the k zone
the week's best meme about the famous family is not the one you already know about
Warning: you are about to enter a Kardashian Zone. If you are one of those people who refuses to acknowledge the Kardashians out of some misguided sense of cultural elitism, please skip ahead.
As someone who does not pay close attention to this family, even I know there was a lot of Kardashian stuff this week. Early this week, Kim Kardashian (of The Kardashians) announced on social media that she flew all of her friends to an island to feel normal again. “After 2 weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine, I surprised my closest inner circle with a trip to a private island where we could pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time.” A lot of people made fun of it. You don’t need me to explain this one to you. It was tone deaf! Pretty self-explanatory.
Last night, the same Kardashian (Kim), announced that her husband, politician Kanye West, got her a hologram(?) of her dead dad(?) and it looks like this?
We all grieve in our own ways, but I also want to echo what Twitter user @6thgrade4ever said, which is that this thing looks like a character model from Grand Theft Auto IV (2008). “Beeg Amereecan holograms!”
But the best Kardashian meme of the week comes from friend of BNet and Arab-meme expert Samer Kalaf, who has alerted me to this very fun, multifaceted goof. I guess Kylie Jenner launched some leopard-print line for Kylie Cosmetics and she put out a promotional video and some photos, and people are having some photoshop fun with it.
We love to have fun at a celebrity’s minimal expense, don’t we, folks?
self-promo time
For the last four years, I was tasked with writing hundreds of mediocre blog posts examining the overwhelming power of Facebook and how it is warping the foundations of society (in a bad way! I support good warps). I was hopeful that I’d never have to do it again but Vice pulled me out of retirement like Pacino in Godfather III to take one last stab at trying to explain why Facebook is so powerful for the right.
So, here it is. It’s pretty long and maybe boring, but if you’ve got some time to kill, give it a shot? It’s less about Facebook, and more about the history of conservative media, specifically its presentation and rhetorical style, and pointing out how those principles align closely with the stated goals of social media platforms. Namely, a focus on “authenticity” and “emotion.”
In short: social media platforms — even if they don’t have the same political values as the Republican party — encourage a messaging style closely aligned with what conservative media has been practicing for decades. And thus, encourage and exacerbate the worst practices of conservative media.
Oops, I spoiled the conclusion of the piece I’m trying to get you to read and share. That’s my bad.
a Call For Submissions
I generally try not to be one of those guys who asks his readers/followers to do his work for them, so I am a little reluctant to do this, but I think it could be fun.
Here’s the deal: BNet comes out on Tuesdays. Next Tuesday, there’s an election happening and honestly, I do not have any good ideas for what to write about. Writing about the election is depressing, writing something else substantive feels wrong. Asking you, the email recipient, to read either of those two options seems like a waste of your own personal bandwidth.
Instead, I’m just gonna try and compile an enormous list of internet garbage for you to peruse. That’s it — no theme, no uniting idea. Just a bunch of links to stuff I like, videos that have lived in the back of my brain for years, and confounding JPEGs.
If you have anything that meets the criteria of “an amusing thing online” that you’d like to share with the rest of the BNet readership, please email it to brian@feldmanbrian.com with the subject line “bnet internet junk” or DM it to @bafeldman on Twitter. A good example is something like this video, but there’s honestly no requirements other than it being something on the internet that you enjoy. (If you want to include a very brief description of why you like it, you can, but I if you want to just sling a link, please do.)
Elsewhere…
the Among Us stream I mentioned in the last BNet ended up raising over $15,000 for the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund. very cool. here’s a highlight.
guess who finally joined TikTok? I think I’m the first to report that Ruben Rabasa from the I Think You Should Leave car focus group sketch is now posting
damn… is this true?
