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
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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
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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. I even remember filling out an “about me” sheet when entering middle school and being embarrassed to list “going online” as a hobby, thinking it was a supremely nerdy thing to do. Though I may have missed the time when the internet was the sole domain of freaks and weirdos, I was around to witness the shift of “going online” from nerdy hobby to ubiquitous part of daily life. Because of this, I’ve always been a little fascinated with everything internet— five years ago, I even wrote on my personal Tumblr about how I wanted to write a thesis on memes.
17-year-old me had no clue that undergrad theses existed yet.
At that point, I was interested mostly in the linguistic and semiotic aspects of memes (though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate that at the time). But in the years that have passed since then, I— along with countless other people around my age on social media sites— have been
3 taking note of the exponential trend towards corporate meme creation and distribution. Over the last few years, my interest has slowly shifted towards this topic.
It used to be a running joke among my high school friends that my only marketable skill was making memes, and that one day I would end up working for Buzzfeed or some social media platform. That joke, which may have been funny five years ago, is already a banal reality for many— and an ever-growing possibility for myself. There’s a tension that exists, I think, among people my age who grew up just as memes were establishing themselves as a form of communication: a tension between the in-jokes so integral to my formative years that I feel like they’re old childhood friends and the scary looming world of Jobs and Corporate Careers that lies ahead of me. As a young person myself about to enter the workforce, I’ve been grappling with the questions of what it would actually mean to produce memes for a corporation. Perhaps this thesis is my attempt at making sense of this tension.
What I am interested in is, as the title suggests, both the actual memes created by corporations and the ways that young people like myself are reacting to those memes. What does corporate presence on social media platforms mean for the youth who use those platforms as sites of entertainment and leisure? Furthermore, for young people who use memes as forms of self-expression and community building, how does corporate use of those memes disrupt those practices? Do corporate memes change anything about how young people make and use memes, and ultimately, how they perform identity and create community online?
In this thesis, I argue that youth responses to corporate memes not only reflect the changing relationship between young people and capitalism, but also serve as agents of that change. Young people are aware and vocal about how the corporate use of social media and memes has been skyrocketing in the past few years, and have been increasingly critical of this
4 usage. This project also explores the ways in which young people alter their practices on social media sites in order to actively resist corporate co-optation. This resistance often takes the shape of memes themselves, particularly when young people use memes in a hostile, exclusive, or pedagogical way in order to make their communities inaccessible to corporations. How are these forms of resistance changing the ways young people’s digital communities operate, altering the strategies that youth use to represent themselves online, and even shaping the kind of content that youth are creating and sharing? When memes are explicitly communist, for example, does this evidence a rising anti-capitalist youth movement? What does this ultimately say about how young people understand their place— and the place of their communities— in a rapidly shifting corporate landscape?
This thesis assumes a basic understanding of what memes are, but it will be helpful to first define what exactly I mean by “internet culture” and “meme culture.” In this next section, I situate these concepts within a broader academic and cultural context.
Understanding “internet culture”: the language of memes
The example that begins this chapter (Fig. 0.1) shows how Gucci’s use of memes transgressed the norms of an imagined “internet culture.” With the internet now being accessed by some billions of users across the globe, it is debatable whether the internet has a single, cohesive culture. Yet young people in this study are speaking about— and so imagining— “internet culture” through a particular set of conventions. For example, @kelseysteck’s tweet displays an imagination of internet culture that is antithetical to corporations, or at least to Gucci in particular. That memes can be “appropriated” speaks to the belief of memes as possessed by
5 those involved in “internet culture.” In fact, I would argue that memes are spoken about as the very language of internet culture.
Richard Dawkins coined the term meme in his book The Selfish Gene, published in 1976.
The word originally referred to any “unit of cultural transmission”— an idea, belief, or behavior, for example— that travelled from person to person.10 Dawkins likened memes to genetics in the way that they would replicate themselves in people’s minds, often mutating and changing ever- so-slightly along the way. Today the word has become synonymous with internet memes, which will be the focus of this thesis, but in Dawkins’ terms, memes are any idea that spreads through person-to-person interaction. Dawkins’ example of nursery rhymes as memes operates similarly to the spread and mutation of internet memes. Take the example of the playground song “Jingle
Bells, Batman Smells”— it follows a certain template, but it seems as though everyone has heard five different versions of the song. One blog post, calling on people to share the version of the
Jingle Bells parody they heard growing up, had 491 comments at the time of writing!11
Another less-often quoted definition of memes, given by Dawkins in his later book The
Extended Phenotype, is “a unit of information residing in the brain” that manifests and replicates itself “in the form of words, music [or] visual images.”12 Using this broad metric, language itself can be considered a meme— and memes can be understood as language. Memes function as language through certain structures and patterns, different lexicons of meme slang and jargon, often even different morphologies and grammar. The “leetspeak,” or “1337,” of the late 90’s to early 2000s hacker and gamer communities, for example, can be understood as a rather straightforward meme featuring replacing letters with creative substitutions, i.e, “h3110” for
“hello.” But far from just being a fun-yet-pointless teenage pastime, using leetspeak served to create an exclusive community among speakers. One participant in Blashki and Nichol’s 2005
6 study ruminated that the purpose of leetspeak was “to create a barrier between those who were in the know and those who weren’t (n00bs vs 1337’s?)” [newbies vs elites].13 While this is an overtly linguistic example, the “subcultural knowledge and technical competence” that is required to create and understand memes today perform the same function of marking who is in and who is out, Whitney Phillips writes in This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.14
The function of internet memes as a linguistic in-group/out-group signifier is key to their function in “internet culture,” as shared language is an especially potent way of creating and imagining community. Benedict Anderson, in his 1983 book Imagined Communities, asserts that the emergence of print-capitalism was one of the key factors in creating a national imaginary.15
The new ability to print on a mass scale meant that literature could now be feasibly printed in vernacular languages as opposed to the more formal Latin, which allowed for “unified fields of exchange and communication” among speakers of the same language that was not possible on a mass scale before.16 This ultimately led to readers becoming aware of their “fellow-readers,” the other thousands or millions of people who were also reading what they were reading, and despite never meeting in person, readers could build a sense of affinity and community simply through the shared language.17
Internet culture and meme culture are, of course, more nebulous concepts of community than that of a nation, lacking centralized governments and strict boundaries, but they nevertheless construct an imaginary of the internet as a global community. As Ryan M. Milner writes, memes can now be understood as a “lingua franca” for participating in online culture.18 In this case, memes take the place of vernacular language; they are less formal than the dominant forms of communication, and their use and spread alert their makers and sharers to a community of other people who share similar ideas, affinities, and identities to them. The internet facilitates
7 this imaginary on an unprecedented scale. Social media alerts people in the community to the presence of others immediately and visibly with the ability to see a numerical representation of how many likes, retweets, shares, reblogs, upvotes, or other markers of interaction on a social media post making this creation of community much more instantaneous than the gradual awareness created over hundreds of years to build nations.
Additionally, “internet culture” is not only imagined as a cohesive cultural community, but also as a subculture, particularly a youth subculture. Dick Hebdige’s 1979 analysis of British youth subculture generally defined something as a subculture if it subverted or challenged mainstream culture, often resisting dominant ideology surrounding race, class, gender, or other social norms.19 This basic concept of subculture as generational resistance manifests in the Gucci example above, where “internet culture” is presented antithetical to older generation (“dads who try to be hip”) as well as large corporations. Another way of situating memes within “internet culture,” then, would be as a form of what Sarah Thornton calls subcultural capital.20 Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital as one’s knowledge or educational background that create social mobility in the same way that economic capital would,21 Thornton defines subcultural capital as a kind of cultural capital that raises a person’s social status within a subgroup, as well as differentiating them from people in other subgroups.22 If internet culture is a subculture, memes are its cultural currency.
Indeed, twenty years after Thornton coined the term subcultural capital, similar ideas are now being applied to memes. Nissenbaum and Shifman’s “Internet memes as contested cultural capital,” published in 2015, explores how the use of memes on 4chan’s /b/ board acts simultaneously as a way to maintain the boundaries of 4chan’s specific subculture and to assert a collective identity within it.23 Also writing on /b/ in 2015, Phillips documents the historical shift
8 of memes from an incredibly inaccessible vernacular to one that corporations— and novices— could participate in with the advent of KnowYourMeme.com (KYM), a site that houses
“detailed, almost clinical explanations” of popular memes.24 KYM made once-subcultural knowledge easily accessible, making the boundary work done on 4chan with memes less functional. This project explores how subcultural boundary work across the internet has had to constantly re-adjust in order to keep up with the corporate encroachment facilitated by sites like
KYM, with members of these subcultures entering the workforce, or simply with the growing pervasiveness of internet use in daily life.
Shifts in technology and social networks force us to move into new understandings of community and culture, to be always reimagining our imagined communities and their relationships to the broader public. The internet as a whole was once imagined as a democratizing “public sphere,” drawing from Habermas’ incredibly influential conception of the public sphere as a community in which debate and the exchange of information could flow freely among all members.25 This definition of the public sphere has been challenged and reimagined several times over. In 1992, feminist scholar Nancy Fraser theorized counter-publics as alternative publics based on exclusion from the public sphere, organized around gender, race, socioeconomic status, and so forth.26 More recently, danah boyd reimagines the public sphere as it exists on social networking sites as a “networked public,” which she defines as “the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice.”27 With this must come the imagination of internet counterpublics, through which marginalized groups come together as collectives online. Perhaps most importantly, boyd writes about the ways in which social networking sites “configure the environment in a way that shapes participants’
9 engagement.”28 This echoes Thornton’s assertions that media does not simply reflect social groups, but also shapes them, becoming “central to the process of subcultural formation.”29
Studying youth community building online requires new understandings of community and subculture. It is necessary to understand how these communities are shaped by the conditions of the internet and social media that exist today— and this is especially true for the emerging generation that is growing up never having known a time before the internet was widely accessible. Studying internet memes is thus a way to study these communities using their lingua franca. Memes not only provide new insight into youth subcultural communities (as the internet makes it much easier to access and archive communications that would otherwise be obscured), they are also perhaps the only way that these communities can be understood. Thus, while there are many studies that predate the study of memes that we can use as theoretical and conceptual foundations, the study of memes and social networks is still new and must be reimagined.
This thesis uses a discourse analysis approach to study memes and internet culture as they are understood by the very people making and sharing them. My argument uses posts by young people and brands in relation to one another as the main sources of evidence. I draw primarily from four sites: Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. Throughout my research, I have found that most of the interaction between young people and brands occur on the microblogging sites
Tumblr and Twitter. These sites facilitate an interaction that is both more informal than traditional media, and also more visible, as most profiles on the site are public. Much of the discourse that occurs on Reddit and Facebook, on the other hand, are young people talking amongst themselves within communities with distinct boundaries— Reddit has subreddits for each individual interest, and most meme posting on Facebook that I looked at occurred on often-
10 private “pages” or within groups dedicated to a topic. As such, citations of Facebook memes from private groups may rely on screenshots, rather than links to publicly-available content.
I chose my key examples using multiple frames of reference. In some cases, I chose memes with a high number of likes or shares on the post: the simple visibility of interaction on such posts allows for a measurement of its spread through popular discourse. However, I avoided using that metric for the entirety of the analysis, as there are many reasons why a post would not receive thousands of engagements. I argue that less-liked and shared posts are just as important and valuable for analysis, particularly in a discussion of anti-corporate memes. Of course, the examples of corporate memes that I choose have all received a lot of engagement. In these cases
I analyze not only the original meme, but the set of interactions associated with the original post.
When selecting memes that resist corporations or are less able to be appropriated, I aimed for a mixture of more and less shared memes, so as to adequately capture a variety of opinions.
Throughout this analysis I interpret discussions of the subject of “internet culture” as referring very broadly to a young person who is most likely English-speaking, Western, technologically competent, and a frequent user of social networking sites. This conception comes partially from the limitation of this study to English-speaking social media sites, and to primarily
American corporations who imagine their target audience as English-speaking Americans. The last speaks for itself: to be a part of “internet culture” assumes some level of technological knowledge, and for the member to actually participate in the public discourses that occur on social networking sites. Outside of this set of assumptions, however, I do not believe that the use of “internet culture” or “meme culture” implies anything about its members’ race, class, gender, ability, or political leaning— at its core, one simply needs to be on the internet and creating or consuming memes.
11 This inclusive conception of internet culture also speaks to an optimistic imaginary of the internet and of memes themselves. Early fantasies of the internet imagined it as a space for freedom & equality— when “nobody knows you’re a dog” on the internet, as the famous 1993
New Yorker comic claimed, you can be liberated from the constraints of race, gender, age, class, or ability present in the “real world.” But as concerns about privacy and anonymity online only grow, it has become clear that this is ultimately not true of the internet. Memes occupy a similarly idealistic position in the popular imaginary, exemplified in a tweet (currently sitting at over 9,000 likes and retweets) by user @existentialcoms:
Memes are communist because they are entirely public, and the creator of the meme, if they are known at all, has no more say in how it is used than anyone else. No one can own a meme, comrades.30
As Anderson posited, it was print-capitalism that made the spread of vernacular language possible; if we understand memes to occupy the same position, it follows that the capitalism that built the internet is also what makes the spread of memes possible. Tiziana Terranova’s Free
Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy expands upon this idea, pointing out that the structure of most websites today requires users to continuously produce content: they “keep a site alive through their labor, the cumulative hours of accessing the site (thus generating advertising), writing messages, participating in conversations...”31 The claim that memes are inherently communist is thus diminished by the simple fact that posting memes online necessarily furthers the capitalist digital economy.
I do not intend to discount these ideas entirely, however, as arguments about a lack of authorship, collective ownership, and public accessibility that existentialcoms’ tweet raises are still true of memes. Though memes are certainly bound by the constraints of a capitalist infrastructure, imagining them as equalizing and even anti-capitalist forces affects the way that young people engage with them— and this imaginary is one of the key factors in why corporate
12 profit from memes is taken as such an affront. Throughout this thesis I will be discussing the idea of memes as a “grassroots,” bottom-up form of communication that opposes mass media forms such as broadcast television or published writing, that are typically unavailable to young people.
That the popular conception of memes already fits into an anti-capitalist imaginary uniquely situates them to act as sites of anti-corporate and anti-capitalist resistance.
The working definition of a “meme” that I will use is not the more formal definition provided by Dawkins, but rather the word as it is used colloquially. I will still be understanding it broadly as a piece of culture that is transmitted from person to person, but I will also acknowledge the multiple implicit connotations and contextual imaginations that come with the word. I will be using “meme” in reference to internet memes, generally consisting of images or pieces of text that manifest as endless variations on a certain template, most often humorous or relatable. Nissenbaum and Shifman distinguish between a meme template versus a meme instance, with the former referring to the entire group of images or text related by some sort of shared format, and the latter referring to a single occurrence of it.32 This distinction is rarely, if ever, made in popular discourse, with both simply being referred to as a “meme.” I adopt this simpler language, as in most cases here the context is enough to distinguish meme templates from meme instances.
Part one of this thesis continues to discuss what constitutes a meme, building from the basic technical and cultural framework outlined here. In addition to expanding upon the definition of a meme, part one also explores the ways that memes are understood to fit into broader concepts of “internet culture” and “youth culture,” and then delves into how corporate usage of memes is understood to disrupt these cultures. I think specifically about how young people imagine an internet subculture that is antithetical to both the “mainstream” and to mass
13 culture produced by corporations, and the ways that memes act as in-group signifiers that communicate that the meme maker is an “authentic” part of this internet subculture. I then discuss how corporations utilize tactics of authenticity to establish themselves as part of the in- group, complicating the methods that young people are using to express their own authentic identities online.
Part two focuses on the meme tactics that youth use to push back on what is perceived as an increasing corporate invasion. I put forward three different examples of these anti-corporate meme tactics. The first is the posting of hostile memes in direct reply to a corporation. This tactic allows young people to publicly spread counter-narratives that oppose corporate ones. The second tactic is the creation of memetic sub-communities that circulate memes that are either too obscene or too inaccessible for corporations to be able to commodify. Finally, I discuss the emergence of explicitly anti-capitalist and even communist memes that act not only as uncommodifiable content, but also as pedagogical tools that communicate information and ideas that are critical of corporations and capitalism as a whole.
Ultimately, this project explores how youth resistance to corporate appropriation of memes reveals the tension between young people and corporations, but also the tension between memes as a form of expression and capitalism itself. Memes rely on capitalist platforms to circulate, but are nonetheless imagined to be antithetical to capitalist co-optation. Memes can be used to build participatory communities, but also to antagonistically limit participation and enforce the boundaries of those communities. Memes are widely documented and archived but are so often changing that they still elude understanding. In writing this thesis, I attempt to make sense of these tensions by studying how young people use memes, as well as how they understand this use of memes to be anti-corporate or anti-capitalist. I show how corporate use of
14 memes requires youth to always be negotiating these tensions. By forcing young people to constantly alter the memetic practices they use to craft their identities and build their communities, corporations actually help to make these practices clearer. Young people are learning to be more aware of these practices, so as to keep out of reach of corporate appropriation. By studying how young people imagine, create, and share memes, we can begin to understand how memes reveal the tension between youth and corporations—but also, how they shape it.
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Part 1 // Corporate Memes
we’re not just a diner, we’re also your buddy. —@DennysDiner, Feb 15, 2019 33
Backlash to brand memes on social media is steadily increasing in visibility and vitriol. Though the internet is undoubtedly altering the way corporations engage with their audiences, and how those audiences engage back, the core sentiment expressed in this backlash is hardly new. As in
Stuart Hall’s classic Encoding/Decoding framework, audiences are never passive consumers of a text; they are always interpreting and making new meaning from any media they consume.34
Hall, however, was writing about broadcast media, in which public engagement from the audience was limited. Advertisements on social media, however, afford immediate and visible audience engagement. Through social media, it becomes easier to see the ways that audiences are reading corporate content from negotiated or oppositional positions, which Hall defines as alternatives to the dominant-hegemonic position, the position that aligns the corporation’s intended message.35
One Twitter user, for example, (whose screen name is aptly set to “nuanced opinion guy,”) said the following after an incident where Delta Airlines tweeted a sassy reply to conservative commentator Ann Coulter when she complained about a seat mix-up:
Me: brands are not your friends, this is just an extension of the toxicity of capitalism Also me: YAAASSSS DELTA DRAG HER 36
Negotiated positions accept some elements of the dominant narrative while still rejecting others— Hall calls them “shot through with contradictions,” much like this tweet displays. These
16 kinds of alternative readings exemplify the complicated relationship that young people have to corporate presence online: though often well aware that they are being advertised to, they still continue to use social media as a space for entertainment and leisure, and despite moral or ethical reservations, corporations can still provide that.
I have already talked about how “meme culture” is conceptualized, and touched a little bit on why corporate use of memes is perceived as disrupting that culture. This chapter will look at some of these corporate memes themselves, as well as at the negotiated and oppositional readings that young people are expressing in reply to those memes. Through this, we can begin to understand the ways that corporate use of social media alters how young people represent their identities and build communities on those very platforms.
How do you do, fellow kids?: Memes as in-group signifiers & corporate misuse
To begin to think about how young people imagine the relationship between corporations and themselves, we first need to understand how young people imagine themselves. One consistent thread among youth who engage with corporations online is the imagination of a “meme culture” or “internet culture” separate from the mainstream. Whether this is true or not is debatable. As discussed in the introduction, the boundaries of what constitutes a “subculture” have been debated by thinkers from Hebdige to Thornton. When attempting to conceptualize subculture online, this becomes even harder. Although different websites such as 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter
(and subsections of those sites, for example, the meme subreddit /r/me_irl or “Black Twitter”) do exist with clear delineations around platform and identity, users of these sites number in the millions, and many users are a part of more than one of these communities.
17 Can these really be said to be “subcultures” separate from the mainstream? Milner’s The
World Made Meme writes that mass media allows for a sense of “communal identification” without the “interdependence of a traditional community,” and that online communities do not necessarily fit with traditional definitions of subculture.37 Despite this, he makes a case for understanding online communities as participating in subculture, noting that the “social imaginary” of many communities online are still in line with subcultural thought in that they
“discursively cast themselves as antithetical to, apart from, or in opposition to a nebulous discursive mainstream.”38 In other words, online communities may not actually be subcultures per se, but believing themselves to be means that they conduct their communities in much the same way, doing the boundary work of keeping the memes created in their “subculture” separate from the “mainstream.”
It is perhaps more fruitful to simply conceptualize “meme culture” as not a single subculture but the imaginary of a cross-platform community based around the producing, sharing, remixing, and consumption of memes, which constitutes a type of participatory culture.
The term “participatory culture” originated in Jenkins’ 1992 book Textual Poachers, and was used to refer to the fan sub-communities that emerged around content creation: fanfiction writers, fan video editors, and fan music groups, for example.39 Though perhaps still tied to these subcultural roots, Jenkins himself notes over 20 years later in Participatory Culture in A
Networked Era that so-called “ordinary” or “mainstream” practices such as taking selfies or participating in forums can be considered participatory culture as well, as long as they “involve meaningful connection to some larger community.”40 Because of the way that social networks are now structured, actions that would not have been participatory in nature now have the opportunity to become so.
18 Subculture still offers an important lens by which to view participatory culture. But in an increasingly networked world, subcultural participation can often intersect with mainstream cultural participation. As Marwick & boyd note in their work on Twitter users, many social networking sites do not offer their users the option to speak only to one subset of people, instead
“flattening” all of the audiences that a user may be speaking to (friends, family, coworkers, etc.) into one.41 The resulting “context collapse” requires users navigate identity on these massive social working sites in ways differently than face-to-face, or on a forum or website devoted to a specific subculture. It also means that content created and circulated on sites such as Twitter or
Tumblr, even when intended for participation in one community, can also unintentionally connect to others in the “mainstream.”
Corporate engagement adds yet another factor. Are corporations the “mainstream,” or are they something altogether separate? As Jenkins noted as early as 2006, we have entered a stage of participatory culture that he defines as convergence culture: a culture “where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect.”42 Imagining “meme culture” as a grassroots culture (in which cultural content is created and spread from the bottom up) that opposes both “mainstream” and “corporate” media (where cultural content is spread from the top down), then, is not necessarily untrue. Thus it is still important to acknowledge that young people are conceiving of their cultural engagement as outside the mainstream— regardless of whether or not millions of people are also engaging in the same culture.
The spread of memes in this newly interconnected digital space can be seen as one example of the new kind of cultural engagement that Jenkins outlines in Convergence Culture, as they are often subcultural pieces of content unintentionally pushed mainstream. Tumblr blog memedocumentation, for example, in its definition of memes, states that memes
19 “...are popular but not too mainstream. Memes must have enough wide circulation that people are able to recognize it as a meme. However, if it is too mainstream, the meme loses its power, causing it to be “dead.”... When memes become too mainstream, they lose the implicit message of having the Internet culture knowhow, making them lose their power. In addition, a meme can simply become stale from being shared so much.”43
The distinction between “popular” and “mainstream” here suggests that popularity within a subgroup is acceptable (after all, there must be “wide circulation” for it to be a meme at all) but once that popularity overflows from the original subgroup, it becomes “mainstream.” The concept of meme “death” here is also useful for understanding how memes can act as a signifier that the user of the meme is a part of a certain subculture. According to this definition, memes are only “alive” when they still have the ability to differentiate someone with “Internet culture knowhow” from someone who is more “mainstream”; the meme “dies” when those who once used the meme lose the desire to continue circulating it. Milner notes that this is one example of boundary work— declaring a meme “dead” communicates that it no longer holds the same value within the subculture as it once did.44
Corporate engagement in— or appropriation of— “meme culture,” then, regardless of if corporations constitute “the mainstream,” still means that the meme has received too much attention to convey the same in-group status, or internet knowhow, that it once would have.
Either corporations bring so much attention to the meme that it is exposed to people outside its original subculture, or they only become aware of a meme once it has already become mainstream. YouTube channel Casually Explained describes “the life cycle of a meme” in a video [transcribed]:
“...the meme is born on 4chan, filtered and popularized on Reddit, spread to your average person on Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter, meme is dead. Jimmy Fallon uses it in a segment, your parents and large corporations use it incorrectly on Facebook, and 4chan makes fun of those people with a new meme, and the cycle continues.”45
20 Of course, this is only one of many models for where memes come from, and certainly represents a bias on the part of the author— an avid Twitter user may imagine most memes come from
Twitter, for example. But disregarding the contested ideas of where memes are “born,” this model is useful in that it displays a common conception that corporations only begin using a meme when it has already passed a certain threshold of popularity among “your average person.”
This model— in addition to the tweet comparing the Gucci campaign to dads trying to bond with their kids— suggests as similarity in the way these groups are viewed: out-of-touch adults trying and failing to understand and engage with youth subculture, often inadvertently revealing their cultural illiteracy through their misuse of memes. This viewpoint is exemplified in the “fellow kids” meme (Fig. 1.1), a reaction image taken from a scene from the TV show 30
Rock. In the scene, the character Lenny Wosniak (played by a then-55-year-old Steve Buscemi) describes his role in a “task force of very young-looking cops who infiltrated high schools.” The screenshot depicts Buscemi, wearing a backwards baseball cap and holding a skateboard but still clearly not a teenager, approaches a group of students, saying “how do you do, fellow kids?”
21
Fig. 1.1 / The above image is used in reply to someone attempting to “infiltrate” a group of people they are not a part of – and failing spectacularly.46
The meme— which also provides the title of this thesis— has been incredibly resonant, spawning a subreddit titled /r/FellowKids that boasts over 450,000 subscribers at the time of writing. The subreddit describes itself as a space for “Ads/media where 'the man' tries to appeal to young people using their vernacular in a lame, pandering way.”47 It’s a place to post memes that feel as stilted as hearing “how do you do” in a high school. As one redditor put it, “90% of the time someone is trying to do an internet it comes off as awkward and utterly wrong... Most of the time it feels like every meme needs to be run by a boardroom on a 11 o clock meeting.”48
Corporate misuse of memes may stem from simple blatant ignorance, as the “fellow kids” meme implies. It also may result from an attempt to wrangle a meme to fit its corporate branding. Much of the backlash against Gucci’s campaign stemmed from it seeming “forced” and “contrived,” as Gucci was “trying too hard,” to make memes in line with its luxury identity
(See Appendix A). Jolly Ranchers’ use of the “dat boi” meme below is another example (Fig.
1.2). The tweet was received so poorly it landed the #6 spot on a list titled “9 tweets that killed
22 the internet’s favorite memes.”49 The original meme features a photo of a green frog on a unicycle with the words “o shit waddup,” while Jolly Ranchers’ version, presumably in an attempt to remain child-friendly, featured a green apple on a unicycle with the words “o hai waddup,” captioned quite accurately “sucks when brands take your meme.”50
Fig. 1.2 /Left: the original meme.51 Right: Jolly Ranchers’ version.
I chose this example particularly because of the caption. Perhaps it was an attempt at ironic self- awareness, but it inadvertently hints at another reason why corporate meme usage is received so poorly: the sentiment that brands using a meme is “taking” the meme often strikes a chord.
Consider, for example, one of the tweets used to introduce this thesis about Gucci “appropriating our sacred internet culture by capitalizing off of memes.”52 This reference to capital as desecrating “sacred” memes succinctly articulates a common sentiment among young people around labor and content creation that is well in line with the academic discourse around the subject. As Tiziana Terranova writes in Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy, the internet cannot function without the unpaid— but willingly done— labor and content produced by its users. But she writes that this free labor is not necessarily about “the bad boys of capital moving in on underground subcultures/subordinate cultures.” Instead, it is more about
“channeling collective labor (even as cultural labor) into monetary flows and its structuration
23 within capitalist business practices.”53 In other words, rather than businesses stealing from
“authentic” subcultures, users within these subcultures are led to voluntarily contribute their labor to such businesses.
This may be why #TFWGucci received such backlash despite the fact that Gucci actually did pay its content creators— Gucci “appropriating” memes and Gucci paying the meme artists are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The controversy lies not in appropriating individual memes but in appropriating “internet culture”— that is, using the norms built around the creation and sharing of memes and structuring them within the “capitalist business practices” that
Terranova speaks of. This is especially true about the “collective labor” that goes into meme culture: paying one meme creator still does not account for the hundreds to thousands of users liking, sharing, and remixing them. Recalling the tweet from the introduction about the popular imagination that “no one can own a meme,” Gucci’s actions thus seem to go against the very nature of a collectively-owned form of communication. Commissioning a meme from an artist only attributes authorship to that individual artist, and because Gucci has paid the artist, allows them to claim ownership over that meme instance.
Additionally, this unpaid labor that users engage in when sharing memes is done for different purposes by users and by corporations. Terranova specifically notes that, for individual users, the labor of content generation is “willingly conceded in exchange for the pleasures of communication.”54 In other words, people do it for fun. When corporations— whose underlying motive is turning a profit— post memes, it can feel inauthentic, as if the corporation is engaging in meme-making without the same investment in the community that individual users have.
Finally, the relatively low cost of meme-making can make corporate use of them seem unfair, given the resources available to corporations in their advertising budgets. The low barrier
24 of entry to creating and sharing memes means that they are often the only form of media production readily accessible to young people. Gucci’s status as a corporation— and especially as a luxury brand— makes it particularly upsetting that they choose to use “grassroots” memes as their advertising method. In a chain of tweets calling #TFWGucci “the worst example of
‘marketing as meme’ by any brand ever,” one Twitter user says [tweets consolidated]:
Brands don't understand that people make memes because they have no resources. I am poor I am sad I am high I am online I have nothing. When a brand has all of the resources and energy and network to create things on the level that a luxury brand like Gucci can And instead of making something amazing or exciting they make a not even funny awkward "hello fellow children" style meme...55
Corporate engagement in meme culture may not be “appropriating” it in a strict sense, but it certainly may feel like it. In using a meme, the corporation diminishes both the cultural value of the meme and the unpaid labor of popularizing the meme. Corporate use of a meme causes it to lose its ability to convey in-group status as it may once have done; additionally, those who contributed to the spread and creation of the meme can feel that the labor they did for their community has been unfairly “taken” for corporate benefit. When corporate memes misuse the format that the community had collectively crafted, it’s even more of a slap in the face.
Wendy’s told me to go fuck myself: folklore and the obscene
In developing a framework for understanding the importance of memes to digital culture, many scholars have looked to the field of folklore studies. Folk culture, as Jenkins notes, is also a kind of participatory culture, existing in opposition to “elite culture.”56 Understanding “meme culture” as participatory culture thus allows us to understand memes as a kind of folklore. Indeed, the often crude content, dynamic and variational spread, and social reflection that memes have in common with traditional folklore has led to digital media scholar Limor Shifman to refer to them as “(post)modern folklore.”57 Though folklore is often associated with folk tales such as those
25 collected by Aesop or the Brothers Grimm, folklore is defined by Toelken in his influential text
The Dynamics of Folklore as any element of cultural expression passed from person to person: it is “local, communal, and informal.”58 As the title implies, Toelken emphasizes the dynamism of folkloric expression—one unifying factor of folklore, he claims, is that it exists in a state of
“...constant change, variation within a tradition.”59 Positioning memes within this context, then, is a natural fit. Memes, like folklore, require an interplay of tradition (Toelken’s conservatism) and evolution (dynamism), mapping onto the static meme “templates” and the endless variations within those templates that comprise memes’ remix culture.
In their book The Ambivalent Internet, Phillips and Milner further make a case for the study of memes as folklore. In addition to abiding by the laws of conservatism and dynamism, memes also share the need to be situated within a specific cultural context to be understood— for
Phillips and Milner, this means that memes are informed by contemporary cultural anxieties and social issues, and cannot be studied without this understanding.60 Importantly, this point of view— that “meme culture” is a sort of informal and communal cultural expression— is shared by academics and non-academics alike. Consider this Tumblr post (boasting over 86,000 likes and shares at the time of writing):
“the key feature of the corporate variant [of memes] is that it tends to rapidly accelerate the meme lifecycle towards phase five [“exhausted”] because commodification of memes directly conflicts with their organic communal development.”61
This user’s take on the “communal development” of memes uses the exact language that Toelken uses to describe folklore: “communal.” Consider as well the “put this in the MoMA” meme— captioning silly or strange images with the ironic suggestion that they be placed in the Museum of Modern Art, made funny through the juxtaposition of such “lowbrow” images with a place associated with formality and “high culture.” (See Appendix B). This isn’t to say that memes should not be valued the same way that traditional art is, rather, that when memes are recognized
26 as art, they are understood to be separate from the elitism of more formal artistic institutions.62
The importance of situating memes in their cultural context is understood well, too, as seen in this Tumblr post by cryptmutt:
Fig. 1.3 63
The image of a man’s face is a cropped screenshot from a comedy sketch parodying infomercials. In the uncropped version, the words “It’s Free Real Estate” appear underneath him: the meme suggests that cats enjoy making their homes in the “free real estate” of discarded boxes. But without this context, the meme is hard to understand. Even knowing the superficial context of this meme may not be enough to fully grasp it— for example, what exactly is so funny about the “It’s Free Real Estate” slogan? As Phillips and Milner put it, like much of folk culture, memes often “[reveal] anxieties about major social issues, for example, concerns about the economy.”64 Another meme dealing with the same themes is the “avocado toast” meme, which mocks an article suggesting that millennials would never be able to buy houses because they spend too much on frivolities like avocado toast (Fig 1.4).65
27
Fig. 1.4 / One such example of the meme.66
For a generation where home ownership is 8% lower than the previous generation (due to factors such as overwhelming student loans and the increasing inability to save for a down payment),67 these memes that poke fun at the housing industry can be a way to find humor in the situation.
But they also reveal that young people are sharing memes with the full understanding that they are relevant only in very specific temporal and social contexts.
However, the most relevant comparison between meme/folk culture to the study of how corporations are using memes lies in the content of memes and folklore: both have a tendency towards the crude. Toelken estimated that up to 80% of folkloric expression would be considered obscene when encountered out of context.68 Folk culture’s informal nature means that it often directly conflicts with formal structures: Phillips and Milner use the example of “furtive talk when the boss isn’t listening,” positioning folklore as “literally not safe for work.”69 Memes, unbound by the rules that dictate more formal cultural expressions, have the freedom to be obscene, morbid, graphically sexual, or just plain gross.
Corporate memes show this is no longer the case— corporations have taken what was once “not safe for work” and, quite literally, made it their work. The tweet below by user
28 @ch000ch, with over 13,000 likes at the time of writing, shows that this is a well-understood phenomenon, as well as that the transition is rather recent:
2013: omg hahaha a major brand's twitter account used the word bae 2018: the Wendy's twitter account just told me to go fuck myself. 70
This is perhaps the largest divergence of meme culture from folk culture. Folk cultures relied simply on widespread person-to-person participation, but internet culture complicates this, as participation is broadcast on a large enough scale to both encourage spectatorship and invite further participation. Jenkins notes that historically, folk cultures have always been “defined in opposition to elite culture,” but modern participatory culture is also affected by the spectatorship and consumption of mass culture.71
Fig. 1.5
Marika Lüders’ 2008 essay “Conceptualizing Personal Media” attempts to understand this, proposing a 2-dimensional model of personal and mass media that rests on two axes: institutional and interactional (Fig. 1.5).72 In the model above, institutional and professional content is formal;
29 personal content is informal. However, the difference between interpersonal communication and mass communication add an extra dimension to the kinds of interactions that occur.
Corporate social media facilitates a “quasi-interaction” with the brand accounts that crosses these established boundaries. As noted in the tweet above, Wendy’s is a prime example of this. It is particularly notorious for its “savage” social media persona that often “roasts” (or insults) its competition, and even its customers (Fig. 1.6). In addition to finding the exchanges highly entertaining to watch, users have even taken to tweeting at Wendy’s to be “roasted” themselves. In doing so, they are not engaging in a symmetrical, interpersonal interaction, the way that joking insults exchanged among friends would be. The “roast” is broadcast on a mass scale. The next chapter will dive deeper into the ways that this kind of interaction is asymmetrical, comparing it to the practices of replying to celebrities on Twitter. For now, however, we can use this model to understand the motivations of corporate engagement in such obscene behavior. The facilitation of spectatorship of a supposedly one-on-one conversation is one such factor. Whereas engaging in folk culture without the aid of mass participatory media would have a limited reach, Wendy’s now tweets to an audience of over 2 million.
Fig. 1.6 / A user’s tweet asking for Wendy’s to “roast” him, and Wendy’s’ reply.73
30 What these 2.88 million (and counting) followers illustrate is that Wendy’s strategy, though oftentimes controversial, has also been a resounding success. Its success may lie in the fact that it can simply be novel and entertaining to watch some part of “formal” or “elite” culture be raunchy, rude, or obscene. Returning to the opening example with the Delta Airlines/Ann
Coulter debacle, one user’s reply was: “It's like Godzilla versus King Kong... Don't need to like either, but it's sure fun when one lands a blow. ”74 It can also be relatable to see one of the “big guys” giving a nod to what people are saying but what most corporations would not dare to acknowledge. However, this can be a delicate balancing act. When the novelty wears off, or when the corporation is a little too off-brand, people certainly notice. Disney, for example, tweeted a meme (Fig. 1.7) featuring a gif of Pinocchio failing to turn into a “real boy” captioned
“when someone compliments you, but you’re dead inside,” and though they deleted it 19 hours later, it was more than enough time for Twitter to react.
Fig. 1.7 / Disney’s meme, screenshotted and reposted.75
31 While some users were entertained by Disney’s use of current meme trends, stating that they
“hella relate” and are “glad Disney understands”⎯ much has been written about the dark humor and nihilism that pervades memes today76⎯ others questioned the specific choice of meme, given Disney’s brand as “the happiest place on Earth.”
Fig. 1.8 77
Finally, the tweet above also speaks to the dangers of engaging with folk discourses without being completely aware of their cultural context. The dark humor popular with young people today is built on finding humor in mental health, depression, and anxiety during a time where depression prevalence has been on the rise.78 Disney attempting to capitalize on the meme trend thus came across as tasteless.
This user, however, also makes an offhand comment about the “disaffected tone” that
Disney was aiming for that is less about the obscene subject matter and more about the manner of presentation. Why would Disney attempt this tone, despite being completely off brand?
Perhaps this points to a changing media landscape in which the voice associated with a brand’s social media does not necessarily have to match the company’s. After all, no one would expect
32 the same treatment from a Wendy’s restaurant employee as they would from the Wendy’s
Twitter. More broadly, this also points to a dissociation between the brand and the brand’s social media, oftentimes through the personification of the social media account. Several replies to the
Disney tweet alluded to the presence of the person behind the tweet. “Can someone check on this intern,” one tweet replied; another asked “Does the person that runs the Disney Twitter account need a hug?” The next section will explore the troubling implications of this personification of brand social media pages and what it means for the way youth then must re-negotiate their use of personal social media.
Give the intern that tweeted this a raise: authenticity and anthropomorphization
I have discussed so far the ways that corporate memes can be disruptive because of corporations’ status as “elite” structures separate from “grassroots” subculture. Interwoven into this discussion is the notion of “authenticity.” Terranova uses the word in her discussions on how commercial use of subcultural production is often seen to be the end of the subculture’s “authentic” phase.79
The conversation around “authenticity” is where some of the most visible discourses around corporate meme usage arise, in particular because any conscious branding at all— even on an interpersonal level— is seen by young people as antithetical to the notion of “authenticity.”
Paradoxically, Lüders asserts that using personal media to express a sense of self is both highly controlled and yet conceptualized as being open, honest, and a reflection of a “true self.”80
Marwick & boyd’s study on teenage Twitter usage echoes this sentiment: teens generally agreed that “authenticity” was embodied by crafting tweets for oneself rather than intentionally tailoring them for an audience, despite themselves engaging in highly self-aware management of their own Twitter presence.81 The same study also found that teens highly valued the notion of
33 authenticity in their interpersonal relationships, a finding replicated in multiple studies on corporate-client relationships as well. A study by Stackla reported that 90% of millennials said authenticity was important in choosing which brands to support, though most believe less than half of the brands they interact with actually succeeded in creating “authentic” content.82 With the audience painfully aware of their motive to sell products with their tweets, corporations can find it hard to achieve this level of authenticity. As with the Disney tweet above, and the countless other examples in the previous sections, corporate memes tend to mimic the voice and content of their audience’s memes, though this can backfire. This section will explore several other tactics of authenticity and the ways they alter the ways that youth must construct their own
“authentic” identity.
Fig. 1.9 / A screenshot from the Bagel Bites Facebook account posted to /r/FellowKids. 83
34 Ironic self-awareness is one such tactic used by brand social media accounts. An /r/FellowKids thread about the image above (Fig. 1.9), in which Bagel Bites parodies the original “how do you do, fellow kids” meme, garnered almost 600 comments, nearly all of it praise. One Redditor even stated that "this is legitimately funny and it's so meta and apparently honest that I can't bring myself to complain about it being an ad."84 Explicitly bringing awareness to the post as a marketing strategy (by signing it as “-Bagel Bites Marketing Guy”) and awareness of their status as a corporation whose content would often be viewed as pandering (by referencing the meme), rather than trying to hide those things, allowed Bagel Bites to appear “honest”— a trait that was so important that the user was willing to forgive it for being an advertisement. “I hate how subtle
[corporations] get, or how it feel fake,” another user said later in the comment thread, lamenting how companies are “trying to merge with us.”85 In this instance, corporate fakeness and authenticity are aligned with how much they are willing to acknowledge their corporate status.
Other comments on the thread give further insight into what made the meme appear so
“honest”— specifically, the idea that the meme must have some relationship to the community itself. “Looks like Bagel Bites' marketing guy has found /r/fellowkids,”86 one user posted; another posited that it happened opposite way around, with Redditors finding Bagel Bites:
“Guaranteed someone that works for their marketing group is a redditor.”87 In this case, it is the imagined presence behind the meme that is relatable— the marketing guy must be one of us, how else would they produce actually funny content? This is in direct contrast to the “fellow kids” meme: just as people imagine bad memes are made by out-of-touch adults, good memes are often attributed to someone young and in the loop— especially someone in the same subculture— due to the level of cultural literacy required.
35 One example of this is the “give this intern a raise” meme (as well as its opposite, “fire this intern,” which is the same concept in reverse). The meme involves humorously replying to
“self-aware” branded content with one of such phrases, suggesting that the person running the brand’s social media did such a good job as to warrant compensation. But important here is the implication that the person running the account is an intern— almost always an untrue assumption. “Search Twitter for “give this intern a raise” and you’ll see just how twistedly devalued the job of social media manager is,” one disillusioned social media manager tweeted.88
Wendy’s is quite forthright with the fact that their social media is not run by interns, replying to several “give this intern a raise!” tweets with a snarky “Well, we aren’t an intern lol.”89
But other corporations actively embrace this (mis)conception, using it to their advantage to build rapport with younger audiences. One tweet from the Potbelly sandwich company, for example, draws on this to create a tweet that reads:
boss: my son says we should use a hashtag to sell the new mint brownie cookie me: real people don’t actually use branded hashtags, they’re exactly the kind of marketing garbage we’re trying to- boss: how about #potcookie me: NO 90
The tweet not only displays a level of self-awareness (“marketing garbage”), it aligns the reader with the “me” character. And while no identifying information is given about this “me” character, the scenario of interacting with an humorously out-of-touch adult invites certain assumptions about their age. A user even explicitly replied that they were “just imagining a guy in a suit standing right next to an interns desk while actually having these conversations.”91 Like with the tweets worried for the Disney intern, this association implicitly aligns the post not with the brand itself, but rather with the person behind the brand’s social media.
And then there are brands that explicitly address their audience as the people behind the account. One of the most successful posts on the Denny’s Tumblr page, with over half a million
36 likes and shares, (549,815 and counting, at the time of writing) simply reads: “college is, like, really important. but if you don’t do well, remember you can still get paid to run a tumblr for a restaurant.”92 For context, in 2016, college-aged youth (18 to 24-year-olds) made up over a quarter of Tumblr’s United States userbase— around 5.25 million users— which offers some context as to how such a simple post went so viral.93 While a few of the replies call attention to the insidious reasoning behind this seemingly innocuous post, pointing out that today the job of a social media manager does require a college degree, scrolling through the replies yields hundreds more comments articulating the desire to follow in the Denny’s Tumblr footsteps, citing their own financial or academic troubles and impulse to drop out.
Fig. 1.10 / Replies to Denny’s Tumblr post, selected examples, compiled by the author.
Earlier, I mentioned Terranova’s assertion that when members of a subculture channel their labor into corporate structures, it is accompanied by cries of “sellout!” This is still the case, but accompanying those cries are also appeals to the humanity of the people working within these corporate structures. Recognition of the “intern” is, essentially, a push and pull: “Hey, this meme is actually good!” “Yes, but it’s from a corporation.” “But the person working for the corporation
37 is one of us! Don’t fault them for trying to make money— I’d do the same if I could.” “Sure, me too, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be critical of the corporation itself,” and so on.
A step beyond humanizing people behind a corporate account is anthropomorphizing the corporation itself, allowing brands to become people. Sometimes, this is implicit: Wendy’s built its social media presence around replying to users in a casual tone, the same way a friend would.
Other times, this is explicit. In reply to a tweet by HBO referring to itself as “I,” the Twitter
Marketing account tweeted that “Brands are talking in the first-person. We (I?) want to know what you think.”94 While one user expressed disappointment, tweeting that “@Potbelly responded to this (and immediately deleted) saying that brands are people. They are not. They are large brands developed by a team and approved by their lawyers and higher ups,”95 many more praised the authenticity and relatability it breeds. One concerning reply reads:
I’m pretty sure there’s a law in the us that some companies have rights... so I guess like why not. Besides I like talking to them like imagine if @Wendys didn’t talk back 96
This tweet inadvertently addresses the exact reasoning behind why such marketing tactics are so disturbing— they play into corporate personhood, the idea that corporations are allowed certain legal rights granted to people. The mention of the “law” likely references the Supreme Court decisions that allow corporations to donate to political campaigns and even exert their freedom of religion by denying their employees birth control coverage.97 Already, corporations wield a tremendous amount of power in spheres other than the economic; by treating them like people on social media, this becomes justified not only legally, but culturally.
This cultural corporate personhood has an effect on how young people engage with content on social media as a whole, and they are well aware of it. In a video titled “The Late
Capitalism of Fast Food Twitter,” Sarah Z. (who describes herself as “in an awkward spot generationally” between a millennial and Gen Z) explains that without a “clear delineation
38 between entertainment and advertising,” people are “less able to notice advertising,” and the supposedly-subconscious choice they make to eat at one restaurant chain over another “becomes less and less of a free conscious one.”98 Ultimately, she concludes that users of social media need to be vigilant about identifying the brand content they consume. Another take on the issue, posted in a Twitter thread by user soyvietunion, sums up the tension between brand social media accounts and their audience succinctly [tweets consolidated]:
it really doesn’t matter who the person who runs social media is because this stuff has to go through marketing and is part of a broader tactic. It’s not one person. These corporations *want* the line between Social Media Account of an International Brand and regular users to become fuzzy because that’s how they go from being an annoyance we begrudgingly put up with to a captive audience they can sell to. It’s all marketing.99
This user implores people to remain aware and critical of corporations’ attempts to keep the line between corporation and friend fuzzy. But users’ own practices of self-expression may also contribute to keeping that line fuzzy. More and more, users are being forced to pay closer attention to how they represent themselves online in order to avoid being associated with corporations.
Both Marwick & boyd’s and Lüders’ works about self-representation online discuss how people use social media in order to express an “authentic” self. However, the increasingly humanized presence of corporations on social media (along with things like sponsored posts) casts doubt on what is authentic expression and what, if anything, is actually corporate. Everyday individual users are thus forced to negotiate an authentic self-expression that exists in opposition to corporations, lest they be accused of being inauthentic. Take, for example, the person who posted the Bagel Bites meme (Fig. 1.9) to /r/fellowkids. The user was accused by another of being a “corporate shill.” Several other redditors replied simply with a link to /r/HailCorporate, a subreddit dedicated to “document times when people act as unwitting advertisers for a product as well as to document what appear to legitimate adverts via native advertising.” Was the original
39 poster truly an “unwitting” participant who just genuinely found the meme funny? Or were they actually acting as a covert marketer? Many posts on /r/FellowKids that praise a corporation for a good or funny meme do so with a reluctant and almost shameful disclaimer: “I hate myself this is semi funny,”100 “Have to admit it did get a chuckle from me.”101 Is even laughing at corporate content an endorsement? If you broadcast that laughter to a wider public online, it could be perceived as such.
The rise of corporate presence on social media thus comes with an increasing mistrust of individual users’ authenticity, suspecting that any content that speaks positively of a brand could be advertising in disguise. Though that line of thought is at the more paranoid end of the spectrum, it reflects a point of agreement in popular and academic discourse. Gilles Deleuze, writing in 1990, proposed that in the society we now inhabit, “the corporation is a spirit, a gas,” that pervades every aspect of daily life; furthermore, “we are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world.”102 Almost three decades later, the ideas of corporate pervasiveness and corporations acting as though they are human that Deleuze put forward have only become more relevant.
Ultimately, people use digital personal media in order to “practise and narrate their identity as reflexive and dynamic projects.”103 Altering online behavior in order to reflect a shifting conception of one’s own identity, then, is still in keeping with the “dynamic project” that is self-expression. However, as corporations begin to use the same markers of authenticity that young people use to express themselves, and to use the same memes that young people use to build communities, this “dynamic project” becomes much harder. Further complicating this are the tactics of brand anthropomorphization and the revelation of the individuals who are behind corporate social media accounts. All of this means that youth striving for authentic self-
40 expression online must engage in a constant battle of re-negotiation of identity and community— with the brands themselves, with the others who inhabit their subcultural spaces, and even with their own personal accounts.
That battle will be the focus of the next chapter, which explores the memetic strategies employed by young people to resist corporate invasion of their communities. The increasing presence of corporations online, the new ways in which subcultural knowledge is being made accessible to these corporations, and the ways in which such corporate endeavors reflect the changing state of capitalism are all well understood by youth, I argue, and are actively being challenged with new strategies of boundary formation and maintenance. For young people online, protecting “internet culture” from commodification is simply par for the course in their everyday meme usage.
41
Part 2 // Youth Resistance
-Alex Norris, webcomicname.com 104
On April 23d, 2017, Tumblr user leviathan-supersystem posted a call for a new meme. The call went:
it seems there isn’t any meme that Denny’s won’t try to jack, so let’s make the new meme “John C. Miller ,CEO and President of the Denny’s Corporation, is a capitalist running dog and his wealth must be seized and redistributed to the people” to see them try to use that for their marketing105
Despite not arising organically, in the way that memes generally do, it took off: the post itself has over 44,000 notes at the time or writing, and the memedocumentation Tumblr page has over
50 examples of the meme’s usage (Fig. 2.1).106 The meme’s success likely arose from the way it reflected already-rising irritation on the part of many Tumblr users at Denny’s seemingly aggressive marketing tactics. Additionally, the meme’s anti-joke format meant that it was often simply added in as the punchline of any meme template, with its humor often deriving from its awkward shoehorning of the joke into a template where it would otherwise not make sense— perhaps paralleling Denny’s attempts to insert its branded content into memes in the same way.
42
Fig. 2.1 / Left: an early John C. Miller meme utilizing the expanding brain meme template, a template that implies that one option is intellectually superior. Right: a later John C. Miller meme, this time using the Kim Kardashian I’m Dropping Hints meme template; here the “joke” of the meme is that it makes no sense to place it in this template.
Eventually, it got so big that Denny’s ended up responding to it—in meme format, of course.
Their reply somehow managed to turn the blame onto the amorphous character of “tumblr” and not themselves:
tumblr: we are a capitalist running dog and dennys: your memes must be seized and redistributed to the people? on it.107
The reply was met with disappointment, annoyance, and derision, and even spawned further attempts at meme-based counterattaacks. Tumblr user bluesturngold suggested attacking the advertising firm, Erwin Penland:
calling out the CEO of dennys for being a capitalist is supremely surface level, i think you’d really have hit home if the new meme had been about how Erwin Penland, the marketing firm behind @dennys, has quite a few poor reviews from ex-employees on GlassDoor.com with many employees complaining that there’s no work-life balance, employees are laid off every fall, and the company has no interest in diversity, with one ex-employee calling it a “boys only mentality” while another warned job seekers “If you are a male caucasian account executive with no heart you might succeed. If not… keep your resume up to date and your eyes wide open.”108
43 In another thread of Tumblr reblogs, user blacblocberniebros suggested focusing attention on calling out their history of racial discrimination lawsuits, to which user an-average-sized-person replied:
The new meme should be “Denny’s Is Racist And No Amount Of Dank Memes Will Change That”109
Fig. 2.2 / An updated expanding brain meme, incorporating the new additions to the anti- Denny’s meme.110
To these updated memes, Denny’s did not respond. What happened? Denny’s, once the darling of Tumblr’s brand account scene, was under attack. “You peaked about a year ago,” user overexposedenjoy wrote in a reply to Denny’s attempt at a comeback. Perhaps they were right: in
2013, when Denny’s first began posting to Tumblr, the presence of a brand on such a casual social media platform was a novelty. By 2017, social networks were inundated by them.
44 But the vitriolic blowback to Denny’s Tumblr account cannot solely be attributed to boredom and annoyance. That much of the resistance came in the form of calling attention to the very real issues of wealth distribution, industry sexism, and racial discrimination also speaks to an increasingly educated and socially aware audience that is concerned with these topics. Young people’s social media activism has been the subject of both fascination and mockery: it seems that for every movement like #Occupy and #BlackLivesMatter that garners widespread attention and praise comes an influx of think pieces about how online “slacktivism” is lazy and superficial.
A 2018 Pew Research poll found that 71% of respondents agreed that “social media makes people believe they’re making a difference when they really aren’t.”111
Were the Tumblr users involved in reblogging memes about Denny’s racism actively trying to make a difference? Did they believe themselves to be engaging in activism, or did it serve another purpose? In this chapter, I discuss the various ways in which the act of spreading memes can constitute a form of resistance, both active and passive, intentional or not. Not all memes may necessarily constitute the kind of organized and targeted political resistance as, say,
#BlackLivesMatter, but they don’t all need to. In fact, the use of memes that are not explicitly political or education as a form of resistance has its own benefits.
The first section will discuss how memes communicate a position to others within a community—in the case of anti-corporate resistance, the use of antagonistic memes in reply to corporations serves to publicly display a negative relationship with those corporations. The second section, focusing on community formation, will return to the power of memes as boundary-making devices, making it difficult for corporations to understand and commodify the memes being created within smaller communities. Finally, I discuss memes’ pedagogical ability by using the example of anti-capitalist memes as facilitating both an informational and social
45 learning among users engaging with such memes. In each section, I explain why memes are uniquely suited to do the job. Even memes created and shared for the purposes of humor, entertainment, or building friendships can harbor immense political power. This is why memes must be taken seriously as a form of speech. This chapter will focus specifically on memes used to resist corporate presence on social media, but memes have only just begun to emerge as a form of communication, and are becoming more and more important in political discourse.
Silence, brand: Weaponized memes
The John C. Miller example may be at the pinnacle of weaponizing memes against perceived corporate appropriation of meme culture, but not all forms of memetic resistance take such an explicit political stance. As we’ve seen in the past chapter, there are much more subtle ways of pushing back against corporations, each one addressing different fears and angers. Some choose to make specific accounts and communities dedicated to mocking corporate advertising—
/r/FellowKids and @brandssayingbae,112 a Twitter account dedicated to making fun of corporations’ embarrassing use of slang are two such examples. This section focuses on memes that respond directly to corporations, whether through utilizing the reply functions on Twitter or
Tumblr, or by commenting on Facebook.
Nissenbaum and Shifman’s “Internet memes as contested cultural capital” provides a particularly salient understanding of memes as discursive weapons. In their examination of
4chan’s /b/ board, they found that members of the community were using memes in a hostile way to admonish other members for not following the informal “rules” of the board, for displaying a lack of knowledge about the culture of 4chan, or simply for posting “bad” memes.113 However, the authors argue that the use of memes as rhetorical weapons ultimately
46 serve to establish a collective identity even among those involved: because memes are the dominant form of cultural communication on the board, even hostile usage of memes creates a shared sense of community.114 In other words, by using a meme to insult, the aggressor assumes a certain cultural knowledge from the person they are insulting; while an insulting meme may communicate a loss of status in the community, they still accept the person losing status as a part of the community.
Antagonistic memetic interactions with brands on social media defy this structure, however. Memetic discourse with corporate accounts serve mostly to publicly display the user’s distaste for those accounts and to mark the corporations as outsiders to meme culture.
Nissenbaum and Shifman’s arguments work within the platform of 4chan, an anonymous community that does not maintain an archive. However, on Twitter and Facebook, memes establishing the boundaries of internet subculture do not include corporations as members of the community. Instead, memes in response to corporations serve only to mark the user’s own cultural belonging and status. A scathing meme posted in reply to a Wendy’s tweet, for example, both marks the corporation as “out,” and marks the person criticizing Wendy’s as “in.” Through public rejection of the corporation and its social media, a person resists being marked themselves as a “corporate shill.” Despite appearing as a reply to the brand, an insulting meme directed to
Wendy’s is less as an attempt to create shared community with the brand account and teach the social media manager the correct meme usage, and more an attempt to create community with other non-brand accounts who witness the exchange.
Take, for example, the string of replies to this tweet by Netflix Canada:
the gays get stronger every time @carlyraejepsen releases a new song 115
47 Much of the response was in meme format, mocking Netflix’s perceived exploitation of the
LGBT community in a grab at attention (Fig. 2.3). One simple reply featuring an edited version of the original “How do you do fellow kids” meme garnered over 3,100 likes and 98 retweets.
Fig. 2.3 / Two memes posted in reply to @Netflix_CA’s tweet.
The “how do you do fellow kids” meme is a quintessential example of a hostile meme that marks the receiver of it as an outsider. In this case, the meme is not simply weaponized, but also used to create a discourse across the community, rather than just a dialogue between the user who posted the meme and Netflix. This dynamic is particularly evidenced by the way that retweets are utilized— by retweeting a meme, users communicate not directly with the brands, but with other users on Twitter; their interaction with the brand itself its one degree removed. The act of replying ostensibly creates a two-sided conversation, but the act of then retweeting that conversation circulates it, inviting others in the community into the discourse.
I say “ostensibly” because, in reality, a two-sided conversation is often not expected or even desired. Netflix Canada has over 304,000 followers; it would be unrealistic to expect a reply from the social media team for every interaction. This raises another point: that brands occupy a position of celebrity on social media. Many, Netflix Canada included, even bear the
“verified” checkmark on Twitter, a badge that the platform describes as letting users know that
“an account of public interest is authentic.”116 Marwick & boyd, in their article “To See and Be
Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter,” define celebrity as not a person, but as a practice—the
48 practice of managing an audience of “fans” using strategies of authenticity and intimacy. Thus, we can understand brands to be practicing a form of celebrity; using this understanding then allows us a framework for understanding how Twitter users utilize the reply function. As
Marwick & boyd point out, “Fans @reply to famous people not only in the hope of receiving a reply, but to display a relationship, whether positive or negative.”117 Receiving a reply back from the corporation is thus not necessarily the end goal. An insulting meme is not tweeted in reply to a corporation for community-building purposes with the corporation— rather, it is done to publicly communicate the user’s negative opinion and build community with others who share that opinion.
Another important point that Marwick & boyd make is that celebrity practice online reveals and reinforces the uneven power differentials between the “celebrity” and the “fan.”
While Twitter and other social media offer the illusion of intimacy and “backstage access” with the “celebrity,” the performance of celebrity still requires a “mutual understanding” between both parties of the inherent status imbalance.118 Importantly, fans must recognize and accept this imbalance when interacting with celebrities online. Thus, when corporations attempt to obscure this power imbalance, it is met with frustration and suspicion. The backlash against Netflix
Canada, for example, came in response to several months of tweets in the first person, in which
Netflix Canada used “I” and “me” to call itself “lesbian” or, in the case of its Twitter bio, “super gay.” Just as individual fan-celebrity interactions require an acknowledgement of the power imbalance,119 community interactions in digital culture require a dialogue in which “structure, membership, and status are constantly performed and discussed.”120 Netflix Canada’s first- person tweeting was thus doubly upsetting in that it obscured not only the power imbalance between a corporation and individuals, but also obscured their claims to membership within a
49 minority community— in this case, the LGBT community. Responses to Netflix Canada’s tweet reasserted that while an individual may be gay, an entire corporation cannot. After the incident, the social media account bio was changed to reflect that the people who run the account are actually the ones who are “super gay.”
Fig. 2.4 / Netflix Canada’s Twitter bio on Feb. 3d, one week before the initial tweet (left); the bio as of March 17th, one month after (right)
Additionally, when Netflix Canada released an apology several days later, it also did so by revealing the LGBT individuals responsible for tweeting on Netflix Canada’s behalf.
the response has been a reminder of the high bar corporations are held to for representation, as they should be. As a gay woman & gay man who have run this account for 4 years, we strive every day to ensure our community is seen & heard. We absolutely take your concerns to heart
These appeals to “representation” and “community” may have been met well, if tweeted by individuals. But tweeted by the Netflix Canada account, the apology ultimately fell flat, with replies continuing to emphasize Netflix’s corporate status. “Ok faceless corporation.” one user tweeted. “This is why I don’t want corporations at pride,” said another. For many users, regardless of the LGBT social media managers, tweeting LGBT-related content in the first person from a corporate account was still unacceptable in that it obscured the “faceless corporation” behind it.
By utilizing the reply function to circulate hostile memes against Netflix Canada, users were able to resist Netflix Canada’s attempt at humanizing itself by forcing the account to
50 explicitly acknowledge its own corporate status and to participate in a discussion of how that impacted its membership within the LGBT community. Ultimately, users’ memetic engagement with this series of tweets served as a rejection of the narrative Netflix was trying to create, and to publicly craft a counter-narrative on the very site of corporate communication— a digital equivalent, perhaps, to picketing outside of the Netflix HQ. Corporations have been well aware that both the biggest strength and weakness of social media campaigns is their power for communication and spreadability; though easy to reach a large audience for comparatively little money, if the message of the campaign is somehow warped or distorted, it can be catastrophic for a tightly-controlled brand image. Memes’ reliance on remixing thus makes them a particularly good medium for warping an intended message and creating a community consensus counter-narrative. Additionally, the bottom-up nature of most memes makes it harder for a corporation to adequately respond— just as Denny’s responded with their own version the John
C. Miller meme, it was still only one version of the meme among dozens, if not hundreds. The power of memes is in how many variations it is possible to circulate, and in how many voices it is able to capture.
In replying directly to corporations, teens show a keen awareness of the ways in which they have control over corporate narratives. With social media, it is now possible to visibly disseminate negotiated and oppositional readings to a potential audience of thousands. Using memes to communicate such positions is not only effective because of their ability to remix and spread, but also, to return to Nissenbaum and Shifman’s ideas from earlier in this chapter, because of their ability to serve as boundary-making and identity-forming devices. Because of the in-group knowledge that many require to be understood, they allow users to communicate to the people running a corporate social media account that the corporation is not welcome, while
51 simultaneously communicating to other members of the community who do understand the memes that this is a position that they should also take.
Nissenbaum and Shifman note that, on 4chan, lack of memetic fluency is often met with the phrase “LURK MOAR,” [sic] imploring the user to quietly “lurk” on the board and learn about its culture before attempting to participate again.121 Implicit in this is that a user can learn, and can ultimately become a part of the community. Yet as the backlash against Neflix Canada’s appeals to the LGBT community show, communities reject corporate inclusion within them simply by virtue of corporations being corporations. As brand accounts become more meme- literate, young people can no longer say “you’re making bad memes” as a way to separate themselves from corporations. Instead, they are now beginning to take the stance that regardless of whether corporate memes are good, corporate accounts are not people who can hold identities as part of the community, therefore any meme corporate accounts make is bad. The next section will discuss uncommodifiable memes, focusing on how youth online form self and community identities that are more resistant to uses by brand accounts.
52 Not for mere mortals: uncommodifiable memes & niche communities
As discussed above, corporations are becoming increasingly comfortable with commodifying once-taboo topics and forms of speech. However, there are some topics that just cannot be co- opted by corporations, whether due to legal or social restrictions. Whitney Phillips points to mid-
2000s meme culture on 4chan as “impervious to corporate commodification” due to its reliance on jokes about pedophilia, rape, racist and homophobic slurs, and other equally taboo topics.122
Using such topics has proven to be an extremely effective way of resisting corporate co-optation: most recently, 4chan’s attempts to “reclaim” the Pepe meme from the “mainstream” involved churning out memes equivocating Pepe with Nazism. This campaign was so successful that the author of the comic in which the Pepe image originated from actually killed off Pepe in the comic’s narrative.123 Despite this in-comic death, 4chan users counted this a win, since they successfully kept Pepe out of the clutches of the “mainstream.”
Of course, there is a reason this tactic worked so well— at least at this point in US politics, open expressions of neo-Nazism are seen as too dangerous. Phillips points out that many
4chan “trolls” may not actually believe their actions to be responsible for disseminating harmful ideologies simply because they disseminate those ideas out of humor or irony and not an actual belief in them—for these trolls, using racist language for “trolling” did not count as being racist.124 But even the ironic spread of Nazi imagery constitutes the spread of those ideas. To adequately discuss the political implications of the memes in these communities would require a level of care and research that is, regrettably, outside what the scope of this project allows. There is no shortage of academic scholarship and online articles on the subject, however, especially after the 2016 US presidential election. Phillips’ work is a good place to begin to understand the
53 culture of trolls on 4chan, and Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies offers a more recent and cross- platform analysis of the rise of the alt-right through meme communities.125
These understandings are still important in informing this thesis by making clear that anti-corporate resistance does not inherently align with a single ideology— from alt-right memes on 4chan to the communist memes I will discuss a bit later on, anti-corporate sentiment crosses the political spectrum. Additionally, memes themselves have no inherent politics. Earlier I likened spreading memes to a kind of everyday activism. But as the rise of the alt-right makes all too clear, the same qualities that make memes so successful in spreading information about
Denny’s racism also make them successful in spreading racist ideologies. Perhaps the only quality that binds the communities who practice anti-corporate meme usage is that all have some desire to protect the boundaries of the communities in which they operate, but nothing more can be said about the content of those communities themselves.
With that said, I turn my focus to a community which claims to forego any ideologies at all (one of the subreddit’s listed rules is “no politics”)— the surreal memes community. One of the other factors that made “early troll and meme spaces” so hard for corporations to commodify— besides the offensiveness of the discourse on those sites— was the simple fact that
“the marketers themselves were outside the circle and therefore couldn’t decipher what was being communicated.”126 With the rise of KnowYourMeme.com (KYM), however, both novice users and marketers alike could gain cultural access into meme spaces, allowing corporate actors to incorporate memes into their advertising campaigns with little to no knowledge of their subcultural origins.127 As of April 2019, there are over 4,000 confirmed meme entries— memes that “show a fair amount of proper spread and recognition”128— with an additional 11,000 submitted but not yet confirmed. Despite this staggering amount of archival work, there are
54 undoubtedly memes that escape documentation altogether. After all, a meme does not necessarily need to be viral. A meme spread only among friends or within a small community is still a meme.
The surreal meme community is one that remains quite large, yet still eludes documentation. KYM has a page describing them as a subgenre of memes, where they explain that their “humor derives from their absurd style.”129 However, there is little explanation beyond this, and a cursory glance at the example images is more confounding than it is enlightening.
Fig. 2.5 / Two example images taken from the subreddit.
The KYM article also references the subreddit /r/surrealmemes, claiming that it maintains a running Google Doc cataloguing such memes (Fig. 2.6). At the time of writing, however, the document is a single page entitled “TRUST HIM,” containing only a repeated line of indecipherable glyphs.
55
Fig. 2.6 / The Google document in question. It is unclear if the document ever actually did contain a catalogue of memes— its edit history is inaccessible.
In fact, the subreddit seems entirely uninvested in being understood by a larger audience, writing in its description of surreal memes that “such memes may be difficult to understand for mere mortals,” but offering no help in that understanding.130 Moderation on the subreddit is strict, banning any references to real life brands or politicians— in an interview with Mashable,
/r/surrealmemes moderator Maester_Patrick said that these rules were in place in order to create a “state of ‘beyond-reality’ absurdism,” and to avoid being “milked [by brands].” 131 In trying to remain absurd, however, the memes must get weirder and weirder— the standards of what constitutes a surreal meme are “constantly being updated and constricted,” making it hard not just for brands to keep up, but for any “mainstream entities looking to cash in.”132 The community relies on its shifting criteria of reality and absurdity in order to remain obscure to the wider public, and out of reach of corporations.
On /r/surrealmemes, the process of creating memes is also rendered hard to access, both explicitly through technological limitations and implicitly through cultural ones. New members must complete an application to become “approved submitters” in order to be able to post to the forum, for example. One of the guidelines to submit a meme is to “put time and effort into your post. It shouldn't look like you took 5 minutes to slap random images into MS paint.”133 Phillips
56 describes how creating memes such as Advice Animals used to require a certain level of technological competency in photo editing, but the introduction of template-based meme generating platforms rendered this requirement obsolete.134 Surreal memes, which rely heavily on aesthetics yet follow no explicit template, still require this competency, often to a higher degree. Making surreal memes involves not just placing text into an image but altering and distorting the images themselves as well, as explicated by the /r/surrealmemes guidelines. The irony of surreal memes, in many instances, also requires an understanding of the tropes and clichés of traditional memes, allowing the meme-makers to break these rules in interesting ways.
Limiting participation in terms of cultural and technological competency ensures a community that, though large— /r/surrealmemes currently sits at over 468,000 subscribers—manages to resist infiltration by outsiders.
Rather than attempting to be uncommodifiable by being too obscene for a corporation to want to associate with it, /r/surrealmemes relies on barriers to understanding and participation.
This approach to memes does not stray too far from the original community on 4chan prior to the introduction of KnowYourMeme. KYM editor-in-chief Brad Kim said in an interview with Vice that surreal memes reflect a “culture that wants to preserve itself from the so-called
‘normies,’”135 echoing Phillips’ assertions that early meme spaces relied on being “inaccessible to outsiders.”136 Esoteric meme making is simply used to determine who has a serious investment in the community and who is an outsider. Like 4chan, the surreal memes community is technically public, yet it manages to keep itself hidden by making inaccessible the knowledge it requires to participate.
Private meme communities on Facebook take this gatekeeping a step further. “The only good thing left on Facebook is private meme groups,” a Mashable article boldly claims.137 The
57 article argues the “hyper-specific” nature of these private groups creates a “greater sense of community.” 138 Additionally, the new feature allowing group moderators to ask screening questions before a user can join means that “problematic Facebook users” can be more easily weeded out.139 Facebook’s ability to make groups private is one way the technical aspects of the social networking platform helps shape the communities that form there. The same kind of community could never form on Twitter or Tumblr, for example. Facebook, in adding screening questions and other administrative tools, has actively encouraged the use of its platform this way.
Mark Zuckerberg himself, in a public statement on his personal Facebook, wrote that these tools were introduced as part of his commitment to “building global community” across the site;140 starting in 2018, Facebook has also begun a yearly “Communities Summit for Group Admins” which hosted several hundred group administrators in its inaugural year.141
As a result, private meme groups thrive on Facebook. Bernie Sanders’ Dank Meme Stash, at 404,000 members, describes itself as the “granddaddy of all other “meme stashes;”142 other popular meme groups include New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens, with 142,000 members, and what if phones, but too much at 52,000. The “x memes for y teens” naming schematic is popular for meme pages, communicating what the memes are and who they’re for in a catchy, rhyming format. Though not every member must be a “teen,” the naming speaks to a population skewed towards youth. Additionally, the popularity of college-specific meme groups such as UC Berkeley Memes for Edgy Teens (191,000 members) and Elitist Memes for Every Ivy
League Teen (81,000) displays a relationship between age and these Facebook meme communities.
The group “Wine Memes for Wine Moms” (WMFWM) nearly follows this naming schematic, except “teens” is replaced with “moms,” suggesting an older demographic. Memes
58 posted to the page relate to the struggles of motherhood—bratty children, clueless husbands, endless housekeeping tasks, and above all, the desire to kick back and enjoy a glass of wine at girls’ night.
Fig. 2.7 / An example of a meme posted to the page. 143
But something’s just a little off. The page administrator appears to be a man in his 20s. This might not seem too strange, until you begin scrolling and realize that there are quite a few young men in this motherhood group. In a sample of the ten most recent posts on the page on April 10,
2019, half were made by men. Among the users whose ages were publicly available, the average age was 23, with four profiles listing a current college or university in their profile. The posts on the page are inconsistent with these identities (Fig. 2.8): users call each other names like
“Sharon,” “Barbara,” “Brenda,” often request that other posters “say hi to the kids for me!” and use slightly out-of-touch slang: a capitalized LOL, a rant about the user’s “hubby.”
59
Fig. 2.8 / One post to the group by a user named “Jon,” whose profile picture and name suggest a user whose identity does not match the content of the post. 144
The only place this is explicitly called out is at the bottom of the group description, in a postscript that reads: “For those that are confused, this is primarily a role play group. We are all wine moms/learning to be wine moms.”145 It becomes clear that the entire group is actually a parody: mainly college-aged young people poking fun at the troubles of a white, suburban, middle-class mother. Sometimes, the parody peeks through. “Capitalism drains us all AM I
RIGHT LADIES” one post is captioned, underneath a meme about drinking wine at work. “NOT
AS QUICKLY AS I DRAIN THAT BOTTLE OF WINE AM I RIGHT BARBARA HAHA
LOL,” comes the reply.146 This brief break in character to complain about “capitalism” points, perhaps, to the purpose of WMFWM: the playful embodiment of what may be perceived as an out-of-reach middle class lifestyle. Returning to the avocado toast meme I brought up in chapter
1 (Fig. 1.3) that pokes fun at millennials’ supposed inability to buy houses due to their impractical spending on avocado toast, the fun of a group like WMFWM can similarly be understood as a way to find humor in the decreasing economic mobility of young people today.
60 Of private Facebook groups as a whole, Mashable writes, “Being part of these groups is kind of being in on an extensive inside joke—if you understand each group's quirks and eccentricities, you're in the club.” Wine Memes for Wine Moms, at over 10,000 members, is a particularly extensive inside joke. What WMFWM makes clear is that the technical affordances of private Facebook groups still do not render the social aspects of boundary work obsolete. It’s not enough to simply answer the screening questions to get into the group— users still must have the niche subcultural knowledge necessary to participate “correctly” in these increasingly specific meme groups as well as the cultural context to understand what’s so funny about it.
Unlike on Twitter or Tumblr, where all communication is posted to a single user profile, not all communication on Facebook must go on a user’s wall, thus preventing the context collapse noted on sites like Twitter.147 This affordance of privacy and division of online identity allows users to join multiple hyper-niche communities while still being a part of larger “internet culture.” Groups like WMFWM need not rely on making memes that are antithetical to a brand’s image, or too hard to understand. Many memes are re-posted specifically because they are so popular among the “wine mom” demographic. For example, Jon’s meme from above (Fig. 2.8) was shared from a page called “Get The Skinny With Georgetta,” a public healthy recipe sharing page that appears to be run by a woman in her 30s to 40s; the meme had over 10,000 likes on the original page.148 Instead, the group itself is rendered hard to access both technologically and culturally, and boundary maintenance is done by way of intentional misdirection for those who aren’t already in the know. The strategies of /r/surrealmemes and WMFWM are only some of the ways many ways users are creating communities around memes that evade commodification or understanding. In the next section, I discuss memes that are hard for corporations to co-opt because they teach and share anti-capitalist ideas.
61 Seize the memes of production: anti-capitalist memes as pedagogical instruments
Fig. 2.9 / Left: original webcomic by @sandserif.149 Right: remixed meme, posted to the @sassysocialistmemes page on Facebook.150
The above comic (Fig. 2.9) succinctly conveys the extraordinary power that memes have to attract an audience that would otherwise pay no attention. In the comic, a character literally frames his insecurities as a meme, causing a crowd to form that was not there before. The remixed version of the comic specifically makes the claim that meme-ifying communism does the same, replacing the word “insecurities” with “communist propaganda.” As before, framing this propaganda as a meme gave it a wider audience. Just by looking at the page that posted this meme, this claim seems to be true— Sassy Socialist Memes has over 1 million likes at the time of writing, and the account regularly reposts from similar pages and groups with follower counts in the tens to hundreds of thousands, such as the previously-mentioned Bernie Sanders’ Dank
Meme Stash, Comemeism (197,000 members), and Leftist Memes (18,000). Anti-capitalist memes pages of all kinds are, by this measure, relatively successful. The pages and groups I draw from align themselves with a variety of political ideologies (socialism, communism,
62 leftism). For the purposes of this paper, I will be referring to these memes more broadly as anti- capitalist memes.
Antagonistic anti-capitalist memes posted in reply to corporations can be weaponized, and the massive communities created around such memes are impossible for corporations to exploit. However, this section focuses specifically on these memes’ ability to teach. As discussed above, much of the popular discourse around corporations on social media has shifted from an amused acceptance to downright hostility, a lot of it now resisting corporations simply for being corporations. The John C. Miller meme (Figs. 2.1, 2.2) is one example of both an anti-capitalist and anti-corporate meme that served to resist the presence of Denny’s on Tumblr and to educate the larger Tumblr user base about Denny’s shady business practices. While anti-capitalist memes can and often do take the form of anti-corporate memes, these memes may also constitute a much broader form of resistance to corporations if they spread messages that oppose capitalism as a whole. Many of the memes (Fig. 2.10) posted to anti-capitalist meme pages are not about corporations, targeting instead specific people or groups (CEOs, libertarians) and broad categories (“the rich,” the US government, capitalism itself).
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Fig. 2.10 / Two memes posted to the Sassy Socialist Memes page. Top: a meme that explicitly targets a corporation. Bottom: a meme whose target is, more broadly, “capitalists.”
64 In addition to this wide range of targets, anti-capitalist memes can also communicate a wide range of information. Some, like the John C. Miller meme and its spin-offs, impart concrete facts: Denny’s has racism lawsuits, there are allegations of sexism against Denny’s marketing firm. Others, like the “capitalism works” meme above, also communicate value judgement. The use of the “distracted boyfriend” meme template, where a woman watches in anger at her boyfriend’s boorish behavior, allows for a quick shorthand to an idea that would take much more text to explain. It communicates, essentially, that capitalists’ desire to believe that capitalism works comes at the expense of many, many groups (“the poor, post-colonial Africa,” etc.), and that this neglect is just as blatantly offensive as a man openly checking out another woman in front of his girlfriend. Though certainly exploitation under capitalism is more grave than infidelity, the meme communicates this relationship between capitalism and exploited groups in a lighthearted manner.
Other anti-capitalist memes facilitate contextual learning that bridges the gap between widely accessible cultural knowledge and academic theories or concepts. For example, the
Gillette meme above assumes that the audience is familiar with razor company Gillette’s 2019
Super Bowl ad, in which the company condemns bullying, sexism, and harassment, and implores men to “hold other men accountable” for sexism—a reasonable assumption, considering the 98 million viewers that watched the Super Bowl.151 152 The meme quite literally points out that
Gillette has a history of sexism, and accuses them of “appropriating important social causes” for profit. It goes on to call this entire scenario “late capitalism adapting itself.” The term “late capitalism” was born out of Marxist thinkers in the mid 20th century, and it is unlikely that each one of the 6,700 people who liked the post on Facebook has read Ernest Mandel or Theodor
Adorno. By connecting the term to the pop cultural knowledge acquired through watching
65 Gillette’s Super Bowl ad (and following the subsequent backlash), the meme allows its audience to gain an approximate understanding of “late capitalism” without having to dive into German texts from the previous century.
These examples are rather heavy-handed with their anti-corporate/anti-capitalist messages, but there are many more memes that are less explicitly pedagogical, using anti- capitalist phrases and imagery— much of it explicitly communist— as the joke in itself. The memetic spread of certain phrases has grown so large that there are several dedicated
KnowYourMeme pages to specific phrases— “seize the means of production,”153 “we have nothing to lose but our chains,”154 and even the previously-mentioned “late capitalism”155 all have their own pages. Much of the time, these memes appear empty of any serious anti-capitalist intent.
Fig. 2.11
The meme above is the first example on KnowYourMeme’s “seize the means of production” entry, and unlike the prior examples, has no pretense of being educational in any way. It was posted to the explicitly anti-capitalist /r/LateStageCapitalism subreddit, however, suggesting that the user does align themselves with anti-capitalist ideas.
66 Does the creation and spread of these kinds of anti-capitalist memes actually count as resistance, given that much of it is spread for humor and entertainment as opposed to an explicit pedagogical stance? It seems almost irreverent to paint meme-making done for humor with the same brush as, for example, the #Occupy memes spread intentionally for activist purposes.
Memes, however, are just the latest in a political culture that is long intertwined with humor, as evidenced by the rich history of political cartooning in the West that dates back to England in the
18th century.156 The fact that memes have, up until quite recently, not been taken too seriously as political tools, and the fact that the creators and sharers of memes may not even imagine themselves to be engaging in activism when they interact with anti-capitalist memes, is actually quite helpful for their spread. In fact, it is what makes memes uniquely situated to serve as tools of anti-capitalist pedagogy.
Engaging actively in social movements often requires psychologically taxing emotional labor for the activists involved. The use of humor, however, is particularly good at “enhancing engagement and preventing burnout” within such movements.157 Humor can both motivate the sharing of a message and mitigate the heavy emotional toll that social activism takes. Memes, especially those with a basis in pop culture, can make it easier to “communicate with each other about politics in a playful and engaging way.”158 For meme-makers who do engage in activism, creating and spreading memes can provide a much-needed break from organized activism.
However, even those who spread such memes for their entertainment value rather than their political value and those who do not explicitly identify as activists still facilitate the dissemination of these anti-capitalist memes.
Memes that simply make use of communist terminology or imagery for comedic value can also have political value. Rather than understanding the repetition of a phrase like “we have
67 nothing to lose but our chains” as hollow because of its use for comedy, we can understand it as using humor to soften ideas that would otherwise be considered radical, thus normalizing their usage. User leviathan-supersystem, in a follow-up on April 27th, wrote that they actually did expect Denny’s to attempt to use their anti-Denny’s meme in a marketing ploy:
the point was more watching the absurd spectacle of them trying to mangle it into something that was usable, and that even after said mangling, they would still be disseminating unmistakably anti-capitalist concepts, in spite of their best efforts to sanitize them 159
Simply disseminating the “capitalist running dog” idea was a victory, in the eyes of the original creator of the meme. This idea— that regardless of intent, spreading a message will still have an effect— is true of any message, as I touched on in my earlier discussion on 4chan’s “ironic”
Nazism. What specifically makes memes good for this?
Earlier in this thesis, I mentioned the ways that memes are sometimes conceptualized as an inherently communist form of communication. While I write that this is a flawed idea, it does mean that young people are engaging with memes in a way they already perceive to be anti- corporate or anti-capitalist. And though maybe not communist, per se, the idea does have some basis in truth: memes undeniably offer far more accessible and collective methods of content creation and spread than traditional media does. Meme accessibility is multifold: not only are memes accessible financially, in that they cost no money to view or spread (save for the cost of appropriate technological infrastructure, of course), they are also accessible culturally for those who are already engaged with internet culture. As with the Gillette meme, repackaging costly, dense, or jargon-y academic texts into memetic format allows for them to be understood and thus spread beyond a formally educated audience. Additionally, the cost of meme creation is lowered as well. A Vice article titled “How Meme Culture is Getting Teens Into Marxism” contains an
68 interview with an 18 year old student who says that while “a lot of people don't have time to write a whole article” about politics, “most people have time to make a meme.”160
We must also consider the pedagogical potential of digital media as a whole. Mizuki Ito writes about the interest-driven and peer-driven learning that happens as “a side effect of creative production, collaboration, and community organizing,” rather than learning done for the explicit purpose of learning.161 Ito gives the example of fans of Japanese anime learning Japanese in order to better engage with their passion for anime, as well as to gain status within a community of fans through creating media such as video remixes. Ito claims that despite being done for entertainment and pleasure, this kind of participatory learning is extremely effective.162
Furthermore, interest- and peer-driven learning exists separately from formal education, which gives less socioeconomically privileged youth more of a motivation to take part in it, a class relationship that is explicated by Ito et. al. in Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking
Out.163 The authors explain that formal education offers uncertain trajectories for young people into the workforce— youth must simply trust that the work they do in school will someday translate into capital as an adult, and understandably, less privileged youth are likely to be critical of such a model as they understand schools to be “defined by structures they see as unfair and oppressive.”164 Meanwhile, informal methods of learning by way of creative media production provide an model that is both more “accessible and immediate” and arises from an
“organic social context” that they are more willing to trust.165 By producing a piece of media, young people not only have a tangible end product that demonstrates the skills or knowledge they have acquired; by sharing that media, they see how that creation has a direct impact on their social capital within a community. While we cannot assume that all creators and sharers of anti- capitalist memes are socioeconomically underprivileged, the learning that memes facilitate offer
69 an informal avenue for accessing information that would otherwise only be accessed in a formal educational environment.
All of this is to say that memes are uniquely positioned, from a technological, cultural, and pedagogical standpoint, to facilitate the spread of anti-capitalist messages. Perhaps most importantly, the kinds of learning they facilitate are not only informational, but social. The informal learning that happens by creating and sharing digital content requires a community to share those creations with; Ito et. al. describe this learning as motivated by “bottom-up social energies... and a sense of communal belonging.”166 Returning to the meme-as-weapon, where posting an inflammatory meme underneath a corporate tweet is used to communicate a stance to others in the community, we can also understand an anti-capitalist meme to be a form of social communication. Thus, an anti-capitalist meme can convey both an informational message (e.g., this is a negative consequence of capitalism) as well as a social one (e.g., this is what my peers value and believe in).
In this way, even non-explicitly pedagogical memes play a role. Because the learning that happens in creating, remixing, and circulating anti-capitalist memes requires a basis in peer approval to be successful, creating the social norms that guide a group of peers is already doing the groundwork of building community. At the heart of this argument, however, is the understanding that it is not just memes themselves that are well-suited to resist corporations— their positioning within communities is what gives them such power.
The simple fact that young people are building communities around spreading antagonistic, confounding, or explicitly anti-capitalist memes reveals the changing relationship that young people have to corporations and to capitalism as a whole. A 2018 Gallup poll found that less than half of young Americans (18-29) have a positive view of capitalism; more than half
70 favor socialism instead.167 Spreading anti-capitalist memes is not only symptomatic of the increasingly negative views young people have of capitalism— it also helps to foster those negative views. By using memes to communicate a negative relationship with corporations and teach other users about the negative effects of capitalism in a humorous and engaging way, these memes disseminate anti-capitalist ideas just as they reflect them.
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Conclusion // 2020: the brands are president
2017: sassy brands who dunk on people 2018: the brands are anxious and depressed now 2019: brands start asking for feet pics -Twitter user @BrandyLJensen, Dec. 11, 2018 168
Replying to @BrandyLJensen 2020: the brands are president -Twitter user @mollypriddy, Dec. 11, 2018 169
What’s next for corporate memes? As the epigraph above illustrates, brand use of social media is only escalating, and it’s hard to know where it will go next. Will brands continue on the path that
Wendy’s has laid, becoming increasingly taboo? Will they push the limits of corporate humanization and enter the realm of politics in new and unexpected ways? Importantly, however, the epigraph also shows that young people are closely following these changes in corporate meme usage— and poking fun at them. No matter where corporate memes go next, youth will continue to push back against them.
With this change occurring so rapidly and dynamically, equally rapid and dynamic ongoing research is necessary to keep up. I make a distinction here between the further research that can be done to address related topics outside the scope of this thesis and the ongoing research that must continue to follow the trajectory of corporate social media into 2020 and beyond. This project was completed with the knowledge that, while the exact practices of resistance that I describe may become outdated within a year or two, the general trends of
72 corporate meme usage and the patterns in how young people respond to those trends that I outline can continue to be useful in informing future studies.
During the writing of this thesis, for example, frozen beef sheet brand Steak-Umm tweeted its own version of a surreal meme.170 The Mashable article about surreal memes that I mentioned earlier considered this an “attempt” at something “surreal-adjacent,” but concluded that Steak-Umm ultimately did not manage to “participate fully.”171 Steak-Umm’s exploratory usage of the format, despite failing this time, still seems to be a foreboding sign that it is only a matter of time before corporations are able to catch on and commodify the trend.
Though that may soon be the case, the arguments I put forward provide a way to understand all of this as part of the cycle of corporate meme usage and resistance. If I have elucidated anything, it is that this relationship between youth and corporations is defined by its constant state of change. Youth practices of identity and community must be constantly re- negotiated in order to evade or actively oppose corporate co-optation. If— or when— corporations do catch up to surreal memes, it’s also only a matter of time before the community moves onto something new.
Throughout this thesis, I have detailed how corporate meme usage fits into the history of corporate co-optation of subcultural expression, but I also show how the unprecedented speed at which memes are able to change and spread makes them uniquely situated to resist this co- optation. I explore how corporate social media accounts often make use of the same strategies of authenticity and practices of identity that youth use to express themselves online, as well as using memes that have previously functioned as gatekeeping devices for marking in-group status. I also show, however, that young people are constantly altering these practices in order for memes to retain the same function as authenticity-marking and boundary-forming tools.
73 Ongoing research must contend with the tension between increasingly invasive corporations and the dynamic, remixable nature of memes. Will memes follow the fate of previous forms of subcultural expression, becoming “structured within capitalist business practices”172 by the young people— like myself— aging into the workforce and bringing their subcultural knowledge with them? Or will the rapid-fire life cycle of memes, and their imaginary as inherently grassroots and communal forms of expression, keep them from being co-opted?
The conclusions that I come to in this thesis lean towards the latter option. I argue that as corporations continue to push the boundaries of these online youth communities, they unintentionally help to make these boundaries more apparent. As I illustrate, the more prevalent corporations become on social media, the more young people become aware of— and critical of— corporate engagements in their communities. Corporate meme usage prompts users to collectively negotiate the boundaries of their communities in order to exclude corporate participation. More and more, youth are beginning to demand transparency and accountability from brand social media accounts, distance their self-expression from that of corporations, and disseminate counter-narratives that reject those put out by corporations. This thesis specifically discusses how memes are used to do this, but further research can explore other kinds of resistance, especially resistance that is more highly organized or overtly political.
I do believe, however, that the study of memes themselves must also continue if we are to make sense of online youth communities. Memes, as the lingua franca of the internet, provide valuable insight into the informal ways that young people communicate ideas with one another.
When we see young people re-orienting their meme usage to be actively hostile, confounding, or anti-capitalist, this displays an increasingly negative relationship that young people have not only to corporations, but to capitalism as a whole.
74 This understanding of memes is not enough, however. Memes must be studied not only as reflections of changing viewpoints, but as tools that actively participate in changing those views. When youth understand memes as a communal— or even communist— forms of expression, it shapes the communities built around these memes. Young people are forming communities of like-minded people that create, share, and remix anti-corporate and anti- capitalist content for humor, socialization, and entertainment. The social norms and boundaries that are collectively negotiated by youth in these communities both explicitly and implicitly resist capitalism. Importantly, understanding these social norms and boundaries cannot be separated from understanding meme usage, since these norms are communicated and maintained through the use of memes.
The conception of memes as inherently anti-capitalist is certainly optimistic. Though memes may not fit this framework exactly— after all, they do necessarily circulate through capitalist platforms— they still have an undeniable power to spread ideas from the bottom-up, foster collective participation, and build community. For the young people imagining, spreading, and building communities with memes in anti-capitalist ways, perhaps it does not even matter that memes circulate on capitalist platforms. The optimistic belief in the revolutionary potential of memes still affects how youth use them to communicate ideas with one another and resist corporate invasion into their spaces of leisure and socialization. Believing them to be powerful means that young people use them as if they were powerful, and that in itself makes them so. On my part, even after writing this thesis, I still hold this optimistic belief. It is a belief not only in the power of memes themselves, but in the power of youth to use them to build community and affect change.
75 Appendix
A. Comments on Gucci’s Instagram, selected examples.
@jacob_rochester, Instagram comment, date unknown, in reply to @gucci, Instagram post, March 20, 2017. https://www.instagram.com/p/BR3N-o1FwxV/ (accessed November 20, 2018).
@karinaspritze, Instagram comment, date unkown, in reply to @gucci, Instagram post, Mach 20, 2017. https://www.instagram.com/p/BR2uIrAla8U/ (accessed November 20, 2018).
@brrrett423, Instagram comment, date unkown, in reply to @gucci, Instagram post, Mach 20, 2017. https://www.instagram.com/p/BR2uIrAla8U/ (accessed November 20, 2018).
B. “Put this in the MoMA” memes, selected examples
Author unknown, date unknown, in reply to @GravityRonin, Twitter post. Archived to the meme repository website me.me August 10, 2017. https://pics.me.me/baguettes- gravityronin-probably-the-greatest-thing-l-ever-drew-when-27133357.png (accessed November 22, 2018).
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@blairbitchcraft, Tumblr post, date unknown, reblogged to @egberts, Tumblr post, November 14, 2017. https://egberts.tumblr.com/post/167480668635 (accessed November 22, 2018).
@bonitaapplebelle, Tumblr post, date unknown, in reply to @tittyminaj, Tumblr post, date unknown. Archived to meme repository website thats-so-meme.info in 2017. http://thats-so-meme.info/post/112315275325/bonitaapplebelle-tittyminaj-i-was-rooting-for (accessed November 22, 2018).
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Notes
1 @shenanigansen, Twitter post, November 20, 2015, 7:20 a.m. https://twitter.com/shenanigansen/status/1064901317515231232. 2 Kyle Chayka, “#TFWGucci: A collaborative Meme project,” Gucci. http://digital.gucci.com/tfwgucci/p/1. (accessed November 22, 2018). 3 @notfolu, Twitter post, April 11, 2017, 5:43 a.m. https://twitter.com/notfolu/status/851777781700730880. 4 @erikabowes, Twitter post, March 20, 2017, 4:01 a.m. https://twitter.com/erikabowes/status/843779538370945025. 5 @miltmiltl, Twitter post, March 19, 2017, 10:06 a.m. https://twitter.com/MiltMiltLu/status/843508914960252928. 6 @biirdflu, @plushdollcami, Instagram post, March 20, 2017, comment on Gucci, “When she asks u what time it is but u wanna flex so u let her see for herself.” https://www.instagram.com/p/BR31UtOlCLn/. 7 @anitahitta, Twitter post, March 20, 2017. https://twitter.com/anitahitta/status/843792640399368192. 8 Kelsey Steck, (@kelseysteck), Twitter post, March 19, 2017, 1:51 p.m. https://twitter.com/kelseysteck/status/843565667588739072 9 Bowles, Nellie, “The Mainstreaming of Political Memes Online,” The New York Times, February 14, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/09/technology/political- memes-go-mainstream.html 10 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 206. 11 Rob Weir, “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells,” RobWeir.com, January 9, 2006. https://www.robweir.com/blog/2006/01/jingle-bells-batman-smells.html. (accessed March 3, 2019). 12 Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 109. 13 Katherine Blashki and Sophie Nichol, “Game Geek’s Goss: Linguistic Creativity In Young Males Within An Online University Forum (94/\/\3 933k’5 9055oneone),” Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society 3, no.2 (2005). 82. 14 Whitney Phillips, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015), 143-144. 15 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 16 Ibid, 44. 17 Ibid. 18 Ryan M. Milner, The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016), 5. 19 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979). 20 Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). 21 Pierre Bourdieu, “Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction,” in Power and Ideology in Education, edited by A.H. Halsey & Jerome Karabel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) 22 Thornton, Club Cultures.
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23 Asaf Nissenbaum and Limor Shifman, “Internet memes as contested cultural capital: The case of 4chan’s /b/ board,” New Media & Society 19, no. 4 (2015). 24 Phillips, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, 139. 25 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger & Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). 26 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text no. 25/26 (1990), 56-80. 27 danah boyd, “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications” in A Networked Self, edited by Zizi Papacharissi (New York: Routledge, 2011), 39. 28 Ibid. 29 Thornton, Club Cultures, 117. 30 @existentialcoms, Twitter post, June 29, 2018, 11:33 a.m., https://twitter.com/existentialcoms/status/1012765916377968640 31 Tiziana Terranova, "Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy," Social Text 18, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 49. 32 Nissenbaum & Shifman, “Internet memes as contested cultural capital,” 484. 33 Denny’s (@dennysdiner), Twitter post, February 15, 2019, 2:36 p.m., https://twitter.com/dennysdiner/status/1096538644926455808 34 Stuart Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During (London: Routledge, 1973). 35 Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” 101-103 36 @charles_kinbote, Twitter post, July 16, 2017, 4:12 p.m. https://twitter.com/charles_kinbote/status/886725344170049537. 37 Milner, The World Made Meme, 48 38 Ibid, 49. 39 Henry Jenkins, Mizuko Ito, and danah boyd, Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 10. 40 Ibid. 41 Alice Marwick and danah boyd, “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience,” New Media & Society 13, no. 1, (February 2011): 114–33. 42 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 11. 43 @memedocumentation, “What’s a Meme?,” Tumblr Post, February 28, 2015. https://memedocumentation.tumblr.com/definition 44 Milner, The World Made Meme, 105. 45 Casually Explained, “Casually Explained: Memes,” Youtube video, 7:30, September 11, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJTSxRBbCQA.
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46 Knowyourmeme, “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?,” last modified December 2017. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-do-you-do-fellow-kids. (accessed 22 November, 2018). 47 Reddit, “#FellowKids,” reddit.com/r/FellowKids, https://old.reddit.com/r/FellowKids/. (accessed 23 November, 2018). 48 @thefran, Reddit post, April 26, 2017, 2:17 p.m, comment on @kevlaryarmulke, “me irl.” https://www.reddit.com/r/meirl/comments/67nrbq/me_irl/. 49 Nicole Galluci, “9 tweets that killed the internet's favorite memes,” Mashable, September 23, 2017. https://mashable.com/2017/09/23/tweets-that-killed-beloved-memes/#CcO12d0Qtqqu. (accessed November 24, 2018). 50@jolly_rancher, Twitter post, May 6, 2016, 10:25 a.m. https://twitter.com/jolly_rancher/status/728636759953842176?lang=en. 51 KnowYourMeme, “Dat Boi,” updated June 26, 2018. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dat- boi. (accessed February 12, 2019). 52 Steck (@kelseysteck), Twitter post. 53 Tiziana Terranova, "Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy," Social Text 18, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 33-58. 54 Ibid. 55 Michael Carney (@carneymichael), Twitter post, March 17, 2017, 8:11 p.m. https://twitter.com/carneymichael/status/842936565009661953. 56 Henry Jenkins. Textual Poachers, Updated Twentieth Anniversary Edition (New York: Routledge, 2013), xxvii. 57 Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014), 15. 58 Barre Toelken. Dynamics Of Folklore (Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 1996), 34. 59 Ibid, 8. 60 Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner, The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 28.
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61 @andhumanslovedstories, “Denny’s is an early adopter of the corporatization of memes and is an atypical representative of that phenomenon...,” Tumblr post, July 15, 2015, 7:07 p.m. http://andhumanslovedstories.tumblr.com/post/124191760081/tedathon-margotkim-ah-i-see-the- breadsticks. 62 Alice Oh, “The Rise of Memes as an Art Form,” Art Zealous, September 11, 2017. https://artzealous.com/the-rise-of-memes-as-an-art-form/. (accessed 25 November, 2018). 63 @cryptmutt, Tumblr post, April 2018, comment on @droidz, Tumblr post, April 2018, http://cryptmutt.tumblr.com/post/173158003705/me-opens-a-package-and-sets-the-box-aside- my. 64 Phillips and Milner, The Ambivalent Internet, 28. 65 9news, “‘Don’t buy $19 smashed avocado’: Melbourne property tycoon hammers millennials over spending habits,” 9 News, May 15, 2017. https://www.9news.com.au/national/2017/05/15/08/39/melbourne-property-tycoon-hammers- millennials-over-spending-habits. (accessed November 27, 2018). 66 Murtaza Hussain (@mazmhussain), Twitter post, May 15, 2017, 12:31 p.m. https://twitter.com/mazmhussain/status/864201688101658627. 67 Annie Nova, “Here’s why millions of millennials are not homeowners,” CNBC, August 19, 2018. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/09/millions-of-millennials-are-locked-out-of- homeownership-heres-why.html (accessed November 27, 2018). 68 Toelken. Dynamics Of Folklore, 8. 69 Phillips and Milner, The Ambivalent Internet, 25-26. 70 @ch000ch, Twitter post, April 2, 2018, 9:52 p.m. https://twitter.com/ch000ch/status/981031601185415168. 71 Jenkins, Textual Poachers, xxvii. 72 Marika Lüders, “Conceptualizing personal media,” New Media & Society 10, no. 5 (2008). 695. 73 @wendys, Twitter post, January 3, 2017, 11:17 a.m., reply to @jasonyerex, Twitter post, https://twitter.com/Wendys/status/816362961367351296 74 Nick Wilson (@nickwilson), Twitter post, July 16, 2017, 10:01 p.m., comment on @charles_kinbote “Me: brands are not your friends, this is just an extension of the toxicity of capitalism...” https://twitter.com/Shaken_Bacon/status/886813119124832256. 75 Ryan Parker (@ryanparker), “Disney just deleted the “dead inside” tweet.,” Twitter post, April 9, 2018, 8:08 a.m., comment on Disney, “Makes no difference who you are.,” https://twitter.com/TheRyanParker/status/983361014736420864. 76 Elizabeth Bruenig, “Why is millennial humor so weird?,” The Washington Post, August 11, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/why-is-millennial-humor-so- weird/2017/08/11/64af9cae-7dd5-11e7-83c7-5bd5460f0d7e_story.html. (accessed November 28, 2018). 77 @aoiph, Twitter post, April 9, 2018, 7:31 a.m. https://twitter.com/aoiph/status/983351611941642240. 78 A.H. Weinberger, M. Gbedemah, A. M. Martinez, D. Nash, S. Galea, and R. D. Goodwin. “Trends in Depression Prevalence in the USA from 2005 to 2015: Widening Disparities in Vulnerable Groups.” Psychological Medicine 48, no. 8 (2018): 1308–15. 79 Terranova, "Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” 38. 80 Marika Lüders, “Conceptualizing personal media,” 695.
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81 Marwick and boyd, “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately,” 119. 82 Peter Cassidy, “Why UGC Is The Key To Authenticity & Consumer Influence,” Stackla, November 10, 2017. https://stackla.com/resources/blog/why-ugc-is-key-to-authenticity- consumer-influence/. (accessed November 22, 2018). 83 @bosoxdanc, “God, this is really meta... and I like it,” Reddit post, May 26, 2016. https://np.reddit.com/r/FellowKids/comments/4l5lot/god_this_is_really_meta_and_i_like_it/ 84 @lexunit, reply to @bosoxdanc, Reddit post, May 26, 2016. 85 @gautedasuta, reply to @bosoxdanc, Reddit post, May 26, 2016. 86 @mrfizzle1 reply to @bosoxdanc, Reddit post, May 26, 2016. 87 @G19Gen3 reply to @bosoxdanc, Reddit post, May 26, 2016. 88 Nate Goldman (@NateGoldman), Twitter post, May 28, 2018, 1:41 p.m., https://twitter.com/NateGoldman/status/1001201803617341440 89 Wendy’s (@Wendys), Twitter post, March 15, 2018, 1:26 p.m., https://twitter.com/Wendys/status/970772499582672896 90 Potbelly (@Potbelly), Twitter post, October 11, 2018, 5:42 p.m., https://twitter.com/Potbelly/status/1050547241545596931 91 @happy_cylinder, Twitter post, October 12, 2018, 7:51 a.m., https://twitter.com/happy_cylinder/status/1050760840134053888 92 @dennys, “college is, like, really important...,” Tumblr post, May 1, 2015, 4:45 p.m., http://blog.dennys.com/post/117893466122/college-is-like-really-important-but-if-you 93 Statista, “Distribution of Tumblr users in the United States as of December 2016, by age group,” Statista. 2016. https://www.statista.com/statistics/244209/age-distribution-of-tumblr- users-in-the-united-states/ . 94 Twitter Marketing (@TwitterMktg), Twitter post, January 20, 2019, 7:56 a.m., https://twitter.com/TwitterMktg/status/1087015938845822978 95 Isabel (@ICorona23), Twitter post, January 22, 2019, 12:58 p.m., https://twitter.com/ICorona23/status/1087816747363774464 96 Yesey (@itsyesey), Twitter post, January 20, 2019, 8:46 p.m., https://twitter.com/itsyesey/status/1087209918313058304 97 Totenberg, Nina, “When Did Companies Become People? Excavating The Legal Evolution,” NPR. July 28, 2014. https://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/335288388/when-did-companies-become- people-excavating-the-legal-evolution 98 Sarah Z, “The Late Capitalism of Fast Food Twitter,” Youtube video, 16:00 – 18:00, October 1, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6bLq4466LM 99 @soyvietunion, Twitter Post, February 13, 2019, 11:03 a.m., https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1095760419078033408 100 @ILaughAtSBubbyMemes, “I hate myself this is semi funny,” Reddit post, December 5, 2018.https://www.reddit.com/r/FellowKids/comments/a3bnw8/i_hate_myself_this_is_semi_funn y/ 101 @JustANutMeg, “Have to admit it did get a chuckle from me,” Reddit post, September 12, 2018.https://www.reddit.com/r/FellowKids/comments/9f6592/have_to_admit_it_did_get_a_chuc kle_from_me/ 102 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992), 3-7. 103 Marika Lüders, “Conceptualizing personal media,” 696.
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104 Alex Norris, “Businesses on social media,” webcomicname, April 26, 2017. http://www.webcomicname.com (Accessed March 31, 2019). 105 @leviathan-supersystem, “it seems like there isn’t any meme that Denny’s won’t try to jack...” Tumblr post, April 23, 2017. http://leviathan- supersystem.tumblr.com/post/159919286619/it-seems-there-isnt-any-meme-that-dennys-wont 106 @memedocumentation, “Explained: John C. Miller Meme,” Tumblr post, April 24, 2017. https://memedocumentation.tumblr.com/post/159962064735/explained-john-c-miller-meme 107 @dennys, “tumblr: we are a capitalist running dog...,” Tumbr post, April 25, 2017. http://blog.dennys.com/post/159991129938/tumblr-we-are-a-capitalist-running-dog 108 @blueturnsgold, “calling out the CEO of dennys...,” Tumblr post, April 26, 2017. Reblogged to @memedocumentation, April 26, 2017. https://memedocumentation.tumblr.com/post/160033786115/bluesturngold-calling-out-the-ceo- of-dennys-for 109 @an-average-sized-person, Tumblr post, April 25, 2017. Reblogged to @memedocumentation, April 25, 2017. https://memedocumentation.tumblr.com/post/160001533365/shitpostingleftist-an-average-sized- person 110 @noesa, Tumblr post, April 26, 2017, 3:19 p.m. http://noesa.tumblr.com/post/160021597702 111 Anderson, Monica et. al., “Activism in the Social Media Age,” Pew Research Center, July 11, 2018. https://www.pewinternet.org/2018/07/11/activism-in-the-social-media-age/ 112 @brandssayingbae, Twitter account, accessed February 2, 2019. https://twitter.com/BrandsSayingBae 113 Nissenbaum & Shifman, “Internet memes as contested cultural capital,” 494-5. 114 Ibid, 495. 115 Netflix Canada (@Netflix_CA), Twitter post, February 13, 2019, 8:05 a.m., https://twitter.com/netflix_ca/status/1095715650109140993?lang=en 116 Twitter, “About verified accounts.” https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about- twitter-verified-accounts (accessed April 1, 2019). 117 Alice Marwick and danah boyd, “To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 17, no. 2 (2011): 145. 118 Ibid, 114. 119 Ibid. 120 Nissenbaum & Shifman, “Internet memes as contested cultural capital,” 498. 121 Ibid, 488. 122 Phillips, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, 138 123 Silva, Daniella. “Pepe the Frog Is Dead: Creator Kills Off Meme Absorbed by Far-Right,” NBC News, May 8, 2017. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/pepe-frog-dead-creator- kills-meme-absorbed-far-right-n756281 124 Phillips, This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, 97. 125 Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies, (United Kingdom: Zero Books, 2017). 126 Ibid, 139. 127 Ibid. 128 KnowYourMeme, “KnowYourMeme.” last modified April 7, 2019. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/knowyourmeme (accessed April 8, 2019).
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129 KnowYourMeme, “Surreal Memes.” last modified July 1, 2018. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/surreal-memes (accessed April 8, 2019). 130 Reddit. “surrealmemes.” https://www.reddit.com/r/surrealmemes/, (accessed April 8, 2019). 131 Bryan, Chloe, “Surreal memes deserve their own internet dimension,” Mashable, February 6, 2019. https://mashable.com/article/surreal-memes/#YoF9Wem8tsqp 132 Ibid. 133 @MC_Labs15, “How to become an approved submitter in /r/surrealmemes,” Reddit post, December 2, 2017. https://www.reddit.com/r/SurrealApprovals/comments/7h16lx/how_to_become_an_approved_su bmitter_in/ 134 Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, 143-144. 135 Matsakis, Louise, “Surreal Memes Are the Last Escape the Internet Has,” Motherboard. July 1, 2017. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xwz833/surreal-memes-are-the-last-escape- the-internet-has 136 Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, 139. 137 Sung, Morgan, “The only good thing left on Facebook is private meme groups,” Mashable. August 9, 2018. https://mashable.com/article/weird-facebook-specific-meme-groups/ 138 Ibid. 139 Ibid. 140 Zuckerberg, Mark, “Building Global Community,” Facebook post, February 16, 2017. https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global- community/10154544292806634 141 Hutchinson, Andrew, “Facebook Puts Out Call for Next Communities Summit,” SocialMediaToday, October 17, 2018. https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebook-puts- out-call-for-next-communities-summit/539828/ 142 Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme Stash (@berniesandersmemes), “About This Group,” Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/groups/berniesandersmemes/about/ (accessed April 9, 2019). 143 Anne, Facebook post in private group, March 8, 2019. https://www.facebook.com/groups/winemoms/permalink/787364871649283/ (accessed April 9, 2019). 144 Jon, “LOL! A fashion trend I can get behind!...,” Facebook post in private group, March 5, 2019. https://www.facebook.com/groups/winemoms/permalink/785610185158085/ (accessed April 9, 2019). 145 Wine Memes for Wine Moms (@winemoms), “About This Group,” Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/groups/winemoms/about/ (accessed April 9, 2019). 146 Ellen, “Capitalism drains us all AM I RIGHT LADIES,” Facebook post in private group, January 10, 2019. https://www.facebook.com/groups/winemoms/permalink/753221361730301/ (accessed April 9, 2019). 147 Marwick and boyd, “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately,” 119. 148 @Gettheskinnywithgeorgetta, “Apparently if you drink wine, you can do crafts!...,” Facebook post, February 7, 2014. https://www.facebook.com/Gettheskinnywithgeorgetta/photos/a.629254460455855/6626063737 87330/?type=3&theater (accessed April 14, 2019). 149 Sandserif, @sandserifcomics, Instagram post, September 25, 2018. https://www.instagram.com/p/BoJuVXyF7P8/
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150 Sassy Socialist Memes (@SassySocialistMemes), Facebook post, January 26, 2019. https://www.facebook.com/sassysocialistmemes/photos/a.1393581200962840/22714156365127 21/?type=3&theater (accessed April 2, 2019). 151 Gillette, “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be | Gillette (Short Film),” Youtube video, January 13, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koPmuEyP3a0 152 Handley, Lucy, “Super Bowl draws lowest TV audience in more than a decade, early data show,” CNBC. February 5, 2019. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/05/super-bowl-draws-lowest- tv-audience-in-more-than-a-decade-nielsen.html 153 KnowYourMeme, “Seize the Means of Production,” last updated March 20, 2017. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/seize-the-means-of-production. (accessed March 31, 2019). 154 KnowYourMeme, “We Have Nothing to Lose But Our Chains,” last updated July 3, 2018. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-have-nothing-to-lose-but-our-chains. (accessed April 1, 2019) 155 KnowYourMeme, “Late Capitalism,” last updated January 25, 2018. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/late-capitalism. (accessed April 1, 2019). 156 Thomas Milton Kemnitz, “The Cartoon as a Historical Source,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4, no. 1 (Summer 1973): 84-85. 157 Rachel V. Kutz-Flamenbaum, “Humor and Social Movements,” Sociology Compass 8, no. 3 (2014). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/soc4.12138 158 Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 136 159 @leviathan-supersystem, “why did so many people interpret my intention as being that they wouldn’t try to use it,” Tumblr post, April 27, 2017. http://leviathan- supersystem.tumblr.com/post/160056923549/cometdragon6-leviathan-supersystem-it-seems 160 Ballantyne, Hannah, “How Meme Culture Is Getting Teens into Marxism,” Broadly. April 27, 2017. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/7xz8kb/how-meme-culture-is-getting-teens-into- marxism 161 Jenkins, Ito, and boyd, Participatory Culture in a Networked Era, 93 162 Ibid. 163 Mizuki Ito et. al., Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010). 164 Ibid, 350-352. 165 Ibid. 166 Ibid. 167 Newport, Frank, “Democrats More Positive About Socialism Than Capitalism,” Gallup, August 13, 2018, https://news.gallup.com/poll/240725/democrats-positive-socialism- capitalism.aspx 168 Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen), Twitter post, December 11, 2018, 10:49 a.m. https://twitter.com/brandyljensen/status/1072564109017800705. 169 Molly Priddy (@mollypriddy), Twitter post, December 11, 2018, 10:50 a.m. https://twitter.com/mollypriddy/status/1072564267084337153. 170 Steak-Umm (@steak_umm), Twitter post, January 20, 2019, 8:21 p.m., https://twitter.com/steak_umm/status/1087203602228232192. 171 Bryan, Chloe, “Surreal memes deserve their own internet dimension.” 172 Terranova, Free Labor, 39.
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