Matt Furie, the cartoonist and creator of the Pepe the Frog character (though crucially, not the meme), reminds me of quite a few of my male friends growing up in Eastern Pennsylvania, and even more of them now that I live in California. He’s carefree, weird in a fun way, queer-adjacent, creative, and a vessel of good vibes. It’s this personality type that draws people in: other cartoonists, his wife, his energetic toddler, his long-haired townie roommate in San Luis Obispo. But contained in this positivity is also Furie’s general aversion to conflict, to bad vibes, which ultimately kept him from […]
Internet memes
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It has been 20 weeks since Breonna Taylor was shot and killed in her own home. And the cops who killed her still have not been arrested. “If you’re online a lot, you’ve probably seen Breonna Taylor being turned into just another meme,” Trevor Noah said on Thursday night near the top of the 12-minute segment he dedicated to her story. While the people keeping her name “trending” may be “well-intentioned,” the Daily Show host said they were “essentially using her name as a punchline.” “Memes are not the best way to honor someone who has passed,” he continued. “It’s the […]
On Wednesday afternoon, amid a global pandemic that’s killed more than 400,000 people, a civil rights movement for black lives hitting all 50 states (and beyond), and a billionaire author’s childhood-shattering campaign of hate, the rapper Ice Cube apparently decided it was the perfect time to unleash a torrent of tinfoil-hat conspiracies—including several anti-Semitic memes suggesting that Jews are fomenting the oppression of black people. Yes, in between sharing memes positing Marvin the Martian as some sort of harbinger of anti-black racism (an odd claim, given Warner Bros.’ racist TV mascot), and alleging that Europeans destroyed the noses of sphinxes in […]
Wednesday morning, a Change.org petition circled the internet calling to “Have TikTok remove any content involving the ‘George Floyd challenge!!’” The page featured a disturbing layout collage, cropped to reveal only the bottom two photos. In each, two white guys mugged for the camera, as one knelt on the other’s neck—both mocking the murder of George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis cop knelt on his windpipe for eight minutes and 46 seconds. By that evening, the petition passed its goal of 5,000 signatures. The new goal is now 7,500. “There is a challenge currently ‘popular’ on the app TikTok,” the […]