(upbeat pop music)
- Elamin Abdelmahmoud and this is Pop Chat.
Today, we are talking about the memefication
of Breonna Taylor
and how celebrities have taken up her cause.
Plus, social media has been
this place of doom and gloom during the pandemic.
And now a new Netflix documentary says,
we need to delete all of it.
That is all on Pop Chat today.
Breonna is not a meme or a headline or a hashtag.
She was someone's daughter, grandbaby, friend
and future fiance.
Those are the words of journalist
and former teen Vogue editor in chief, Elaine Welteroth.
She was talking about Breonna Taylor, of course.
And since her death,
her name and image have become
this kind of rallying cry
for anti-racism protesters and activists.
And then there've been these countless memes
that featured her image.
They've been shared on Instagram,
on Twitter, on a TikTok.
Has this memefication of Breonna Taylor
erased her actual personhood?
What kind of effect has it had on her actual case?
Let me start with you, Stacy.
Why has Briana tailored become
this cultural touchstone, you think?
- So, I think two things,
the first is that,
this story is so tragic.
If you can hear that this young woman,
with a bright future and plans for her life,
was shot by police officers
while sleeping in her bed.
If you can't see what an injustice that is
then, I mean, I don't know what to tell you.
I'm obviously very emotional about it.
But I think there's that, right.
It's incredibly tragic.
The problem when we talk about victims of police violence
is often that we require them
to be perfect victims or good victims
and so, you know, that's a problem in general.
We don't need to be good people to deserve
not being shot by the police
but in this case,
she couldn't have done anything wrong, right?
She couldn't have been fighting back.
- [Elamin] Mm-hm.
- She couldn't have been doing
whatever it is to make police scared
and justified in shooting her
because she was asleep.
So I think that has a big part of it.
But the other part, I don't think we can understate
how important it is, the role that black women played
in making sure that we all knew
Breonna Taylor's name, right?
And that is part of the, Say Her Name movement
which is also a social media campaign.
It was started by Kimberly Crenshaw,
who is also the academic and the lawyer
who coined the term Intersectionality
and for Kimberly Crenshaw
and for, you know, black women
and women of color in general,
there's a tragedy, a particular tragedy
when black women are killed by police
because their stories don't go viral in the same way.
- The format of the meme
almost became like a modern day
kind of rickroll, if you will.
People would try to sort of hide it
in places that you wouldn't expect.
- So I think, initially it started off
as just being repurposing
of quite well-known meme formats
and one of the popular ones was
about was cited in a few articles was like,
Hey Arthur.
It was less like Arthur related themes,
where they would kind of take the song
and then add at the end,
they would add and arrest the three cops
that killed Breonna Taylor.
And then it sort of expanded into.
So the ones that I had seen mostly on Instagram
were from influencers who were like doing makeup tutorials
and then midway through the makeup tutorial
they would kind of just mention,
you know, arrest the three cops that killed Breonna Taylor.
And it came at an interesting time
because I think in the wake of the
George Floyd killing and the protests,
I think there was lots of conversation about,
what is the role of influencers
and what is the role of social media
and stuff when it comes to highlighting injustices?
Because, you know, if they have lots of followers
who are willing to write for them and
then surely this is like a
moral responsibility on their behalf.
So I think, this was very much like that conversation
being tried to play out
but what ended up happening
or like what we ended up seeing was like,
actually influencers, even though influences may have
this audience, that responds to them
in responds to the content that they put out,
at the same time, their ability to bring about,
to kind of facilitate a societal change is very limited.
So, they're basically using the methods that they know
which is how you manipulate an algorithm
or how you kind of feed into a particular trend
than we were trying to disrupt those trends.
But using the logic of the systems that had
that they benefited from
and that they still benefit from
in terms of their career.
- I'm wondering, Angelina,
what do we lose in the focus about someone's life
when their death becomes a meme like this?
- I think it's the same phenomenon
that happens on the internet
with lots of things
where things get flattened,
they get reduced to their most basic,
sort of trite form
and then that's how they go viral.
So we lose nuance, we lose humanity.
We actually lose like a rich discussion,
as lots of people had pointed out.
What are we talking about?
Abolishing the police?
Do we wanna reform the police?
What are these?
So when we say arrest the cops
who killed Breonna Taylor, what does that mean?
What's your actual opinion?
(upbeat pop music)
- What I want people to know
is that everything they're doing online
is being watched,
is being tracked,
is being measured.
Every single action you take
is carefully monitored and recorded.
Exactly what images you stop and look at,
for how long you look at it.
Oh yeah, seriously, for how long you look at it.
- That is one of many, let's say disturbing,
honestly terrifying moments
from this new documentary on Netflix called
The Social Dilemma.
The doc kind of is built around
these really delicious, behind the scenes looks
at the very intentional decisions
that social media networks made
in order to make us so addicted to the thing.
- Let's get into it, I'm gonna start with Hussein.
Tell me bout your initial reaction
as an extremely aligned person
to watching this doc.
- I was disappointed with this.
Partly because I think that it was very, very over-hyped.
For not really giving a lot of information.
I also think it doesn't really answer its own question.
So it starts off with this premise
of like social media platforms are very addictive
and that addiction is used to harvest your data
and that data can like have real human impacts
and that can result with like
you know, death or the destruction of a democracy.
And sometimes destructions of the country.
These are all really, really interesting things
but then they sort of like leave it flat.
So, there's a period of time when they kind of talk
about the algorithm, but we don't really go beyond that.
They just kind of say,
yeah, but this is algorithm that's there,
it like does some stuff.
- Yeah, I felt like it was someone telling me,
to Hussein's point, how they ruined my life
without apologizing
(all murmuring in agreement) or telling me how to fix it.
It was like, thanks for this self-congratulatory schlock.
- [Elamin] They're very sorry.
- They're not sorry.
- I think Tristan is sorry.
- Why?
He didn't say it. - I don't know,
he just seems really sad all the time.
(laughter)
- I wanted tears, I wanted remorse.
I wanted some sense of,
you guys aren't talking
as experts separate from this problem.
You are a problem.
- [Elamin] Yeah.
- And there was this idea
if they float the idea that the algorithm
is not politically neutral
but then they don't do anything about it
or they don't even explain how the algorithm came to be.
- Mm-hm, yeah. - So like, hm, I wonder,
I wonder who was in the room
when you were deciding what kind of content to
you know, to make sure that rises to the top
or like, you know, what kind of people
are identified in photos?
Or who?
I just can't imagine,
which obviously I can
but the other thing too
is that this idea of who the documentary is for,
I really felt that in that incredibly irritating
docu drama radicalization of that boy
because it felt like they were conflating
the far-right and the far-left
and those are the same height.
They don't have the same energy.
(upbeat pop music) - Thank you to my panelists.
Hussein Kesvani, Stacy Lee-Kong and Angelina Chapin
for joining today on Pop Chat,
the show where we try our best
to help make sense of the cultural drama
blowing up the internet.
I am your host, Elamin Abdelmahmoud
Let's do this again next week, shall we?