Endless Thread - The context of all in which we live

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

When future generations learn about the launch of current Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign, memes are going to be part of the story. Election season has always yielded yuks on the internet, but this year, the memes have gone mainstream. Why were Harris and coconuts inescapable for a several day span, and what does it tell us about the context of all in which we live? Kalyani Saxena, Endless Thread's colleague from WBUR and NPR's Here & Now , and Madison Malone Kircher, internet culture reporter for The New York Times, decode the origins of this particular political meme explosion, and the online communities behind it. Show notes: What is the KHive? (The New York Times) Kamala Harris edit to 360 by charli xcx. brat president. (TikTok via @flextillerson) 'why did I stay up till 3am making a von dutch brat coconut tree edit featuring kamala harris and why can’t I stop watching it on repeat?' (X via @ryanlong03) Credits: This episode was produced by Grace Tatter. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. It was hosted by Amory Sivertson. Our managing producer is Samata Joshi.

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. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Kalyani, thank you so much for doing this. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to have you because you are, well, by day, you are a producer for here and now, WBUR and NPR's Midday News Show here and now. That's correct. By night, but maybe also by day because it's part of your job. You are chronically online. Chronically online. There's not a moment that I'm not online.

In the bathroom, online. In bed, online. My chronically online colleague, Kalyani Saxana, is endless threads people, you could say. And it's especially fitting to talk to her right now because A, Ben is on vacation with the fam, yay vacation. And B, because the past several weeks have brought a deluge of political means, which is kind of Kalyani's jam working on a fast-paced daily national news show. She sat down with me to help me keep my head above water. So when we all found out that Joe Biden would no longer be running for president and that he was endorsing Kamala Harris, when did you start seeing memes?

Well, I actually think we can't start there. I think we have to start weeks and weeks earlier. When Joe Biden announced that he was leaving the race, the coconut train had beyond left the station, was like already in the Swiss Alps by this point. The coconut meme has been going at least as far as I can tell since shortly after the debate. Okay, so explain the coconut meme for us. Okay, so it's a bite from a speech from last year with Kamala Harris. She was giving a speech at the White House Initiative on advancing educational equity, excellence, and economic opportunity for Hispanics. So it was an official event. And this is just one small bite where she's talking about something from her mother.

She would say to us, I don't know what's wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you. Something about her delivery and her laugh. And then the quick tone switch to, you belong in all the context of the things that came before you, really stuck out to people. And it came up sort of after Joe Biden had that, you. you know, disastrous debate performance, and the conversation started to rumble around, well, okay, should he pull out of the race? And if he pulls out of the race, who would replace him?

Kamala Harris is sort of the next natural thing. And then people were pulling out different videos of moments when she was the V. The veep. Oh, round in round. Okay, so do the salt and pepper all over it, like, just like, lather that baby up. I really love Ben diagrams. You know, the circles, right? And there were just threads and threads of really funny moments of her just saying outlandish things.

Laughing was a common thread. But at this point, like, there was no sign, right, that Joe Biden really was going to pull out. He said it would take the Lord Almighty to take me out of the race. So it was entirely a joke. Of all in which you live and what came before you. And then there were the remixes that came out with Brad. So Charlie X-E-X had this album that came out Brat, and people were already talking about having a Brat summer and really just enjoying the vibe, the like, you know, kind of brash sound of that album. At that point, the album became intertwined with her and the memes around her and that like bright, bright green that you saw her own campaign start to adopt.

Okay, you just hinted at the lime green, which is the album art for Brett. It just says brat on a very bright, slimy lime green. Yes, I have heard it described as chartreuse green. Sure, that's a nicer word for slimy lime green. So we have this crossover of the Brat album. We have the coconut memes all over the place. But then Joe Biden on July 21st announces that he is pulling out of the race. Right.

And then what do we see? On that same day, Charlie X, CX, a few hours later, tweets Kamala is brat. And then around the same time Kamala HQ, which used to be Joe Biden HQ, rebrands with that, you know, green in their banner on Twitter. And then in the description says providing context, which is, of course, a nod to the coconut meat. Okay. So I feel like an important thing to define here is brat. Brat. When Charlie XEX tweets Kamala is bratt. What is she saying? See, now I would never presume to speak for a genius, but I can try to put myself in the mind of Charlie X-E-X. I mean, it does lean into the original definition of Brat, which is like you're being unapologetic, you're being loud, you're being out there.

The sound of Brat, the album is very, it's very brash, it's club music, but I as a person who, like, goes to bed at 9 p.m., still am brats. Like, it's not necessarily like you have to be out on the town. It's kind of like you're, I hate to say, you're with it, but you are with it. And also that you are being out there and loud and I guess unembarrassed, I would say. You're unembarrassed. And I think that's part of why people are entertained by Kamala Harris's. She seems generally unembarrassed by things that other people think are embarrassing. Once she sort of took that role,

where she's now looking like she's going to be the Democratic nominee. And I think her campaign sort of wink, wink, nudge, nudging, acknowledging the memes. Then it was like, oh, she thinks this is fun too. Or her campaign does. And somewhere along the way, it shifted. The shift being from kind of ironic, more laughing at than with, to earnest standum, to now being an official tool of the presidential campaign. And the memes probably will continue to shift, right?

Like memes cannot be contained. They can't be controlled. Just when you think they're all going to go in one direction, like someone's going to co-opt the meme again and make it mean something different. Yes. Are we already seeing that at this point? Like two-ish weeks out from the turnover of Joe Biden to Kamala Harris?

I think it reached peak frenzy about one or two days after Joe Biden pulled out of the race and she kind of became that frontrunner. And I was seeing remixes to every possible. song with the coconut audio spliced in. And one that, like, really sticks with me is America has a problem by Beyonce, and they did it with, like, America has a coconut. Coconut tree? You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You know what's so funny is that it occurs to me that, like, a lot of the discourse around this particular window of time, this, what is it, what is it, three months, three and a half months from when Joe Biden says, nope, to when Kamala Harris.

Harris steps in and Democrats are like, oh no, three months. We only have three months. But on the internet, three months is an eternity. It's an eternity. And so it's just hitting me how long those three months could potentially feel and just how much more there is to keep up with because memes move at light speed, they get picked up, they get turned, they get twisted. You're like, wait, are we making fun of so-and-so now or are we supporting them? Are we supporting them? Is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? How is this group interpreting it? How is that group interpreting it? And I just wonder if you're ready for that. I am and I'm excited. I will say I don't think the internet is ever funnier than during an election season. I think that the internet, that's sort of their way of coping with uncertainty, which we are absolutely entering a time of uncertainty and fear and a great deal of anticipation. And the memes to me are a way. Sort of, you know, people tell people online, like, go out and touch grass.

I think this is the way of touching grass. Because if you let yourself get sort of overwhelmed by the potential scale of all the things that could happen in November, it's easy to, like, get stuck up in the clouds. And I think memes are actually a way of bringing people back down to earth and be like, this person who is yes, has this huge political platform and is super important is also just, like, deeply funny. And we can poke fun at them because, like, we're people and that's fun. the idea of memes as the new touching grass is making my head explode in real time a little bit right now. But I think it does speak to this idea that the lines are truly getting blurrier between Internet and real life, how we process things online, how we process things to each other. And I appreciate you for explaining a bunch of this to me. Thank you. I'm so happy. I'm so happy that you guys made the time for it.

After the break, you think Kamala Harris stands fell out of a coping. We'll get the history and the context of the so-called k-hive. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. and hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts.

There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's Business Partnerships Team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. whatever your goal, we can help.

Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Madison Malone Kircher is the Internet Culture Reporter for the styles desk at the New York Times. Which means I spend way too much time watching TikTok. Or just enough time watching TikTok. No, it's way too much. Okay, fair enough. Well, you probably watch just the right amount of TikTok for what we're talking about today. and other corners of the internet,

because we're talking about the K-Hive. And can you just start by telling me what is the K-Hive? Sure. The K-Hive, put incredibly simply, is a group online of folks who support Vice President Kamala Harris and have supported her over the years in various campaigns starting as early as 2017. As with most items of Internet culture, tracing it back to a singular start point is a little murky, right?

But in 2017, we have this tweet from the MSNBC correspondent Joy Ann Reid who coins the name, which is a play on Beyonce's fandom for fans of then first term senator from California, Kamala Harris. And that then follows her into the 2020 primaries where she picks up more and more supporters who are in earnest members of the K-Hive. I spoke to folks who have been using this term for years, who were, you know, all in for Kamala Harris in 2020 and, you know, became, let's say, They dormant. Do bees go dormant? They're a hive. They, you know, become more dormant, more quiet, or throw their support to Biden after Harris does not secure the nomination. And they've been largely quiet since, until now. Was the k-hive always fluent in memes and internet culture? Or are they coming at us right now at the same time? They're coming at us at the same time. The K-hive, the OG K-hive, shall we say, was always very online. And this was a time where Twitter

X Twitter back then was a really different place, right? So it was a very Twitter-heavy fandom, lots of hashtags, lots of tweets. And as fandoms tend to go, things on the internet can go from friendly to dangerous very, very quickly. You know, the K-Hive has been criticized for, you know, aggressive tactics and for perhaps some less than friendly behavior online when it came to how it treated and reacted to non-supporters of Kamil Harris. That said, it's now 2024.

many of the folks I spoke to who are making Kamala Harris memes said they felt like K-Hive now has at least two factions, that it's sort of split off. You've got this original group of really, truly earnest supporters of Vice President Harris. And now you have the second group online who are starting to get on board, but with a like a tinge of irony, a green tinge of irony, if you will. You know, we're seeing people who perhaps would not have been fully on board with with Vice President Harris and with her platform in the 2020 election are now saying, well, this is my option. This is where I'm going. Here's my lime green contribution to the discourse. Hmm. Okay. So that's interesting because you have this genuine support. You have this tinge of irony,

which makes me wonder what the goal of the memes are, who they're intended for, what they're really trying to achieve. I spoke to one young woman who was, I believe, 21 and a political communication student at George Washington University. Her name is Ali McCormick. And she had made a now very, very viral video edit of Kamala Harris using a Charlie X-E-X song. The lyrics to the song go, I'm So Julia, and she had swapped out the words to be I'm So Kamala. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? And when I talked to her, she said, her words, within the last four years, Kamala Harris has built a larger tent. And that tent, she was describing now includes 21-year-olds who make memes. She said, you know, I think in 2020, we had this really concentrated primary

group excited about Vice President Harris. And now I'm seeing people in the center who are excited about her, but I'm also seeing people who are much further to the left. And I think that's where the memes are coming from, right? This group of extremely online, perhaps more detached, ironic political participants who now have something to sink their teeth into. Do you get the sense that the majority of these memes are being created by younger people, by Gen Z people? The organic ones we were seeing a couple of weeks ago, yes. As with all things, the minute brands and campaigns get involved in me making the fun sort of stops. But I would say they're being organically made.

I don't know that the folks that I spoke to who were making these memes a couple of weeks ago were doing them because they were trying to stump for a candidate and get. It was the language of the Internet that was popular and they were fun to make. And it's fun to get that dopamine hit of making something that lots of people watch on the Internet. But I now think it's more than that. I think for many of the people making these memes and making these videos, supporting Vice President Harris' campaign is now becoming tacit in having made those and continuing to make them. I ask that because there are 8 million Gen Z voters who have aged into the electorate since the 2022 midterms. So if these are memes created by Gen Z intended primarily for Gen Z or, you know, trying to fuel that particular youthful energy, it's like, was this an attempt to mobilize, energize that demographic in particular?

I think it has mobilized and energized that demographic, but I think this was largely luck. Brat Summer gave the Biden Harris. Now Harris campaign such a gift. It's the sort of earned media value you can't ask for. The day that President Biden announced he would not be continuing his campaign, Charlie XX, quite literally tweeted, Kamala is Brat, which is the highest praise. I have tried to explain this many times, and the best I can come down to is that this is just an incredibly high compliment. And since then, the Harris campaign has sort of taken this and run with it. They redesigned their Twitter header to be in the style of the brat album art. What we'd seen out of the Biden campaign in the past was more traditional, a little more

stayed, right? I think the only meme we can think of when we think of President Biden is this meme, Dark Brandon. I'm going to be fine with your jokes, but I'm not sure about Dark Brandon. Can you explain Dark Brandon just for anyone who may have missed that? What are you referring to? Dark Brandon is a sort of an internet alter ego of President Biden, and it presents him as this sort of mastermind on the fringes of the online. And most importantly, he's, dark Brandon is visually portrayed as President Biden, but he has these like laser red eyes that glow. So if you've ever seen Biden with glowing red eyes, that's actually Dark Brandon, which also like the coconut memes we're seeing now, started organically, but the minute the campaign took it to use, the fun. just died. And that's sort of, I think, the dance that the Harris campaign is having to do right now, right? Because the minute you take something organic from the internet and you try to use it

for marketing, it's not really fun anymore. What we're seeing around Kamala Harris right now, it does feel like this kind of fan community you see more with artists, musicians in particular, and to have this confluence of political energy at the same time that you have the actual, like, The pop stars are behind it themselves. Charlie X-E-X, Beyonce, how is this fueled the flow of memes in a way that it's like you can't, kind of like you said, you couldn't hope for something better. You can't make this up. Right. And each time one of those pop stars gets on board or is utilized, you bring in a different fandom.

So the Harris campaign has used a Chaparone song, which I'm going to absolutely mumble the pronunciation of Feminine Nomenon. But they have changed the words to be Kamala nominon, which started as a bit online organically with fans of those two women. The joke we're seeing online right now, and it's an incredibly tired cliche, is like, you know, somebody give a raise to the Gen Z intern who's running the social content for the Harris campaign. And that's a really tired narrative. It's 2024. We know that there's not some teenager secretly strapped to a phone in Harris HQ. This is a very sharp, savvy social media team.

What they're doing is working and it's resonating with younger generations in a way that feels organic, which is so hard to do. It may not last. Yeah. It's also really hard to know when you're just looking at a meme, it is often hard to know if the meme is genuine support. If there's tingees of irony, if there's like whack you over the head, it's meant to be satire. Jezebel writer Kylie Chung tweeted earlier this month, there are people who think enthusiasm for Kamala is sincere and serious, hit in the head by a falling. coconut, perhaps? Is there a way to be able to tell if a meme is sincere or not? And maybe, along with that, do you have any advice for maybe the Kamala Harris campaign in terms of when

they're seeing content? What is content that like, yeah, pick up on that, run with that versus, I don't know about that one? In terms of trying to discern whether a meme is sincere or not, What I think is so great as an internet culture reporter who studies this stuff is that they don't have to be one or the other anymore. I think this is the first time we're seeing political memes where, and this came up over and over in my reporting while I was talking to K-Hive members or maybe K-Hive members, this idea that you can make Kamala Harris memes, you can be a member of the K-Hive, and you can still be hypercritical. Your meme does not have to be 100% in, as opposed to, I think, attempts at memes we've seen in the past from political campaign. Hillary Clinton, chilling in Cedar Rapids, comes to mind as a real clunker, Pokemon Go to the Poles, things that were really cringy. Oh, God. Yeah, sorry, jump scare.

Yeah. You got to have a disclaimer before those. I know, I know. Pokemon Go to the polls. Were we ever so young? As for the Harris campaign, I would not want that job because they have to perfectly strike the balance of borrowing from the Internet. and interpolating social media content to their benefit, but also figuring out how much of it to ignore,

how much to just let this organic movement continue to coconut pill the internet while they pretend they're not seeing it. Because there's a lot of power in that in saying, we didn't do any of this. This happened organically. How incredible is that? Yeah. And other than like the cringe factor,

which is, should not be downplayed, But what is the danger of leaning into these memes too much, tipping too far in the sincere or the ironic direction? People will stop paying attention. They will stop being fun. And once they stop being fun, it's over. Because right now, the Harris campaign of these memes is secondary to the fact that it's fun to hear a new remix of a Chapel Run song

or a Taylor Swift song or watch a late-night host doing a dance to a song by Charlie XXX, which is also sort of a campaign performance for Harris HQ. You're talking about Stephen Colbert doing the TikTok dance to Apple from Charlie XX's brat album on The Late Show. It is my certified braditude that empowers me to do this. All of these things are interesting to watch in real time. And the minute they start being manufactured, the citizens of the Internet, particularly the younger generations, Gen Z, are incredibly savvy.

They can smell something. inorganic, something manufactured from a mile away, and they're not interested. Yeah, memes, they can become cringy. They can also just die out. And so I wonder how the Kamala Harris campaign kind of keeps the energy going, keeps the momentum going, given that all these memes have popped up within the last, you know, however many days, two weeks now since she became the presumptive presidential nominee. And yet there are three months to go until the... election. And in meme time, that's ages. It is. And I am fully aware, and you probably are too, that as we sit here speaking from the New York Times and public radio, that we've killed it.

The fun is over. It is, this is the Death Watch Beatle for memes. I am fully so conscious of this any time I begin typing about something fun on the internet that where the fun ends is the minute you try to explain a meme. And so that means the Harris, is going to have to really have its finger on the pulse for what is next and to not try to play this out for too long. Loving it and letting it go is probably their best bet. Solid advice. Although yet, I would say that the existence of a job like yours at the New York Times and the fact that a public radio station has a podcast like NLess Thread, I hope is a sign that we are actually further blurring the lines between internet culture and,

everything else. And so, you know, yes, we may have killed it. And in that case, you know, I'm sorry for my part in that. But also, I wonder if by talking about it, we're saying the thing out loud and maybe, I don't know. I don't know what that leads to. Maybe it's death or maybe there's something else on the horizon that we can't see coming the same way that we didn't necessarily see any of the news that has happened in the last two weeks with regards to Kamala Harris coming. per se. I mean, I really think there's only one thing to say to that. What's that? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you. True words. True words here from Madison Malone Kircher. Well, thank you so much for doing this. This has been a great journey we've been on. We don't know where it's going, but it's been fun talking about it with you. Anytime. Happy Brad's summer. Do you have a favorite political meme? Did your ironic TikTok get picked up by a political campaign? You know what to do. Send us an email, Endless Thread at WBUR.org.

Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was hosted by me, Amory Sieverts, and produced by Grace Tatter, with help from Summa to Joshi and Mia Giuliani. Special thanks to our colleague, Kaliani Saxana. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Ben Brock Johnson, and Paul Vicus. We'll see you next week.