Here's an idea--
Pepe the Frog both is and is not a hate symbol.
If you spend time either on the Internet
or following political news, there's
a good chance you've heard of this guy, Pepe the Frog.
And, if not, here's some background.
Pepe was originally drawn by artist Matt Furie for his comic
Boys Club.
According to KYM, the appearance of Pepe
that solidified his popularity is this comic
where he explains that the reason he lowers his pants all
the way down to his ankles to pee is that it feels good, man.
This image was my first encounter with Pepe,
and I think that's true for lots of other people
too, as the "feels good, man," and sometimes the
"feels bad, man" frog or Slowpoke.
This actually is another important aspect
of Pepe's meme history.
Over time he mutated and morphed,
was shopped and pasted into countless situations
and onto an endless parade of preexisting characters.
Around 4chan, Reddit, and other spots,
people cracked wise about the value of certain Pepes
based on their scarcity, originality, or both.
Jokes began to arise about the relative rareness of Pepes
and their collectability.
We're going to talk about some developments in the Pepe market
at the end of this episode, but first.
Pepe's biggest entre into the public spotlight
came late last year in the midst of the American presidential
campaign and, to be defensive for a brief moment,
just after our Furthermore episode
where we claimed memes played a very small role
in the political climate.
Woops.
There are a series of events which
led up to what we might call the defining moment in Pepe's
metamorphosis, where he transforms
from a simple Internet frog to an alleged hate symbol.
That moment was the release of a Hillary Clinton campaign
explainer on Pepe and his apparent white supremacist
leanings.
The explainer is short and focuses on two things.
First, a Daily Beast article which includes an interview
with Jared T. Swift, a self-described white
nationalist interested in taking Pepe back from the "normies."
He and his cronies would do this, he explains,
by associating Pepe with white supremacy,
by combining him with symbols widely understood
to represent Nazism.
The Clinton campaign explainer focuses
second on the use of Pepe by then-candidate Donald Trump's
campaign associates and supporters.
The explainer posits a relationship
between Trump and white nationalism
and at the 3/4 mark displays a tweet
where Trump himself includes Pepe.
After not long, the news media picks up the story
and reports widely on this apparently secretly
racist Internet frog.
The Anti-Defemation League, the nation's premier civil rights
slash human relations agency, adds Pepe to its hate symbol
database.
Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL CEO, says, "Once again,
racists and haters have taken a popular Internet meme
and twisted it for their own purposes of spreading
bigotry and harassing users."
These statements made by the Clinton campaign, the media,
the ADL, and others were met with confusion
in many corners of the Internet.
For one, it appeared Jared T. Swift and his bros were trolls.
Such was the claim that they made
to Tucker Carlson's conservative news site the Daily Caller,
anyway.
Swift was not engaged in so calculated a Pepe
transformation campaign as he said.
At least, not beyond the Daily Beast article, which
is maybe all that was needed.
Joke or not, troll or not, true or not, the association spread.
And, in the meantime, actual internet Nazis, or people
pretending to be Internet Nazis-- cf.
Poe's law and the whole video that we
made about the complication about pretending
to be things you might not be-- boop--
began using Pepe or the frog emoji as a Pepe icon
in and around their hateful messages
and to connote their in-group status respectively.
The association that Swift set out to build
or not materialized anyway.
Furie himself made several statements
about the nature of Pepe, once drawing a comic indicating
that it was akin to a terrible nightmare
and saying in Time magazine that Pepe is whatever you say he is
and I, the creator, say that Pepe is love.
Not a hater.
He's a lover.
[LAUGHS] I don't know.
The ADL's hate symbols database reads
"Though Pepe memes have many defenders,
the use of racist and bigoted versions of Pepe memes
seems to be increasing, and not decreasing."
And "Because so many Pepe the Frog memes are not
bigoted in nature, it's important to examine the use
of the meme only in-context."
The Furie and the ADL are even apparently working together
to rehabilitate Pepe.
But the damage is maybe done.
"Pepe was framed" is a kind of lamentation
at the loss or complication of a beloved,
if crass, collectible meme character, a complication
exacerbated by recent footage of Richard Spencer,
noted white supremacist, getting decked in public while
explaining his Pepe the Frog lapel pin.
It's, uh, Pepe.
He's become kind of a symbol--
It's maybe lucky for Pepe defenders
that Spencer stopped before explaining his position on what
Pepe kind of is, lest he potentially strengthen Pepe's
ties to hateful ideologies.
But the thing that I want to talk
about is not Richard Spencer getting walloped,
but, rather, how it is that Pepe's meaning changed.
How it is that a symbol which has no hateful meaning
takes on a hateful meaning, and how might that meaning
be erased, reclaimed, or defied?
And to do that, we're going to talk for a sec about something
else with a few meanings.
We're going to talk about the word "soft."
Soft can mean a bunch of things.
It can mean pleasing to the touch.
It can mean gentle or describe a manner of speech.
It can mean generally just quiet.
But it can also mean compassionate
and even nonalcoholic, as in "soft" drink.
So how is it that soft can mean this many things?
The answer is a phenomenon known as polysemy, or polysemy.
A polysemous word, or sign, or phrase, or symbol,
has multiple meanings which are somehow related.
The etymology for soft relates it
to second-century European words for agreeable or gentle.
And so, over time, it gets deployed in various situations
and takes on multiple senses rooted in this central meaning.
As opposed to being rough, perhaps, an object or a person
is soft.
As opposed to being loud or grating, a sound may be soft.
A drink if it is not hard could be soft.
All contiguous with agreeable or gentle.
Polysemy is different from homonymy,
where the same word has multiple meanings that are unrelated.
Take "pole," for example, which can
mean a long stick, a resident or native of Poland,
or the ends of the axis of the planet Earth.
These senses of "pole" aren't polysemous,
as each of these meanings are etymologically distinct.
They have parallel but individual roots,
and different histories.
Symbols as opposed to words that are as polysemous as "soft"
are comparatively rare.
One well-known one is this hand signal, which can mean victory,
peace, or goodbye--
victory after "V" for victory, peace
after its use by '60s anti-war protesters,
and goodbye because peace is also a salutation.
Peace.
We could argue whether this and this are technically
the same symbol.
But for simplicity, we're going to say they are.
However, if you happen to be in the UK, this can be insulting.
That meaning would be a homonym though, not a polyseme.
It has an unrelated etymology.
The insulting usage is thought to come
from English archers taunting the French during the Hundred
Years' War, showing them that they hadn't been captured
and thus hadn't had the fingers on their draw hand cut off
as punishment.
Basically, you're going to get arched.
But, OK, what does this even have to do with Pepe?
Well, I think it can provide us with some insight
into how Pepe ticks.
We can ask whether his various senses--
"Feels bad, man," "Feels good, man," smug frog, rage frog,
collectible frog, and hate symbol frog--
whether they're polysemous or homonymous.
Is Pepe more like "soft," a sign with several senses
all converging upon a shared territory of meaning,
or is he more like "pole," a single item with many branches
of meaning, each stemming from separate and distinct
traditions?
What hangs in the balance is a determination
of what Pepe is versus how he's used.
I, personally, find it hard to divorce Pepe from his roots.
Cartoonish and a little vulgar, sure, but also
popularized via 4chan, a place notable for its preponderance
of shock where the attention economy is often
gamed through the use of racism, homophobia,
and sundry other forms of purposefully
offensive communication.
To me, this makes Pepe's various senses polysemous, not
homonymous.
Whether he is or not, it makes sense in the semantic way that
Pepe could be a symbol of white supremacy because of his
association with places on the Internet-- corners of 4chan,
Reddit, Twitter, et cetera--
widely thought to harbor white supremacists.
Swift's joke is Poe's law par excellence.
Does this make Pepe himself a white supremacist?
No.
And the ADL admits as much.
But while meaning dictates use, use also dictates meaning.
This is exactly how things are co-opted, in a word.
This may mean that Furie, the ADL, and Pepe defenders
everywhere working together have a hard time creating
a homonymous Pepe meaning as opposed
to a polysemous one that rehabilitates him
in the eyes of the general Internet public.
A separate, though lexically-related, sense.
In fact, the swastika has experienced several shifts
in meaning itself.
And, no, I'm not about to say that Pepe is the new swastika,
but both have undergone comparable processes.
A symbol of good luck and auspiciousness
originating in ancient India, Nazis co-opted the symbol
and created their hooked cross claiming
the early Aryans of India were the paradigmatic white
invaders.
They used the symbol not to represent
good luck and auspiciousness, but movement, nationalism,
and the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man.
Source.
As Malcolm Quinn writes beautifully, but rather
opaquely, the symbol as the imaginative catalyst
for a new context has been transformed
into a totalizing framework for the control of the existing
one.
In other words, meaning has not been followed.
It has been restrained and then created.
In Britain, however, early punk rockers in the '70s
attempted to co-opt the itself co-opted swastika
as a counterculture sign.
They wore it not to advertise their allegiance
to white nationalist ideals, but to shock members
of polite society and to reflect back the reaction
they felt punks inspired.
That they were the enemy, social pariahs, the scum of the Earth.
Also, source.
Pepe rehabilitation then would have
to be the reverse of this process--
individual communities working to create a new meaning
against an institutionalized sense which
claims to reflect true significance but is, in fact,
distinct from the symbol's actual history.
Pepe's new meaning could perhaps channel
not hate but collectability.
This is what, apparently, the folks over at the Rare Pepe
Directory are attempting.
By using block-chain technology, they've
managed to enforce digital scarcity.
The restriction of the free and willy-nilly proliferation
of digital assets and to track the issuance of Pepe images,
from the rather common philanthro-pe to the most
rare OnlyOnePepe.
Speaking with Motherboard, when asked about Pepe's association
with the alt-right, one person involved
said, "Best to just ignore those extremists."
And to be rare, be Pepe.
What do you all think?
I have a bunch of questions.
Like, can you ignore those extremists,
as the Rare Pepe Directory people suggest?
Or is Pepe just ruined?
And if he is ruined, can or should he be saved?
Or is it just too late?
And if you do think he can or should be saved,
can the Rare Pepe Directory do it?
How would you do it?
How do you save an image or reverse its meaning?
Let us know in the comments and I'll respond to some of them
in next week's comment response video.
In this week's comment response video,
we talk about your thoughts regarding battery anxiety.
If you want to watch that one, you
can find a link in the description
or wait for the end card to show up.
If you would like to support Idea Channel,
we have a Patreon.
We'll put a link to that in the description as well.
And we actually have--
Morgan, we have to post that other blooper video.
We should do that soon.
We're going to do that soon.
We have a Facebook and IRC and a subreddit.
And two Tweets of the week this week.
The first is from Aaron H. who sends us
towards a masterpiece of technical memery.
It is "All Star" set to the tune of "Walking on the Sun"
as performed by Santana featuring
Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty.
It-- I can't--
it's-- I think I watched it five times in a row.
It's unbelievable.
And the second Tweet of the week comes
from Lesbian Undertones, who points us towards an Everyday
Carry forum.
If you don't know Everyday Carry,
it's people who sort of are concerned-- not concerned, not
preoccupied-- interested in which objects
they carry in order to be prepared for most situations
during the day.
And I think that the comparison to battery anxiety is a really
interesting one, because, you know,
I think that it's-- is it about--
it's about preparedness.
And so, in a way, that's what your battery pack
to thwart anxiety is about.
It's about preparedness.
And these folks are very prepared.
And last, but certainly not least,
this week's episode would not have been possible or good
without the very hard work of these full-length repastes.