Brake the meme machine: Slow circulation, ‘Z' gesture, and pro-war propaganda on TikTok

In one of the videos posted in response to a trending TikTok dance challenge, a young woman performs a series of gestures. The performance is accompanied by a catchy tune, culminating as her hands shape the letter Z. In a similar video, another woman wearing sunglasses replicates the gesture when a sticker in Russian emerges, reading ‘The gang sign of real women’.
In yet another variation, the gesture repeats with an added video effect, flash-enlarging the final position of fingers decorated with long acrylic nails. The nails extend the gesture. The video caption proclaims, ‘Russian Lives Matter’. Z, however, is not a typical viral TikTok challenge. A trusted identity marker for Putin's supporters that lingers on the pro-war side of TikTok, it reverberates itself into being by pretending that it has an audience of its own. Its normcore look, aiming to blend into the crowd of aspiring influencers, conveys the message that Z stands for the many. Film yourself Z-ing, add a song from the music library, put a sticker, and post. Not ‘Russian’ enough? Search for Katyusha, select a trending version, use #viral hashtags, and publish. The collective body of Z is a broken meme machine — too scripted to feel authentic, it feeds forward attention that clusters on already visible content. By incorporating popular elements (songs, hashtags, effects) in anticipation of new adaptations, Z templates serve as a means of targeted bonding. The logic is simple: trial, error, remix.
In this piece, we ‘brake’ the meme machine behind the ‘Z’ gesture. Following Boler and Davis’s notion of propaganda ‘by other means’, we make a case for examining Z in its role as a symbolic and affective vehicle. We propose that, within TikTok's participatory environments, Z simulates a community that thrives on the replication of the seemingly banal. Unlike the painted sign on the military vehicles invading Ukraine, it primarily exists to distract from the plain terror of the Russian ‘special military operation’