Carbon Chemist

Tag: memes

  • The Trademark Tug-of-War Over ‘Demure’ Shows a Massive Meme Power Shift

    The Trademark Tug-of-War Over ‘Demure’ Shows a Massive Meme Power Shift

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    All of this underscores that, unlike 10 or 15 years ago, there is now a greater understanding that “content creation is labor,” says Kate Miltner, a lecturer in data, AI, and society at the University of Sheffield’s Information School. “It is time-consuming and often poorly remunerated labor for the most part,” but far more people make entire careers out of being content creators than a decade ago, Miltner adds, “and it feels like an ethics of plagiarism, in addition to trademark/copyright, have come into play.”

    Simply put, people get this shit now. A decade after “on fleek,” creators are much smarter when it comes to ownership of their creations. “A series of conversations and discourses about cultural appropriation and where a lot of contemporary (online) language comes from (Black communities, queer communities) have happened since Peaches Monroee,” Miltner says. Lebron may have felt like she dropped the ball because of a lack of resources, but the resources she did have were other creators who knew how to call out what had happened. She also had companies like Netflix, which—perhaps anticipating blowback for just hopping on a viral trend—just asked that Lebron curate a “Very Demure, Very Mindful” list.

    The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to TikTok.

    Will this happen every time? No. Memes built from everyday language will always be hard to trademark—Miltner cites Fox Media’s unsuccessful attempt to trademark “OK Boomer” as an example. But now that even Hawk Tuah Girl has merch, the possibilities of getting credit for your meme, or even cash, don’t seem as unlikely as they did before. Might your meme get ingested and reinterpreted by an artificial intelligence bot? Yes. Will that bot be able to make a T-shirt? Er, well, that might happen, too. Creators, especially minority creators, will always have to fight to keep control of their works once they’ve been unleashed onto the world. Now, though, they have a few more coaches in their corner.

    Loose Threads

    Leave Chappell a-Roan. After speaking up about her fans’ “weird shit” on Drew Afualo’s podcast The Comment Section in June, pop star Chappell Roan took to TikTok to post a pair of videos thoughtfully asking her followers to just stop with all the uncool behavior. “I don’t care that abuse and harassment, stalking, whatever, is a normal thing to do to people who are famous or a little famous or whatever,” Roan said. The videos now have a combined 27 million views and are garnering Roan praise for being the rare celebrity who can set boundaries with fans.

    Silence of the Lambs as a romantic comedy. The title says it all. This idea has actually been around for quite some time—since, like, 2017, maybe? But it’s making the rounds again. Perhaps because Donald Trump keeps talking about Hannibal Lecter.

    BritPop is not optimized for SEO success. So says this Thread, which points out band names like Oasis, Blur, and Pulp aren’t very unique in Google’s eyes. Still seems like people will be able to find out about the Oasis reunion and upcoming tour, though.

    The humbleness of Glen Powell. An anonymous producer recently told The Wrap that Glen Powell is the kind of movie star that gets people to go see movies, “unlike Ryan Gosling whose appeal is mostly limited to female audiences.” Powell replied with a tweet referencing Gosling’s iconic Barbie song, saying, “Gosling is a legend. I’m just Glen.”



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  • The Australian Breaker Who Broke the Internet

    The Australian Breaker Who Broke the Internet

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    Before some of them were taken down, the memes about Australian Olympic breaker Rachael Gunn, aka Raygun, were all about poking fun. Videos of her flipping around or kangaroo hopping on the competition floor at the Paris Summer Games were accompanied by captions like “what my nephew does after telling all of us to ‘watch this’” or images of Gunn spinning next to images of Homer Simpson doing the same. The cringe was endless.

    It was also only the beginning. As the internet does what it does and made jabs about Gunn’s performance—she ultimately won no medals and didn’t earn a single point—it also did the other thing it does and went down a rabbit hole on how exactly someone with less-than-stellar skills managed to represent Australia in the Olympics.

    That’s when things got complicated.

    Fairly quickly after the Olympics breakdancing competition ended, controversy began to swirl as to how Gunn, a cultural studies professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, made it to the Games. People began to question her bona fides, her relationship to the Australian Breaking Association, and whether or not her performance was an insult to breaking. Someone even started a Change.org petition asking for an investigation into what happened and whether Gunn’s participation meant a less privileged dancer didn’t get a shot.

    According to a Vox report, the malfeasance allegations against Gunn are largely unfounded. Some breakers in Australia and beyond even rallied to her defense. Still others in her home country noted the side effects of the situation were rough, telling The Guardian that Gunn’s performance could affect the ability of other dancers in Australia to get support.

    “How do I go to work now and try to get our sponsorship and get our grant money for breaking programs [for a sport] that’s just been made a mockery of?” Leah Clark, who runs a dance studio in Brisbane, asked the outlet. “This is actually affecting us on a much larger scale than just memes.”

    What this represents is actually a sizable disconnect online. As the past week wore on, Gunn took to Instagram on Thursday to post a video saying she didn’t realize competing in the Olympics would “open the door to so much hate,” calling the experience “devastating.” Harassment is already a huge problem online, but in situations like this, it becomes too easy for genuine criticisms to get drowned out by quick jokes and hot takes.

    There is merit to interrogating what role Gunn’s privilege played in securing her spot—if nothing else, she could afford to participate in qualifying events which may have been out of reach for some—and larger questions about cultural appropriation in breaking. (“Raygun Deserves an Olympic Gold Medal for Colonizing Breakdancing,” read the headline in The Grio. There are also several threads out there on this topic, and I encourage you to read them.) Those questions are being raised in several places, but chances are you might not see them until you’ve watched a few spoofs or reaction vids first.



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  • How Camo Hats Became an Instant Meme

    How Camo Hats Became an Instant Meme

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    On Tuesday, when Vice President Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz to be her running mate in her bid for US president, she commemorated it by sharing a video of her calling the Minnesota governor and asking him if he’d like to join her campaign. In the clip, he appears in a T-shirt, khakis, white sneakers, and a camouflage baseball cap.

    In politics, this is known as “appealing to the base”—looking like an average (yet electable) American. For pop culture followers, it was known as “appealing to Chappell Roan stans.” Over the last year, during the singer’s meteoric rise, Roan has been selling camo caps emblazoned with “Midwest Princess” in orange block letters. Once Walz officially joined the ticket, the campaign began selling a similar hat with “Harris Walz” on it.

    Soon, everyone wanted to know: Has Chappell seen this?

    Eventually, she did. Later on Tuesday she reposted an image on X showing a side-by-side comparison of her hat and the Harris campaign’s with the caption “Is this real[?]”

    Indeed it was, and according to reporting from my colleagues at Teen Vogue, the 3,000 hats that were initially made sold out in 30 minutes. Close to $1 million worth of hats have now been sold, officially making it a liberal status symbol. As the hat, and its similarities to Roan’s merch, began to spread, the jokes sprang to life.

    “This is the Bushwick x Los Feliz unity our nation needs,” wrote podcast and TV personality Desus Nice, referring to the hip enclaves in New York and Los Angeles, respectively. Wall Street Journal tech columnist Christopher Mims shared Roan’s tweet on Threads saying, “Chappell Roan posting the Harris-Walz camo hat is some kind of Gen Z inception.”

    You say “inception,” others say “reclaiming the narrative.” Yes, the hat could be a subtle (or not subtle) attempt by the Harris-Walz campaign to get a Roan endorsement. When President Biden was still running for reelection, she’d turned down an opportunity to play a Pride event at the White House, and so maybe the hat was a move to make her reconsider. (A rep for Roan didn’t respond to a request for comment.) It could also be an attempt to make camo do for Harris-Walz what red has done for Donald Trump.

    In the years since Trump started wearing them, the red Make America Great Again hat has become a symbol of not only Trump’s campaigns for the US presidency, but also for the values he and the GOP stand for. Red hats became symbols, memes of their own. Kanye West wore one to the White House; supporters wear them at rallies.

    The language of the MAGA cap also became something translatable. The Strand bookstore in New York made a line of hats that said “Make America Read Again” (albeit in white); in 2020, LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers wore red caps that read “Make America Great Again Arrest the Cops Who Killed Breonna Taylor.”

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  • Roaring Kitty Is Playing With Fire

    Roaring Kitty Is Playing With Fire

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    Gill did not face charges then, but this time could be different. The securities regulator for the state of Massachusetts has already confirmed it is looking into Gill’s recent conduct, without providing specifics. It would appearthat Gill is aware of the risk of provoking an SEC investigation, too. On May 16, he posted a clip of a CNBC interview in which Jay Clayton, former SEC chair, expressed the view that his conduct should not be tolerated. The SEC declined to comment on the existence of an investigation.

    At the start of Gill’s YouTube livestream, a long disclaimer scrolled up the screen like the Star Wars opening crawl. “You should not treat any opinion expressed on this Youtube [sic] channel as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy,” it read. As Gill bantered with his YouTube viewers—all 600,000 of them—the price of GameStop stock briefly rose. “Shit, look at this. It’s going up,” he said. “Do I have to be careful what I say here? I don’t really know.”

    It might seem self-evident that Gill’s posts, cryptic as they may be, have caused a rise in the price of GameStop stock from which he stands to profit, as a stockholder. But absent a full history of his trading, it is difficult to assess whether he has actually violated securities laws, says Richard Schulman, partner at law firm Adler & Stachenfeld. “It’s never entirely clear until the facts are fully formed,” he says.

    But Gill has given regulators plenty to dig into. “Was his purpose to influence the movement of stock price? Did he, in fact, affect demand for the stock? Will he profit from these activities? These are the kinds of issues a regulator will want to investigate,” says Schulman. The answers could determine whether Gill faces a formal investigation.

    Specifically, Gill could find himself in trouble when his call options expire on June 21, leaving him with a decision: should he sell his options at a profit, if the stock price remains high, or take delivery of the GameStop shares they represent? Having made his position public, says Bragança, Gill is required under a little-understood facet of securities law to provide his audience with advance warning of any sales, even if doing so would jeopardize profits. “The problem is when you change your position,” says Bragança. “Before you sell, you’d better tell the marketplace. Most people on social media don’t think that way. The initial [social] posts are not the thing that is going to get him in trouble—it’s the stuff we can’t see.”

    Gill may question how his conduct differs from any other pundit that offers stock tips, or chief executive who talks up their company. And he could have a point. There is an extent to which Gill is flirting with gray areas in the securities rulebook, devised long before someone imagined an influencer in a position to swing the market with a single tweet.

    But the SEC has typically contended that the rules are sufficiently malleable to allow for mutations of age-old violations to be dealt with. “Market manipulation is not necessarily a rigid concept,” says Schulman. “The SEC is not unused to trying to apply concepts to new situations in the world that has developed.”

    The SEC has not made public its thinking, but former chair Clayton, in the interview with CNBC, implied the agency will be eager to prevent further volatility in the price of GameStop, which risks imposing large scale losses on investors. One way to do that would be to bring cases against an individual that it considers has wielded social influence in an illegal way, with the aim of deterring others from doing the same. “It’s like Aesop’s fables,” says Bragança. “We’re telling a story. You should take a moral from it.”

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  • AI Killed Images. Legacy Russell Knows How We Can Revive Them

    AI Killed Images. Legacy Russell Knows How We Can Revive Them

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    Think of a collector who is writing a postcard to a loved one from a position of endearment, and on the other side of this correspondence, they are sharing an image of someone being brutally murdered.

    We should be asking about similar models of engagement and complicity that are enacted in this moment now when we are looking at things via our screen, exchanging materials of violence against Bblack people. The question, really, is how that is sustained by a broader public as part of the economy of the internet.

    Because of the rate at which Black images move on the internet, so swiftly robbed of all context, is there a way to reclaim ownership over them?

    Part of the interest in writing Black Meme, and having it exist as a physical [book] away from our screens, was the idea of creating slow media. So the slow media that has then intersected with the accelerated media of now—cyberspace and digital space—is very critical because part of this discussion is about a mitigation of speed.

    What happens when things are circulated and compressed in a mass acceleration, when many things are being perceived as copies of copies? Images are degrading over time. Often we are not seeing them for what they are. We’re seeing them as a contour instead of actually better understanding and situating the truth that lives inside that transmission. What I am proposing is a need to engage a different model of thought around the transmission of Black culture, as well Black people and their representation through and beyond our screens.

    The inverse of slow media is our current reality. We are bombarded with media at all times. The velocity is constant and unpredictable. What is the danger in how social media, specifically digital spaces like Instagram or TikTok, has shaped our understanding of how memes live or die?

    It’s important to ask questions about the sustainability of the Black meme.

    Sustainability, yes.

    Vine in particular was a place where a lot of Black people were creating space and community, as well as engaging performative action. I call it performative action because it came in different forms of sonic engagement, movement, and models of gesture. The very idea of Vine was essentially a site where Black people were putting this to good use and then it reached a point where it couldn’t sustain itself any longer, and thereafter was the rise of Instagram. Now TikTok is part of that broader equation, that brief and furious history.

    Platforms like TikTok are increasingly under scrutiny because they are being used as sites of organizing and exchange for and by people of color across many different diasporas. As the economies shift around that space, certain platforms fail to exist or collapse altogether, the question becomes who is that impacting?

    Generative AI seeks to automate every part of our lives. In Black Meme, you call for royalties and reparations around those issues. What does this mean for the images that we will increasingly encounter, specifically within the Black visual medium? Are they under threat or is a new window opening?

    That’s a big question. It might be useful to complicate rather than simplify.

    Ok.

    As we’ve seen with early histories of digital automation, there have been many think pieces written around the feminization of automated labor, and what that looks like. Be that the feminized frame of Alexa or Siri. Aspects of these technologies exist within the gender and class economy, and also the race economy, although that’s spoken about less frequently. There has always been an imprint that is gendered inside of technologies as a means of making them familiar to us.

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  • Truth Social Can’t Meme Its Way Into Becoming the Next Gamestop

    Truth Social Can’t Meme Its Way Into Becoming the Next Gamestop

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    On Reddit and Truth Social, users have been trying to recreate the meme stock magic for Trump Media and Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social, that boosted companies like Gamestop in 2021. So far, they haven’t been too successful.

    Truth Social, former President Donald Trump’s Twitter copycat, lacks two essential ingredients to the narrative of previous campaigns: underlying fundamentals and the foil of institutional investors. Large hedge funds had shorted Gamestop, betting the price would go down. This time, the stock is primarily owned by retail investors.

    Unlike other social media companies, the company doesn’t disclose how many users it has, but has previously said just 9 million people have signed up for the site, compared with over three billion monthly active users on Facebook. TruthSocial visitors have declined from 5.4 million in January to around 5 million in February, according to web analytics firm SimilarWeb. The site’s lack of users has contributed to poor financial performance.

    On the Wallstreetbets subreddit, home of meme stock boosterism, most users aren’t buying what Truth Social is selling.

    “If you invest in this on a long enough timeline you will lose everything. Thus is strictly a movement play,” wrote Reddit user Rich4718. “If you think Donald Trump is going to create an income positive social media platform you are an absolute fucking moron.”

    The company started trading publicly last week recently, and has already experienced wild swings in price. On Monday, the stock slid nearly 20 percent, erasing $2 billion in value.

    In a filing on Monday, the company said it had just over $4 million in revenue and $58 million in net losses. This comes after the auditor for Trump Media and Technology Group made a startling admission: the company’s losses “raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue,” according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 25.

    And yet, the company is valued at around $7 billion, despite reporting these sizable losses. The valuation is propped up in part by Trump fans who see investing in the company as a way to support the former president. In some cases, these investors hold a genuine belief that Truth Social could become a major social media player.

    Albert Choi, a professor of Law at the University of Michigan, says investors in Trump Media may be motivated by factors beyond traditional financial logic, like boosting the price through generating hype.

    “If that’s your primary motivating factor, then you’re not going to care too much about whether the company is actually making money,” says Choi.

    “I believe DJT is an investment in Donald Trump, not just Truth Social,” Reddit user autsauce, who declined to share their real name, tells WIRED. “If market participants start asking that question, which I am betting they will, they will likely arrive at a very different price valuing Truth Social in a silo.”

    Choi noted that Trump winning the Presidential election could actually hurt the company’s stock, as investors’ perceived need to support the former president financially by investing could fade.

    “My guess is that the interest in the stock would largely disappear,” Choi said.

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  • Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ Meets Online Fandom at the Crossroads

    Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ Meets Online Fandom at the Crossroads

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    There’s a nasty not-so-secret secret no one likes to talk about, so it’s best to start there: Black women are among the most hated demographic worldwide. In America especially, anti-Blackness is the air. It’s everywhere even when you can’t see it. From the ivory halls of Washington to c-suites at Fortune 500 companies, Blackness is treated as less than. And because that is how it works and how it has worked generation after generation, not even Beyoncé, currently the most commanding force in music, can escape the fangs of misogynoir.

    Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: A Black woman was told she did not belong, that she was not welcome into a certain space, so she paved a path all her own. That’s the story Beyoncé recounted in an Instagram post in March, the day she announced her new country album Cowboy Carter. “The criticisms I faced when I first entered this genre forced me to propel past the limitations that were put on me,” she wrote. Unlike other musical genres, country is infamous in who it chooses to exclude, the genre’s history is rife with allegiances to the old ways of American prejudice, and no bearing or status can change that.

    The sweet irony, of course, is now we have Cowboy Carter, the second installment in a three-act project of historical and musical restoration Beyoncé began in 2022 with Renaissance, her dancefloor sendup to house music. She is on a mission to reclaim her time. Beyoncé is the rare artist who can pull off such a canny move because she now represents something bigger than music. She’s an industry unto herself: swaggering and audacious in reach, with a built-in fan base that anticipates every album drop, Instagram post, and product release. Whether you agree with the motivations behind her work or not—and there are valid criticisms to be made for artists who create at such a grand scale as her; mass influence in all arenas of life necessitates some level of questioning—there is no denying the fact: No other contemporary Black musician will bring more awareness to country’s gated meadowlands—its past, present, and possible futures—than Beyoncé. If nothing else, she gets people talking.

    “I’d like to actually thank the CMAs for pissing her off,” X user @gardenoutro wrote Friday morning, just past midnight, in the hour following the album’s official release, calling attention to Beyoncé’s her 2016 performance with the Chicks that was later shunned by Country Music Association members. Where Lemonade was scorned memoir and Renaissance flirted with fantasy—a disco-lit dreamscape where freedom and love have no inverse—Cowboy Carter unravels like autofiction: blending biography with novelistic flair on songs like “Daughter” and “Spaghettii.” It takes country music beyond. “It’s easy to listen to 27 tracks when they’re all good,” songwriter Rob Milton wrote on X.

    That’s the other thing about the Beyoncé Effect: there is no room for dissent in her universe. Online, and particularly across social media, a new album of hers is given billboard status. It is cause for celebration but rarely one for challenge or sharp inquiry.

    “A lot of people still want to join in with something larger than themselves. Fandom offers them a way to do that. It is not, though, entirely a utopian space,” says Mark Duffett, a professor at the University of Chester who researches fandom. “The concerns and issues that society has are mirrored in fan communities; they do not escape from being part of the wider social world.”

    As powerful as her music can be, the release of a new Beyoncé album exposes the fiction of a shared internet. There is not one but many. In its most intense form, fan logic thrives in isolation. On Beyoncé’s internet, as is the case for comparable fan cultures, logic finds comfort in the sideways geometry of the echo chamber. Its reasoning animorphs into blind zealotry, wagging its finger in the face of disagreement. Fan logic butts against balanced judgment. It has led Barbs (Nicki Minaj fans), Beliebers (Justin Beiber fans), Hive members (Beyoncé fans) and the like into a cycle of heated confrontation, and sometimes wild irrationality.



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  • No One Knows What TikTok Is

    No One Knows What TikTok Is

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    “Most of these push notifications went to minor children, and these minor children were flooding our offices with phone calls,” Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois told CBS News. “Basically they pick up the phone, call the office, and say, ‘What is a congressman? What is Congress?’ They had no idea what was going on.”

    Maybe TikTok won’t rapidly lose its relevance with young people after all.

    That’s not what Krishnamoorthi is worried about, but maybe he should be. Not because all of those Gen Zers will one day be able to vote, but because TikTok is their lifeline to the world, and they don’t know what a congressman is. TikTok is where a lot of young people have found their community, their voice, their income. Eradicating TikTok, like the killing off of Vine, rips up a piece of the social fabric.

    The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.

    Kayla Gratzer, a TikTok creator in Eugene, Oregon, who had a recent viral video about the mysterious pregnancy of Charlotte the stingray, noted that she would “hate to see the time, effort, and love gone into growing their platform be stripped away from them.” (Side note: Without TikTok, I may never know if, or when, Charlotte has her pups.)

    There is also something to the notion that some TikTokkers make a living while also being a part of the cultural discourse and zeitgeist. Alex Pearlman, known on the platform as @Pearlmania500, has built a large following thanks to his humorous TikTok rants. When I emailed him about the bill, he noted that, thanks to TikTok, he’d been able to launch a podcast, build a community, and book a nationwide comedy tour. It also provided the income he needed for the birth of his son in December.

    “If we had a functioning government,” he wrote. “I wouldn’t have had to yell on TikTok to be able to afford to start a family.”

    What happens next with the TikTok bill is something of a mystery. It needs to go to the US Senate, but the timing on that is uncertain. If it passes, President Joe Biden has said he’ll sign it. Steven Mnuchin, the former US treasury secretary, claims he’s assembling a group of investors to buy TikTok if the measure goes through.

    Watching all this unfold, I kept thinking about something Norman told me. As a biracial, bisexual person, she’s found a lot of her own corners of TikTok and remains unsure if she could just up and create that on another platform if the app gets blocked. Black people and queer people, she noted, already face censorship, so the question becomes, “Is there a future for me in America? That’s not really about how I am going to pivot on TikTok, but it’s more saying ‘Are there any areas in this country where I can exist?’”



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