Autonomía económica y financiera

Senator Bernie Sanders ran for the Democratic Presidential nomination on a far-left platform which emphasised economic and racial inequalities and appealed most strongly to

181

Sullivan, S. and Zezima, K. (2016). Op. cit.

182 _{Netzer, Y., et. al. (2014). Op. cit.} 183 _Ibid.

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young white millennials.184 The memetic success of Sanders’ campaign was observed quite early in the election (even though SNL called him a “human Birkenstock”).185 Caitlin Dewey of The Washington Post described Sanders an “anti-establishment white dude,” and commented that his anti-Wall Street rhetoric resonated with white liberals who made up a large percentage of Reddit.186 Reddit posts about Sanders gained extraordinary traction as once-depoliticised users became martyrs of the Sanders campaign with rapid speed. Soon, the phrase “Bernie Bro” emerged, describing the young, white men who used aggression and misogyny in their online support of Sanders.187

In October 2015, Sanders’ cultural power on Reddit reached a high point: the subreddit /r/SandersForPresident housed memetic content, and described itself as “a grassroots for Sanders production”, already forging a connection between Sanders memes and political activism.188 Reddit’s entire politics subreddit was saturated with news about Sanders for many months.189 College Humor’s video “How Bernie Sanders is Actually Winning” addressed Reddit’s culture of Berniebros warping statistics to create a victory narrative.190 When it became clear that Reddit’s growing obsession with the candidate was not going to fade, Sanders was used to lampoon Reddit culture on the self-parody subreddit /r/CircleJerk.191 One post, accompanied by a picture of a Bernie Sanders doll, proclaimed “Someone brought a bunch of these lil Bernie dolls to the Bernie rally today. She told me she

184 _{Holmes, R. (2016). Bernie Sanders Beats Donald Trump at Social Media. [online] Available at:}

http://fortune.com/2016/04/18/bernie-sanders-donald-trump-social-media/ [Accessed 3 Sep. 2016].

185 _{Saturday Night Live. (2016b). A Hillary Christmas. [online] Available at:}

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvSiH1eAF3s [Accessed 10 Jun. 2016].

186 _{Dewey, C. (2016). Op. cit.}

187 _{Meyer, R. (2016). Here Comes the Berniebro. [online] The Atlantic. Available at:}

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/10/here-comes-the-berniebro-bernie-sanders/411070/ [Accessed 7 Sep. 2016].

188 _{SandersForPresident. (2016). Reddit. Bernie Sanders For President - 2016 • /r/SandersForPresident. 1}st

February 2016 via the Web Archive. [online] Available at:

http://web.archive.org/web/20160201002126/https://www.reddit.com/r/sandersforpresident [Accessed 26 Sep. 2016].

189 _{Politics. (2016). Politics • /r/politics 1}st _{February 2016 via the Web Archive. [online] Available at:}

http://web.archive.org/web/20160201152857/https://www.reddit.com/r/politics [Accessed 26 Sep. 2016].

190

College Humor. (2016b). Op. cit.

191 _{Circle Jerk. (2008). Reddit. a high quality subreddit for high quality redditors • /r/circlejerk. [online]}

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made 42,069 of them and donated profits to the campaign.”192 This joke invokes the tone of clickbait and the number “42,069” (referencing both 420, the numerical representation of marijuana, and the 69 sex position). The phrase “Bernie Sanders” thus became a part of Reddit’s self-reflexive memetic lexicon, setting the precedent for the type of memetic content about Bernie Sanders: hidden beneath thick layers of irony, yet conveying a generally positive stance about Sanders himself.

Reddit’s love of Sanders as a memetic feature catalysed the nexus of memetic culture and Sanders politics. The public meme-sharing Facebook group Bernie Sanders Dank Meme Stash (hereon referred to as BSDMS) has over 432,000 members who are overwhelmingly between eighteen and twenty-one years of age.193 The group was one of the major distributors of Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer, but also incorporated Sanders into a variety of “dank” memes using “incongruous pop culture references.”194 BSDMS required members to understand the nuances of American politics in order to create more complex, niche, and dank content. “The group’s only overriding message,” Caitlin Dewey of The Washington Post observed, “is that Bernie is ‘cool.’ The memes are far less concerned with policies [Sanders] has promoted, or statements he’s actually said, than they are with furthering his Internet-icon status.”195 And on the internet, iconography is what counts – BSDMS was the most popular Bernie Sanders Facebook group.196 Examples of BSDMS memes can be seen in Figure 19 below.

192_{Devinchancexxx. (2015). Reddit. Someone brought a bunch of these lil Bernie dolls. [online] Available at:}

https://www.reddit.com/r/circlejerk/comments/3nfemw/someone_brought_a_bunch_of_these_lil_bernie_dolls/

193 _{Alexander, L. (2016). Blame it on the Zodiac killer: did social media ruin Ted Cruz's campaign? [online] the}

Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/04/ted-cruz-campaign-social-media- memes-zodiac-killer [Accessed 27 Aug. 2016].

194 _{Dewey, C. (2016). How Bernie Sanders became the lord of ‘dank memes’. [online] Available at:}

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/02/23/how-bernie-sanders-became-the-lord-of- dank-memes/ [Accessed 27 Aug. 2016].

195

Dewey, C. (2016). Op. cit.

196 _{Bereznak, A. (2016). The Bernie Bros rule the Internet. [online] Available at:}

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Figure 19: Bernie Sanders is combined with lyrics from Smash Mouth's All Star, a song from Shrek; Bernie is inserted into a vaporwave style album cover; Bernie lays down some sick tracks for the kids. BSDMS, 2016.

The group’s early growth can be attributed to its viral spread. As Menczer observed, sharing content across multiple interest groups increases virality.197 BSDMS members spread pro-Sanders memes “across Facebook, on Reddit, in their Twitter and Tumblr feeds.”198 This early community-building meant that BSDMS memes gained traction within the group and as reposts to other communities. No other candidate appealed to the liberal tastemakers of the

197 _{Lewis, G. (2016). Op. cit.} 198 _{Dewey, C. (2016). Op. cit.}

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internet quite like Sanders did. Dewey commented that “BSDMS has a pretty narrow definition of what it considers ‘dank’ or ‘cool’: this is quality as judged by white suburban stoners and nostalgic male nerds.”199

There were two major phases of Bernie Sanders Dank Meme Stash: the hopeful excitement of the primaries seen in Figure 19, and a tone of political angst after Sanders’ withdrawal and endorsement of Clinton. These represent two vastly different modes of memetic internet engagement. The first, full of irreverent caricature, is a loving form of political fandom. This kind of mediated political engagement follows Henry Jenkins’ five levels of fandom activity:

(1) sharing and debating meanings between other members of a community (2) relating interpretations back to one’s own lives

(3) “involves a base for consumer activism,” i.e. speaks back to the creator or performer

(4) “an emphasis on loyalty, identity and belonging” expressed through aesthetic norms developed within the community

(5) “functions as a social community [with] the ability to offer symbolic solutions to real world problems.”200

Fandom has the ability to build communities, and relies upon intertextuality as a means to communicate ideas about a text, the creator, and societal context. Fandom exists as a means to express ideology and celebrate creativity, central values of participatory culture according to Netzer et al.201 BSDMS became a mediated space of social connection, exemplifying another function of participatory culture as set forward by Netzer et al.202 The creation of BSDMS as a community catalysed political consciousness raising more than the memetic content itself. The group acted as a means of community building, and this is where the true power of BSDMS lay.

199

Ibid.

200 _{Parikh, K. (2012). Political Fandom in the Age of Social Media: Case Study of Barack Obama’s 2008}

Presidential Campaign. MSc. London School of Economics and Political Science. Available online at:

http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/mediaWorkingPapers/MScDissertationSeries/2011/64.pdf [Accessed 3 Sep. 2016]. p.7

201 _{Netzer, Y., et al. (2014). Op. cit.} 202 _Ibid.

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Figure 20: Disillusioned memes and coping with Bernie's endorsement. BSDMS, 2016.

The second era of BSDMS was a reactionary period after Sanders’ withdrawal that attempted to incite political action through memes. Sanders’ endorsement of Clinton brought group- wide criticism of Sanders as a sell-out who had lost his integrity to satisfy the corporate political elite, as seen in Figure 20. Memes were more actively engaged with policy and political participation, and often implored members to write-in Bernie as a third-party candidate. Memetic support for Green Party candidate Jill Stein also emerged in the group.

Figure 21: Charged memetic activity of BSDMS, September 2016.

Figure 21, above, exemplifies the posts that flooded BSDMS in September 2016. It demonstrates the use of politically charged hashtags such as #OurRevolution and

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#BernieOrJill (referring to Jill Stein). These hashtags signal a comedic space being used for activism in alignment with Krefting’s concept of charged comedy.203 A memetic space was now being co-opted to incite direct socio-political action. BSDMS was originally a memetic space first and a political one second, and it was this that gave it cultural power. Its transition into a political action group was largely ineffective.

So what is the political efficacy of a fundamentally cultural memetic space? Long- time blogger Carles argued that for BSDMS to impress upon American political culture, it needed to engage with a wider audience:

Does dankness translate to electability? …when it comes to non-Millennial demographics (who can be counted on to vote in primaries and general elections), perhaps the dankness of these memes could make Bernie Sanders seems unapproachable to those who prefer memes curated by their local radio station’s Facebook page.204

Within broader political culture, BSDMS alienates the uninitiated. It does not act as any traditional political group might; but then again, political action looks very different within modern mediated spaces.

BSDMS is a manifestation of the notion of a personal “micro-politics”, as set forward by Jenkins et al.205 It becomes clear that memetic political groups do not necessarily impact upon broader political discourse, but upon memetic discourse and personal consciousness raising: the community facilitates a mediated micro-politics. While BSDMS did not directly influence traditional means of political activity (“voting, lobbying, or petitioning”), it had the power to mobilise a depoliticised segment of society – dispossessed youth – to interact with politics on a cultural and personal level.206 Jenkins et al emphasise that participatory politics “cannot in and of itself overcome structural inequalities that have historically blocked many

203 _{Krefting, R. (2014). Op. cit. p.23.}

204 _{Carles. (2016). Can Bernie Sanders’ Dank Meme Stash Swing the Election? [online] Available at:}

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/bernie-sanders-dank-meme-stash-facebook-page [Accessed 27 Aug. 2016].

205 _{Jenkins, H., Itō, M. and boyd, d. (2016). Op. cit.} 206 _Ibid.

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from participating in civic and political life,” but within mediated liberal spaces, BSDMS becomes a powerful tool for cultural activism.207

This cultural power was recognised by Clinton supporters, who saw the internet as a cultural battlefront that belonged to Bernie. On April 26, 2016, six pro-Sanders meme pages were temporarily suspended from Facebook. Jamie Peck of Death and Taxes Mag investigated these suspensions: while there was no immediate reason why they had occurred, “a number of members [reported] seeing explicit images, even child porn (!), posted by trolls for the likely purpose of getting the groups flagged and removed.”208 While not suspended, BSDMS was being barraged with pornography when Peck’s article was posted.209

Peck speculated that it may have been the work of David Brock, who led a Clinton Super PAC and formed “an online mob of paid trolls designed to attack any and every person who says one cross word about Hillary Clinton on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, or elsewhere.”210

Peck supported his allegation after finding evidence of a Brock supporter “bragging in the ‘Bros4Hillary’ [Facebook] group about getting a Sanders group taken down.”211

In addition to factional warring, BSDMS was also subject to leadership corruption. Administrator Will Dowd was shown to have filtered out as many as 100,000 posts, and charging $150 to promote clickbait articles by third parties.212 Dowd continued even when warned that his actions could lead to a lawsuit for accepting payments under another’s identity.213 Despite its non-normative engagement with political activity, the meme-sharing

207 _{Ibid. p.161.}

208 _{Peck, J. (2016). Did Hillary Clinton's super PAC pay trolls to shut down Sanders Facebook pages? [online]}

Death and Taxes. Available at: http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/288806/hillary-clinton-trolls-shut-down- sanders-facebook-pages/ [Accessed 27 Aug. 2016].

209 _Ibid.

210 _{King, S. (2016). Hillary Clinton now paying trolls to attack people online. [online] Available at:}

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/king-hillary-clinton-paying-trolls-attack-people-online-article- 1.2613980 [Accessed 7 Sep. 2016].

211 _{Peck, J. (2016). Op. cit.}

212 _{benjaminwareing1998. (2016). Viral Group ‘Bernie Sanders Dank Meme Stash’ Owner Involved in}

Corruption. [online] Available at: https://nextgenerationblogs.wordpress.com/2016/07/01/viral-group-bernie-

sanders-dank-meme-stashowner-involved-in-corruption/ [Accessed 7 Sep. 2016].

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community was still susceptible to political controversy, and was seen as a threat to the Clinton campaign.