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The neighbors got together for drinks and carols at the weekend. As an English Jew, I love the carols all those old-time bangers from the time when midwinter really was bleak, all those Zionist lyrics about royal Davids city and kings in Israel. I consider it a mitzvah, a religious obligation, to spread the joy, because theres not enough joy to the world these days, so I play the piano, this year in an impromptu trio with an Irish American fiddler and an English literary critic who, it transpires, toots a mean descant on the trumpet. We spread the joy as a farmer spreads muck, but its the spirit that counts. Without rehearsal or premeditation, we turned Silent Night into a Dean Martin drunk song.

Two nights later, it was the first night of Chanukah. My three daughters lit three menorahs and we sangMaoz Tzur (Rock of Ages):

Furiously they assailed usBut Thine arm availed usAnd Thy word broke their swordWhen our strength failed us

The song has become associated with the Maccabean Revolt of 167 BC the first nationalist movement in history but it was written, like many of the carols, in the Middle Ages. Its impossible not to read those words without thinking of those who fought for their religious freedom against the Syrian tyrant Antiochus IV and those who died for it in medieval and modern Europe as in a kosher market in Jersey City.

It may come as a surprise, but Jews dont spend most of their time thinking about anti-Semitism. Or rather, we spend as little time as safely possible thinking about it. We are obliged to choose life, and life and the making of joy and children mean we must refuse to be defined by a morbid shadow-play of other peoples projections. The tide of hate and violence is rising, however.

It has become acceptable to say appalling things about Jews some of them calumnies carrying the stale flavor of the Middle Ages, some of them more recent and carrying the Germanic taste of blood and iron things that remain unsayable about any other people. Especially online, which for reasons that elude me is considered to be a Casablancaof the media, where anything goes and no one is accountable.

It also appears to have become acceptable, in New York City in particular, for Orthodox Jews to be assaulted without the police or mayor doing much about it. And it appears that the strength of many Jewish organizations, the Anti-Defamation League among them, is more devoted to sustaining the Democratic partys coalition than to doing their job of defending Jews. The same goes for many assimilated Jews, who keep their own heads down and complain that religious Jews make it hard for themselves and everyone else. But there are also many, including many people who are not Jewish, who do stand up for what is right and fair, and who fight against lies and incitement.

Furiously they assail us. This year was the first year I received anti-Semitic tweets, anonymous physical threats, notifications that my name was on a list for future punishment, Holocaust denial (on one impressively sick occasion in rhyming couplets) and, in an unneeded further proof of the collapse of our public discourse, images of the alt-right fetish object Pepe the Frog. This year, while the dimwitted online world argued about tropes, my younger daughters learnt to read trope, the ancient cantillation that they will perform when the elder of them has herbat mitzvahin May. Rock of Ages, let our song / Praise thy saving power.

So I refuse to give up hope, and I know that we will be here, and there too, for as long as we have the faith to do so. In many ways, we are living in an age of miracles. The United States, despite its balkanized society and demented politics, remains an island of tolerance between religions, despite the perverse hostility of the Democratic left, street thugs and a few college professors. The state of Israel, which did not exist when my grandparents families were murdered, is thriving and has never had such good diplomatic relations with some many states and peoples. This year, work began on the Abrahamic Family House, in the United Arab Emirates capital Abu Dhabi, a development whose centerpiece is a common religious space, with a mosque, a church and a synagogue.

The year ended with what, for an English Jew living in the United States, was an almost overwhelming double gift. On December 11, President Trump extended the protections of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act (1964) to Jews, as the George W. Bush administrations Department of Education had decreed in 2004 for Sikhs, Muslims and Jews, and the Obama administrations Department of Justice had confirmed in 2010.

On December 12, Jeremy Corbyn and a hard-left Labour party were demolished in Britains general elections. The elections were about many things Brexit, the National Health Service, the prospect of punitive taxation but a crucial factor was Corbyns foul politics, including his defense of the murderers of the IRA, Hamas and Hezbollah, and his seeking out of the company of Holocaust deniers and those who rationalize a selective and obsessive hatred as anti-Zionism.

On the first night of Chanukah, Britains prime minister Boris Johnson sent amessage to Britains Jews: When the Maccabees drove the forces of darkness out of Jerusalem, they had to do so on their own. Today, as Britains Jews seek to drive back the darkness of resurgent anti-Semitism, you have every decent person in this country fighting by your side.

From darkness to light: from the prospect of a Labour government that promised to drive Zionists almost all Jews, in fact from public life, to a Conservative government whose leader sends a clear and moral message, albeit one in which Johnson, an Oxford-educated Classicist, mixed Antiochus III with Antiochus IV.

President Trumps Executive Order and the British publics rejection of Corbyn show that the Jews are not alone in these difficult times. They show that, for all the experts who complain about populism, decency is not inimical to democracy. They show that, despite everything, we should look forward in hope.

I pray that the coming year will be a better one for all of us, including the Kurds of Syria, the Muslims of China and thepeople of Iran, hundreds of whom have beenkilled in recent weeks for demanding their freedom. The Abrahamic family house has many mansions.I wish all my friends and readers a Happy Christmas and aChag Chanukah Sameach.

Dominic Green is Life & Arts editor of Spectator USA.

Link:
The hope of Chanukah - The Spectator USA

The last decade has seen such a bewildering series of changes in culture, media, politics and every branch of the modern world, its bracing to consider just how and where these changes have had the greatest effect. From the proliferation of memes, the redefinition of celebrity, all the way to the corruption of elections, and the reshaping of music, TV and film.

As we break into the third decade of the millennium, here are five of the most culturally significant tech trends of the twenty-teens.

While web notoriety was once a subset of more general fame, internet celebrities, be they professional gamers, YouTubers or Instagram personalities, are now just celebrities in their own right. 70 per cent of all internet use is devoted to streaming services such as YouTube and Twitch, and streamers such as PewDiePie and Ninja now make more money and rack up greater weekly views than any comparable TV or Hollywood figure.

Such success has also spilled over into the real world, where Logan Paul and KSI ditched the Fifa tournaments and unboxing videos for two boxing matches which drew over a million individual pay-per-view punters. Meanwhile, established celebrities have used Instagram as a primary focus for their careers. Kylie Jenner is reported to make as much as$1.3 million per sponsored post on the social media platform, with Cristiano Ronaldo, Ariana Grande and Kim Kardashian coming in or around the $1 million mark.

At the middle-tier, however, there are signs of a boom turning bust, as the saturated market for influencers, brand-engagers and insta-inspiration peddlers has begun to generate diminished returns, and concerns among YouTubers over ad revenue have left more than a few content producers wondering just where it can go from here.

Memes have created some of the most enjoyable and spreadable content on Earth, but have also carved out a second life as a near-impenetrable vehicle for information, counter-information and disinformation. The frothy silliness of the meme format, once the most forgettable medium of entertainment ever conceived, has now created some of the decades most lasting cultural icons, and Pepe the Frog, This Is Fine, Distracted Boyfriend and Galaxy Brain have proved every bit as enduring as worthier cultural touchstones from decades past.

It was perhaps inevitable that their power would be used for more dubious ends, as this decade saw the rise of political slogans and bad faith arguments becoming meme-ified by increasingly sophisticated social media brands. Memes of 10 years ago lived on wackiness or charm, be they Sad Keanu, double rainbow, or endlessly lamentable viral wedding dance videos. Fast forward just six years and anime figures and cartoon frogs were being weaponised as fascist propaganda on the worlds biggest social media platforms.

We used to laugh at dowdy politicians mangling cultural references to seem cool; now its so inherent in political discourse that meme techniques are winning elections and being taught in political science degrees. Weve come a long way since Piano Cat.

The spread and consolidation of streaming TV, film, podcast and music platforms has created an unlikely paradox in entertainment. Cinema attendance and TV viewing figures have cratered, meaning the typical cultural reference points have shifted away from the traditional outlets and toward decentralised pockets of content; a development with which the established media has been slow to keep up. As youll have noticed after that endless spiral of dinner party conversation ( Have you seen this show? No, but have you seen this one?), choice for high-quality drama and comedy has never been wider, but audiences are more atomised than ever, with each of us living in our own bespoke islands of content. Regardless, producers are doubling down. Netflix is set to spend $15 billion on new content in 2020, while Amazon has freed up $1 billion for its Lord of the Rings adaptation alone.

Cinema, meanwhile, has increasingly become the home for blockbuster mega hits at the exclusion of all else, and Disneys cannibalisation of Marvel, Lucasfilm and Fox means that seven of this years highest-grossing films came from the House of Mouse, not counting the giant takings expected for their Star Wars sequel The Rise of Skywalker later this month. In music, the effective monopoly of streaming platforms such as Spotify has seen listeners increasingly find their mega-hits in narrower circumstances, and truly mind-boggling numbers.

The inclusion of these figures in traditional charts has resulted in some eye-popping results, such as when ubiquitous guitar-pop gnome Ed Sheeran spent several weeks of 2017 with 14 songs in the UKs Top 15. With blockbuster artists and studios making bigger impacts than ever before, and the rest scratching for relative crumbs, its hard to predict how the industry will keep any but the largest boats afloat in the decade to come.

As anyone who received an email in 2018 can attest, privacy became a thing this decade, as GDPR rules came into effect to stop peoples data being held indefinitely online. A storm of scandals from Google and Apples maps technology tracking your every move without consent, to Samsung having to admit that yes, their smart TVs were listening to your conversations and, maybe, tailoring ads to your needs in response brought privacy issues to the forefront.

While the idea of your TV trying to sell you lawnmowers and sanitary products is not exactly optimal, privacy issues really reached their dystopian zenith in the wake of the numerous scandals which rocked Facebook, and the near-endless vault of data they hold on the Earths population. In 2016, the data of 87 million people were harvested by strategic communications firm Cambridge Analytica; information which was then weaponised to influence the 2016 US presidential election and the UKs Brexit referendum interventions which several sources claim were decisive in both cases.

The sheer range of information from our private lives now contained within the servers of Big Data, and the sophistication with which it can be wielded, should have made online privacy the issue of the decade.

But, for all the news and opprobrium generated by privacy issues, more disturbing still is the fact that they dont seem to have a lasting effect on peoples attitudes to their data or, more accurately, whether they should share it regardless. A Pew study from 2019 reports that most Americans are alarmed by data collection, with 72 per cent of respondents saying they believe that most or all of their movements online are being tracked, and 70 per cent saying they feel their data is less secure than it was five years ago. Despite this, less than a fifth report that they always or even often read the privacy policies they agree to.

A Viber study from 2018 reported that only 55 per cent of those asked would object to that data being shared without their consent, but, given the fact that said consent is usually waived away with the tick of a box at the point of use, its hard to see this as a particularly strong objection. All of which makes sense given the sheer amount of data people are submitting to their technological overlords, despite all of the concern so often invoked. Loss of privacy is, it seems, not just something were concerned about, but entirely resigned to.

While the current generation of always-online consumers think they ought to be concerned about their privacy, we dont always seem to remember this when it comes to using all of the services we like to use, and are seemingly unwilling to sacrifice the ease of the modern world to negate that risk entirely. For all our protestations to the contrary, like 1984s Winston Smith, the twenty-teens have seen us win the victory over ourselves.

As much as we deny it, we do love Big Brother, after all.

Excerpt from:
A decade of memes, streams and data harvesting machines - The Irish Times

Part of the Decade Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

Perhaps no single cultural artifact did more heavy lifting in the 2010s than the meme. This was the decade the meme became far more than a fun piece of internet humor: Memes evolved to encompass everything from hashtags to viral videos, becoming their own language with their own communities.

The rapid rise of mobile internet use and the increasing domination of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social platforms helped shift the overall nature of memes from edgy and esoteric to warm and wholesome. On niche forums from 4chan to closed Facebook groups, memes peddling subversive or insular humor e.g. dank memes were standard. But the memes with humor fit for the whole family, or at least for people who werent that active online but checked their feeds once in a while, were the ones that really filtered into the mainstream through social media.

With increasing frequency, memes stood in for political arguments and ideological positions. They became right-wing recruitment tools, weapons of harassment, and tools of offline political resistance movements from Washington, DC, to Hong Kong. This was the decade some online memes became tangible offline disruptors, and the decade some were taken so seriously that they ceased being online fantasies and morphed into narrowly averted tragedies. Through it all, memes became for many of us a common language, one of the few we all still could parse as we searched for meaning and commonality in an increasingly polarized era.

Below, Vox presents a list of 10 memes that captured the zeitgeist, from those that summed up entire ideological positions to others that seem, on the surface, inane but reveal a lot more than you expect about the decades cultural journey.

If you were online in 2010, there was a chance you described something not-that-intense as so intense. That came from the now-classic Double Rainbow, a video recorded just a few days into the decade, on January 8, 2010. YouTube user Paul YosemiteBear62 Vasquez filmed and streamed the genuinely impressive sight of a full double-rainbow crowning the mountaintop beyond his front yard.

Vasquezs half-tearful, half-euphoric commentary alongside the footage made Double Rainbow instant, hilarious kitsch when the video abruptly took off in July of that year. The meme later got a boost from the Double Rainbow Song, one of the first viral examples of the Gregory Brothers popular Autotune the News musical series, which launched a whole YouTube autotune subgenre and birthed the most-watched video of 2010, the Bed Intruder Song.

At first, however, the public greeted Double Rainbow with a mix of bafflement, amusement, and mockery. Looking back now, its easy to see it as an early progenitor of the wholesome meme, which would, in the latter half of the decade, become one of the things that saved many from despair and burnout over increasingly dire climate disaster and geopolitics. Thinking about the mocking cultural reception of Double Rainbow then, versus what its reception would have been in the era of Wholesomeness, gives us a picture of how the internet progressed over the decade as the sociopolitical climate worsened.

And its hard not to feel a sense of sadness, too: We didnt realize that rainbow really was that intense, all along. Look into the mirror, look into your soul! Mr. Vasquez told his YouTube audience. Wed spend the rest of the decade doing just that.

Arguably another viral video that would be slotted into the weird but wholesome category, 2011s Friday was a laughably mundane song and music video introducing the world to a gawky-but-sincere 13-year-old named Rebecca Black, and to YouTubes utterly baffling video production wormhole. Vanity songwriting had been around for years, and so had amateur YouTube performances. But never had the two converged quite like this.

Friday, with its hypnotically bizarre music video of regular teenager Black and friends partying, partying, yeah! was a bouncy trainwreck. But as badly as it was made, Friday and its bargain-basement production studio, Ark Factory, contained the kernels of algorithmic virality throughout the decade: The entire company was about manufacturing influencers. As we all learned shortly after the baffling video became famous, Ark Factory put out scores of these prewritten, keyword-friendly songs and manufactured videos, all engineered to provide normal kids a simulation of celebrity at a low, low cost. (Friday took about $2,000 to make and produce, paid for by Rebecca Blacks family.)

Additionally, the company hoped to identify teens who had the talent or charisma to become social media successes, if not actual pop stars. The scheme sounds sketchy, but this was more or less the approach major companies took to viral marketing, and the influencer industry continued to take through the 2010s, seeking out low-level social media personalities and offering them money and exposure in exchange for endorsements.

Friday also typified the strange experience of the non-celebrity going viral overnight. By the end of the decade, wed see this happen frequently, from Ken Bone, to Gary from Chicago, to Plane Bae. Like many of them, Black hadnt been looking for viral fame or mainstream success of any kind; she wasnt even a vlogger. Her overnight fame brought some success but cost her friendships, a year of school, and, for a long time, her dignity. That she survived, grew up into someone pretty cool, and now makes music thats actually good is a testament to how much Rebecca Black still had to learn, and how much time she had to grow, when the internet found her and perhaps a sign that social media had yet to learn how to weaponize its cruelty.

The myriad problems with Kony 2012, a 20-minute-long YouTube documentary produced by a California-based activist group called Invisible Children, should have been apparent from the outset. While the videos outrage over the plight of abducted Ugandan children was contagious, its goal was nebulous.

Invisible Children urged the public, through donations and viral noise, to somehow invoke the wrath of the US government upon the Lords Resistance Army (LRA), the militant extremist group responsible for the abductions especially its leader, Joseph Kony. The video racked up nearly 30 million views within days of its March release, and for a while, the #stopKony and #Kony2012 hashtags were everywhere.

Except Kony wasnt actually in Uganda, and hadnt been for years; hes rumored to move around a lot, and to lie low throughout South Sudan. Plus, the entire glossy production seemed designed to funnel funds to, and essentially glorify, the three young white men whose films about Kony comprised much of Invisible Childrens efforts.

The project was widely criticized as being a prime example of colonialist white savior rhetoric, designed to commercially appeal to Westerners who would then go buy the organizations branded T-shirts, and not actually aid or facilitate action from Ugandans. (Amid the backlash, video creator Jason Russell had a full-frontal nude meltdown in the streets, prompting one deadpan TMZ reporter to observe, Rebecca Black didnt do that.) Ultimately, although Invisible Children did generate ongoing aid to Central African communities impacted by violence, it also nearly went bankrupt and while the US government got involved with the hunt for Kony, it ended fruitlessly in 2017.

Kony 2012 highlighted the pitfalls of viral charity, as well as problems with Western media coverage that characterized a decade of reporting on issues like detention camps and the Syrian refugee crisis. It also predicted similar online mass social movements, from the obsession with raiding Area 51 to the Ice Bucket Challenge. Most importantly, Kony 2012 gave other movements a template for what not to do. When the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag appeared in support of locating abducted Nigerian children two years later, the emphasis was where it should have been along: on supporting and sustaining developing nations and their already extant social justice movements.

Its no secret that the internet used to belong to cats but now belongs to dogs. During the Aughts, i.e. the LOLCat years, most memes were formed from captioned images. The sharpest humor relied on childlike linguistic permutations like spelling the as teh and declaring I can has cheezburger? in the original lolcat meme and upon twisting the familiar into something quirky and unexpected, like the lolcat concept itself. Cats as cultural phenoms flourished during a weirder, less homogenized, and less mainstream period of internet culture the time before social media became our dominant way of interacting and spreading ideas, and internet culture increasingly just became culture.

Thus, the insular, sarcasm-infused internet humor represented by cats and lolcat speak evolved into more universalized, easily accessible humor, represented by dogs and doggo lingo, i.e. a language of love. And the moment this paradigm shift occurred was roughly around 2013, when a sweet Shiba Inu named Kabosu, a rescued shelter puppy, became the adorable face of Doge, an image macro-turned-linguistic meme whose effects were manifold.

Popularized on Tumblr, Doge took the cat memes to new, absurdist heights, an early hallmark of neo-Dadaist millennial humor. The doge meme brought dogs into internet fashion and made doge-speak into its own standalone thing. This gave us a few years of such adjective, very noun language as a result. As doge endured, this quirky language became associated with dogs at large, just as it already is IRL; after all, we tend to use very simplified speech with our pets.

So doge is weird, but comfy and cozy; it tipped the realm of edgy memes toward the new era of the wholesome meme, before this divide had really become cultural. Doge appeared two years before the We Rate Dogs Twitter made good doggos into a thing in 2015, but without doge, its likely we would have had neither. Such accomplish! Very wow.

The images were instantly terrifying, yet felt as if theyd always been among us: The impossible height, the disproportionate gangliness, the not-quite-there face, the nebulous number of arms, and the grim expressions on the faces of children allegedly forever lost in the arms of the Slender Man.

Slender Man was an instant urban legend but one with a definitive origin. In 2009, a guy named Eric Knudsen wrote an eight-sentence story on the internet cultural hub Something Awful under the name Victor Surge. Knudsen posted his piece to a thread for photoshopped versions of creepypasta, short, scary stories meant to be easily passed around forums, blogs, and other social networks as urban internet legends.

Slender Man spawned a following unique among creepypasta villains: he was one of the most popular memes of the decade, routinely topping most-searched-for terms on meme and creepypasta websites. The Slender Man Mythos burgeoned into an internet subculture of fans dedicated to remixing and expanding the original story.

Slendys popularity spawned the rise of home-grown internet folklore over the decade. The webseries Marble Hornets dramatized Slender Man to great success, while users of the subreddit No Sleep filled the board with thousands of other first-person horror stories attempting to deliver similarly viral dread. SyFys Channel Zero dramatized several classic examples of creepypasta; one No Sleep story, The Spire in the Woods, is currently being developed into a feature film by Steven Spielberg. And the Slender Man story itself inspired everything from video games to fanart to a bizarrely late 2018 horror film.

But there was also an uglier, offline side to the online horror stories. In 2014, the story of Slender Man inspired two preteen girls to attempt to murder a third friend as a sacrifice to the creature, whom they believed to be real. The victim survived a brutal stabbing and Slender Man became part of the disturbing trend of online memes inspiring serious real-world action, particularly internet urban legends. Slender Man preceded the Blue Whale challenge in 2017, which led to several actual deaths before it thankfully faded, and the Momo challenge from earlier this year, which didnt lead to real-life self-harm, but understandably scared people into fearing it might.

Theres an eerie commonality between the online cult of Slender Man and the wave of internet conspiracies that grew and flourished during the 2010s from strange fandom shipping conspiracies to Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory that began as an ironic 4chan meme before it circulated as fake news and cultivated true believers. In 2014, it was hard to believe that two 12-year-olds could fall so heavily into this alternate reality that theyd take their obsession offline. By the time Pizzagate had provoked one zealot to terrorize a DC pizza joint two years later, the delusion fostered by 12-year-olds seemed to be just another part of a larger, internet-fueled alternate universe.

This meme originated in 2013 as part of a six-panel installment of cartoonist K.C. Greens webcomic Gunshow. In the comic, a dog sits and drink his coffee during a house fire, insisting that everything is fine as he slowly melts away. The comic was originally titled On Fire, but after a truncated two-panel version started to spread through Reddit a year later, it became known as This Is Fine, in honor of the dogs ironic final line and the perfect way to describe everything being the opposite of fine.

In its various comic and animated incarnations, This Is Fine became the epitome of our reaction to the increasingly distorted, disaster-laden world. To the growing ideological divide, the worsening geopolitical climate; the rise of Gamergate, the alt-right, and their even more extreme brethren; the fact of social media and tech culture unwittingly undermining democracy; school shootings and mass gun violence with no end in sight; and, of course, to climate change, when things are frequently literally on fire, the millennial generation murmured, This is fine.

The meme works if you want to articulate your own inability to process how overwhelming all of this change is. And it also works if you want to sardonically call out someone elses perceived indifference to an urgent issue, whether tiny or huge.

The peaceable irony of This Is Fine was the spiritual opposite of the much more noxious Pepe the Frog meme. Both memes were based on webcomics, and both emerged as politically charged icons roughly around the same time. Pepe was an amphibian stoner, originally created in 2005 as a webcomic character by artist Matt Furie. Since the Aughts, he had been a dank meme and mascot used by online troll types; in the mid 2010s, however, the frog became an alt-right symbol, used as an enormous dog whistle for white supremacy. It wasnt until the 2019 Hong Kong protests that Pepe received his political reclamation at the hands of democratic student protesters.

But where Pepe (a crude cartoon frog) gained a very specific contextual use that got even more specific and localized over time, This Is Fine (a crude cartoon dog) was much more easily universalized, applicable to nearly everything, and increasingly relevant to more and more people as it grew in popularity. If this cute little hound couldnt figure things out, clearly the rest of us were all screwed.

The phrase on fleek a saucy shorthand for aesthetic excellence was invented in 2014 by a 16-year-old Vine user named Kayla Lewis, a.k.a. Peaches Monroee, to describe her perfectly waxed eyebrows. In the six-second loop that was standard for all Vine videos, she prepped for a night out with a litany of slang catchphrases, all well-known except for that soon-to-be-immortal one.

On fleek could be seen as just one of the decades many classic Vines, like why you always lying, oh my god, they were roommates, its Wednesday, my dudes, vroom vroom, back at it again at Krispy Kreme, and of course, do it for the Vine, et cetera, into infinity. Like all of the above, on fleek was instantly viral across all social media, and the video showcased both the hilarity of the Vine platform and the way catchphrases born from its six-second clips could easily find their way into collective cultural jargon.

But on another level, the trajectory of the phrase, which immediately traveled across the internet to be capitalized upon elsewhere by pop stars, major brands, and assorted corporations, captured a pivotal undercurrent of pop culture in the 2010s: a growing awareness of cultural appropriation.

Vine, which shut down in 2016, was a rich hub of black internet culture, and its memes were constantly finding their way onto other internet platforms and into common usage, often divorced from their original context. Vine was thus a microcosmic example of the way, throughout the decade, black culture was spread and watered down as it reached the mainstream.

The birth of on fleek was frequently ignored as it mutated into a contextless slogan, and critiques of its cultural erasure gained traction. Soon, the internet became more aware of the damage done by majority cultures borrowing elements of minority cultures, brands exploiting marginalized consumers, and even more lighthearted forms of making jokes out of cultural difference. And Lewis was frequently cited as one of the touchstone examples of this trend, perhaps because she was vocal about how quickly her words had been appropriated from her.

By drawing attention to the way her words were being lifted and repurposed without her consent, insisting on credit while allowing the meme to flourish, Lewis set the tone for years of discussion, and embodied the spirit of being on fleek herself.

Few memes more hilariously summed up and parodied a whole decade of social media overreaction as this 2015 Tumblr post about, as it says on the tin, feeling attacked for no apparent reason. Originally made by a user named chardonnaymami who subsequently deleted their account, the post brilliantly combined internet humor with the flavor of gin-soaked reality TV drama. In fact, the public fascination with melodramatically feeling very attacked arose nearly simultaneously thanks to a heated moment from Drag Race.

The post spawned numerous imitators, and the language of feeling attacked has entered common parlance. That means that this meme is still pretty much everywhere to this day hell, by this point most people have probably forgotten this idea even started out as a meme at all. You can be attacked for everything from feeling hilariously called out, like so:

Or for having deep passionate feelings about things at unexpected moments, like so:

All this is classic Tumblr humor in its purest form. When you say, I feel so attacked, youre using intentionally hyperbolic language to express ironic enjoyment of your own dramatic emotions. Tumblr users led the rest of the internet in the expression of wry hyperbolic passion, in everything from feels and I cant even to I am trash and I love this garbage [thing].

Although the so attacked meme neatly encapsulates the wit and humor of Tumblr, it instantly spread to other platforms, and subsequently was rarely correctly attributed to the Tumblr user who first wrote it. And that fact all by itself sums up the cultural underestimation of Tumblrs vital role in internet culture throughout the decade.

Tumblr has always punched far above its cultural weight, whether through its symbiotic relationship with 2010s media outlets like Mic and BuzzFeed, or its magical ability to have all its memes rediscovered and recycled by Twitter users five to seven years after they were de rigueur on the much looser blogging platform.

After all the quality content it gave us, Tumblr still was perpetually written off by mainstream culture as a silly teen site, though it continues to thrive even as the rest of the world continues to assume the blue hellsite (thats the internets nickname for Tumblr) is perpetually stumbling toward obsolescence. Really, guys? We Tumblr users just came out to have a good time, and honestly.

The best queer memes of the decade (be gay, do crimes, the gay babadook, lesbian boba fett, etc.) all play into the traditional association of gay with whimsy, and this one is perhaps the most whimsical of all. They also abide by the classic cultural association of queerness with deviance and subversion and what could be more subversive than springing an illicit, passionate 1950s love affair between Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara upon an unsuspecting old couple?

For all its saucy impudence, Theyre lesbians, Harold also manages to be somehow wholesome. The 2015 Tumblr post that spawned it was originally about Carol, one of the most beloved movies of the decade. But the phrase more generally captures those priceless moments when straight culture abruptly comes face to face with queer culture. The best queer culture is celebratory, open, and, well, proud, and Theyre lesbians, Harold works because of whats on the other side of the meme: queer identity, existing and thriving throughout history, despite the best efforts of straight culture to whitewash it or pretend it doesnt exist.

Theyre lesbians, Harold also falls within the realm of another kind of meme that emerged in the latter half of the decade, the variant of meme that mocks a hilariously out-of-touch older person especially a straight white person whos trying to figure out whats going on with kids these days. Perhaps theyre voicing their indignation at an aspect of progressive or diverse culture they dont understand. Perhaps, like the baffled elderly couple in this meme, theyre merely startled.

Even though Harold originally referred to a specific Harold, weve understood certain names as codes for universalized archetypes ever since Beyonc brought us Becky with the good hair with 2016s Lemonade. As part of that code, youll often see basic Anglican names universalized to represent the defensiveness that many white people deploy when faced with performative expressions of queer identity or other marginalized identities. (Sorry if that gets your hackles up, Tammy.)

Theyre lesbians, Harold predicted later memes like 2017s mocking Spongebob and 2019s OK boomer, while still embracing impudence and sassy irreverence for your scandalized straight feelings. Crucially, though, we never know if the initial recognition of the womens sexuality sparks horror or outrage in the original couple; theyre forever on the brink of either rejection or acceptance, which makes the meme itself forever hopeful: mocking, yes but with plenty of affection and optimism in the mix.

So much has been said already about Harambe including by Vox that we may admittedly feel exhausted by the thought of saying it again. But that exhaustion was built into the meme all the way back in 2016, and its part of what made Harambe such a weird and bizarre phenomenon, unique among memes even three years later.

The Harambe meme erupted across the internet after the 2016 killing of a Cincinnati Zoo gorilla, a beloved zoo resident whod just celebrated his 17th birthday the day before. Harambe died after he approached a small boy who had climbed into his pen. While many onlookers believed the gorilla was trying to protect the boy, he was deemed to be dangerous and was immediately shot by zoo officials.

The public outcry over Harambes death was massive, one of the bigger controversies of 2016 which, you might recall, had plenty of human controversies. The uproar was politically and racially charged, particularly directed at the boys mother, and lasted for months. The meme largely fueled the conversation, in which Harambe was both sincerely mourned and sarcastically milked for all his worth to become a weird spectacle of grief, bizarreness, and outrage.

The Harambe meme was basically an intense online wake for a gorilla that exemplified the way dank meme culture can borrow weirdness and spawn more of it. Plenty of people seemed to be sincerely grieving Harambe, while others were just deeply committed to the gag, as a way of ironically expressing their bafflement over the whole scandal. Either way, the meme kept the emotions high for ages; it simply did not quit.

The outrage over Harambes death summoned debate about everything from animal cruelty to gun violence to race and sexism. It was a deeply layered meme, serving a range of different ideological ends. That might explain why Harambe is still never far from the internets collective mind.

Its very recent, but its hard to deny that Baby Yoda the adorable puppet character who steals the show in the Disney+ streaming Star Wars series The Mandalorian is one of the last great memes of the decade.

In the latter half of the 2010s, in inverse proportion to all the aforementioned calamity, weve attained an era of peak wholesome culture, from hygge to hopepunk all spurred on by the rise of the wholesome meme, with its emphasis on cute, cuddly, and healing aesthetics. And clearly, with this cute, cuddly lifelike baby puppet, the wholesome meme trend is sending us off on a high note.

And if Baby Yoda turns out to be evil well, it will still be right in keeping with the thwarted hopes, disrupted belief systems, and unexpected chaos of the 2010s.

Heres to the 2020s, and may the Force be with us all. Well need it.

Aja Romano is an internet culture reporter for Vox. They last wrote about Cats and the rise of Andrew Lloyd Webber for the Highlight.

Correction: An earlier version of this article mischaracterized the United States involvement in the hunt for Kony.

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The memes that defined the 2010s - Vox.com

Behind Nick Fuentes, the host of America First, follows a new group of far-right conservatives. They call themselves the Groypers. And theyve launched a war against the Republican party.

Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, and Donald Trump Jr. do not seem like likely targets for a rising right-wing faction. But much to their surprise recently, the Groyper army chose events hosted by Kirk and Trump to descend upon.

Groypers attended a Turning Point USA conference at Ohio State University to heckle speakers with loaded questions. Turning Point is a conservative nonprofit that mobilizes Republican students on college campuses.

Trump, meanwhile, was booed off the stage at a free speech event at the University of California Los Angeles. The Groypers are claiming these two events, along with seven others, as victories against the mainstream Republican party, which they now consider to be fake conservatism.

A Groyper is a member of Fuentes movement of his brand of alt-right white nationalism. The alt-right is a loose collection of conservatives that harbor white nationalists. Fuentes is currently one of its most public faces.

As their chosen mascot, Groypers took hold of an exploitable illustration of Pepe the Frog. While iterations of Pepe are commonly used within the far-right, this version is of Pepe resting a conspicuous face against his two hands.

The meme appears in different forms on Groypers Twitter pages to show their allegiance.

pic.twitter.com/waW5rgrJ40

Fuentes Twitter bio declares himself as the Groyper leader. His image header illustrates Pepe soldiers holding up a flag that states Groyper War, Total Victory!

The header also has the names of the events, primarily on college campuses, and dates of when the Groypers heckled conservative events, all claiming victory.

The Groypers galvanize around the idea that the current Republican party is fake conservatism. Basically, they try to push each conservative position farther to the right by supporting a white, male, heterosexual America. They embrace white nationalism in support of policies that, although they have foundations in conservatism, even some Republicans find too far.

The group is extreme on immigration restrictionism, often calling for a total shutdown of immigrants into America, and pushes anti-LGTBQ propaganda to continue to fight a culture wore they believe the right gave in on.

Support of Israel is one major difference between the Groypers and what they call the traditional Conservative Inc. While the Republican party remains firm in supporting its Israeli ally, the Groypers extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism pushes them outside the bounds of normal right-wing discourse.

America is NOT a propositional nation. We have NO ALLEGIANCE to Israel, Fuentes posted on his Telegram according to Vox. We are CHRISTIANS and we dont promote degeneracy. Demographic replacement is REAL and it will be CATASTROPHIC.

Fuentes is also known for casting doubt on the number of Jews that died in the Holocaust, using crude analogies relating to cookies and baking.

He described the above cookie comparison as his hilarious and epic Holocaust joke on his Telegram channel.

The Groypers are loyal to Fuentes and share this anti-Semitic perspective. For example, one Groyper page posted a tweet with a photo of a blimp that says jews rape kids.

your uber driver has arrived, @ayyyetone tweeted with the photo.

Fuentes, an extremely online pundit, thinks he can shape youth conservatism because hes better at catering to the internet culture that many Gen Z or Zoomer college students are inclined to consume.

I think the generational style is so important, Fuentes posted on Telegram. Idk if its post modern or post ironic but the style and tone is very native to Zoomers which is i think why ppl like Shapiro or Kirk imagine theyre check mating me with some of these controversies but in reality its just turning young ppl onto my content.

Fuentes and the Groypers primarily target the bulk of the Republican party.

In the past, they have heckled speakers like right-wing talk show host Ben Shapiro, as well as Trump Jr. and Kirk.

Their goal is to expose high-profile Republicans by asking loaded questions, often about Israel and homosexuality, to prove their distance from the extreme or true right.

There were a number of trolls who sabotaged the Q&A portion of tonights @tpusa event, Turning Points Benny Johnson tweeted following an event at Ohio State University. Many of the questions were abhorrent and were not asked in good faith.

Fuentes responded to Johnson by calling out Turning Points moderate stance. Turning Point has been scrutinized in the past for its own racist biases.

Turning Point is now making a concerted effort to slander all critics of their bullshit fake conservatism as extremist trolls,' @NickJFuentes tweeted. We are America First and you are being exposed for the sellout frauds you are.

Fuentes has been promoting the Groypers next event on Dec. 20. White nationalists Patrick Casey and Jacob Lloyd will join Fuentes in West Palm Beach for the Groyper Leadership Summit. The Groypers will also be mobilizing against Republicans again, as the event is set to overlap with another Turning Point conference.

The GLS will feature speeches by myself, Patrick Casey, and Jacob Lloydwe invite all Groypers to join us for a celebration of our Total Victory over Charlie Kirk in the Groyper Wars! Fuentes posted on his Telegram board.

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What are Groypers? - The Daily Dot

Believe it or not, the first emoji was created in 1999 by a Japanese artist, Shigetaka Kurita, who wanted to create a simple, quick, and attractive way of conveying information. At that time, Kurita was working as a developer for i-mode, an internet platform owned by Japans main mobile carrier, DOCOMO. Fast-forward almost 20 years and these small, yellow, emotive characters now represent a lot more than at first sight.

Emoji has been referred to as a lingua franca a bridging language that allows us to bypass spoken language barriers and cultural differences. But emoji arent just as level ground for communicating, or as an innocent outlet to sext, theyve become an accessible symbol of activism and politics over this past decade.

Emoji has become a summary of our society and has increasingly intertwined with our conversations, even when were talking about politics, Lilian Stolk, an emoji expert told TNW. Not only do we use emoji for politics, but the process of adding new emoji is also a political game. Big tech companies use emoji to show that they represent diversity such as Apple with itsdisabilities emoji and Google with its gender neutral emoji.

A few months back, when people first started talking about US President s potential impeachment on Twitter, the peach emoji which was once a harmless sexting reference became the latest protest symbol against , and more specifically, his potential impeachment get it?

This emoji seemingly became a homonym having the same spelling or pronunciation but different meanings after Lizzo, an American singer-songwriter, tweeted a message which gained almost 120,000 likes. Lizzos IMpeachMENT tweet was likely in celebration of House Speaker Nancy Pelosis decision to launch an impeachment inquiry against Trump.

Emoji are used in their literal sense to spread political messaging, especially in countries were censorship restricts free speech. For example, in China, #MeToo is censored, so people who want to share their stories of sexual harassment and assault instead use the cooked rice and rabbit emoji because rice bunny in China is pronounced similarly to me too.

Throughout the recent general election campaign in the UK, the red rose emoji was used as a symbol for the Labour party.

But just as emoji is used to spread positive political messaging, its also used to represent the opposite. For example, several emoji including the frog (in reference to Pepe The Frog), the milk glass, and the ok sign are used to symbolize white power.

The most political thing about emoji that surprised me is that Apple is not displaying the Taiwanese flag on phones in China, and recently they also blocked it on devices in Hong Kong and Macau. This shows that Apple wants to keep the Chinese market a friend, Stolk added.

With the more controversial political opinions, I think its safer to use an emoji, or a meme, instead of making a message more concrete with words, Stolk added. If you bring your political opinion with a layer of irony, you can hide behind the irony. If you post a pepe meme or use the frog emoji people can deny a real connection to extreme right-wing ideas, because its just funny. But at the same time, it still connects to these ideas.

Although it may seem like Emoji just magically appear on our phones once a year, this isnt exactly how deployment works. The Unicode Consortium, the official body that manage emoji, accept or reject emotive characters submitted by users, designers, and activists.

Over the past couple of years, the Unicode Consortium has faced some backlash over its decisions. Earlier this year, they approved the release of a blood drop emoji in what was widely considered to be a first step in ending period shame and sparking conversations about menstruation.

This is all thanks to a girls-focused development charity, Plan International UK and Plan Australia who in 2017, launched a campaign to create a period emoji in an attempt to reduce the taboo surrounding period and menstrual health.

To make the process of adding emoji to our phones more democratic Stolk created, Emoji Voter, a web-based app where people can vote for which emoji should appear on our keyboards.

Similarly to Tinder, Emoji Voter works by swiping through various emoji proposals which have been officially received by the Unicode Consortium. By swiping an emoji left, youre rejecting the design and its meaning, but by swiping right, you agree that this emoji should be included in the next round of updates.

Once the results are in, theyre sent straight to Unicode who then decide if theyll appear on our phones one day.

A handful of people from The Unicode Consortium decide which emoji we can communicate with. Imagine if just a few people would decide what words we can use? Its very weird that we as users dont have a voice in this. This is what I want to change with Emoji Voter, Stolk said.

The emoji proposals include harmless, fun examples like a rock to depict Earths foundation. But also include more inclusive and political emotive characters like a beaver thats a playful subcultural symbol among the LGBTQ+ society and afro hair which would help diversify cultural representation and its currently the only hair-type missing from the emoji catalog.

As gatekeepers of the language that we all use online, Unicode and their voting members are not consistent in their choices. They state that a new emoji should not be too specific and have the potential to become popular, Stolk explained. Then why is there a red-haired emoji and no afro emoji, while there are many more people with an afro worldwide? Why was a period emoji too specific, but there will soon be 70 symbols for people with disabilities? If we continue in this way, within eight years well be scrolling through 5000 emoji. Do we want that? We should think about this better.

According to Stolk, the most voted emoji will be the hugging and lip biting emoji. Both are a form of non-verbal communication, and thats how we use emoji most often, Stolk said.

Although the voting process is far from perfect, its reassuring to see that diversity and inclusivity are increasingly becoming part of the debate. While an emoji may not spark real change in society, it does encourage a conversation and acts as an accessible form of communication between various cultures and languages it could be argued that emoji speak louder than words.

Read next: Unblock your favorite streaming sites & watch them anywhere for $40

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From sexting to politics: How emoji evolved this decade - The Next Web