Corporate Memes & Youth Resistance
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How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?: Corporate Memes & Youth Resistance by Janine Goetzen Advisor / Teddy Pozo Second Reader / James McGrath April 2019 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in the department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University ii Table of Contents // v / Acknowledgements 1 / Introduction: meme culture, corporate disruption 5 / Understanding internet culture: the language of memes 16 / Part 1: Corporate Memes 17 / How do you do, fellow kids?: memes as in-group signifiers & corporate misuse 25 / Wendy’s told me to go fuck myself: folklore and the obscene 33 / Give the intern that tweeted this a raise: authenticity and anthropomorphization 42 / Part 2: Youth Resistance 46 / Silence, brand: weaponized memes 53 / Not for mere mortals: uncommodifiable memes & niche communities 62 / Seize the memes of production: anti-capitalist memes as pedagogical instruments 72 / Conclusion: 2020: the brands are president 76 / Appendix 78 / Notes 86 / Bibliography iii Figures // 1 / Fig. 0.1 - A meme posted to Gucci’s Instagram in 2017. 22 / Fig. 1.1 – The “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme. 23 / Fig. 1.2 – The “dat boi” meme; Jolly Rancher’s remixed version of the meme. 27 / Fig. 1.3 – A screenshot from Tumblr featuring the “It’s free real estate” meme. 28 / Fig. 1.4 – A tweet about the avocado toast meme. 29 / Fig. 1.5 – Marika Lüders’ two-axis conception of personal and mass media. 30 / Fig. 1.6 – A Twitter exchange where a user asks the Wendy’s Twitter to “roast” him. 31 / Fig. 1.7 – A screenshot of Disney’s “dead inside” tweet. 32 / Fig. 1.8 – A Twitter thread expressing bewilderment at the Disney tweet. 34 / Fig. 1.9 – Bagel Bites’ remixed version of the “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme. 37 / Fig. 1.10 – Screenshots of replies to Denny’s Tumblr post. 43 / Fig. 2.1 – Two examples of the Anti-Denny’s/John C. Miller meme. 44 / Fig. 2.2 – An updated version of the Anti-Denny’s/John C. Miller meme. 48 / Fig. 2.3 – Two antagonistic meme replies to Netflix Canada’s tweet. 50 / Fig. 2.4 – Screenshots of Netflix Canada’s Twitter biography one month apart. 55 / Fig. 2.5 – Two examples of posts on the /r/SurrealMemes subreddit. 56 / Fig. 2.6 – Screenshot of a Google Doc from the KnowYourMeme page on “Surreal Memes.” 59 / Fig. 2.7 – A meme posted to the Wine Memes for Wine Moms Facebook group. 60 / Fig. 2.8 – Screenshot of a post from the Wine Memes for Wine Moms Facebook group. 62 / Fig. 2.9 – A web comic by sandserif; Sassy Socialist Memes’ remixed version of it. 64 / Fig. 2.10 – Two memes posted to the Sassy Socialist Memes Facebook page. 66 / Fig. 2.11 – A meme from the KnowYourMeme page on “Seize the means of production.” iv Acknowledgements // First of all, the most love in the world to my beautiful mother, for keeping updated on the Providence weather all the way from San Diego, and for texting me to stay warm every time she heard a storm was coming. I couldn’t be here without the support of my family in every possible way, so thank you. Of course, many many thanks to Teddy Pozo for advising this thesis. This was such an unbelievably huge project for me to take on, and I could not have done it without the guidance and feedback that you’ve provided over the last year. Thanks to Jim McGrath for being my second reader, and for teaching a kickass digital storytelling seminar. Thank you, Hannah Goodwin, for the social media class you taught while you were at Brown— it was my first time engaging with memes in an academic way, and it was the first time that I actually believed that it was something that I could do, too. And shoutout to Alex Daigle, for the “brands are people too” presentation that we did together in that class. It ended up being the precursor for this thesis, and it was really fun, too! So much love to Holden & Harrison Jones for creating the game that introduced me to my first internet friends and my first internet community, way back in 2007. That community was extremely special to me, and had a more profound impact on my life than you could ever know. It would be hard to say exactly, but there’s a very good chance I encountered my first meme on that game. Thanks, Mech & Jolt— and Hammeh, Judd, Cy, Kat, Yami, Kira, Matt, Wuso, Hani, Reno, Berri, Ling, Mametchi, and even Sprout. Hope I’m not forgetting anyone. Love, Jan. Thanks to the bussy bears, mojiganguitos, loves of my lives Alyssa, Alina, Tal, Marguerite, Marianne, and Dayana. Thank you to David, for being the best randomly assigned roommate in the world. Thank you to Leah, Penmai, & Meisha, for being my go-to “wanna gcb?” texts whenever I was feeling overwhelmed with writing and needed a drink. Thanks to everyone who sent me memes they thought would be relevant to my thesis— some of you have already been named, but shoutout to Kelly, Brian, and Juli. Thank you to Owen Colby, for loving me, and for being so busy so often that I was like “damn, maybe I should do some work, too...” And thank you to everyone who slid into my Instagram DM’s when I was posting my thesis countdown with words of support and encouragement— it was so appreciated! I love you all so much <3 v vi Introduction // Meme culture, corporate disruption people talk about meme culture what is culture itself, but a series of memes? —Twitter user @shenanigansen, Nov 20, 20181 In spring 2017, Gucci launched #TFWGucci, a meme-based marketing campaign promoting their new line of luxury watches. Featuring collaborations with already popular Instagram content creators, the end result is what Gucci called “a curated collection of captioned art designed to help viewers express themselves online.”2 Not only did they recognize memes as “art,” they also paid their collaborators like they believed it. Regardless, the response was mixed, with some praising the brand’s initiative and diverse artist pool (“creators that aren’t all white+straight”)3 and others calling it “not funny Nd really not relatable,”4 or “like dads who try to be hip and cool to bond with their kids.”5 Fig. 0.1 / One example of a meme posted to the Gucci Instagram. Some comments include “that doesn’t make any sense” and “the photo doesn’t match the text of the meme.” 6 1 What exactly was so bad about the Gucci memes? One Twitter user’s reading of the situation was that “Everyone's saying it's a great marketing strategy and maybe it would be if they were funny,”7 suggesting that if the memes were done better the reaction would have been more positive. Another user, @kelseysteck, however, tweeted their dismay that “Gucci is appropriating our sacred internet culture by capitalizing off of memes,”8 in this instance implying that regardless of the actual content, the simple fact that a large corporation was “capitalizing” off of part of “internet culture” meant that it would receive a negative reaction. Gucci is only one of the many corporations now taking an earnest interest in memes. Their description of memes as “art” would be almost comical just a few years prior, but it betrays a growing gravity in how memes are being perceived, both in the corporate realm and the world at large. Memes very recently gained widespread attention as a serious topic of study following the 2016 American presidential election. The use of political memes on both the right and the left to inspire outrage and hope was incredibly well-documented, and it seemed as though memes were for the first time beginning to be spoken about as significant cultural artifacts instead of disposable jokes made by teenagers. Echoing Gucci’s “art” sentiment, in an interview with the New York Times, former director of data for Trump’s campaign Matt Braynard said of memes: “I don’t want to call it literature, but it has an art.”9 As the first generation of young people who came of age alongside the internet are entering the workforce and the political realm, the forms of communication that grew up alongside them— internet memes— are suddenly gaining a newfound importance. It’s about time. Memes, with their intimate person-to-person nature, their spread and reach across platforms, their ability to touch hundreds of thousands or even millions of people with a single post, the incredibly low barrier of entry to creating and sharing them, are 2 undeniably powerful. With the sheer mass of available memes and the incredibly archival quality of social networking sites (“the internet is forever,” or so the saying goes), memes can provide unprecedented insight into larger cultural trends. Studying memes provides a broader look than studying individual conversations, but more insight into the everyday, informal communications than other cultural artifacts like books or even blog posts, especially among young people to whom these other forms of cultural creation are often inaccessible. Political, economic, and academic forces are scrambling now to make use of all of this data— and make sense of it. It’s interesting, on a personal level, to witness this confusion when memes are simply something I grew up with. I’ve considered myself a part of this “internet culture” for over a decade now, and can still recall a time when I thought that memes were a weird and dorky thing to enjoy.