Six years ago, the phrase “meme culture” recalled online characters like the troll face and a cartoon frog with the caption “feels bad man.” These characters were the faces of a newly emergent digital folklore. Their fans used them to create and share comics, and printed their faces on t-shirts to prove their technological prowess.

There have been a number of developments since. The “feels bad man” frog turned out to be named Pepe and, in 2015, his face was tweeted by the future President of the United States. Following that tweet, it took less than a year for the Southern Poverty Law Center to classify Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol, used as a mascot by white supremacists. Hillary Clinton’s campaign, meanwhile, published a solemn explainer. “That cartoon frog,” it read, “is more sinister than you might realize.” Matt Furie, the artist who had created Pepe as a lovable stoner in the 2000’s, was forced to act. By the time Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, Pepe was canonically dead, buried by his friends in a final one-page comic.

In more than one way, Pepe’s vertiginous rise and fall is emblematic of what has happened to public perception of the internet in the last decade. The internet, once celebrated as a cultural leveller despite corners which were filled with trolls and crime, now attracts everything from liberal moral panic about the corrosion of democracy to right-wing triumphalism about the insurgent power of memes. “We did it,” said one Republican voter on the day before Trump’s inauguration. “We memed him into the presidency.”

An Xiao Mina’s Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power is an attempt to sketch a kind of political economy of the internet. Focusing on memes, it turns out, is a particularly lucid way of doing that. In ways both good and bad, however, the book feels a few years removed from the present.