Did Harambe Mark the End of Internet Monoculture?
Why the Internet of 2016 Feels Like Another Universe
Did Harambe Mark the End of Internet Monoculture?
Harambe became one of the defining memes of 2016 because his death arrived at a moment when internet humor, mainstream news, political anxiety, smartphones, and platform culture were colliding. What began as outrage over the death of a gorilla was transformed into an absurd, participatory meme that people used to express grief, anger, irony, alienation, and the feeling that history had entered the wrong timeline.
In this episode of Network Issues, media scholar Jamie Cohen and marketing strategist Destinee Day revisit Harambe ten years later. Jamie argues that Harambe was not simply another viral joke: the meme may mark the end of internet monoculture—the period when online culture and mainstream media still appeared to participate in one shared conversation.
Why Does 2016 Feel Like Another Universe?
Nostalgia for 2016 is not only nostalgia for specific music, fashion, apps, or memes.
For many people, it represents the final period when internet culture still felt collectively legible. A meme could move from Tumblr, Twitter, Vine, Reddit, or YouTube into classrooms, offices, television shows, campaign speeches, and ordinary conversations. Even people who were not deeply online frequently understood the same references.
The internet was already fragmented, commercialized, and politically volatile. But it still produced moments that seemed to reach almost everyone simultaneously.
Jamie describes this as internet monoculture: a cultural environment in which a relatively small number of viral stories, videos, images, and jokes became shared points of reference across platforms and mainstream media.
By the end of 2016, that relationship had changed.
Algorithmic feeds, political polarization, niche communities, reactionary content, and platform-specific identities increasingly separated users into different informational worlds. People were no longer merely interpreting the same viral event differently. They were being shown entirely different realities.
What Was Internet Monoculture?
Internet monoculture was the period when a viral event could become recognizable across the web and traditional media at the same time.
A meme might begin on a social platform, spread through online communities, appear on morning television, become a late-night comedy segment, enter advertising, and eventually become part of ordinary offline conversation.
The concept does not mean that everyone agreed or that every person saw precisely the same content. It means there was a more visible center to online culture.
Events such as Kony 2012, The Dress, Damn Daniel, and Boaty McBoatface were not confined to isolated communities. They became collective cultural moments.
The boundaries between “internet culture” and “mainstream culture” briefly appeared to dissolve.
How Kony 2012 Demonstrated the Power of Shared Virality
The Kony 2012 campaign is one of Jamie’s starting points for understanding internet monoculture.
The campaign video spread with extraordinary speed, combining emotional storytelling, social sharing, celebrity amplification, activism, and political pressure. It became something people encountered not only online but also in classrooms, television reports, workplaces, and everyday conversations.
Kony 2012 also demonstrated the limitations of shared virality.
A piece of media could reach an enormous audience before many viewers had the context necessary to evaluate its claims, framing, or political implications. Emotional certainty traveled faster than critical understanding.
That tension—between collective attention and incomplete media literacy—became one of the defining features of the social internet.
Why The Dress Was Peak Internet Monoculture
In February 2015, a photograph of a dress created a global argument over whether it appeared blue and black or white and gold.
The event was trivial, participatory, visual, and instantly understandable. No specialist knowledge was required. Anyone could look at the image and choose a side.
The Dress moved rapidly between social media, digital publishers, scientific explanations, celebrity responses, television programs, and private conversations. It was online content that became mainstream content without losing its participatory nature.
For Jamie, The Dress represents the peak of a moment when the internet and mass media seemed to breathe together.
The joke did not belong solely to one community. The disagreement itself became the shared cultural experience.
What Happened to Harambe?
On May 28, 2016, a three-year-old child entered the gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo and fell into the moat. Zoo staff shot and killed Harambe, a 17-year-old western lowland gorilla, because they believed the child faced an immediate threat.
The event generated intense public disagreement.
People argued about:
Whether the zoo had another option
Whether the enclosure was adequately secured
Whether the child’s parents were responsible
Whether Harambe was protecting or endangering the child
Whether a tranquilizer could have worked
Why the incident was recorded and circulated
How people should respond to the death of a captive animal
The footage and surrounding commentary supplied multiple targets for grief, blame, outrage, and speculation.
Harambe was almost unknown outside Cincinnati before the incident. Afterward, he became an international cultural symbol.
Why Did Harambe Become a Meme?
Harambe became a meme because the event could contain many different emotions and political meanings at once.
The meme could express:
Genuine grief over the death of an animal
Anger toward the zoo
Anger toward the child’s parents
Cynicism about public outrage
Mockery of online activism
Frustration with mainstream news
Nostalgia for an alternate timeline
Rejection of respectable public language
Reactionary or transgressive humor
A general sense that the world had become absurd
This flexibility made Harambe a cultural vessel.
The original event supplied seriousness, emotional intensity, video evidence, public controversy, and unresolved questions. The internet then converted those elements into an endlessly remixable object.
Academic analysis has described the Harambe meme as beginning partly in animal-rights discourse before being transformed into a broader internet culture jam.
Was Harambe the End of Internet Monoculture?
Jamie’s argument is that Harambe became the pivot point between two eras.
Before Harambe, online culture and mainstream media often amplified one another. A viral object crossed platforms, television converted it into mass entertainment, and the internet responded to that amplification.
After Harambe, the internet increasingly rejected mainstream attempts to control, sanitize, or commercialize its culture.
The meme’s more transgressive iterations functioned as a form of reclamation. Online communities were effectively declaring that the meme belonged to them—not to news anchors, brands, campaign strategists, or television producers.
At the same time, social platforms were becoming more algorithmic and politically powerful. Shared virality was giving way to segmented attention.
Harambe did not single-handedly cause that transformation. The meme can instead be understood as a marker—a visible artifact located at the point where the old relationship between the internet and mainstream culture began to fracture.
What Did “Dicks Out for Harambe” Mean?
“Dicks Out for Harambe” became the most recognizable and deliberately vulgar extension of the meme.
Its offensiveness was part of its function.
The phrase was difficult for mainstream media, political campaigns, brands, and respectable public institutions to adopt without neutralizing it. That made it resistant to the normal process in which viral culture was collected, repackaged, and resold to a mass audience.
The meme became a boundary marker between institutional culture and participatory internet culture.
It was not merely a tribute. It was a culture-jamming device—a way for online communities to retain control through language that could not be easily absorbed into conventional media.
What Boaty McBoatface Revealed About the 2016 Interne
In 2016, the United Kingdom’s Natural Environment Research Council invited the public to suggest and vote on a name for a new polar research ship.
Boaty McBoatface won with more than 124,000 votes.
The research vessel itself was ultimately named RRS Sir David Attenborough, while the Boaty McBoatface name was given to an autonomous underwater vehicle.
The episode illustrates the relationship between institutions and participatory internet culture.
The institution invited the internet to participate, but the internet did not behave like a traditional consultation group. It treated the poll as a creative opportunity and produced a result that was absurd, memorable, and collectively legible.
Boaty McBoatface demonstrated both the power and unpredictability of opening institutional decisions to online participation.
Why Damn Daniel and Vine Mattered
“Damn, Daniel” became one of 2016’s defining short-form video memes.
The original compilation showed a teenager repeatedly complimenting his friend’s outfits—especially his white Vans. Its humor was simple, repetitive, and easy to imitate.
The meme spread during Vine’s cultural peak, when six-second videos generated phrases, gestures, sounds, and characters that moved into everyday speech.
Destinee remembers students repeating the phrase in person. That detail matters because it illustrates how internet culture once traveled.
People did not simply watch the meme alone in an algorithmic feed. They carried it into classrooms, offices, friendships, and physical interactions. Recognizing the reference became part of participating in shared culture.
When It Was Stranger Not to Know the Meme
During the monocultural internet, knowing major internet references became normal.
Someone who did not recognize a viral phrase could feel culturally behind, even if they were not active on the platform where it originated.
That differs from today’s fragmented culture.
A modern video may receive tens of millions of views without reaching anyone outside a particular algorithmic audience. Two people can use the same platform every day and encounter almost no overlapping content.
Virality still exists, but shared context is less guaranteed.
The metric may be larger while the cultural center is smaller.
How Political Campaigns Tried to Use Internet Culture
By 2016, political campaigns understood that internet culture had become influential.
They did not always understand how to participate in it.
Hillary Clinton’s “Pokémon Go to the polls” line is a useful example. The campaign attempted to connect a rapidly spreading game with voter participation. The phrase became famous partly because many internet users experienced it as forced and institutionally manufactured.
The moment exposed a widening gap.
The mainstream political system wanted access to internet culture’s attention, but internet culture had become increasingly resistant to visible attempts at appropriation
A meme used naturally within a community could feel participatory. The same reference used by an institution could feel like evidence that the institution did not understand the audience it wanted to reach.
How 2016 Political Memes Accelerated Fragmentation
The 2016 election demonstrated that memes were no longer only jokes, cultural references, or promotional tools.
They could organize political identity, attack opponents, distort information, create group belonging, and move messages between fringe communities and mainstream platforms.
Research into cross-platform meme diffusion has shown that fringe communities can meaningfully influence the broader meme ecosystem. Memes can move between anonymous boards, Reddit, Twitter, political communities, and mainstream audiences while changing meaning at each stage.
This helped transform meme literacy into political literacy.
Understanding the joke was no longer enough. People also needed to understand where it came from, which community was using it, what ideas traveled with it, and how platforms rewarded its circulation.
Why People Remember 2016 as an Alternate Timeline
Harambe became connected to jokes about alternate universes, broken timelines, and the idea that reality took a wrong turn.
These jokes allow people to place a complicated historical feeling onto a single, recognizable event.
The argument is not literally that Harambe’s death changed the timeline. It is that the meme provides a symbolic dividing line between two cultural environments:
Before:
More shared viral moments
Greater overlap between television and the internet
More visible collective jokes
Less generative AI
Less public awareness of algorithmic manipulation
A comparatively coherent mainstream feed
After:
Increasingly personalized algorithms
Political meme warfare
Platform-specific realities
Greater polarization
Fragmented audiences
More visible surveillance and data extraction
A growing inability to agree on basic context
Harambe gives that transition a face.
Why Nostalgia for 2016 Feels Real
Jamie distinguishes genuine nostalgia from purely aesthetic nostalgia.
People may miss 2016 not because it was objectively peaceful or politically healthy, but because the culture felt more shared.
Nostalgia often erases the problems of the past. In this case, however, it may also recognize something that has actually been lost: the feeling that a large portion of society was responding to the same cultural object at the same time.
People could disagree about The Dress, Harambe, Kony 2012, or Boaty McBoatface while still knowing what the disagreement was about.
Today, people often lack even that shared starting point.
Why Pepe, Doge, and Harambe Matter
Jamie identifies Pepe, Doge, and Harambe as three of the internet’s most consequential meme figures.
All three are animals—or animal-like characters—that became vessels for meanings far beyond their original contexts.
Pepe
Pepe began as a comic character and was remixed across countless emotional and political contexts. The character demonstrates how creators can lose control of a cultural object as communities continually reproduce and redefine it.
Doge
Doge transformed an image of a Shiba Inu into a flexible visual language, a cryptocurrency identity, and eventually a political symbol.
Harambe
Harambe began as a real animal involved in a tragic event. The meme turned him into a martyr, joke, political vessel, timeline marker, and object of collective nostalgia.
Animals work especially well as memes because they are expressive without arriving with fixed human political identities. Communities can project meaning onto them while preserving enough emotional distance for humor and remixing.
What Is Media Archaeology?
Media archaeology examines technologies, platforms, cultural artifacts, and forgotten systems to understand how present-day media developed.
Instead of treating digital culture as completely new, media archaeology looks for layers, repetitions, dead platforms, abandoned technologies, and turning points.
A meme can become an archaeological artifact.
The Harambe meme preserves evidence of:
Smartphone video culture
Zoo and animal-rights discourse
2016 platform dynamics
Participatory humor
Political anxiety
Mainstream media amplification
Culture jamming
Algorithmic fragmentation
Looking back ten years later allows the meme to be studied not only as a joke, but as an object that captures the structure of its era.
Did Harambe Cause the Internet to Change?
No.
Harambe did not cause algorithmic feeds, political polarization, platform capitalism, or the collapse of shared media culture.
Jamie’s argument is that the meme marks the change particularly well.
It sits at the intersection of several forces that were already accelerating:
The rise of algorithmic platforms
The collapse of Vine
The politicization of meme culture
The 2016 presidential campaign
Smartphones recording public events
Increasing distrust of mainstream media
Online communities reclaiming cultural ownership
Platforms learning to profit from reactionary engagement
Harambe is therefore best understood as a timestamp, not a single cause.
Key Takeaways
Harambe was killed at the Cincinnati Zoo on May 28, 2016.
The event became a meme because it could contain grief, blame, irony, politics, and absurdity simultaneously.
Jamie argues that Harambe marks the end of internet monoculture rather than causing it.
Kony 2012 and The Dress demonstrate an earlier period of highly shared online attention.
Boaty McBoatface showed how institutions struggled to control participatory internet culture.
Vine memes such as Damn Daniel moved naturally between online and offline conversation.
Political campaigns increasingly tried to borrow internet culture during the 2016 election.
Algorithmic platforms later made it possible for users to inhabit radically different cultural realities.
Pepe, Doge, and Harambe became durable vessels for political and cultural meanings.
Nostalgia for 2016 may reflect the loss of shared context rather than a belief that the year itself was perfect.
Questions Answered in This Episode
Why did Harambe become a meme?
Harambe became a meme because the circumstances of his death generated grief, blame, controversy, recorded footage, and unresolved moral questions. The internet could then use him as a flexible symbol for irony, outrage, alternate timelines, and cultural alienation.
When did Harambe die?
Harambe was killed at the Cincinnati Zoo on May 28, 2016, after a three-year-old child entered his enclosure.
What is internet monoculture?
Internet monoculture describes a period when a relatively small number of viral stories, videos, images, and jokes became widely recognizable across platforms, television, news, advertising, and offline conversation.
Did Harambe end internet monoculture?
Harambe did not directly cause its end. Jamie Cohen argues that the meme is a useful cultural marker for the point when online communities, mainstream media, political culture, and algorithmic platforms began separating more visibly.
Why do people feel nostalgic for 2016?
People may associate 2016 with a more shared internet, before personalized algorithms and political fragmentation created increasingly separate media realities.
What was Kony 2012?
Kony 2012 was a viral advocacy video produced by Invisible Children. It reached an enormous global audience and demonstrated how online media could mobilize attention, emotion, celebrity amplification, and political discussion at unprecedented speed.
What was The Dress?
The Dress was a 2015 viral photograph that caused viewers to disagree over whether a dress appeared blue and black or white and gold. It became a global shared-media event discussed across social platforms, news, television, science, and everyday conversation.
What was Boaty McBoatface?
Boaty McBoatface was the winning name in a 2016 public vote to name a British polar research vessel. The ship received a different name, but an autonomous underwater vehicle was eventually named Boaty McBoatface.
What was Damn Daniel?
Damn Daniel was a viral 2016 video compilation in which one teenager repeatedly complimented another’s outfits and white Vans. It became a defining example of Vine-era catchphrase culture.
Why are Pepe, Doge, and Harambe important?
Each became a flexible cultural vessel that could be remixed into humor, emotion, politics, identity, or protest. Their meanings expanded far beyond the original images or characters.
What is media archaeology?
Media archaeology studies old, forgotten, or changing media technologies and artifacts to understand how today’s digital culture developed.
Episode Chapters
00:00 — “Media archaeologists thinking about fascism”
A photograph from Ireland becomes the starting point for examining 2016 as a historical turning point.
00:28 — What do you remember about the memes of 2016?
Jamie asks Destinee which shared cultural references remain a decade later.
01:00 — Harambe’s tenth anniversary
The hosts revisit the event that became one of the most durable memes of its era.
01:20 — Why Destinee feels nostalgic for 2016
Personal memories overlap with a broader sense that online life once felt simpler.
02:15 — The Ireland photograph that unlocked the conversation
A caption written days after Harambe’s death becomes an accidental historical artifact.
02:45 — Why 2016 nostalgia feels real
Jamie distinguishes lived cultural loss from purely aesthetic nostalgia.
03:00 — The last year the internet and mainstream media were together
The episode introduces the central argument about internet monoculture.
03:20 — Kony 2012 and shared online attention
A viral advocacy video demonstrates the internet’s growing ability to shape mass culture.
04:20 — The Dress and peak shared internet culture
Millions of people argued over the same image at the same time.
05:00 — When television and the internet were fully merged
Late-night shows, daytime television, celebrities, and digital publishers participated in the same viral cycle.
05:35 — Harambe’s death and the breaking point
A tragic zoo incident becomes a global cultural object.
06:00 — Why Harambe marks the end of internet monoculture
Jamie positions the meme as a timestamp for a larger media transition.
06:25 — Political platforms and cultural atomization
Algorithmic systems begin separating users into more individualized realities.
06:50 — Boaty McBoatface and participatory culture
An institutional naming poll produces the internet’s preferred absurd result.
07:15 — Damn Daniel, Vine, and shared jokes
Short-form videos move from phone screens into everyday speech.
07:40 — Destinee’s office-prank story
A student meme prank illustrates how deeply internet humor shaped offline relationships.
08:10 — When it was stranger not to know internet culture
Major memes functioned as common cultural literacy.
08:35 — Harambe as a reaction to political anxiety
The meme absorbs emotions larger than the zoo incident itself.
09:00 — Why Harambe became ideal reactionary content
Different audiences could project opposing forms of anger onto the same event.
09:35 — The internet reclaims the meme
Online communities push the cultural object beyond mainstream control.
10:05 — “Dicks Out for Harambe” and ownership
Transgressive language makes the meme resistant to institutional appropriation.
10:35 — Pokémon Go to the polls
A campaign’s attempt to participate in internet culture exposes the widening cultural gap.
11:10 — How the internet became atomized
The episode moves from shared jokes to individualized algorithmic feeds.
11:35 — Harambe, grief, and alternate timelines
The meme becomes a place to store the feeling that history went wrong.
12:05 — Why people still miss 2016
The nostalgia may be for shared context rather than the year itself.
12:40 — The unresolved questions around the zoo incident
Destinee revisits the practical and moral details that made the event so controversial.
13:00 — The three most important memes
Jamie introduces his ranking of historically consequential memes.
13:20 — Pepe, Doge, and Harambe
A frog, a dog, and a gorilla become vessels for global political culture.
14:00 — Why animal memes become political symbols
Their emotional familiarity and flexibility make them ideal for projection and remixing.
14:35 — Platform capitalism and the end of something
The episode connects meme history to the business structures of social platforms.
15:00 — Why 2016 matters to media archaeology
Harambe becomes a digital artifact capable of preserving an entire cultural transition.
About the Hosts
Jamie Cohen
Jamie Cohen is a media scholar, professor, writer, and expert on internet culture, memes, online extremism, digital media, and media archaeology.
Website: jamesncohen.com
Substack: New Media Homework
Follow Jamie:
Instagram: @jamiecohen
Destinee Day
Destinee Day is a marketing strategist and founder of Rudy & Company. Her work focuses on communications, digital strategy, branding, media, and social media.
Website: rudyandcompany.com
Follow Destinee:
Instagram: @destineeday
Continue the Conversation
What was the final internet meme that you remember nearly everyone knowing? Did internet culture really feel more collective in 2016—or are we recreating that feeling through nostalgia?
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Jamie (00:01.016)
Hey, how are ya?
Destinee Day (00:03.198)
Doing better than you.
Jamie (00:04.188)
Yeah. Yeah. Well that you could let's start that over. That is a hundred percent true. I mean there's no you can't it's not a debatable. okay.
Destinee Day (00:18.797)
Ha ha ha.
Jamie (00:22.936)
Okay.
Destinee Day (00:23.891)
My goal is to make you laugh so hard that you poop out your butt.
Jamie (00:26.772)
my god, please don't. I d I did No, I'm not gonna say this on the recording. There's okay. Okay, so Destiny, I have a question for you. What do you remember about the memes of twenty sixteen?
Destinee Day (00:32.321)
Okay.
Okay, sorry.
Destinee Day (00:39.726)
Yes.
Destinee Day (00:45.518)
boy. Great question. I mean, I remember Harambe. I I mean most memorable in my mind is when we went to Ireland and we memed our little visit with hashtag beef2016. yeah, that's what comes to mind my mind immediately.
Jamie (01:02.05)
Yes, yeah.
Jamie (01:09.336)
So that's exactly so I want to start with Harambe here because Harambe's an 10th anniversary is this May. Okay. And I want to pose a question to you about what Harambe means 10 years later in terms of how and why we have nostalgia for 2016. Do you have nostalgia for 2016? Do you have a a a desire?
Destinee Day (01:15.818)
Mm. That's crazy.
Destinee Day (01:30.24)
Yeah man. I I mean that was our trip to Ireland where we did media archaeology. We won a fun little award for that. we had great students at the time. We had great memories. I feel like it was a simpler time.
Jamie (01:53.954)
Do you remember
Destinee Day (01:54.156)
I wasn't worried about AI taking over my life or my job or what you know, the society crumbling or nuclear war yet. So yeah, I have nostalgia for twenty sixteen.
Jamie (02:03.724)
Do you remember taking this photo?
Destinee Day (02:06.966)
Yes, I took that photo. Yes. That was in Northern Ireland. That was no wait, hold on. I love this photo because this was a great day because just the chaperones on the trip got to go and take a visit. So we went to Northern Ireland and we saw a bunch of stuff and I took this photo of you and our colleague. And when we got back, all the students were really mad because they had to spend a whole day in class and we got to go have one without them.
Jamie (02:07.736)
Yeah. So this is this
Yeah, this isn't a
Jamie (02:33.152)
Yeah. Yeah. We got to go see the Giants Causeway and we got to go experience the if you remember this quarry site is I think where Daenerys Targaryen did something. I think this was a scene, but we did like a mini Game of Thrones tour at this point. But I I just want to point you to the caption that I put on this because this is May 31st, 2016. Okay. So this is an important part of this photo. It's May 31st, 2016, and it says
Destinee Day (02:44.876)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yes. Yeah.
Jamie (03:01.29)
Media archaeologists thinking about fascism. Okay. Now that this picture has come to mind for me lately only because when I started thinking about the Harambe meme again on its 10th anniversary, I started thinking about the nostalgia people feel for 2016. And I started feeling that it's earnest. I do think that nostalgia for 2016 is real. I think in most cases, nostalgia is performative. I think people like do it because they like.
want the computer room or they want the Tuscan kitchen or they want some bullshit that's aesthetic but not actually a feeling. But I think it's so different in twenty sixteen because I think twenty sixteen was the very last year where the internet and mainstream media were together.
Destinee Day (03:48.63)
Interesting.
Jamie (03:49.731)
So here's what I think. Okay. So you remember Kony 2012, right? Okay. So a lot of people don't know that. And a lot of my students are literally late, they were like eight when that came out. So like so they don't know that. But Kony 2012, I think was the beginning of what I would consider like an internet monoculture. That's where like the internet broke through from being the internet into like real space. And Kony 2012, which I remember when I was teaching it,
Destinee Day (03:55.33)
Mm-hmm.
Destinee Day (04:01.609)
no.
Jamie (04:18.678)
At Malloy. It was it was it was the first time I ever sent a shared a video without prepping it. Like I didn't pre-screen it. And so I remember showing it to the class in a class called Understanding Social Media. Like that's funny in 2012, right? Like people had to take that course. and they watched it and at the end, I'm watching this video. I'm like, what the f it was like so propaganda full of it. And by the end of it, I was like, what is this? And I turned to the class and they were crying. And I was like,
Destinee Day (04:47.192)
Yeah.
Jamie (04:48.126)
No. So it was like one of those mistakes that I made. But the point of that is that at that point we knew that the internet had a cultural zeitgeist that can now lift it into the mainstream and people knew what was going on there. From there, it peaked in twenty fifteen, probably with the dress. Okay, which to me is still black and blue. What is it to you?
Destinee Day (05:11.34)
Yes. Yes, it's black and blue. I don't know how it's what what world do other people live in that it is not? I wanna know.
Jamie (05:13.72)
Okay, cool.
Well, no, listen, I'll give credit. One morning, one single morning. I remember I woke up and I remember opening for some reason. I well, I open my phone every day is the first thing I do, but I looked and for the briefest second I saw white and gold. I was like, and in front of my eyes, it switched. And I was like, some people do get to see it. So I guess it has something to do with the cones or something. But that was like that was the moment where there was no difference. So by this point,
By 2015, Jimmy Kimmel was basically doing sketches that were internet-based. Lonely Island and SNL were basically making content for the internet and for television. And Ellen DeGeneres was like this apex predator where she would basically see these viral things, pull them up onto the TV and like make them famous for like two weeks. Like they'd hear on the Today Show, like Yodel Boy. Remember Yodel Boy? Actually, he was 2018. But there was, he would pick up these, they would pick these characters up and bring them there. But the problem that I found that thinking back here,
And remembering this caption, because I was like, that's so interesting that we're thinking about fascism right here. And it has to do with Harambe. It doesn't have to do with anything about that because at this moment, while we were in Ireland, on May 27th, 2016, Harambe was killed at the Cincinnati Zoo. And I argue that Harambe's meme marks the end of internet monoculture. It marks the end moment where the symbiosis between mainstream media and the internet.
Ceased to exist. It just started breaking apart. And I don't think the meme had to be Harambe. And the reason why we're thinking about fascism is because two days before Harambe was killed, Trump clinched the GOP nomination. And people forget that. Now, this story isn't about Trump. What this story is about is about platforms. It's about how the internet itself sees itself. And the problem with an internet monoculture is that it is not profitable. See that the thing that
Jamie (07:11.2)
Internet monocultures do is makes media all the same, which means it has to be commercialized, like old school, like traditional TV commercials, put places, you it has to be placement, product buys, and so forth. But the internet doesn't work like TV, it's nonlinear, it's all scattershot. So at a certain point, platforms are probably getting like fairly bored of all this monocultural significance. 2016 was also the year of Bodie McBoatface, where do you remember they they asked what to name the boat? And I think it was like
A hundred and twenty four thousand people or something like that voted for vote Bodia McBoatface. That was a that was a pretty popular meme then. And then there was do you remember Damn Daniel? Do you remember Vine? Vine's Peak? Damn Daniel.
Destinee Day (07:44.686)
I don't remember that.
Destinee Day (07:50.988)
Yes, of course I remember Demp, because our students would not stop saying it to me.
Jamie (07:57.561)
Damn, Daniel back at it with the white shoes. And it was like this constant, like and of course for you, I mean you probably heard it way more than me, because at least I have the classroom threshold where they're just like having fun around you. Like they're just going nuts.
Destinee Day (08:01.288)
Yeah.
Destinee Day (08:11.566)
There was one time, no joke, a student photoshopped my face onto Donald Trump and covered my office and it printed off thousands of pieces of paper and covered it. And they thought I was gonna lose it. And I just no, because that would have given them what they wanted. I very calmly walked in like nothing was different, removed the pieces from what I needed to succeed, and just started working, and they were so disappointed.
Jamie (08:26.402)
Did you?
right.
Jamie (08:39.618)
That's so great. But that's what I mean. They assumed, I think, that in 2016, it was actually weirder for you not to know what was going on the internet than it was to know what was going on. It you people knew what was going on. It was flowing back and forth. It was this constant breathing pattern between it. Harambe, I think, is an is a reaction to Trumpism because it didn't have to be harambe. That weekend was filled with anxiety for people.
Including like our colleague and myself, like while we were out there, because it was for those of us who knew, we knew. All right. We were like, we all right, here's how here's how it's going to end up. And for those of us who like didn't know, we were kind of like, there's another option. But I'll tell you who did know: platforms. Platforms needed the profit model. So they treated him like the underdog. And it wasn't about him being the underdog, it was about the idea that he can create atomization. Because of reactionary ability, Harambe set the model.
For reactionary content. Because at first, Harambe was perfect fodder for that. They killed an ape in a zoo. And in killing the ape in the zoo, you have these multiple questions. You have this shame of like, how did a parent, how dare these parents let their kid wander away and get in the gorilla cage, which is like the terrifying, you know? Gorilla's 440 pounds, the baby was like probably 40 pounds. You know, it's like, that's terrifying. Second, cameras, cell phones were capturing everything. You could hear the horror that was going on there. And then third, is like,
The action of killing this beloved ape that no one knew until that day, except Cincinnati residents, causing it to become this martyr of like animal captivity, you know? So soon after, Harambe becomes this like pseudo meme, right? And then, then the internet actually regains ownership of it. The split occurs and it goes back down. And this meme occurs somewhere about a month and a half later called Dicks Out for Harambe. Which
Which I I'm not gonna go into full explanation here. I think it's pretty explanatory by the hashtag. but but this moment showed that the internet was reclaiming these memes. It was no longer happy. And when I use the term the internet, I'm using the community. I'm using people that claim ownership over internet content, people who were believing that internet content had some sort of value to it versus value of of mainstream. And
Jamie (11:04.628)
So that created this ability to create a profit model, if I were to say that. Like so the profit model of reactionary content or meming then leaned into the idea of is it possible to meme a president into presidency? Which we I obviously know the outcome of that. by the way, I think that the real end of the monoculture is Pokemon go to the polls. I think when Hillary said that, that was like it was over at that point.
Probably possibly the most cringe moment in now this is by comparison to everything we know, by the way, but this is one of the most cringe moments in political history was that.
Destinee Day (11:46.328)
So many mistakes.
Jamie (11:47.553)
So many. And this isn't a question of like who would have been better. This is a a story about how the internet itself learned how to become atomized. And by the end of the year, Harambe basically replaced another meme. And the reason it solidified itself in the history of memes is because the large hadron collider turned on a few years previous than that. And people liked referring to it as like, this is.
We flicked that switch and now we're in another universe, or the we've we've never turned this on, or a black hole happened, or maybe we're all dead and we don't know it. But because it's a scientific technology, it was actually pretty hard for people to get a grip on like what that means in reality. So Harambe represented that. What if he didn't die? What if he wasn't killed? What would that world be like? And so it basically created this pocket. And now Harambe, 10 years later, acts as a center of where we could place grief.
And that's why I think like nostalgia from twenty sixteen is like real. I think that's real. I think people actually do feel for that moment.
Destinee Day (12:52.268)
Yeah, I mean, I remember that happening in my first reaction being like, What the f what those parents? What are you doing? I'm still confused about how that actually happened. Like how did the kid actually get in the gorilla? If it if a small child can figure it out, why haven't adults done it, like
Is it because we know what a gorilla is capable of and we're just like, Absolutely not, we're not gonna do that? Or I don't know. Like why are they not?
Jamie (13:21.728)
I don't know the answer to that at all. It's a really good question I never of all the things I think about, I didn't think of that that.
Destinee Day (13:28.51)
Why are there not more like suicide by zoo animal? You know what I mean? Like
Jamie (13:32.404)
my gosh, don't put that into the universe.
Destinee Day (13:36.69)
I'm just saying a guy shot and killed himself on the golf course over here two days ago. Like But no, you know what I don't know, like
Jamie (13:42.264)
This went really morbid.
Jamie (13:48.419)
Right. The logistics of the entire scenario were like that's why I'm saying like it it was able to supplant a lot of different angers. It was what was the parent did the parent mess this up? Did the kid was there a gap in the security? Was there a way that other people could have fallen in? Right. Like it was all these different unknowns that became known very quickly. But it was also like watching a a wild animal get like murdered, like in front of you is like terrifying. Now, last question.
Destinee Day (13:52.108)
I'm fascinated by the logistics.
Destinee Day (14:03.458)
Right.
Destinee Day (14:12.27)
Yeah.
Jamie (14:18.678)
What do you think? I would think that Harambe is the third most important meme of all time. What do you think are the other two?
Destinee Day (14:35.65)
I don't know, I think about memes that I've seen for a while and I still see to this day. It's like that that guy turning around one.
Jamie (14:42.826)
Okay, so not the formats. I'm talking about impact memes. I'm talking about memes that have have changed the entire world.
Destinee Day (14:46.103)
Impact.
Destinee Day (14:51.439)
no, Jamie you can't do this to me today. I'm I'm not Okay.
Jamie (14:53.718)
All right, I'll give you a hint. The the guy I'm sharing that photo with that you took of us, he and I co-authored the first peer-reviewed paper on him. Pepe. Yeah. Pepe is probably the most impactful, but now I would say Doge. I would say the dog.
Destinee Day (15:01.432)
Is it Pepe?
Destinee Day (15:12.302)
doge.
Jamie (15:13.76)
Yeah. I and I did I'll I'll give myself a little credit here is that in twenty twenty one, I think I gave a talk in the city and somebody asked me what I think is the most important meme of all time. And I was like Doge. And they're like, Doge? Why is Doge? And I was like, Because it's still a vessel that someone will use. And like it's now it like
Destinee Day (15:34.336)
It did. Accurate. He co authored by
Jamie (15:37.069)
Yeah, it bec it became a political thing. So I th what's funny to me is I think what we forget about humans is that we occur we live 10 years is a good time to look in a retrospect. It's time it's a good way to like see how time unfolds, what happens that time. And the thing I like to look at is like in that 10-year time, like we still have these static memes. And it turns out to be like a frog, a dog, an ape. You know, like there's these animal constructs that
If given the opportunity to go back to 2016 BC and you get in like a group chat, it's possible they'd be talking about like frogs, apes, and dogs inside that group chat. So it's it it it just seems like it's a timeless, shareable thing. But I think in the age of platform capitalism, I think that 2016 marked the end of something and the life Harambe lived from 1999 to six.
To 2016 and his 17 years lived in a world that is completely unrecognizable to our world today. But in the long scale, we have no idea what Pepe, Doge, or Papame will become in the next couple of decades. You know, it's it's just a fascinating thought experiment. And I really love knowing that we were standing there May 31st, which is just a few days after this, thinking about what's to come, knowing.
That the unknown was just so far ahead of us. It was just, it's such a it's just a fascinating archaeological moment in that history. And the fact that you and I and and and Matt were on this trip of media archaeology doing this work is just so such a there's a pin in that moment, you know. And I think that pin wasn't just ours. I think that pin was global.
Destinee Day (17:25.198)
Well now we're gonna have to go back.
Jamie (17:29.33)
We have to go back.
Destinee Day (17:35.722)
Jamie (17:35.96)
All right, that's that's all I got on that one.
Destinee Day (17:43.0)
I think that links pretty intensely into media archaeology, which I don't know if you wanna talk about when you come back.
But we should.
Jamie (17:57.209)
But it but it is a media archaeological experiment, right? They are digital artifacts. Harambe is not is no longer an ape. Harambe is a digital artifact. Like it is there is a media archaeology to that. It is fascinating.
Destinee Day (18:01.302)
It's
Destinee Day (18:16.364)
You encapsulated it in such a meta moment, which is actually really like cool.
Destinee Day (18:24.32)
Do you ever have your students like just map things like Harambe onto just a a a a timeline? I know that you do things very specific to like Rome, Ireland, things like that, but
Jamie (18:39.232)
No, but now I might.
Destinee Day (18:42.028)
I need to like put things like that into context and just create a essentially a media archaeology map of the internet, you know, pr post nine eleven even.
Jamie (18:54.688)
Interesting. I did it once with Ryan Broderick. We did a a project for chapter where we kind of did a a history of the evolution of the internet through prime moments. And the prime moments were like like things that affected the world as well as the internet. Like so it's like Hurricane Sandy, the image of the the the it's an infamous photo of like the roller coaster ride out in the ocean.
You know, like there's that scene, and then there's that's like an impact scene. And then there's like you basically can you could replace the idea of that image with like the challenger exploding. You know, it's like these moments that are like so connected, but like tied across these eras, like these these loops. And that's why I'm saying like memes themselves lift that archaeology off its moment and into an ephemeral culture that like is can only be seen from
Destinee Day (19:22.85)
Mm-hmm.
Jamie (19:51.392)
A future that doesn't yet exist. Yeah.
Destinee Day (19:53.934)
Crazy, right?
You know, something that popped up on my timeline was us having drinks at the Jameson factory.
Jamie (20:04.574)
yeah. Yep. I have that one right next to this picture. And that's
Destinee Day (20:09.998)
Yeah, I was gonna say that was shortly after. With children that didn't drink but still wanted to go on the tour, so gave us their drinks instead.
Jamie (20:18.666)
Yep, that was very nice of them. Yep, that's how we'll end this. Cheers.
Destinee Day (20:20.727)
Yeah.
Yes, that one. That was such a good drink. I still think about that drink.
Jamie (20:28.118)
It was so good. And and I know this is a side note here, but huge mistake here that I had made by not we they had a a bottle there called the Distillery Select, right? It was a 12-year bottle of Jameson that was very much you could only get at the distillery. And the distillery was, I think, in Cork at this point, but the Dublin warehouse is there. Well, they stopped bottling that bottle in 2020, and now that bottle's worth like six hundred dollars. Yeah, I know. I know. And
Destinee Day (20:53.164)
What
Jamie (20:57.418)
And a while back, Josh went to Ireland and I was like, get me a bottle of Distillery Select. He's like, that doesn't exist. I was what do mean it doesn't exist? And then I looked it up, I was like, man, we could have we could have made a fortune. Could have refunded all our trips by stacking up on those things, had we known. But again, we didn't know in 2015 that not stocking up on Distillery Select could have made us hundreds of dollars in 2026, 2026, 10 years later.
Where we could have invested that in crypto.
Destinee Day (21:30.774)
This is all very back to the future part two.
Jamie (21:34.528)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, it erases.
Destinee Day (21:36.258)
Where if we did if we did go back, we'd probably mess up the timeline way even even worse. Make it even worse with the intention of making it better. and really biff it.
Jamie (21:49.464)
It's like that joke. Why do these time travelers keep trying to show up at Donald Trump's house?
Jamie (21:58.329)
The my you know, my theory on time travel. I think there's a lot of time travelers lost in space.
'Cause you'd for you forget, like you go back in time, but the earth's moving. Fuck. The last thing you think before you're zapped out of existence. All right, that's what I got for that one.
Destinee Day (22:09.996)
Yeah.
Destinee Day (22:18.99)
geez
Jamie (22:25.619)
Let's talk about one you got.
Destinee Day (22:28.27)
do you wanna talk about just the fact that the clipping thing existed and then and then it the platforms responded and now do we live in a world where the platforms are going to do anything about it or do we
Jamie (22:35.03)
Yeah, it exists. And we could talk about it 'cause I think here you l you leave that one.
Jamie (22:45.154)
Well, did you see what Meta launched today? Meta one. That's the response to that.
Destinee Day (22:48.458)
I did not. I've been I've been very in my dog content world.
Jamie (22:55.16)
So that's why it's a little tougher to talk about. We could talk about the robot fight, you know, if you want. or whatever you want to talk about. We could do one more real quick.
Destinee Day (23:01.014)
Okay.
Jamie (23:08.086)
The robot I mean, if you want if you if you find a creative angle that maybe you could surprise me with, I'll be glad to talk about it w with you because you know me. I'm just too cynical about it, so
Destinee Day (23:17.984)
Maybe it's more of a this robot clip surfaced. You know, Ronan Farrow is who he is. But also we live in a world where major corporations are laying a ton of people off in favor of AI. So what is our wor I mean, I don't know. It's incredibly dark and I don't have a solution to it.
Jamie (23:45.666)
I don't yeah, I just don't know how to it's kinda depressing. But it kind of leads
Destinee Day (23:49.536)
It's massively depressing because I was like I was like, I saw I saw that and I was like, so one of these days