The Bernie Sanders Meme Proves the Internet Is Resetting
The internet often speaks earnestly of cultural resets. Shakira performing at the Super Bowl? Cultural reset. Parasite winning Best Picture? Cultural reset. Beyoncé doing literally anything? Cultural reset. Loosely defined, cultural resets are the moments when things shift and the mood in the collective pop culture room recalibrates. This week’s cultural reset? A 79-year-old US senator from Vermont sitting in a chair
Wednesday’s inauguration of President Biden and Vice President Harris was full of fashion moments: Lady Gaga’s golden bird, Harris’ pearls, Michelle Obama’s everything. But it was senator Bernie Sanders, decked out in his coat and mittens and holding a manila envelope (and maybe a cashier’s check?), who captured the attention of meme-makers everywhere. Before the swearing in even happened, people were tweeting out images of the senator, commenting on his accessories and give-no-fucks demeanor. By the time the sun set, he was being Photoshopped into all kinds of scenes, from New York City subways to the Iron Throne.
It was a cultural reset but not in the traditional sense; no one is really thinking about memes, or Bernie Sanders, or even mittens differently now because of this. Instead, it was a realization that, occasionally, during the Biden/Harris administration there will be flip, inconsequential memes about politics. That in the absence of reacting to tweets from President Trump, social media will get to react to something else.
This is not to say that now that Trump has been deplatformed and dethroned, the internet will return to the way it was in 2015—that would be naive and short-sighted. America’s problems don’t immediately get fixed by new administrations, and no matter who wins there will always be people who feel not in on the gag. But the meme does show that there has been a shift. (Well, this and the fact that @POTUS now follows Chrissy Teigen.) It was almost as if it tested some uncharted waters, some Great Beyond (Trump’s Presidency) Sea. Scrolling to find each new one felt like hearing Lucille Bluth on Arrested Development say, “It’s so good to laugh again”—an unsure moment of levity delivered amidst what are still very fraught times.
Many of the best memes are born this way. Like most good humor, they’re tension breakers. A collective release. The internet has had some good ones over the past four or five years, but often, amidst the political bickering, it’s been hard to know when to interject with a joke. On Wednesday morning, people let ’em rip—and suddenly the thing keeping everyone warm was laughter.
A Fight Over GameStop’s Soaring Stock Turns Ugly
Today, a war over the value of video game retailer GameStop’s stock has caused what market guru Jim Cramer called “the squeeze of a lifetime.” Howling with glee along the way, traders on the chaotic and obscene subreddit WallStreetBets helped push GameStop’s stock price up from $20 on January 11 to $73 after traditional analysts deemed the stock a clunker.
While this isn’t the first time WallStreetBets has contributed to a surprising market shake-up, GameStop’s unlikely trip to the moon is unique in both its velocity and the allegations of harassment and hacking that accompanied it.
Like other physical retailers, GameStop’s business has suffered in the past year. Few gamers would rather hit the mall than Amazon’s significantly safer Buy Now button. But GameStop was in dire straits even before the pandemic struck. Its thousands of store locations couldn’t compete with the digital marketplaces offered by the game consoles and PC titans Steam and Epic Games. GameStop laid off dozens of regional managers in mid-2019 after a precipitous, years-long decline in its stock price. To remedy the situation, GameStop announced it would pivot to a social-hub model, like a modern LAN cafe. Then the pandemic hit.
Stop Ignoring the Evidence on Covid-19 Treatments
Thanks to twitter, you can now watch a doctor’s heart break in real time. Like everyone else, we’ve often made our feelings plain during the pandemic—our despondence over all the deaths, our anger over their preventability—but there’s another sort of public display that’s more special to our discipline. I like to call it publication humiliation. It comes out when you realize that the published data on a favored treatment just aren’t on your side.
There was plenty of publication humiliation to go around a couple years ago, when studies started coming out against the magical healing powers of Vitamin D. Researchers had noticed that people with low Vitamin D levels seemed to have a greater chance of developing a range of medical problems, and many serious physicians bought right in. Recent data from well-designed clinical trials suggested otherwise. Could taking Vitamin D prevent cancer or heart disease? Well, no. What about diabetes and depression? No, and no again. But heartbreak, as it often does, played out as denial. It wasn’t the treatment that was wrong; it was the science used to study it. If randomized controlled trials came out against the use of Vitamin D, that’s because they weren’t done correctly. Maybe the doses were too low to have an effect; or else, if the doses were high enough, then the timing wasn’t right. “If you are already too sick or have a disease, it is too late for Vitamin D,” one doctor tweeted when a major trial found the treatment wasn’t saving any lives. (Never mind the fact that prevention trials also come up short.)
If some doctors like to close their eyes in grief, others dig for deeper answers in the data. A “subgroup analysis”—for which you may end up picking out only the parts of a data set that happen to support your theory—is a useful tool in this regard. Doctors who were undeterred by the 26,000-person study on Vitamin D supplements and cancer quickly got to work on a second publication drawing from the same results. This one suggested that the vitamin could, at least, prevent more serious cancers … so long as you were only looking at the skinny patients. (If that hadn’t panned out, they might have tried dividing up the patients by eye color or favorite Seinfeld episode.)