This research examines the role of digital memes in organizing political campaigns, focusing on the 2024 US presidential election, where Kamala Harris's candidacy gathered momentum through meme-driven engagement. This research examines the role of digital memes in organizing political campaigns, focusing on the 2024 US presidential election, where Kamala Harris's candidacy gathered momentum through meme-driven engagement. Employing a novel methodological approach called digital media phenomenology that incorporates generative AI tools in qualitatively analyzing large volumes of online media sources, the research examines how individuals, collectives, and organizations perceive and derive meaning from their experiences with memes. By unfolding the ambivalent ontology of memes as gene metaphors that are intentionally altered, as well as genuine cultural replicators that spread from person to person like an infection through algorithmic decision-making, the research conceives the organizing of a political campaign as a memetic contagion where meaning-making emerges as a dynamic process that is provisional and temporally situated. As a window into prevailing moods and emotions, memetic contagions exhibit a complex, shape-shifting energy that resists capture and conformity by political operators. The research contributes theoretically to memetics research in organization studies by proposing an ambivalent ontology of digital memes, methodologically by devising digital media phenomenology, and empirically by developing the concept of political campaigns as memetic contagions, offering a framework for analyzing memes in socio-political and organizational contexts.
