There Are No Girls on the Internet - Kanye West’s antisemitic, anti-Black antics are another battle in “The Meme Wars”

Episode Date: October 12, 2022

Kanye West is trafficking in antisemitism and white supremacy, and he’s using memes to do it. In this longer episode, Bridget talks with Harvard researchers Dr. Joan Donovan and Emily Dryfuss about their insightful new book, “The Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America.” They break down the history of memes, and what today’s memes tell us about our social and political futures. And they have a lot to say about Kanye West.   BUY MEME WARS: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/meme-wars-9781635578638/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Are No Girls on the Internet. It's time to talk about Kanye West. You've probably seen by now that Last week, Kanye West and right-wing extremist Rifter extraordinaire, Candice Owens, wore White Lives Matter T-shirts at Paris Fashion Week. And when Vogue magazine editor Gabrielle Johnson, the first black woman to ever style a Vogue cover, joined the chorus of people who didn't think that White Lives Matter shirts at a fashion show were such a good idea. Kanye responded pretty predictably for him. And by that I mean, he responded by leaning in to touch.

targeting a black woman. Posting Gabrielle's picture to his millions of followers on Instagram with the caption, This is not a fashion person. So what's going on? Why White Lives Matter? Well, White Lives Matter has been a thing since around 2015, when white supremacist groups like the Aryan Resistance Society and the Klu Klux Klan adopted the motto to invalidate the Black Lives Matter movement.

And it took hold in all of the circles that you would expect. But now, Kanye and Candice are pushing White Lives Matter into mainstream discourse. White Lives Matter is yet another political meme used to seed and spread an idea. So when you hear the word meme, you probably think about Grumpy Cat or some other jokey image with text on it. But memes are pretty serious business, and they can tell us a lot about where we're at and where we're going politically. I'm Joan Donovan, and I'm the research director at Harvard Kennedy's Shorenstein Center, and I'm the director of the Technology and Social Change Project.

And I'm Emily Dreyfus, and I work with Joan at the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center. I'm the senior managing editor of the Technology and Social Change Project. And I'm a journalist. From White Lives Matter to lock her up or build the wall, memes have had an outsized role on our political discourse. Dr. Joan Donovan and Emily Dreyfus study memes, along with their co-author, Brian in Friedberg, their new book, Meme Warfare,

charts the history of memes and how they've been shaping our political and social landscapes. How did this come to be something that interested the both of you? I'll start. This is Joan. You know, years ago, I started researching social movements online. I guess it's been more than a decade now where I started looking at the Occupy movement and the ways in which groups were coming together. But I was most interested in the, in looking at how do they find each other, how do they scale participation, and then how do they coordinate that participation towards some kind of social change? So interestingly enough, over the years, we have this broad sweeping changes in our technological landscape that has led to

many, many academic studies about pro-social movements, anti-capitalist movements, any kind of movement that might be called a hashtag movement, for instance, like Me Too, or Black Lives Matter, or even Occupy Wall Street or the Indignato's movement in Spain. So I'd become very acquainted with that organizing style, but one of the most understudied pieces of this field was about the media created by these movements. And so over the years, I've kept an eye on it, I've kept track of it, working very closely with our colleague and co-author Brian Freeberg. We looked very in-depthly over the years at the development of different meme campaigns. And then when I switched my focus to looking at right-wing movements and trying to understand how they get coordinated online,

memes seem to take on a very important relevance, especially memes that were about what we now call culture wars. So you would see these content wars play out, much like you would see culture wars play out in the media. And memes were the mechanism and the arsenal by which different shots were fired. So after I looked at research how left-wing movements were coordinating online, I switched gears and started looking at how to right-wing movements do that. And this was during the rise of Trump in 2015. and I had been studying the far right and the use of DNA ancestry tests as a way to mark identity. And so I was already embedded in these communities when Trump was rising to power.

And I was able to track the rise of the alt-right in real time. And from there, I realized that means we're having an extraordinary impact on our political communication. but because they're funny and they're ironic and they're hard to decipher, most people that study the Internet and social movements disregard memes. They don't think about it as something that's going to move fringe ideas of mainstream. However, once you start studying memetic theory and you start trying to understand cultural transmission, it's a very useful set of theories for understanding how our politics change. So, you know, I have a totally different background to Joan, right?

Joan is an academic. She's a sociologist. She studied, she has a PhD. And I am a failed philosophy major with a bachelor's degree in English, only because I tried to major in philosophy, but I didn't want to finish the requirements. And it turned out I'd accidentally fulfilled the English major requirements without even trying because I'm a writing nerd. But so we come at this from a really different background and then, you know, I went on to become a journalist because I didn't know what else you do with your life when your only skill is writing.

But one of my things I've been obsessed with kind of my, you know, since my philosophy days is how do we make meaning and like where does knowledge come from and cultural understanding of like if we have core beliefs as a. group of people, where do those beliefs come from and where did they start? And I didn't get that much of a chance or I didn't really have a good framework for how to think about those questions when I was doing straight tech reporting. But then during the 2016 campaign, I was running wired coverage of the campaign. And Donald Trump just presented this, you know, such posed such a problem for us in the media because he was just constantly saying things that weren't true and yet they it didn't seem to matter people didn't seem to care that it wasn't true truth seemed in some ways irrelevant so I started looking into like how and why do these

beliefs form around and and is social media a part of it and so I was like I did some articles about how social media allows for such intense repetition of ideas, which this is an old, you know, psychological and philosophical idea that like the more you repeat something, the truer it seems. And there's like cognitive neuroscience to back it up. And that, so that basically means like the more someone hears something, they will think it's true than when they hear it again, what, no matter what the context is. And so, So once I was learning about that, you know, it struck me that social media is the perfect vector for that. Like social media is a repetition machine.

And you can blast out with bots. You can use a hashtag over and over again. And then right around the same time that Joan was transitioning to look at the right wing internet, that was when I also started grappling with having to take memes seriously. Because as Joan was saying, a lot of people were dismissing memes in academia. and elsewhere, and I will say for myself, Mea Copa, like I, as a journalist who was assigning culture stories about the internet and assigning political stories

about the internet was certainly not for a long time paying attention to memes. I didn't understand how powerful a vector for communicating an idea they are. And it wasn't until the 2015-2016 election cycle that these like memetic phrases like lock her up and basket of deploy. And then that's where I even first became aware of this idea of a meme war when all of these online trolls started or trolls and various others started taking credit for this real life thing.

So that's when I started to get interested in it. And then by the luck of fate, I got to join Jones team in 2020. And that year spent looking at the pandemic and everything that it was happening in the media online through the frame of medium manipulation and memetic warfare really, like, gave me me such a whole different understanding of how everything worked. And then, boom, January 6th happened. So I want to take a step back because I thought as a pretty online person, tech podcast person, that I was like, oh, certainly I know what a meme is.

But I was surprised in reading part of meme wars that the origin of the term, meme goes way back. I assume that it was like, oh, it must be pretty new because we're talking about something that like is a thing on the internet. So just to level set, what is a meme? So in our book, we lean on some early memetic theory. Richard Dawkins first introduced the idea in the 70s to describe essentially cultural transmission. How do people within a culture get access to the same ideas and then also intergenerationally, how do these ideas proliferate? You could even take a meme like grumpy cat

and start to think about, well, what are the other famous and antagonistic cats through history? Like, you know, the cat in that's gowing right now. Yeah, the one that wants temptations right away. You know, when Garfield, you know, but Garfield, he clip, you know, the list goes on, the cat in the hat, and of course, the Cheshire Cat, whatnot.

You know, cat says tricksters. So within our culture, we have memes that surround us every day. Advertising as a profession really monetized means, especially around jingles. In particular, you can think about jingles like Just Do It or I'm Loving It, and you instantly know what brand they're referring to. And so memes are all around us. There's nothing new about them, but they do help us understand how small bits of culture move through groups

and move to new generations. And what's most interesting, I think, about what we draw from in Mimetic Theory is that there's four main characteristics of memes over time, which is that good memes, or memes that go viral, tend to be anonymous. They tend to be very sticky. That is, they'll have a pithy saying that might ring out in your head. They usually are three words. They can be participatory. That is, people will remix them. And then they have this feature of bringing in groups and separating out groups. So if you see a meme and you don't know what it means, you just move on. It's not like

you spend a lot of time trying to unpack it. when we were thinking about means in particular in the far right, these are acting as similarly to political dog whistles. If you know what certain color schemes and skull face masks look like with, you know, some veiled racist language, you could have, if you're on the in-group, you know that that might be something that was generated by Adam Woffin Division or or generation identity or some other far-right group. But if you don't understand those signals and those dog whistles, you often don't know where these messages are coming from.

In particular, in the 2016 election throughout Trump's presidency, he was tweeting all kinds of memes, in particular, build the wall, which came from 2004's Minutemen, vigilante border enforcement gang that had started in the early aughts patrolling the border on their own. So that built the wall phrase once you realize it's racist origins, not just because it's overtly racist already, but that Trump was borrowing these things from other places and remixing them. And so we, throughout the book, the memes act as characters. that bring together actors and the content and different behaviors.

And then what we try to help people understand is how the Internet didn't invent means, but they surely, the design of social media surely has impacted the way that we communicate and the way that we coordinate. And certain groups, particularly ones that want to hide who they are or what their motivations are, will use means as a vector by which they spread their ideas without having them attached to all the symbolism in the outright racism, sexism, misogyny, and transphobia of the groups that are producing them. Well, and Bridget, I identify myself in the book writing process and just in life as a normie. And so like the my normie definition and like understanding of memes before I got into this was really that a meme was a picture on shared on the internet with images on it.

And and that is that is a meme. That's a form of a meme. But actually that's a specific subtype of meme that they call macro, macro images, macro image memes. And with Dawkins, who's an evolutionary biologist, who's the guy who coined it, He was trying to create a word that was commensurate with gene. So if genes are something that traveled through people, through bodies, through generations, and, like, you'll have the same, you'll inherit them from your mother or whoever in your community. Well, definitely your mother and also others in your community.

Same with memes. Mean was supposed to be like a unit of culture in that same way that gets transmitted. So as Joan's saying, like all of these phrases can be memes, slogans can be memes, but so can a flag become a meme. So can a gesture, if you think about dabbing or like, you know, there are, there are I'm sorry, I just have to interrupt you because your normie mom voice came out there on dabbing. I was like, wait, you know, I was like, oh my God, Emily, come on. I mean, I am a normie mom, though, you know?

Like I'm trying. I'm a deeply entrenched, extremely online. Normie mom. In my day, it was planking the kids were doing. Oh, planking. Planking. Yeah. So, so that dates me as well. But so you can see from all those things that like means as an idea, if we just think of it as this kind of consistent idea that can be transmitted, it can be visual. It can be oral. Like it can be a ditty. But it could also just be like a shape or whatever. what has to happen is that it's consistent and that it can be put into different contexts and that in those contexts it is conveying some central idea, even if that idea changes over time.

So like the we start the book by explaining that the Gadsden flag, that snake that's coiled up and says, don't tread on me, is a meme. It was meant as a meme in the first place. It was made to, it was created by Benjamin Franklin. He created it to say, like, don't tread on me. Me is us, the in-group of the U.S., the United States, you know, and it was talking directly to an out-group. And it was memorable and it was pithy and all these things. And then it became a, it wasn't maybe a meme when it was created,

when it was created, it was a flag. It became a meme when it became adopted by all of these various identity groups and different people who used it as a signifier of their beliefs. and as a signifier of their identity. And then it's such a successful meme because it can be used in all these different contexts. So we think of it as like libertarian. But before it was libertarian,

it was actually white supremacist KKK people using Don't Tread on Meem. But it also didn't have its origins are not white supremacist. And then it's been used even by people who are like anti, who are pro-abortion activists, who are like pro-choice activists to say don't tread on my body, you know, but it's also then been used as like a don't tread on me for anti-vaccine folks. You can see its flexibility and memorability. And then when you see it out in the

world, it gives you a sense of maybe rightly or wrongly who the person is that is sharing it or like holding it up. Yeah, the way that you put that in the book is so interesting because I didn't know any of that history of that flag, but, you know, the way that the meme has this ability to be be contextualized, co-opted, and used against its creators. Because as you said, originally that flag was meant to be like the United States. And then the way that it is, you know, adapted by people who are probably not super into the United States government or like that kind of thing. Like how it is then used against the people that originally contextualized it in the first place. It's so fascinating.

Totally. Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor Me with Robert Smygel and Friends, me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter.

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with Tom Bogart and Tabramos on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast. It's pretty easy to not take memes seriously. But in their book, Joan and Emily described how memes can actually be a powerful means of spreading an idea and pushing it into the mainstream in what they describe

as meme warfare. So if that's your understanding of what a meme is, what are the meme wars? Yeah, so in our book, we try to open up with an understanding that meme wars are something that have gone on long before the internet, especially in this moment. We do open with the insurrection and we end with the insurrection. And then in the in-between chapters, what we try to understand is the ways in which people are fighting over certain definitions of culture. So we go deep into Occupy, not just to elucidate what Occupy was all about, but to understand it as a kind of meme war where there was this new emerging definition around this identity of the 99%. what did it mean to go through this major stock market crash and economic crisis?

People were losing their homes. And then how did that get distilled into these very pithy memes like, you know, we are the 99% or in particular the memes that we started to focus on because we didn't want to tell the same history that others have already told artfully. we went in and started looking at, well, what were the right-wing elements that were fighting for visibility at that same exact time that we were having this more anarcho-libertarian-type movement in Occupy. In 2011, I was pretty big into the Occupy movement, the global movement against economic inequality that had folks like me camping out in places like Zucati Park in New York or Freedom Plaza here in D.C. And if you were involved in the Occupy movement back then, you know that memes were a big part of how that idea spread. From the rallying cry, we are the 99% to represent the global majority of people of the world who are not billionaires,

to the image of a police officer, casually pepper-spraying occupied demonstrators at the University of California. While these memes spoke to leftists like me, it's actually been far-right extremists who have really harnessed the power of memes to speak. write an idea. Emily and Joan chart how those memes set the stage for the meme warfare that we see today and beyond. So we were looking at memes like End the Fed and Pepper Sprang Cop and all of the ways in which the issues of the day were being both nuanced and then flattened into these different memetic catchphrases and sometimes fun and participatory. memes online. But the rest of the book, after that, we trace out of that moment people like Andrew Breitbart, who did pass away but was a very important and key figure over the years

in bringing together right-wing media online and learning how to mobilize people on the internet towards specific political ends. We look at the movie that Breitbart made with Steve Bannon and called Occupy on Mask and why that was such an key moment for the right wing to figure out how to mobilize large groups of people online. We look at Alex Jones and how he participated in Occupy by hosting a couple different Occupy events. And then we go deep into Ron Paul and the Fed movement so that we can understand that this doesn't just come out of nowhere. This comes out of a struggle for definition, a struggle for the definition of movements, the definition of the situation. And so as we go through the book, we look at the development of the manosphere and misogynist

groups online and how they learn to mobilize in GamerGate. We look at groups like white supremacists and looking at the ways in which they organize online and maintain their anonymity while at the same time trying to mainstream certain sayings and slogans and also mainstream political violence through their manifestos. We also, oh, you want to say a moment? I was just going to interrupt really quick to just make the point that the reason you're giving those examples is because all of those are communities that have engaged in meme wars, and meme wars are when people come together in a coordinated way to use memes, political means, to push their agenda into the mainstream.

Whether it's a white supremacist agenda, whether it can be a pro-social agenda. Like there could be a meme war that is using the internet in a coordinated way, all coming together, using memes to push an idea that is good, you know, that is like, moral. And then, but then more often, and the ones that we are looking at in the book are ones where it's a specific, like, ideological agenda, like women deserve this kind of a life or whatever, you know, coming from a place of, like that. And then they use memes as the artillery in the warfare. And the way that the meme wars, like the terrain is to use the internet to,

get other people into your army, to recruit and draft people into your army? Yeah, like Emily's definition is probably a little bit more clinical than my own of Memoirs in the sense that for me, it's, it's not necessarily just about recruitment. It's mostly about the spreading of an idea. That's what makes it great about having three authors is we can still debate and disagree or agree on agree to agree. And that's where, you know, I actually feel like the real research gets done is when we can challenge each other. And I'm not disagreeing with you, Emily.

What I'm saying is that for me, it's not quite as linear because there's a lot of adaptation. So, for instance, we in our book, look at White Lives Matter. So Emily Joan and I talked just days after Kanye and Candace's stunt at Paris Week with the White Lives Matter T-shirts. And somehow, a few days after we recorded this interview, it got worse. Kanye's Instagram and Twitter accounts were both locked because he tweeted outright anti-Semitic threats of violence to go, quote, dead con three on Jews. And other comments that really played into anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish people, like conspiracy theories that a shadowy bunch of Jewish people are to blame for all of society's problems. What's kind of sad to me is had Kanye swapped the word Jews for a dog whistle like bankers or globalists, I don't know if I can say that those tweets would have been taken down.

Kanye West has 31.4 million followers on Twitter. That's double the amount of Jewish people in the world globally. So Kanye using his massive platform to spread white supremacist anti-Semitic talking points is really dangerous. And his comments were full of separating people into groups, you know, the uses and the thems. And it's really difficult to see someone with his visibility and platform doing this kind of thing as anything other than a clear normalization of anti-Semitism, which we know is connected to real-world violence. Last year, there were 2,717 anti-Semitic incidents recorded in the United States, an increase from 2020. So, we were, we were, seven hundred and

So Kanye is making these statements against the backdrop of a very real rising climate of hatred and violence toward Jewish people. And of course, Kanye's comments are making the rounds in exactly the kind of circles that you would expect, extremists, conspiracy theorists, and white supremacists. He did a very weird interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News, and even Alex Jones went on his show to take credit, saying, we woke up Kanye West, folks. So if I don't sound very thrilled to be talking about Kanye West, it's because I know that doing so is its own tricky thing. Because Kanye West wants people like me to be doing exactly this, talking about what he's doing.

It's all about attention. Of course, it's all the rage in the news this week because Kanye West and Candace Owens wore White Lives Matter T-shirts to his fashion show. And so decidedly unfashionable as the T-shirts were. Very banal. They were so banal. I mean, come on, at least bedazzle them or something. You know, like no more insulting to the fashion world. But that meme comes straight out of white nationalist groups.

It's not the case that they're saying all lives matter, which is a different kind of meme about who gets to. participate in these identity-based movements and the, you know, the washing out of, you know, what a politically important saying Black Lives Matter is. But to say White Lives Matter is something where you are catering explicitly to white supremacist groups online. and it is more than a dog whistle. It's a notion of supremacy. And of course, they're going to hedge ironically and say, well, what's wrong with two black people saying white lives matter?

I mean, we're out here. And they're just playing that same identity game that then turns into a meme war. And if you look at online, who's really happy to hear that Kanye and Candace stepped out for the White Lives Matter crew, it's white supremacists and they're the ones getting all the attention and and bravoing this this um you know controversy for controversy's sake type of act um and so as we think about the mean wars we have to think about um not just that you know someone would get recruited into a different kind of movement which definitely does happen but what happens to people then when they start to Google or search for White Lives Matter, where do they end up because they're seeking, you know,

to follow whatever kind of intentionality Candace and Kanye had. And what they end up with is getting loaded straight into white supremacist message boards who've been saying this for years, who've been organizing around it for years. And so it's just an unfortunate and also very predictable kind of media manipulation tactic that our book tries to show in many different ways how the mean wars can be triggered and play out and then lead people into these groups that have this really disgusting politic.

Well, and to jump on that and just build off of what Joan is saying, the Kanye and Candice Owens' example is really points out also an essential part of the meme wars. Like really one, if a meme war is usually a cycle. And one essential part of that cycle is media attention. And so Kanye is, you know, he's a celebrity. Like he's an ultimate influencer. And same with Candace Owens.

Like Candice Owens is out there fighting meme wars, amplifying meme wars on behalf of the people that she agrees with, in a lot of times, and it is that we find that that kind of amplification is then what drives media attention. And then media attention is, even if it's critical media attention, can be a way that then that meme more reaches more people. So, you know, we wrote about White Lives Matter. We wrote the book now a year ago, because publishing takes a long time. But it's, a lot of people are probably learning about it right now because of coverage of Kanye. And that is, that's a phase of the meme.

Right. Is now this main, that kind of thing is streaming. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message.

Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at IHeartadvertising.com. That's IHeartadvertising.com. Hey, I'm Jared Adano. You might know me as that loud guy who yells out,

help on the internet. Help! Somebody! Please! But there's so much more to me than me. I'm an actor. I'm a comedian. And recently, I've become quite the helper myself.

And on my new podcast, hope from a hypocrite, I'll be changing lives. helping people in need with my sage advice and thoughtful solutions. Sike, I'm a comedian. I'm not qualified to give good advice. Join me and my comedian friends as we riff, rant, recommend some of the most legally dubious advice known to man.

If I'm calling you, even if you're on your phone, let it ring twice. One ring is too scary. Oh, cream of chicken suit. Hey, cream. Cream a chicken suit. This is help from a hypocrite. The worst advice from the dumbest people you know.

Listen to Help from Hypocrite as part of the Mike Coulthura Podcast Network available on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone. I'm Cheryl Stray, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. I'm excited to share that I have a new podcast called Mind Over Mountain. In each episode, I interview athletes, adventurers, and adrenaline seekers to discuss the inner landscapes and life experiences that inform, and inspired their extraordinary feats.

I also bring a bit of advice into the mix so we too can better understand how to face our own seemingly insurmountable challenges. Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to pull out what you already have inside. We're coming into this world, fighting for our lives. All I'm going to do is pull out what you already got inside.

We're there to support and celebrate each other. And that's not like your story versus my story. You're going to walk up and over that dang mountain. You're not just going to put your mind over it. Yep, yep, exactly. And if I can't walk up and over it, I'm going to go through it. Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it.

I used to, there was a time in my life where I loved Kanye West, right? Like, I idolized him. I could go, I could talk all day about how much I used to like him. And so, more recently. College dropout is one of my favorite albums of all time. I'm not going to lie. college dropout. It is the album that gave me the courage to drop out of grad school.

I was in grad school. And I was, I came home and I put that album on repeat. And I was like, I have to leave grad school. And if it was not my album where he says she couldn't afford her car, so she named her daughter Alexis. I was like, every Alexis that I knew at that point got a text message. I was like, it was good. It was good record.

It really was. What a shame. And I guess here's my question. So in the recent years, I've been like. Kanye, like, I love you, but I'm just, we're done. I'm not going to, you know, I kind of divested from Kanye. And when the White Lives Matter thing happened just the other week, obviously I was, you know, I was like, oh, this is same old Kanye.

I agree with you, Emily, that it is, it is attention and media attention. Like that is why you do something like that, right? Like, it's a stunt. You hope people talk about it, even if they're critiquing it. how do we responsibly talk about it, you know, pick it apart, whatever, in a way that it's not giving them what they want? I really, so I have been basically trying to ignore the White Lives Matter shirt because I was like, how do I, at any way that I talk about it, I know that people like Candace Owens, they feed off of attention. That's what they want. And so how can we walk that line of talking about it, critiquing it, putting it in the context of the ongoing meme wars that you all are doing while also not feeding.

into what they want, which I believe is attention. Well, so I think one of the most powerful ways to do that is as a journalist, when you cover it, because some of these things need to be covered, right? And some can be ignored because they're just media spectacle, but some have real-world impact or trying to, and they really do need to be covered. So one of the most responsible things you can do is when covering it and when talking about it, talk about the origins of the thing that this person is amplifying, talk about who created it,

why it was actually, you know, made as a response to something. So in this case, it was like a response, a negative response to people declaring that Black Lives mattered was why then this hashtag came up as a reaction to that. So talking about that and kind of the history of these events, I think kind of takes the wind out of the sails in the immediate moment of it having a media spectacle because you can then reveal like this is this is not just like some guy. This isn't even Kanye like doing something transgressive of his own cord.

Like this has a long, long history. And there have been a lot of people who've been waiting and hoping that someone like Kanye would amplify this exact idea. you know, it kind of changes the valence of the coverage, I think, of it. And then, you know, Joan was talking earlier also about how these kind of meme wars will influence the search results for phrases like this. So if someone hears it or they see it or they see it on Kanye's shirt and they Google it. One important thing is that like high quality journalism does rank well in search results. And so it's not, we use, you know, there's a way in which we say, like, maybe there are certain things the media should not amplify. But if something's already out there because it's at the level like Kanye West is amplifying it, then it's actually helpful to provide high quality journalistic explanations about it so that when someone goes online to learn about it, they're not only going to find information that was left there by the meme warriors who are pushing that agenda.

And then the other thing, which I totally didn't take my own advice, but I'll give it now and I'll try to do better going forward, is that you can talk about these things without actually repeating the phrase that is the thing that they're trying to get everyone to repeat. So, like, we can talk about how Kanye wore a shirt that was a negative reaction to Black Lives Matter and that wore a hashtag that people have been trying to mainstream without using the hashtag in our coverage too much. just so that we literally don't repeat it into people's brains over and over and over again. The reason why we are particularly attentive to this right now is while we were writing our book, Brandy Collins Dexter was writing Black Skinhead and has a chapter on Kanye West in particular. And this notion of the Black Skinhead is something that came up in a song of his, that she then titled her book after. But she's really charting the rise of these Black political outsiders.

And so as I was watching his interview on Tucker Carlson, it really resonated with me that he is, even though he's probably the most famous black man that's a pop culture superstar, very iconic, he still struggles to find voice and political relevance, which is really interesting when you start to think about the evolution of what it means to be platformed and what it means to say things in public. and how artists and musicians have this enormous platform, especially ones that are celebrities who get covered in the media. But for some reason, and I don't know if this is just an ethic of the right wing or whatnot, they always assume they're being silenced in some way, even when their voices are so loud. And I just thought that was really interesting, this idea that he speaks on his own behalf, He says his only audience is God.

But then at the end of the day, I think he's very influenced in the fact that he himself has been struggling to find an audience that really respects him enough to listen to these opinions that he has. And it just it just dawns on me that even when you have the biggest platform in the world and you can, you know, own everything you want to own. being listened to is what's desirable. And that's something you can't make other people do. That's such a good point. And it makes me think, Joan, about how, like, Bridget, when you were saying how much he used to like Kanye, like I remember the moment I liked Kanye and, like, first became aware of him,

really was when he was like, George Bush hates black people. And I was, like, watching that newscast live. And it was just such a transgressive moment where, like, he said something that was so much like, you're not supposed to say that, you know? And he's always been transgressive. And this reminds me of in our book, you know, a lot of the characters, we go behind the scenes of these meme wars and introduce you to the people who are fighting them and why and show you, you know, what their reasoning is in their own words.

And it's confusing because they don't. don't all agree on things. You know, they're not a monolith in a way that I kind of had thought far right. Okay, they all agree on this. They don't. They have things that they feel really, they have disagreements about things. But one way, one thing that binds them together is transgression, that they like to be transgressive. And then that's also why, one of the reasons why Donald Trump was such an appealing figure, because he was a really transgressive media figure. And similarly with Kanye, both Trump. and Kanye have succeeded in both having a platform and making themselves seem like a victim of not

having a platform. Yeah. And they are being like transgressive against like in Donald Trump's case, the meme like the deep state, you know, who's actually in control. So even if he's, even if he's in charge, he's not really in charge. So therefore he's a victim. But in Kanye's case, it may actually be more like the real structure and mainstream, of mainstream culture. and media coverage is in some ways not stacked in his favor.

And so in order to be transgressive, like I just think there's something there that is the same. It's this idea that they want to go against a status quo. Yeah, that's so interesting. And I mean, this is such a weird example, but it reminds me of like every kind of edgy, in air quotes, guy that I knew who loved edgy jokes and edgy humor and edgy memes. And I could tell that the reason why that felt like empowerment for them

was because it felt, it felt transgressive. It felt like I'm doing something that against the grain. But what they couldn't see is you're actually doing the same thing that like every other edgy teen is also doing. Like you're trying to paint yourself as this, you know, iconoclast while simultaneously doing the same thing that everybody else is doing. and you're saying at once that like, I'm, you know, doing something different, but you're doing something completely the same. That is so true. And I know I have met so many men like that.

I mean, why is it always men who are like that? I met a man a few years ago who was trying to flirt with me, I think. And his way of flirting with me was to tell me that he doesn't eat food, that he's different from other men, other humans, because he doesn't like to eat food. I was like, dude, you know, I know you're trying to be cool, but like, that just doesn't make any fucking sense at all. What does he eat? Then I stood there talking to him for so long to try to figure out what he eats. And then I realized, like, I've been suckered into a conversation with a person who was just trying to be, like, provocative and transgressive on purpose in order to get me to talk to him.

And what am I doing? You know. It's so boring. yeah that's the equivalent of i don't watch television oh right but do you even content though like come on give me a break don't watch tv we love tv you know with tv totally childhood so no but i you know when it comes to the transgressiveness of means i think that uh one of the things that as a kind of academic practice here is you know once you get to the root of a thing and you realize how many levels of abstraction have had to happen so that it can get

mainstreamed into the culture, there is some kind of bitter bitterness to the fact that white lives matter couldn't be mainstreamed by white supremacists. So it has to be mainstreamed by two black people who are looking for different kinds of media attention, right? And so it's the wrong way in which the meme enters into public consciousness as well. And so what we're going to watch for and probably will see is this battle over who gets to represent the meme now that it's out there and the mainstream media is paying attention. And I just did a quick look on Google to see what was coming back. And yeah, we're looking at hundreds of media outlets that are putting white lives matter in their headlines.

Oh my dog. And the ensuing a meme that's going to happen is going to involve people resurrecting old zombie content that already existed. And then we have already see about half a dozen online shops trying to sell

a version of this t-shirt. And you will see it start to crop up and become something that it never was intended to be. I think that that's one of the main points of our book is that these things take on a life of their own. And then the people who are behind them, eventually they fade into the distance. And some of them in our book in particular, if you look at those that were trying to mainstream certain right-way means after the election. and those that went to the Capitol on January 6th to, quote, unquote, stop the steel,

many of them are up on charges or they've lost their livelihoods. They've lost their money. Many people that were very close to Trump have lost their jobs and their credibility. I mean, the crying Brad Parscale meltdown is one such instance. But, you know, the mean wars don't. tend to work out well for those who try to participate in them. And that's where we are going to look at and pay a lot more closer attention to what's coming in 2024.

Because I have a feeling we're going to see many candidates dipping a toe into Q&ON. There's already a couple dozen candidates that are running in the midterms that are using Q&ON-type slogans and hashtags. President Trump is now trying to revive Q&on through truth social. It's likely once Elon Musk takes full control of Twitter that Trump is going to return to the platform and we're going to see many new memes and many old adversaries come back. But I think the one thing that our work really is future casting is really able to, you know, I don't want to say that we can predict what's going to happen in the mean wars,

but in these midterms that are coming up, America First seems to be much stronger than the candidates that they're running on the America First platform. In this meme, America First dates back to, what is it, Johnson? No, it's Woodrow Wilson. Wildrow Wilson. And then from there, the KKK pick it up. And then it's had many different utterances within the right wing over the years. But our chapter on Joker politics shows how the radical fringe of the right wing that really wants to, quote unquote, destroy the GOP, have utilized this moniker of America First to bring about their sort of whitened cultural utopia online.

and to discuss America as a kind of isolationist state. And this is feeding into politicians who want to have an audience online so that they can spread their messages and they can spread their campaign materials. And so we're going to see a lot more of these Nemours leading into 2024. And if it is the case that Trump does return to social media, as we see this rise in conspiracism and this kind of culture war

is playing out through popular celebrities. We're not going to be able to depend on the same kind of defenses that movements have been depending upon for the last couple of years with deplatforming and de-indexing. It's just not going to work when it reaches a certain scale

and the people who are running these companies are not sympathetic to the needs of community safety. And so unfortunately, I wish our book wasn't so much of a crystal ball here. But when I look back at history and I think about the future, I get really vexed by thinking about how much pain and antagonism is going to be sort of part of our political future if we don't really get a handle on how to make sure that people are safe online

and how to make sure that politicians don't use the internet to politically suppress others. Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.

This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends

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You might know me as that loud guy who yells out, help on the internet. Help! Somebody! Please! But there's so much more to me than that. I'm an actor. I'm a comedian, and recently I've become quite the helper myself. And on my new podcast, Hope I'm a Hippocrat.

I'll be changing lives, helping people in need with my sage advice and thoughtful solutions. Sike, I'm a comedian. I'm not qualified to give good advice. Join me and my comedian friends as we riff, rant, recommend some of the most legally dubious advice known to man. If I'm calling you, even if you're on your phone, phone, let it ring twice. One ring is too scary.

Oh, cream of chicken suit. Hey, cream. Cream a chicken suit. This is Help from a Hypocrat. The worst advice from the dumbest people you know. Listen to Help from Hypocrite as part of the Mike Cultura podcast network available on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHeart Podcasts presents soccer moms.

So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend, Janet. Hey. And we have been joined at the time. the hips since high school. Absolutely. Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip.

Just a little bit bigger hips, wider. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drink. Sidebar. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? Oh, they had a bogo. Well, then you got it.

Do you want a white claw or something here? Just hit it. Oh, what are y'all doing? Microphones? Are you making a rap album? Oh, I would. Come on. How did you imagine?

I would buy it. Cut through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake. That sounds delicious. Oh, you're lucky. I'm not a drug addict. You're lucky I'm not an alcoholic. You're lucky I'm not a killer. I love this team and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on.

Listen to soccer moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. At our back. When you think about the future of where we're at, Like, are you hopeful? And it sounds, Jonas, it sounds like, I mean, I don't want to answer for you. That didn't sound very hopeful. Are you both hopeful about our ability to make meaningful change in terms of safety online to get a handle on this? Or how are you feeling?

After having written this book? No, I'm not hopeful. I'm sad that we let it get so far away from a mission of, you know, is building technology and the public interest. You have the same types of authoritarian seeking to rule, the ways in which they used to go along on to TV and radio, is the same way we see them showing up on social media. It's no longer a tool for movements to be heard.

We have the very, very powerful, extremely invested in their power. And when you have everything, when money becomes meaningless to you, the only thing left to do is rule of world. And that's why I get so upset about the way in which our communication system has been over the years and maybe even the last 60, 70 years, owned by and monopolized by a very few companies in the hope of the Internet was that it would, wouldn't be the case, that it could be decentralized. But more and more, we're seeing certain companies take control over our global information commons and then not be proper stewards or librarians of that information. And so we need a broad whole of society approach to returning to a public interest internet, lest we end up with what we're getting now, which is more of the same very, very rich people who don't need to care how we survive this because it's not going

to affect them or their families or other people that they care about. And so the stakes couldn't be higher, I think, for a broad global movement to return communication to the people. So, okay, my answer is, or my instinct is to be hopeful because, like, we're living on this planet, you know? Like, we're not, here we are. I got kids. Like, I need them to be able to be safe. And I do think that I have a couple of things that make me a little bit hopeful, maybe more hopeful than not. One is that by writing this book, through the process of writing this book, what I learned is that all of these things that seem out of control, like QAnon, which to me just seemed like it, whoa, it came out of nowhere.

Like, what is this thing? The insurrection. Like, holy, you know, where the fuck did that have come from? Why is this happening? It actually comes from somewhere. It all comes from somewhere. And it's planned and it's coordinated. And we can know that and we can find that out.

And so I guess that I think that there's something to be hopeful about the fact that you can be empowered by knowledge. Like, we can tease out how these systems work and lay that there for people. And we hope that this book is like doing that as a first step. And then the reason to do that, right, is not just so that like individual people like us can be like, hey, the reason that happened is this. But actually so that then we could all come together and like advocate for some kind of systemic whole of society. response that Joan is talking about. And we should advocate for that. And we can advocate for that in some ways that, you know,

learn from some of the memetic theory that we're looking into. Like, you know, the thing I said about repeating a lie over and over again makes it seem true. Well, also repeating a truth over and over again makes it seem truer. Like repeating the things that you believe in over and over again, if they're pro-social beliefs, you know, bear repeating. And sometimes people will be like, oh, you know, obviously the bedrock of progressives in America and liberalism is like a multiracial democracy where we have equity and freedom and we don't need to mention that because

it's like a given. But like, you know, givens, we should be repeating the givens. And the other thing I want to say is just that the book made me realize that fighting these memoirs and mainstreaming these ideas doesn't necessarily result in, let's say, policy changes, like build the wall, right? Did not build the wall. It did result in a lot of talk. It resulted in like a go fund me campaign that maybe we'll send Steve Bannon to prison. But it didn't result in an actual border wall. But what it did do in a very crucial way is expand the, people's understanding of what's possible. So like anti-immigration folks who already had anti-immigration beliefs were not before that calling for a wall.

And they may not ever get one, but now they think of it as an option. And one thing that I think the left, frankly, like, doesn't do a great job of is helping people have an imagination about what's possible and what's better. So, you know, we can ourselves, like, start talking about how there are things we really want. And, like, right now there are cases in front of the Supreme Court. I spent the whole morning trying to figure out these two cases that are going to be in front of the Supreme Court that have to do with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to try to figure out, like, is this going to be a thing that's going to fix this? Like, are people going to be held accountable? And what I learned is that those cases, though they seem to have a lot of merit, are not even being considered on the merit.

The merits are not being considered. It's a procedural question before the court. And just which brings me to this idea that so much of the reason why we think change is not possible is because of bureaucracy and like entrenched procedures and norms. in our legal system and in our government system and in our education system and in the infrastructure of the internet that was built in a specific way that ended up incentivizing specific things and we think we can't change it. But the truth is like actually those things can be changed. And we could still have an amendment. We could make an amendment to the Constitution that would codify row and give rights and do all of these things. But we don't even ever talk about that

because we're like, oh, that's not possible. But anyways, I'm hopeful that we could begin expanding our imagination of what's possible, put it out there, and then who knows what could happen? Maybe something good could come of it. Very rosy. Very rosy. You want a constitutional amendment to protect women's rights. Well, I do because, frankly, amendments are, like, this is me, like, learning how the government works so late in life.

And you know what? I've been learning a lot about it from TikTok. So thank you. But like amendments give, amendments give rights, you know. Laws don't give rights. Laws like in some cases curtail rights. They take away rights. They enforce rules. But they don't give rights. Rights or amendments. I'm like, I don't think that there's been a new one in my lifetime. And that is, I mean, there probably has. So definitely fact check that. I'm not an expert in this. But there hasn't been one in a long time.

And there's this, I spent this morning learning why. And it's like all stuff that can change. And actually like we could decide to work on that. And then we could codify road. I don't know. I don't have a lot of faith in government these days. Teach yourself home health care. Joe's not going to let us make her hopeful about this. She's like, no, I don't think so.

Not today on all days. It's Friday. It's sunny now. For me anyway. But yeah, no, I hear you about wanting to have hope in this world and wanting to have a positive social vision of where we need to go. But I don't know if that's possible with. so many of these types of people at the helm of our politics and our communication and maybe I've been totally nihilistic

in my descriptions today, but I'm not having a bad day, you know? It's like, you know, I'm out here laughing, I'm out of your understanding the contingencies. And I agree with you that if people like the key here and the key is the question that began the

you know decade of research that I've done about the internet which is how do people coordinate to do anything right and and there's a time for social protest there's a time for lawyering there's a time for uh hiving and swarming and so I agree it's going to take all of these things but I also know that if we don't get our communication infrastructure in line, then it's going to be used by those in power to further polarize and divide us. And this is the big lesson of the last, you know, five or six years of digital organizing, which is that it's amazing to have all of these open platforms and forms of communication that allow us to meet each other,

to meet across the globe, to have these grand visions. But the only people I see building technology for these political purposes is the far right. And this isn't what it was like 10 years ago. At Post-occupied, there was an explosion in leftist and anarcho, creation of social media platforms. The first Facebook clone I ever used was developed by

people in Occupy. And so there seems to be a lack of investment in the infrastructure that allows for that kind of organizing that you're talking about Emily to really take shape. And we're not going to get there without our technologists getting on board and seeing this through. Because for so long, I think we've been able to depend on for worse the organizational means by which Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have provided. But I don't think we're going to be able to count on that in the long term. And I don't think that organizing in public is going to be as useful as organizing in smaller local groups has been for many, many decades.

And so I think part of this is about trying to think through the obligation to move out of just these myopic online spaces and to think about what is the infrastructure that we're going to need to unite people who want to do the street protesting with the people who want to do the lawyering with the people who want to change our institutions. And I think that to do that, we're going to have to ask for a different internet and we're going to have to build it and we're going to have to fund it in many different ways. And, you know, I love the name of this podcast. There are no girls on the internet because it really reminds me about how all of the invisible work of women over the years with infrastructure labor, the fact that women were first telephone operators and is because, you know, women with really long arms would get. hired at AT&T and Bell because they could operate the switchboards easier. You know, that women have been the backbone of our communication technology for so, so many years. And I think it's possible to do something bright and workable if we invest in the means to do it and we resource it well. But I hesitate to say we can get it done with what's around at this point because I just don't see the political will within these companies

in particular to build the internet that creates broader public interest and information. Instead, we see more and more drive to monetize and marketize information. And even though our communication one-to-one has gotten cheaper than ever, we're paying the price of that in our politics, in our education, in our economy, because a few people have used this technological change as a smash-and-grab operation on the rights and civil liberties of the rest of us. And so maybe I sound like a crazy Marxist at the end of the day, but I do believe that communication should be free. And I do believe that if we don't make that a possibility that the power of the internet and the power of these networks is going to be reserved for the chosen few

who have always managed to come out on top. And when I say that, I'm saying particularly, are political elite and the 1% who have bought up these communication networks or made themselves millionaires in the process and then we'll glom on to saying, well, we don't mean content moderation because everybody is the right to free speech.

But when that free speech is being used to hunt people down and stop doctors from giving care to people, then we have to question if that's really about free speech. Sorry, I'll get off my soapbox now, Bridget. No, I love it. I think, like, it's, I wouldn't even necessarily say that's not hopeful. It's just a different, it's like hopeful for a different kind of thing, hopeful for kind of tearing down our current systems and rebuilding them

so that they work for more people. That's, it's a big, it's a tall order, but it's not absence of hope. Yeah. I hear you. And in the meantime, you know, I'll be selling White Lives Matter shirts. Oh, my God. At least bedazzle them. At least make them, you know, jazz them up a little bit.

The best ones out there. I mean, I still can't believe that. You know, I'm sitting here in disbelief, looking at it, thinking to myself, how did we go so wrong? And how is everybody taking the bait on? that. And yeah, so maybe that's where a little bit of my disillusionment is coming in. And I won't, obviously I'm not going to be selling anything on eBay. If my sarcasm isn't coming through, I relish the canceling that's on my way, that's coming my way. So Joan, you said earlier that maybe

your answer sounded nihilistic. And I have been thinking about nihilism a lot this morning. And I also, So I will, my final parting thought is that I used to think of myself as a nihilist because like LOL Nothing Matters is like my favorite and only meme I paid attention to before, you know, writing this book and doing this research. LOL nothing matters was my meme. And I've realized that LOL nothing matters is not nihilism. LOL nothing matters is absurdism, which is that nothing matters, but that means we get to make the meaning. We get to do whatever we want. And we can do good. We can do, we can have fun. And like, our systems are not working right now. They're not working for like a vast majority of people. But we can. We could remake them. And also, like,

I was learning about First Amendment today. Speaking about hate speech, like the First Amendment doesn't actually protect hate speech as an amendment, that's part of the law that has been built up over the years of interpreting it. And who wrote, who did that interpreting largely white male judges? You know, so like, that's not necessarily surprising that they carved out a, that like hate speech decided to be included. So, LOL nothing matters, but therefore, we can change everything if we want ourselves. Words to fucking live. by the book is Me Moore's The Untold Story of the Online

Battles Abending Democracy in America. Joan, Emily, thank you so much for being here. Is there anything that I did not ask that you want to make sure it gets included? Buy Black Skinhead by Brandy Collins. Oh, yes, we're going to have her on. You got it's all in your pocket.

Get her book. Yes, we're going to have her on very soon. I'm partway through the book. It's so good. Got a story about an interesting thing in or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoody.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoody.com.

There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio,

check out the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you.