuff and jokey description of some of his company’s products as ‘crap’ and ‘cheaper than a Marks and Spencer prawn sandwich’ during a speech in 1991 caused the value of the Ratner company to plummet. Approximately half a billion UK pounds sterling were wiped off the value of Ratners.

I thought immediately of the Ratner debacle when I saw the rise in the number of ‘Amelia’ memes and AI created videos. For those who are unaware of this story, the background is this: The UK Government produced a video game/learning package in 2023 designed to divert young people from extremism and in particular right wing extremism. A character called Charlie is presented with challenges to navigate, different scenarios being presented with extremism both online and off and avoiding them. One of the scenarios featured a purple haired female Goth anti-migration campaigner whom Charlie meets called Amelia.

Now it’s quite clear that the intention of the Government’s communications people and the lavishly rewarded (with taxpayers’ money) NGO, named Shout Out, that put this together was for the audience to be turned off by Amelia. The ‘look’ of Amelia was, in the original artwork that can be found on Know Your Meme, clearly not designed to look attractive to teenage boys. Even I as a teenager who had a penchant for girls who were ‘jolie laide’ or ‘differently pretty’ as it could be said, would have given the real life equivalent of the original Amelia artwork a very wide berth, no matter what their political views might have been. There’s something about the character in the original artwork that if made flesh and presented to the teenage me would not have attracted me for a whole host of reasons that could be categorised as ‘bad vibes’.

The original artwork character reminded me of the stereotypical woke social justice warrior who have done their utmost to run a wrecking ball through society over the last decade or more. I wonder whether the handsomely rewarded NGO and the Civil Servants who put this together deliberately chose that ‘look’ for their Amelia character in order to make the character seem more sinister or different in a not nice way and more recognizably ‘nasty’ to those on the political Right? It’s a possibility.

If you were designing characters to send a message or be a piece of propaganda, then you’d most obviously make the character representing the opponent of whatever sort look ugly or unattractive or repulsive. The Soviet Union did that with images and messages about their enemies and opponents; as did the German National Socialists, Communist China, along with generations of Kims in North Korea. Various Western and ostensibly democratic nations at certain times in their history or when those societies were under stress, such as in time of war or crisis, have put out public messages that have an ugly representation of the enemy. The WWI propaganda images of the rapine and destructive beastly Hun put out by Allied governments are a good example of this uglification of the enemy.

Maybe the Amelia character was intended to be some sort of modern version of all the beastly Hun propaganda that was thrown at the British people during the First World War?

However, whatever it was intended to be, how the Amelia character itself has ended up is a totally different matter. Various people have latterly and somewhat belatedly, taken the original less than attractive Amelia figure and created a different more attractive version of Amelia based on a ‘Waifu’ type character from Japanese Anime. It’s quite obvious that this recreation is of the original Amelia because of colour, dress etc. The new Amelia is popping up just about everywhere, from what I can make out. She’s appearing in nationalist anti-migration and anti-Islam memes and there’s now a growing number of AI created videos featuring the new Amelia, where she breaks every woke taboo you can think of especially when it comes to Islam. The new Amelia also speaks very, very harshly about migration and the current state of British society.

Whether you agree with the message being transmitted by the new Amelia (which you can find for yourself by searching) is immaterial. What’s fascinating is seeing a massive blue chip government communication message not just fall flat on its face but have elements of it used, very successfully it seems, by those who were the opponents of the message that this extremism messaging campaign was attempting to promulgate. It truly does look like a ‘Ratner Moment’ for His Majesty’s Government. Watching the contrast between what the Government and Shout Out did and what the alt-creatives have done to their product is like watching a data distribution contest between a early 1980’s print journalist whose life rhythms were based on when the first edition of their paper ‘went to the stone’ with their uncorrectable copy at 9:30pm or so, with an intellectually agile YouTuber or blogger able to update and bring in extra and related data whenever they want or need to. In that analogy the UK government is the 1980’s print journalist and the memers and AI video creators, who’ve created this new Amelia, are on the other side.

I would guess that tens maybe hundreds of thousands of pounds has been spent on producing the game featuring Charlie and Amelia and it all appears to have gone to waste, although Shout Out UK, the anti ‘disinformation’ and ‘defending democracy’ NGO that has been heavily involved in this debacle, has probably pocketed a great deal of public money for their services and input. It’s nice to know isn’t it, that whilst the nation suffers massive economic and structural problems, some middle class left activist types of the sort that staff many organisations similar to Shout Out, the NGO at the centre of the current furore, have had a ‘nice little earner’.

Although this game and resource might have been taken seriously from its release onwards, I doubt that anyone with an internet connection and an account with some social media networks or those associated with people with such accounts, will ever again take seriously this ‘Pathways’ game produced by Shout Out UK. It’s now permanently tainted by being so heavily memed, mocked and by having its elements appropriated. It is, as the famous sketch once might have said ‘ an ex extremism diversion programme’.

The questions about the Pathways programme and its creation that I’d like to ask begin with what was the commissioning and planning process for this programme? How much knowledge or understanding did those involved in the planning and creation of this programme have about their target audience or of meme culture? Could not the potential mocking of this Pathways game and the appropriating of the Amelia character and changing it to something different be foreseen and planned for? It seems not. Did the planners and creatives involved in this not think for one minute what the political current they treat as opposition would make of it and what they’d do with it? Maybe not. Granted that the creatives and decision makers in charge of Pathway could not have foreseen the democratic distribution of AI tools that have given the new Amelia a life as a political icon, but they could at least have foreseen the memes. After all 2023, when the Pathways game was released, and the prior planning stage was not that far chronologically from the Great Meme Wars of 2016. Someone should have thought ‘how can this be memed’ and done something to make that less possible.

How this error came about might be down to both the Tory government in power when the Pathways game came out and was being created and to Shout Out all living and operating in the same cultural, political and viewpoint bubble and not being in contact with the wider world of Britain and its culture or with differing opinions. It looks to me as if what the then government and Shout Out have created, is something for their own group in the gallery seats and not for those of the rest of us in the stalls, to use a theatre analogy. It’s like mates saying to artist mates: ‘Ooh this looks good, this will be effective’ and the creator not going out and getting views from anyone other than their mates before going massively public. In those situations, which I’ve seen with arty types, it’s only when the artwork gets out into the wider world that it faces the sort of constructive and less than constructive criticism that it might have been better that the artist got in the first place. Why were early versions of the Pathways product not tested more widely than seems to have been done?

I don’t think that those who put this Pathways programme together had a clue. They didn’t seem to have a clue about their audience or how to do persuasion, without being heavy handed and obvious, or how modern imaging technology and software could give their creation and their message a 180 degree turn in meaning. Also many of the examples I’ve seen of the imagery and text and structure of the Pathways game look rather too cringe to me. They are about as cringe as a bowlderised version of the punk magazine Sniffin Glue, which was a thing when I was a teenager, being written by my East Germany loving full-on Stalinist German language teacher. I’d rather have read that teacher’s copies of ‘GDR Review’ magazine, which he had stacks of in his classroom, than read something like that.

A lot of people have messed up here and messed up expensively. The original intent of the Pathways programme is now buried beneath a viral tsunami of memes and AI videos. Shout Out UK and the previous government have failed big time here. They didn’t know their audience, probably failed to think outside of their cultural and political boxes, produced a cringe worthy product and failed to comprehend just what a motivated opponent with some modern but basic tech would do with elements of their creation.

What the previous government and Shout Out have inadvertently helped to create with their spectacular failure is nothing more than a British version of Pepe the Frog. Just like the Pepe character, it has moved from being initially shared by elements of the very online Right to becoming mainstream adjacent at least. What happened during the Great Meme War of 2016 was that the Right memed better and harder than the Left ever could and it got results. The Right’s memes were more cutting, offensive, bold, iconoclastic and often very, very funny. The Left could not match that. Dashing individualism by meme creators back then fed the political Right and particularly boosted Trump supporters and robbed Hilary Clinton of her chance to be President. If a load of edgelords chucking out Pepe, Hilary and Trump memes could play a part in boosting Mr Trump to victory in 2016, what might be the result of a British Pepe in the form of the new Amelia becoming one of a number of similar meme icons? We shall see what we shall see.

For the record I don’t like extremism of any sort, religious, political or otherwise. I don’t like it because extremism often ends badly for all including the extremists themselves, but also because life is nuanced and extremism and extremists are the opposite of nuanced in their approach to the world. There’s ways of tackling extremism that don’t involve chucking tens of thousands of pounds or more to middle class left ‘disinformation’ NGO’s to produce cringey, ineffectual and easily mockable products. The problem is that to really tackle extremism, especially political extremism, you have to work out why people are attracted to it, what motivates people to abandon traditional political paths and ask some very hard questions and get back possibly uncomfortable answers in the process. This is harder work than producing a game or some digital learning experience that looks good to the members of the same social class and political viewpoint cadre as were the creators of Pathways. To truly tackle extremism of all types, takes intelligence, street smarts, knowledge, empathy and more, all qualities that seem to be missing presumed dead in UK government and associated circles.

At least Mr Ratner can go to sleep tonight and know that his is not the worst public relations cock up in British history, since the British government’s Pathways programme debacle might just have knocked him off his top spot.