Endless Thread - MEMES, Bonus: The Chorus

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

Amory and Ben team up with NPR to take on Twitter Spaces. This bonus episode is a recording of ET's 11/30 livestream chat with meme experts Kenyatta Cheese (Know Your Meme), "meme librarian" Amanda Brennan and Garbage Day newsletter author Ryan Broderick.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, our meme series, it is finally Dunnish. That's perfect. Perfect way to put it. Dunnish is in... Well, we might meme again. We could meme again. The meme writers could ride again, right? You never know when the meme riders will take flight. Does that mean we're riding on something that flies? I'm flying. If you want to

want to walk or drive, you go for it, but I'm flying. Good. But the is because we've released our last full meme episode as of last week. But today we have one kind of final installment, which is this Twitter spaces chat that we did with NPR, all about memes. And we were joined by a couple members of our meme chorus. So we had Amanda Brennan there, the meme librarian. We had Kenyatta Cheese, who's the co-founder of the site Know Your Meme. And then we had Ryan Broderick, who writes the newsletter Garbage Day, which is all about different internet-y things.

Yeah, and you should check out all of their work. And in the meantime, take a listen to all of us chatting about memes and about our season. To close out year of our memes 2021. Oh, yes. And what a year it's been. Is that offensive to say? Is that sacrilegious? Not to my meme lords. Kenyatta, Amanda, Ryan, thank you for hanging out with us today. Thanks for having us here.

Yeah, thank you. This is super fun. Amanda, I'll toss this to you first, which is just I think we should start with the baseline definition of a meme. What do you feel like is maybe the OG definition of a meme? And then obviously Kenyatta and Ryan, feel free to jump in as well. Yeah. So a meme is an idea, a piece of content. It's not just a picture with words on it.

It can be a type of phrase. It could be like vocal fry the way we talk about, the way we talk is a meme. But it spreads from person to person, changes and iterates along the way. Is there a difference between a meme definitionally and a modern day or an internet meme? And I'll let anyone jump in with that. Oh, I don't think so. I think internet memes are weirder and allow you to get more into a different kind of headspace.

But that's really the only difference. Yeah, I would say that there's a slight difference online because you can track them more clearly. So they tend to move faster. I always like the joke that the first meme I was ever aware of was when everyone in the 90s started wearing their baseball hats backwards for some reason. Yeah. Or like the first time I watched like people. at the Oklahoma State Fair do the Macarena, but I didn't know what the Macarena was yet. I feel like these sort of things are memes, but now online you can just very easily find out

why everyone is touching their arm in a certain spot on TikTok. Yeah. And I feel like that has an effect on them, but, you know, but they're more or less the same, yeah. Yeah, like 1877 cars for kids. Exactly. Kenyatta, can you, are you able to, I think I've heard, you chime in at different points a little bit here and there. Can you hear us? Can you talk? I can't hear you. Oh, beautiful. I wanted to ask you,

because you're kind of, you kind of introduced the general public to the idea of memes through Know Your Mem. This was like 2010 that Know Your Mem got started. Is that right? I actually don't remember anymore because time is a class circle, but it would be a little while ago. I mean, in internet years, it was like a century ago, but I think it was about a decade ago. And why did it occur to you a decade ago that this is something that should be catalogued, these internet means? So first, there were a bunch of folks who were already cataloging, who were sort of tracking internet memes, but they were sort of doing it in ways that were kind of inaccessible to the world, like in Psychopoeia Dramatica. I don't know if any of your folks remember that. And so the thing that we saw that we who were working in our community

at the time saw happening was that like other folks like us who were getting in there and being like, oh, here's some interesting thing. Here's something interesting happening in a meme world. Let me take it and bring it over here to like this work thing I'm doing. And then all of a sudden you saw a meme show up at like advertising. You saw a meme show up in all these sort of like places, professional places where people were making money off of them. but they weren't giving credit back to the community.

And so we thought that, hey, this is something, you know, if no one else isn't getting paid, we need to be the ones to do that. Kenyatta, one of the things, one of the poll quotes from the series that we've made on In This Thread that I love so much that came from you is that, and I hope I get it right here, it was in our episode about the Gregory Brothers.

I think you said, memes are the final boss level of appropriation. Yeah. they are the idea that nothing is sacred and not only can I take somebody else's joke, can I only kind of take somebody else's thought and somebody else's idea and like make a version of my own that is useful to the people who I'm in conversation with. Once you kind of get rid of that place, it becomes this thing where everybody can kind of borrow from one another and there's like cool, really, really great things about that.

but because we have all these like, you know, power dynamics that we haven't been able to figure out. It also means that, like, things can get a little messed up, right? When all of a sudden you're appropriating, when we see it all time, when artists appropriate things from, from cultures and spaces that there, that isn't theirs, right? And then, and then all of a sudden, you know, that's a, you know, that's a big, freaking issue. So it, and, you know, it's a lot of, but, you know, the approach that we've always had was a lot of, was a lot of, a lot of depends on whether or not you're of that culture first, whether or not you can contribute back, which means not necessarily having to be born into it,

but being able to contribute back to that culture in a way that allows you to pull stuff out. And, you know, when I look at all this, when I look at the state of like memes now, I feel like we see a lot more of that, which is great, right? Folks being realizing that, like, when I'm putting, when I'm appropriating this joke, this image, macro from over here in my private Facebook group, my private anti-vaccin Facebook group. I'm not in.

I'm not actually here. But whatever it is, right? And then I cross-post it over here, right? I cross-post it over here to Twitter. That I'm bringing some of the context within Jett. Yeah. Something that's going to come up, I mean, it's come up throughout our mean series, but I think it's going to come back for the episode that's coming out this Friday quite a bit

is the difference between a viral piece of content and a meme or a memetic piece of content. So who wants to take that one? What's the difference? What is the difference between something that goes viral and something that is a meme? Oh, boy. It's so tough because the line, for me, the line is that iteration. So I think if there is no remix or like someone making it their own, that's when it stays in that viral ether.

Yeah. Like, for instance, like, Alex from Target was, like, a viral thing. Yeah. But then there weren't more, like, cute Target boys. Like, it didn't become a meme. Whereas, like, the Harlem Shake was a viral song that then produced more videos of the dance. So I guess it's maybe the most academic framework I could provide for that. Ryan, can you tell us a little bit, this is backtracking a little bit, but I'm just curious,

I mean, it feels like you're logging this stuff every day or every other day or every week. You know, your newsletter has become essential reading for me, but can you talk about how memes factor into your work on garbage day? Like, how do you think about them, work with them, write about them? Is it really central to the sort of mission of the newsletter? So writing about memes, I think, is really hard, especially in a newsletter format because the best way to write about a meme is to kind of show it, right? So the way I kind of do it is like if I see a meme on two or more platforms, so like if I see the same meme happening on Tumblr and Twitter, I think, okay, so it's probably time to

explain it to like normal folks who just want to understand culture. and then there's like a bunch of those types of things that don't pass the test like they're like Amanda will definitely know this but there was a huge uh joke on tumbler recently called there are many benefits to being a marine biologist and I never it's impossible to explain and I never really wrote about it because I thought like okay there isn't a ton of public interest there you know it's like is this going to pop up in a Wendy's tweet a week from now and people are going to under like you know is is the nutter butter. account going to make a joke about this. Like, do I need to explain this for people? And that's sort of how I follow things just because I think that a lot of things now come through so fast that there's no real point in logging them in a newsletter. Obviously, you know your meme is doing like a directory of this and they're building this sort of like archive. But for a newsletter, it's sort of like I'm waiting for them to get to a certain size. There used to be this thing. I like the way you just like to train that because there's

to be the thing that we used to do. We used to say that well, because we couldn't do an entry on everything. And this is before, like, there was this, like, tremendous community that was there, kind of, like, finding interesting things happening, and then going ahead and, like, dropping the entry into the database, and then that everyone else could build on later, right?

Because anybody can go and contribute to it, which is great. But one of the things that was, one of the distinctions we tried making was, oh, has this jump from, like, place to place? Did it jump from Tumblr? over to like where all of a sudden it's showing up on deviant art in some weird way and if so it's like oh that sort of transmission from community community makes it feel like it's more than just an in joke that's just going to sit on in this one space but but to Ryan's point like later like that doesn't mean that like months from now somebody's not going to make a joke that's going to be like partially based in that one tumbler meme from way that's in and then people aren't going to have any reference at all. and that's harder, right? That's happening so often now, too.

Like, it's so crazy. Right now we're in this really weird moment where stuff that was viral like six to nine months ago from like a one-off tumbler post or like a random Twitter thread just blows up out of nowhere. It's so weird. I have a theory on this.

Oh, yeah. But before I get into it, to touch on what both you and Kenyano were saying is like now that I am in an agency and not platform side, I really encourage everyone on my team to kind of share the memes they are seeing because the internet is so algorithmically driven now

that we all have our own internets. So if I want to verify that something is memetic, I will need to see it a couple places, but also I want to hear that the 24-year-old on the other team. Oh, do we lose them? Am I still here? You're back.

Yeah, yeah. I hit my time limit for the day on Twitter. We lost you right out. after the word 24 year olds. Yeah, but I want to know that the 24-year-olds are also seeing it because that affirms to me that it's not just like in my weird pocket of the internet, it's in theirs too. But my theory about why TikTok is now finding all of these weird what off Tumblr means

is because they're trying to outweird each other. Like the internet, like we're talking about context and lenses and all of these things and we just keep pushing the boundary of what memes or what you can like make memes about or but people are trying to tap into these feelings that other people in the internet have had and just trying to outweird each other. I also think like TikTok has like created this really interesting culture where like every facet of a TikTok is trendable so like the audio can trend, the filters can trend, the text even like the motions or like what you're doing in it like like you know the the the TikTok face is a face now like that people,

people made. The older millennial TikTok voice is, hey, guys. Well, you know, like, it's happening. And I think it's just like turning everything into training content. It's so fascinating. Oh, we got a question from, from Aunt Pruitt. Ant. My question for the panel is regarding copyright. Has there ever been anything to address potential copyright issues when it comes to me? Because you take the popular show, the office and how there's a gazillion memes just in one episode.

Has there ever been anything to come about copyright infringement for that stuff? Okay, nobody say NFT or blockchain. Just kidding. Just kidding. Go ahead. So, yeah, I mean, the answer is yes all the time, right?

Like, there was like even a brief phase, I think, like five or six years ago where like Disney wanted to scrape all the Disney gifts from the internet. I think that like it was briefly floated that that was a possibility. And like nobody really knew like how copyright works, but I do think that is beginning to change. Particularly with audio on TikTok where it's now like how people find music. And so I suspect like as viral,

as virality gets more closely connected to like actual economic counts. I think companies will become like more understanding of like how to create media that can be like iterated on. But I think right now there is a very weird tension where we have like probably the most amount of media monopolies maybe ever. You know, like there's like three companies that own all of culture. And then we have like an entire internet experience based around ripping apart that intellectual property and doing whatever we want with it. And so it is like a really funny tension to be in right now. But I think things are beginning to finally shift after like 20 years of kind of a weird copyright cold war. Talking about it from like a person, like you are a person and you go viral, like that's one whole other story with layers of context.

And I think a lot about like people who have accidentally gone viral for like there was a story earlier this week of a person on TikTok who then was accused of being a serial killer. that is like one whole other thing. You know, most days I look at the internet, the various platforms that I am on and follow, and I see memes being created, and I just think like, damn, people are so creative. And then yesterday, my husband sends me this tweet that it's from someone who goes by,

The Vibe formerly known as Julian. And the tweet says, between the urban dictionary, I won't use the swear word, between the urban dictionary ish and the bus is, it's 100% clear that we're in a meme recession. And this tweet took off. It has 205,000 likes. And so I just started thinking about that because I've never thought of us as being in a meme recession, but did any of you see that tweet? Does that resonate with you? Do you feel like we're, we have lost some creativity as of late? Okay. I have, I have some passionate thoughts about this.

Oh, yes. Yeah. So I saw this tweet. So first, we go through like basically a cycle every nine months to 10 months, right? A boom, if you will. A boom, for sure. And even complaining about a lack of memes is itself at this point. I mean, I know I've lived through claims that this was, it was all over like at least a dozen, two dozen times.

So, yeah, there's a lot of memes that, like, kind of come back around over and over again, like the urban dictionary one. But then there's a brand new ones happening, like, at a pace that we've never even seen before. So it's interesting. I guess I'll put it in that. It's interesting that that is itself a meme complaining about a lack of money. We have about 15 minutes left to go. So this is, I will consider this maybe my last call to people out there for your questions. You just hit the request to speak button.

And then you can get invited into the conversation if you have burning mean thoughts or thoughts about meme boom times or recession times. And if they're still there, I think we have either Stefan or Stefan Hayden either way. Love it. Are you there? Can you jump in? Like so much talk about memes is about like the large culture of memes and what memes are breaking out. But are there like different ways to think about them when they're happening in like smaller communities? So many times on like Patreon or Twitch or Discord. like there's like these small communities creating memes and like are there like different ways to think about how they stay small as opposed to the ones that blow up? I love this question.

Same. Who wants to take it? Amanda, do you have thoughts on on memes, smaller memes? I have so many thoughts. And I think it kind of ties back to what Ryan was just saying about like that understanding of a good meme. And like some people see that meme and they recognize. it and they're like, oh, this needs to stay within this group. So they don't want to share it out further.

And I think I'm in a lot of smaller patrons that have like, you know, Discord spaces where we'll have like, it's just more inside jokes. But I think people are starting to recognize like, hey, I'm going to cherish this meme and not spread it. I know it's good, but, you know, I don't want it to get bigger. I know we only have a few minutes left, But I guess one big question that I think we've tried to think about as we've reported this series on this thread with the help of, you know, Ryan, Amanda, Kenyatta, and many others is, are memes fundamentally changing how we communicate with each other? And I'm curious if Ryan, Amanda, Kenyata, if you guys have an answer to that question.

I think they've made us a lot more vulnerable and have provided a way to be vulnerable without using words. And I think that's why there's been such a shift to talking about like mental health and the great resignation and just being honest with each other. Wow, I love that answer. Ryan?

I think we're able, to Amanda's point, I think we're able to express very complex feelings and thoughts via internet content. But I think there's also this really interesting thing where once we've put it out, like once we've put a joke or a relatable idea or a trend onto the internet, we can look at it. And then we can start to change it. And so I think we're,

we're at this really weird moment where, like, I think Genzi in particular are becoming a lot more aggressive about, like, using the internet content we've already archived and then making new things out of that. So now we're like, we're like six layers of remix deep. And things are beginning really interesting. I think we're going to start, like, finding, like, finding, like new ways of expressing ourselves or new subcultures to identify as because we can now see everything. And I think it's like that idea where it's like if you can observe something, you inherit, you change it. And I think that's kind of what memes are doing at the moment is that we're, we're, by the very fact that know your meme exists and is archiving them,

or the very fact that, you know, people like me and Amanda are, are trend spotting and doing this work is changing it. And, and I'm really excited. And, horrified to see what comes next. Because I think the GameStop pump to me was the moment where I looked at it and I was like, oh shit. Sorry if I wasn't supposed to curse. No, no. But I literally went, uh-oh, when the GameStop pump happened because that to me was kind of like the Avengers level threat of the internet. That was the moment where I said like the memes have altered the economy.

And I felt a similar way with Donald Trump where it's like we're now seeing like internet. that content changing reality because we can look at it fully and we can see it. And so I'm kind of horrified and very excited to see where that goes. So I think we have room just a few more minutes and we will get cut off at the top of the hour. So thanks to everyone for participating. But we have a few more minutes and I want to try to throw it to not oral history if they are here and ready to ask a quick question before we close it out. Yeah, I'm here.

Thank you so much. I'm actually a cultural anthropologist and so I want yeah I know and I love your stuff I love this conversation I wanted to bring up two things one is what do you think about memes and circulation and consumption and remixing beyond English language US centered so different cultural context different languages is what are you looking at that at all? Do you think that that is something that we can do as like very American focus internet users in general? And then number two, I wanted to say that in terms of what Stefan said about smaller communities, another thing that's happening that I've observed is like different marginalized communities

are actually circulating and creating memes that are sort of empowering or at least, allow them to resist. So like disability and chronic illness communities. So I just wanted to add that in there. Thanks. Yeah, does anyone want to speak to that? Thanks for your supportive comments and your question. Yeah, I'll jump it first.

I'll just say absolutely, oh, we can curse. So absolutely fucking yes. The interesting thing has been seeing in the ways that memes have never been a, English only or or sort of Western-centric phenomenon. It is global. And to see the ways that those happen, that happens in other places is fascinating

because we see it outside of our own context. There are lots of different places, lots of places through Internet spaces throughout Africa where you see sort of formats like image macros being taken and used in ways that are very local and just absolutely fantastic. ways you see throughout the Middle East I have seen it in different

Asian countries specific Asian countries where it's used as a way of both personal expression especially because it's a pic-because these are pictographic based communities they're able to fit so much more in an image macro than we are so those like complex ideas that feel like you know that feel like credit kind of like to Amanda's point or

where all of a sudden we have a format for expressing many ideas in one place in one way. It's like they're already on some like arrival hepatopod shit, which is amazing. And I think there's a piece that maybe if there's ever part two, it would be great to talk about how where, what was the precursor for beams.

And although the like bifurcation point, that's starting point that we were talking about a lot of inner culture, comes from Western like context that was dominated by a particular type of user. I personally feel

like the prior art for for this was hip hop before it was on the internet before before we did it this way we did through remix culture a lot of the ideas behind and behind the way that that hip hop was structured and the different roles that you play in constructing the hip hop track are the same things you see in memes so yes absolutely so whether it's it's communities that it's i i think that A lot of us has deep, deep roots in marginalized communities where those ways of expression, work around ways of expression, work around censorship, work around ways where your speech wasn't accepted and been put out on, you know, put out there in a way that, like, you can get around those sensors.

Like, it actually has its roots in those spaces. I just want to say a quick and hearty thank you to Kenyada, Ryan, and Amanda for participating in this conversation. Kenyatta, co-founder of Know Your Meme, Amanda Brennan, meme and internet librarian, Ryan Broderick, author of the Garbage Day newsletter. Please go check out their work, follow them, and please consider listening to Endless Thread. All right, folks, that was our Twitter Spaces chat about memes with some of our meme course members and our internet friendo, Ryan Broderick.

We have a lot of new stuff coming in 2021, which we're really excited about. We're working on new episodes right now. You mean 2022. Oh, shit. What is time? What is time, Amory? No, I think, yeah, I wouldn't edit that for a bit. I think you just perfectly captured how we're all feeling.

Yes. More of the hamster wheel, folks. More of the hamster wheel. But seriously, we do have a bunch of episodes that we're working on. I'm really excited about returning to our different story. every week format with you for you. So hang tight while we drop a couple of our favorite episodes into the feed over the holidays and take a listen to our back catalog if you want to hear some stuff you haven't heard before.

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