 It is my great pleasure today to introduce our speaker on Chow Meena, who will be talking not about the Internet of Things, but rather the things that emerge from the Internet. Ann is a technologist and researcher and fellow fellow at the Berkman Klein Center. She leads the product team at Meedan, which builds tools for global journalism. Ann is also working on a book about the topics that she's going to be discussing today on Internet memes and social movements, which is going to be published by Beacon Press. Now, I've had the opportunity to get to know Ann over the last year at the Berkman Klein Center through the Hardware Working Group, which Ann and I, together with Jason Griffey, started. We also have the distinction of spanning 15 time zones, which is a challenge that is known by all people who produce things in Shenzhen. So it's our own little taste of it. My own research is about the Internet of Things, and so it's been really interesting hearing and learning about Ann's perspective, which is not about just the technology, but more about how ideas on the Internet can turn into physical objects and how this process is shaped by people and by social movements. I'm excited to hear more about this today. Please join me in welcoming Ann. I'm excited to speak here because I became acquainted with the Berkman Klein community about four years ago when I spoke at RaffleCon 3, rolling on the floor laughing, on a panel that Ethan Zuckerman hosted about Internet meme culture globally. And this talk today is kind of an extension and evolution of some of the research that I presented there and is looking at some new trends around object culture and its intersection with Internet culture. So I'm going to be talking about hats, if that's not obvious from this photo, but I also want to clarify the hats I'm wearing today, the metaphorical hats. I'm a product manager, so I think about products and how products enter the world and how they influence the world and reach new audiences and users. I also look at Internet culture and how that intersects with social movements. I'm interested in the social power of the Internet and some of its drawbacks as well. I'm also a little bit of a photographer, so many of the photos here are photos that I've taken in different contexts around the United States and in China. And as I speak, I encourage you to ask questions. We'll have time afterward for Q&A, but also feel free to just raise your hand and jump in if you have questions. I'll be talking about two seemingly very different contexts, one of which is political culture in the United States in the past few months as evidenced by this photo. And then I'm going to jump to Shenzhen in China, Southern China, to talk a little bit about commercial production culture over there. And I'm going to try to weave together some threads and themes and talk a little bit about the mechanics of object production as it meets networked culture. So I want to start with the March, the women's march from just a few months back and subsequent marches and protests that have happened since then. From afar, it's always a very visually striking movement. You can always see a lot of signs. You can see a plethora of pink hats. And I think what's interesting here is when you start to zoom in and you see how those signs are structured and how they're often intersecting with the Internet, it's very much a networked sort of protest in terms of its aesthetics and media. Over the past few years, we've seen the emergence of hashtags, these kind of digital artifacts popping up on protest signs from Black Lives Matter to hashtag nasty, referencing the hashtag nasty woman that popped up after the third presidential debate. These hashtags are very interesting to me because it's a digital artifact that then gets expressed into the physical sign. And why people do that is an open question. It's something I'm interested in talking about. And as those hashtags, that hashtag is where it's kind of central to the sign. And these hashtags are starting to behave very similar to how we see hashtags on Twitter and Instagram posts, where they're kind of tying together different signs where the main theme is semantically very different, but then you have these hashtags that tie together those signs in the same way that digital hashtags might connect Instagram posts and tweets. But here it is, here it's happening in the physical world. And then you have other sorts of digital artifacts popping up, those specifically Internet memes. The nope-nope-nope octopus has popped up in a number of signs with these nope-nope-nope signs. So they're very common in different protests. You have the honey badger doesn't care. This time the honey badger does care, and this is a printout of that same honey badger meme. And then this is Find Dog, which became very popular in 2016, also popping up on signs. And so you're starting to see the emergence of kind of Internet meme culture inside the physical signs, which are then photographed, they're designed to be photographed, and then pushed back online where they enter the Internet meme vernacular. The hashtag YIMarch was a popular hashtag during the march. And there are a lot of number of people like this woman who is encouraging people to actually write on the sign why they march. And she was really riffing off the social media support kit of the women's march, which had encouraged people to use the hashtag to indicate why they want to march. And so here again, you have a digital practice placed onto the physical sign, and then people were taking pictures of that sign, putting it back online, back on the hashtag. So it became part of the Internet vernacular, even though it was happening in physical space. Let's dive into one of these kind of viral media. And this was one of the more popular tweets that emerged after the elections that came from progressive circles. And so this tweet from April Daniels, as you can see, got 14,000 retweets, really resonated with a lot of people. And then during the Muslim ban protests a few months ago, that same tweet started showing up on signs. Because it had gone so viral, it started to show up on different signs. And this was one that was in Los Angeles, I believe, and it was then posted on Instagram, and then it once again entered the kind of circulation on the Internet. These are photographs that I took of variations of that. People were remixing that. This is obviously Grumpy Cat. The reason she had included Grumpy Cat was so she could have a conversation with her children without using the punchline for the original tweet. And then, of course, and then other variations where people modified that, and this is in Copley Square in Boston. And so what we're seeing today is protest signs have as their audience and source of inspiration, both the physical crowd around them, which is where traditionally protest signs are done, the wider Internet, the Internet where people are looking at pictures of these signs, and then all the other protests as well. And what we're seeing is an emergence of kind of a shared visual and verbal vocabulary of protest signs and other objects that pop up around national protests and increasingly in international protests in many Western contexts. And I included this one because this is kind of an indicator of that new relationship with the network because many signs now have words on the back as well because there's no longer this relationship or assumption that the photographer would be in front of you but also might be part of the crowd and therefore taking pictures and therefore maybe it might be posting things online. Anyone who's been to these marches knows that there are also a number of hats that have been popping up. And this is a picture I took at the Women's March because it was right after inauguration day of two types of hats. And it was very apparent to me when I entered Union Station to see pink hats and red hats. And very much the association with these two hats was one of people coming for the Women's March and one of people coming for the inauguration day. And so I want to zoom in on the ones on the left first. So these are the pink pussy hats. The pussy hat project started really the brainchild of Christasa in Los Angeles and became part of a project with a little nittery in Los Angeles. And I'm going to ask if we could start passing out. I actually brought some of the pink pussy hats and started looking at them because from a far they all look very similar. You see the sea of pink heads. But in detail they're actually quite different. And the way the project worked was the pussy hat project distributed patterns online that encouraged people to make these kind of pussy hat designs. So these pink yarn designs. And then they prefigured that with an illustration of what that might look like at the march to really inspire people. And this happened about two months before the march and then people started getting together in knitting groups, knitting circles. And instead of following the pattern word for word or kind of script by script, instead people made variations of that. And what I want to argue today is that part of these hats, these physical hats are actually following internet meme culture and the norms of internet memes. And as you look at them, I'll start tying that together. But take a look at some of these hats and these variations. These are all variations from DC. Here's a black one with the rainbow flag. These are also from Maryland. You can see on the sign different colors beyond pink. And then this is one from Boston. This is a pussy hat screen prints in Oakland. So people are taking the basic idea, the basic kernel of it, but often remixing it. And as you're looking at these, you can see in detail that they're actually quite a bit of variation. And there's a loom being passed around from Berkman's own Carrie Anderson because she also made some as well and used a loom instead of kind of the handed instructions. So people often reinterpreted the hat to their own skills and interests. And that was kind of the point. The point of the project was that it was networked. These are pictures from the Instagram account for the Pussy Hat project. And the whole goal here was that the hats were designed so that people who could not attend physically would make the hat. They would send it to someone who was able to attend. That person who attended would then take a picture of themselves with the hat and send that back to the maker. And so the whole point of this was that it was digital, it was networked, and it was participatory in a way that combined both the physical and the digital. So what I'm talking about today is that I think these hats, these signs, and these other objects that I'll be talking about today are part of internet meme culture in a different way than we traditionally think about objects. So when I talk about internet meme, I want to make a distinction between the kind of docking sense of meme, which is the notion of the cultural unit, and then the kind of this notion of the internet meme. Lee Moore Schiffman has written about this and helps us make a distinction between, you know, the word internet meme is what kind of emerged in the culture of the internet as this kind of unique practice. This thing on the internet that happens, that's kind of diverged like a meme from the original docking sense of meme. So when I'm talking about meme today, when I'm talking about memetics, I'm typically talking about internet meme specifically. And so Schiffman's definition of memes is a useful one that I tend to agree with that helps us think a little bit about what's going on with these hats and these signs. So an internet meme is a group of digital objects that share a common stance, form, and content. And so you have this kind of shared characteristics and there's a platonic form, but no one is alike. They're created with awareness of each other, so this is kind of social component to it. And then they're circulated, imitated, and transformed via the internet by multiple users. This last part is really important because this notion of transformation and multiplicity is what makes an internet meme different from a viral object, at least within the definitions that I'm talking about today. Because a viral object might be like the old Spice video that is shared frequently and is looked at and viewed, but doesn't have this notion of transformation. Whereas a video like the Gangnam Style video where people are dancing along, creating their own videos is more as closer to what an internet meme is, at least in this definition. So the classic example, of course, is the kind of Nyan Cat where, and you're looking at the Nyan Cat, it has common characteristics of form. There are multiple people creating versions of this. They're following the 8-bit format in this idea of a cat with a pop tart, but often remixing and reshaping it based on their perspective, their interests, or contributions. And in many ways, the pussy hats follow those same formats. And in many ways, it's as much digital when you look on Etsy, you look on Google Shopping, you look on any website and just Google Pussy Hat, you'll see that wide variety of variation just like you do with digital memes. And I think this is intentional. I think this is people aware of the fact that they'll be photographed, the fact that these images will be circulated online, and that their contribution will be part of the shared visual language around protest in the United States. Now, there's often a contrast drawn between, and especially on the weekend of the Women's March, between the hand knit pink hats and then the red, the kind of red Make America Great again, merchandise that was perceived to be mass produced. And again, from afar, it looked like that, right? You see pink hats, you see red hats. But as you dig deeper, you see that these kind of mass produced objects also have this notion of remix and multiplicity that we associate with internet meme culture, and as I argue here, with object meme culture as well. These are photos that I took during the Women's March. This is a man who's wearing a red hat that he had remixed because he was campaigning for transgender equality in North Carolina, and so remixed the red hat to reclaim the notion of the red hat for his political cause. Other hats included WTF America. This woman had the universalist, unitary and universalist principles on her hat. Our own Ethan Zuckerman made a remix of Make America Kind again. And if we could start passing around the red hats, I think those are circulating now. Some of the red hats circulating include this one from Harone Mosaldania, who's a activist artist who created all these remixes in response to key phrases and things that had been circulating online. And you can see those hats, and you can see how they're made. They all take the form, but then they remix it, they modify it. It's a very different process, of course, from the knitted hats, which rely on hand production, and I'll walk through how those are made. But the spirit of this is the same. With digital objects, we're used to the idea that they never stay still. And now we're starting to see this with certain class of physical objects as well. And I would argue also part of the effectiveness of the hat, if you look at Harone Mosaldania's profile picture, is that this becomes a political indicator, a declaration of political allegiance through selfie culture. So once again, the hat is physical, but it's also digital, in the same way that screen overlays for marriage equality had been a way to indicate political allegiance, now you have hats as well. And that's part of the effectiveness of the red hats. So 2016 was known as the meme election. I think a lot of people were observing this. I'm sure many of us were observing the number of memes that were popping up. But I think what was missing from this conversation was this notion that meme life cycles now include both digital objects and increasingly physical objects. And let's take a look at what I mean by that. You can see in the background some of the nasty woman mugs. So remember during the third presidential debate, when the Republican candidate said, called the Democratic candidate such a nasty woman. I'm sure many of us remember this moment. Within seconds, people responded. They created a hashtag, nasty woman, hashtag nasty, as a way of reclaiming that phrase as a source of power rather than an insult. Within minutes of that, there are digital ones. People remixed the Janet Jackson album, Nasty, to include Hillary Clinton's face. There are comics of these. We're used to this kind of thing happening now. This is the meme election. What was interesting to me was the product memes that popped up after that. If you search on Google Shopping for nasty woman pillow, nasty woman cloth bag, nasty woman hat, nasty woman mug, nasty woman pin, nasty woman sticker, think about any product and put nasty woman. You'll probably find that product. And you'll probably find endless variations of that product in much the same way that the digital memes were circulating. Those memes then, as they shipped, they became part of selfie memes. This is a photo from a fundraiser for the Texas Democrats. And then they circulate, they circulate, they go back online. And again, this kind of intersection between the digital and the physical, where the objects are just as memetic as the digital objects. The physical objects are just as memetic as the digital objects. And so I argue we should extend our understanding of internet memes to include physical objects as well. And a certain class of physical objects are not yet nasty woman computers or cars, or maybe there are, I'm not sure. But for a certain class of physical objects, you have this notion of remixing just as, almost as quickly as digital objects. None of this is a surprise or an accident. Since 2008, the Facebook election, the meme election has seen a wellspring of technological developments that have made it easy for us to quickly adapt a t-shirt for any idea that we have on the internet. So it's easy for us to slap on text, a logo, a digital meme, and put that on a t-shirt, indicate a price, and then do some fundraising around that. And then you can get the matching mug as well. Sites like Teespring, Vista Print lets you order just one hat of a kind. So if you really feel passionate about that hashtag, you could just get one for yourself. Custom Ink, there's a hat floating around from Custom Ink, allows you to do this for all kinds of products. They really streamline that process so that it's much simpler to take your idea into a physical object, in the same way that Photoshop has done for images. And if we follow the path of April Daniel's tweet, she got so much response from November for her tweet that she then went on to Teespring, created a shirt using that tweet, and then created a fundraiser for the SLU. And this is all deliberate. Walker Williams, the founder of Teespring in an interview noted that the goal here, the goal with the site, is to bring a product to market as quickly as possible to take care of the production, the logistics of shipping, the logistics of printing, so that all you have to do is have the idea and so you can get it to your audience as quickly as possible. So it streamlines this process. This is why it's just as easy, almost as easy to type a hashtag as it is to make a t-shirt with that hashtag, because you have tools and processes to make that simple. So I'm going to transition now to China, and I want you to hold this thought about this idea of outsourcing a project and outsourcing sort of the tools and the ability to create complex, formerly complex products and start thinking about this in another context, in the commercial context. So I want to take you to Shenzhen. Shenzhen is a city in a small city of 12 million people in the Pearl River Delta. If something is made in China, it's probably made in the Pearl River Delta. And if that's something that's hardware, it's probably made in Shenzhen. This is the region of the world, typically known as the factory, the world's factory, where all the stereotypes are made in China, cheap products, copycat goods, things like that are popping up and being shipped around the world. This infrastructure has also given birth to a new type of object production known as Shanzhai. And I'll talk about a little bit of Shanzhai, and I apologize to the non-Chinese speakers, but Shenzhen and Shanzhai have nothing to do with, they're not related etymologically, although they sound very similar, but Shanzhai is really endemic. Shanzhai production is endemic to Shenzhen. What we're seeing is right now is a shift in narrative about Shenzhen, from made in China to created in China. And in the Western world, the narrative is shifting from Shenzhen as the Silicon Valley of hardware. How many of you have heard that phrase? Shenzhen is the Silicon Valley of hardware. Starting to emerge, yeah, starting to become more familiar as the narratives around what is made in China and how things are made in China starting to shift. But what interested me was, at the one plant I was interested in kind of Silicon Valley practices entering Shenzhen, but I was also interested in selfie sticks. And I'll talk a little bit about why that is, but let me define Shanzhai for you really quickly. Shanzhai means mountain bandit, and it's typically translated as bootleg, but in many cases it's actually a form of open production that very much looks very similar to the hat production to the yarn production, where many people are producing objects using raw materials. And so if I can ask, if we can start passing around some of the selfie sticks, I brought a bunch of selfie sticks from Shenzhen. And again, from afar they all look the same, but as you look closer, you start to see these characteristics, these common characteristics of form, style, stance. And I'll talk a little bit about how this open excuse me, a community of production is now intersecting with the internet. So for those who don't have selfie sticks in your hands, here are some photos I've taken from around the world. This is from New York. This is from Paris. Sorry, it's a little dark. This is from Spain. These are from China. And the selfie stick is itself an iteration. It's itself a remix of the culture of producing tripods. And so you remove the tripod base and then you get a selfie stick. And so this is really the evolution of the selfie stick in the form of iteration. There is no one selfie stick. There is no one producer of selfie sticks. There's no one factory of selfie sticks. There's no one shipper of selfie sticks. It's highly, it's a highly, multiply produced and distributed product. And yet somehow it went global and became a global product very quickly. And there are a ton of variations. There's ones with mirrors. Yes. There is actually, and we can talk about that actually. So let's hold on to that note. So there's selfie sticks with Bluetooth triggers. There's selfie stick. This is a selfie stick that has no trigger because it comes with an app that detects when you are doing the peace sign, which is a common sign that Asians use when getting a picture taken. And then it automatically takes your picture. There's a tiny selfie sticks. There are mid-sized selfie sticks. All these selfie sticks are in this wide variety of variation. And so when we're talking about patents, for instance, the question, of course, is in which selfie stick is patented and to what extent is our variations covered by that patent or not? And so it's an open question. And so I'll put the volume down here. Some video from Shenzhen. And Shenzhai, the way Shenzhai works, and this is a great description from Sylvia Littner and Sarah Mavle who wrote about Shenzhai, is that it's a network process. Shenzhai is very much bottom-up production rather than top-down supply chain management. What that means is that a small but a quickly expanding network of producers, designers, entrepreneurs, engineers, vendors, and traders are working in a network way to compete in the global markets with, typically, in global south markets to create products that people want, but typically don't have access to from top-down supply chain management companies. And so Shenzhai is very much a network process within Shenzhen, the city, not Shenzhai, the production process. Shenzhen, the city, you have stores where you can buy the raw parts to make electronics. You can also buy the electronics themselves. The Shenzhai ecosystem has created miniature phones, it's created Bluetooth karaoke mics for your smartphone. And these are phones that were exhibited at the V&A Museum exhibition in the Shenzhen Biennale. Again, a remix of existing phones but with larger buttons so that elderly people or people with visual impairments could actually read the buttons. And so our narratives about the products that come out of Shenzhen as copycats really needs to shift to start thinking about this notion of remix, that there's a base product that people are often riffing off of and then making variations that didn't exist before, yes. You put your own brand on that and sell it. That's a great point. What we're seeing here is an example of white label production. So in that notion of brand, it's very similar to the hats, actually, where you can order these phones online and then place a brand or a brand identity or logo similar to the hats and how the hats work. So these adaptations are very much designed for people to come from the internet to say, okay, I want these sort of phones, I'm going to slap a logo on it and then create that. So the way Shanzhai works is very similar to how digital content works. And if anyone's ever tested headlines for journalism articles in journalism, people often test 10 different headlines, but throw them all out, see which ones get resonance, and then pick the one that gets the most likes and clicks and then amplify that one. Shanzhai works in a very similar way to digital content in that regard. Products are market tested directly by throwing small batches of several thousand pieces into the market. So for selfie sticks, people weren't sure if those would actually reach market saturation or market interest, and so they would just throw out a few hundred and see what happened and then see if people responded and wanted to buy some. And then here, it's actually a very different process from how Silicon Valley typically works. Here prototyping and consumer testing occur rapidly and alongside the manufacturing iteration process. So as you're throwing things out, as with those headlines, as with digital content, you're also getting feedback immediately from buyers. And so that's how Shanzhai works. It's very much in this kind of open system. And it's already, this was really before the internet started to take hold in China. And so as the internet is connecting with this kind of open network system, we're starting to see that the internet is, in many different ways, a shortening production time. We did a workshop with Sam Hu at the Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, which was founded by David Lee, who's a friend of Berkman and an advisor at the Digital Asia Hub. And there, they're really studying different styles of open innovation that look different from our typical definitions in the West about what innovation looks like. And so Sam was really arguing, as we did this workshop, is that the internet is shortening production time. Typically in Shenzhen, with the Shanzhai ecosystem, a phone can be built in 26 days. A new phone can be built in 26 days. And Sam was arguing that that can be dramatically shortened to sometimes as short as two weeks, but probably a little bit longer than that. But in any case, we're seeing increases in efficiency. And to break that down a little bit, these are a few examples of what that might look like. So WeChat, how many of you are familiar with WeChat? Chinese language social network kind of resembles WhatsApp or Facebook. It's allowed for people to directly communicate with their factory, regardless of where they are. Importantly, it's allowed for user feedback loops and users of selfie sticks or other products can have direct interaction and contributions with the designers and makers. So they have a tighter feedback loop so people can make those quick iterations that I was just talking about. You have direct sales and e-payment. And e-payment is really important because it means you don't even have to leave your house to buy a new product. Taobao is another site. How many of you are familiar with Taobao? It's kind of an eBay-like platform, yep. So Taobao has crowdfunding as well. You can see my idea, see how many people buy it before you make a production line. This allows for crowdfunding of different products. It's also direct sales. And Taobao really taps into the Shenzhai ecosystem because it provides data for the things that you're selling so that you can respond just like headlines to the ones that are trending and quickly spin up new production lines. Alibaba Express has a shipping logistics so the difficulty moving atoms across countries become streamlined. And then there are also Western networks, and this is probably, I'm not sure, this is probably how the selfie stick, the hoverboard, e-cigarettes first started emerging in Western context through Kickstarter, through Amazon, that allow for crowdfunding and direct sales online, and then also through Instagram. Instagram is a key way that a lot of the Shenzhai ecosystem is tested in global markets based on lights and shares. So people can, again, just like with digital content, test an idea before committing to the full thing. McKinsey's done a report on this, on wired companies. And so there's a number of benefits that a company gets when they connect with the internet. And obviously there's this kind of boost in productivity. But as we saw with the t-shirts, as you get an increase in productivity, you also get a flowering of creativity. So points four and five are really relevant to this conversation, where you have these lower barriers to innovation. It's lower barrier to production to creation so that once you have an idea online, it's easy to realize that and actualize that in physical space. And then also new competition because it empowers entrepreneurs in small business. We can debate that point, but the point here is that it's easier for an individual with a random idea to make a product and then test it in the global market. And selfie sticks, again, are a good example of this. Because selfie sticks are, they're kind of a spectacle. This is a selfie stick with a light. And it's a spectacle when it's being used and people are compelled to take a picture of it. When they take a picture of it, they post it back online and then people are wondering, oh, where did you get that selfie stick? So just like those digital memes, it becomes, the selfie stick becomes part of digital meme culture, an internet meme culture. And then those sales on Instagram are circulating on the same networks on which some selfie stick memes are circulating. So if we can imagine, this is a very rough diagram. This is much rougher than the other one. But if we can imagine the kind of meme-sparking event, I'm sure we all remember the first time we saw someone using a selfie stick and how odd that looked. And the kind of compulsion to take the picture. That picture, as it circulates online, it's being watched. People are looking at the trends of selfie sticks. Which ones are circulating? Which ones are popular? Where are they coming from? And then you can, in the Shenzhen ecosystem, people can create a variation. Post that online, test that on Instagram, test that on Taobao, test that on other sites. And then get feedback from their users. And oftentimes they often bypass the physical markets. They just rely on the intranet as a means of distribution. And so the object distribution is looking just as memetic as kind of the way that the digital representation of those objects are spreading. And then finally, if it goes into the physical markets, it's often reached a certain scale. And so at that point, it becomes, like the selfie stick, a global product that you can now find in pretty much every major tourist site around the world. So memes, internet memes are interesting just as a cultural practice. And they kind of feed into the kind of human interest in remixing and riffing. I think, and as we think about, I think about memes, I often think about technological enablers. They're looking at memes in a variety of global contexts like China, Uganda, Kenya, United States. And the meme culture often depends on the technological culture and the technological capacity of the context in which memes operate. And so early memes, early hashtag memes often sprung up in the dial-up context or in low-bandwidth contexts. And so the technological ability to distribute memes limited people to text and hashtags and assay art. And so they use networks like Blog, Potter, Twitter, and then you have the production capacity for keyboards and computers. Photos and videos, as broadband comes around in different contexts, that's when photo and video memes start to emerge. You start to see the remixes of videos, YouTube videos, Vine videos, et cetera, enabled by broadband and mobile broadband. And then also the emergence of networks that allow people to have that kind of shared space that's so important in internet meme culture. And then also the production of this. You need smartphones, you need cameras, you need editing software to really effectively make a visual meme. And I argue that we're at that stage now with objects. And what I mean by that is that we have a means of distribution. We have simple ways to simplify that UPS, ship, Alibaba. And then you have networks that allow for sharing rivalry for knitting networks, Taobao for hardware, Amazon for other types of products, Thingiverse for 3D printing. And then you have a means of production as well. You have the Shenzhen ecosystem in China. You have maker spaces and knitting spaces in the United States. You have 3D printers as well. And then to some extent, distribution can also happen on the internet. This is most true with knitting patterns and with 3D, there are kind of scripts for 3D printing where the raw materials are locally available. But the distribution of the code to make those raw materials into objects can be done through the internet. So to conclude, I want to just kind of share three points. One is that object memes reflect an aesthetic rebuttal to this notion of digital dualism. Digital dualism is the idea that the digital world and the real world are separate. We often talk about the real world and the virtual world, but as we see the intersection of internet memes and object memes, we're seeing that internet culture is influencing culture more generally and vice versa. And so I don't think it's useful to think of internet culture as entirely separate from the culture at large. And we're starting to see that literally manifesting itself in protest culture in the United States. The internet meme framework is also a useful way to understand a certain range of object production, a certain sort of informal production that combines networked modes of production similar to Shanzhai or the hat printing with the global reach of the internet and global shipping services as well. The ability to move bits and atoms with just as much ease and efficiency. And then thirdly, thanks to key technological enablers like these sites, like white label sites that allow for us to interface with the makers and producers, we're seeing more than gains in efficiency. We're also seeing a burst in creativity from a multiplicity of people. And so as you get that kind of ease of production, you also get an increase in creativity. And so objects produced in this way start to behave like digital objects. They're remixable. They never quite stay still. They're informal. They're produced by individuals. And they're not produced with kind of top-down supervision. And they appear to be random, much to many people's consternation, but also to many people's delight. And that randomness is a key part of this. As you look at the objects, a year ago they would have seemed completely random. So that's the conversation. Those are the notes I wanted to share. And in Shanzhai fashion, I just wanted to throw those out there and then get feedback and let other people guide the conversation from here. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Ann. That was super interesting. I was wondering, are there different characteristics of an online meme that make it more likely to cross over into the physical? You gave a few examples of political memes. Are there things that have to do with identity or what kinds of demographics would be more likely to engage in this? Yeah, that's a very interesting question. I do think that, especially when we're talking about hats and t-shirts, those are identity signals. In protest culture, before the internet, we had buttons and pins and stickers and bumper stickers as a means of connecting our political identity with kind of a physical object that either we wore in our person or that we drove around with. So I do think that, at least in the political context, often the digital memes that have to do with self and have to do with a strong sense of self or strong sense of emotion tend to do very well. A recent one is she persisted. The kind of meme that popped up in response to the phrase, she spoke up and something like, she spoke up, we told her to be quiet and nevertheless she persisted. And so for Elizabeth Warren. And so things that evoke strong emotion tend to pop up more frequently in these kind of physical objects. Thanks. Yes. I think the mic's coming around. There's something very attractive about the production model that you showed in China by, I recall hearing about one of its disadvantages about a year ago, which is remember the exploding hoverboards? Yes, absolutely. And it sounds like they came from a system like this where there were many different manufacturers, they were weekly branded or unbranded and it was really impossible for anybody whether you were, you know, an airline or a store that wanted to sell them or a consumer or consumer reports magazine. Nobody could really tell what were the safe models and which weren't because the branding was so weak and the production was so distributed. What are your thoughts on that? Sure, absolutely. I think that's absolutely right. I think I completely agree. And I think this is why I often reference digital meme culture because digital meme culture as we know now is not always rosy. There's a lot of fake digital memes floating around. There's a lot of unregulated memes. We don't know if it's real or fake. Multiple sources. Yeah, that part I'm less sure of. Definitely hoverboards because of the weak regulation and because multiple people can produce this, right? And there's this competition for lower price, lower price with maximum sales, right? It's the same dynamics that we see with digital memes. As we think about content that circulates online, it's often not necessarily reliable. We don't know. And we often need an extra layer of verification and checking. And so absolutely these informal modes of production with physical objects tend to inherit the same problems with digital memes already we see in the digital context. So I think the hoverboards are a very good example of that. Fortunately, selfie sticks don't explode. This one might because it does have a battery. And what you do have is e-cigarettes made in the ecosystem that do explode in your face. And so the lack of regulation is a risk just as it is in digital context. Yes, I think there's a microphone. I think the problem with the phone was the design of the battery case that somehow been rounded and it was smaller than spec, so any battery would have been bad enough. Okay, okay. Do you know the process by which those batteries are made? I saw the tech reports. You saw the tech reports. It was the case size of the design of the battery itself. Okay, okay. Did you say the 2016 election was the meme election? A lot of people said that. Yes. I'm wondering what the memes were among evangelicals or conservatives because I think it was used there as well. Yeah, absolutely. What are some examples on that side? Absolutely, the pluribals. If you look at hashtag the pluribals, so when Hillary Clinton referred to many of Trump's supporters as a basket of the pluribals, it was the same practice of reclamation of what was intended as an insult into a form of empowerment. I'm a deplorable. Excuse me? Like I'm a deplorable. Exactly. And so if you search for t-shirts, hats, mugs, cloth bags, pillows, you get the same phenomenon. And so you have the deplorable's hashtag, the deplorable's memes, you have the pluriball, which is a physical gathering on Inauguration Day, and then you also have the physical object. So this kind of meme ecosystem exists just as much on the right as it does on the left and with other circles as well. I wonder if it won the election for them? There's a debate about it. There's a conversation around that. Meme practitioners on the right refer often to meme magic that helped elect Trump. And so, yeah, when we think about memes and influencing elections, I would argue that we really need to think about the larger media ecosystem and how the memes relate to that. So I think it's a more complex question than simply looking at the memes, if that makes sense. Thank you for this really thought-provoking talk. I take weird factory process tours, so I've got a comment on that last question and another question for you. Sure, please. Swizzle sticks. I've actually toured the factory that's the major swizzle stick manufacturer in the United States. And their secret sauces, they figured out how to combine inkjet printing with injectable plastic molds so that they can do custom swizzle sticks. And so that's another sort of example that you probably wouldn't come at through these normal means of seeing that. Another factory I've toured, and this was a number of years ago, was a light bulb factory in Ohio. And like any, like a lot of factories, you might tour, the first question you end up asking is, why are you still here? Why are you still in the United States and not being produced in China? And their answer was Walmart. It turns out that Walmart's product cycle time for light bulbs, like season light bulbs for Christmas, is too short for the slow boat from China, as it were. So my question is, what's the shipping network for these products that make them sort of meme-able at internet speed? Is there something about them that lends them to air shipment, et cetera, rather than being stuffed on a freighter that's going to take weeks and weeks, thus completely changing the iteration time? Yeah, I think with many, because of the particularities of the Pro River Delta, it's long been, because it's been the factory of the world for so long, shipping networks have to go through there. So what you often see with informal production and kind of informal makers who are not necessarily part of those shipping networks, they're able to piggyback onto existing shipping networks to get the products out there. It's not particularly fast, but it's much faster than before because of those efficiencies. And then what sometimes happens, and this is more on the speculative side, what I've been talking about with people who do the kind of global distribution of some of these informal objects, is that one, they'll test it on Instagram, and then they'll actually fly someone over, someone who might be flying back to whatever context it is, to then start showing them around and put them in a shop, see people by that. And so that's one way that people skim over. But there is still, of course, the limitation around the shipping. Something that's important here is also the logistics of shipping, which is customs, packaging, things like that. And that's part of what makes things faster, is that you have infrastructure that makes it much simpler to do that. And I think an American analog is a product called SHIP. SHYP, are people familiar with SHIP? SHIP allows you to just take a picture of an object, and then someone would just show up, pick it up, package it, and ship it for you. Very easy, right? So the ability to move the object is still bound by geography and laws of physics. But all the other logistics are streamlined substantially by services. Great. I want to go off-script for a second. I'm just curious, who in this room has engaged in making a physical version of an internet meme in whatever way? You see that. Oh, really? So I was also curious about, like, demographics of who's most engaged in this, and also is this mobilizing communities or demographics that wouldn't ordinarily be engaged in an internet meme? Yeah, yeah. So the demographics that I'm noticing tend to be people in their 20s, so people with a little bit more access beyond, like, the kind of digital memes, because these are people who are organizing events. And so, Jeronimo Saldana is a good example of someone who is an organizer and activist, who wanted to use hats as a way of galvanizing people to come out. And I think there's something important there in the kind of physical manifestation in terms of social movements, because by putting on these hats, by putting on these shirts, people indicate once they're in a crowd that they're part of that crowd. So when you have photographs, and that's why these pink hats are really important, there's no ambiguity about who's there. It's kind of a direct address to misinformation networks around what crowds are gathering. So often we see pictures of crowds that are misused. So we're actually from Venezuela a few years ago. But with the pink hats, it was a very clear code that this was happening, particular to this event. So in terms of demographics, I do notice it's more common with activists and the people that activists are trying to kind of organize and rally. Rachel's question sparked this question in my mind. Have you looked into culture surrounding turning memes into Halloween costumes or the cosplay community? Yes. Yeah, I haven't looked formally, but there's an annual gathering in New York called Halloween for Halloween where people dress up as memes. And so I think looking at creative communities like cosplay, like even street art, these kind of creative communities, long before these object cultures that I just referenced, use the internet as part of their sharing and their kind of inspiration. And so you have networks where people can post their ideas, post like their tips, and then other people in other contexts can then do the same. And so what's interesting about looking at this in protest culture is seeing how that, again, establishes kind of visual and verbal vocabulary that makes a protest in Chicago, in Seattle, in San Francisco, in New York, all kind of feel the same in terms of the media objects. But I think you have the same phenomenon with other creative communities. Knitting certainly long before the pussy hats was very important. As much as it is physical. Yes. Yes, I don't know how relevant this is to what you were talking about, but my favorite cap was from Norway and it was mostly red and it had a white and blue stripe, but people kept stopping me on the street and wanting to know if I was a Trump supporter. Finally, my wife said, wearing that cap is just not a good idea. Yeah, so I think that's an interesting example of how symbologies can be transformed. Kind of the hegemonic meaning of a symbol like a baseball cap and a red baseball cap that before it might not have meant anything in particular, it might have signaled allegiance to a sports team. But that can then have its meaning overtaken by a larger collective of people who agree to a certain meaning of that symbol. And I think that's why it's so important to also understand the kind of remix cultures that emerge out of that because what people are doing is responding to that hegemonic symbology of the red hat and trying to transform it into another sort of meaning. So you have the Make America Mexico again hats. Jose Antonio Vargas, who's an immigrant rights activist, created an Immigrants Make America Great red hat and that's on his Twitter handle. So these attempts to reshape the symbology should be seen as activist actions that try to change the meaning of these things. Whether or not that's successful is a different debate. From a non-advocacy stance, I kept thinking about films like blockbuster films even or perhaps larger indie films that could like a hybrid. So you have these marketing of products that go along with Disney or something like that and I'm wondering if there could be or if that would work for them to connect with the bottom-up approach to get their products connected to the film more widespreaded marketed. Absolutely. There's a different talk I could give that would be for marketers. They would be basically the same slides but with different talking points. I think when we're talking about marketing and film distribution or on trending memes about any given movie they're also listening for how the audience is responding to that. I can think of one example that's not quite a film but is kind of related is Lego. Lego had for the longest time distributed instructions for how to use Lego and they noticed that people were sharing tips on how to make other kind of Lego products make other kind of Lego combinations and for a while there's a little resistance but pretty soon they embraced that bottom-up production and then created Lego communities so that people could share that. So absolutely I think there's a lot of value for marketers or people who are trying to promote a brand to think about this beyond the social movement context and I'm pretty sure I can find an example of a branded selfie stick or a branded hat that kind of dips into this but no specific examples come to mind right now. Yes. I just wanted to reintroduce a question that got asked earlier and you put off which was about the patents and the selfie sticks. Yeah, absolutely. So the history of patents of selfie sticks is actually very interesting. The first patent that I'm aware of was by a Japanese man I'm going to misquote this so I'm going to spread misinformation but it's I think in the 70s who created a kind of selfie stick like device that wasn't quite ready for the market because you didn't have smart phones and then you see selfie sticks in Chindogu which is a Japanese art of creating useless inventions and I think those in the 80s and so back then it was deemed a useless invention but again because the cameras hadn't caught up the networks hadn't caught up and then there is I believe Canadian created another patent for a selfie stick and thinking about patent law is a little outside my... Excuse me? Many of them, yeah I believe so but also there's this question and a patent lawyer would have to comment on this given the variation of selfie sticks that you've seen does the patent cover all those variations because again when we look from afar it always looks like there's one selfie stick but when you actually go into depth into what's happening in Shenzhen there's actually a wide variety of variation and the original patents probably look very different from this one with the light for instance. I have a follow on question which is in your research or in research of other people do you know of anybody that's mapping out the evolution of some of these memes especially with the physical part like I'm curious about the selfie stick like how it spread do you know of anybody doing that kind of work? No I'm not actually if there's other people who are familiar with this I'd be great I'm actually interested in starting to map one of these I suspect I have two hunches right now and I'll just save them on record is that the karaoke mic for smartphones and also certain types of Bluetooth headphones might be the next kind of thing that kind of percolates in global markets and so I'd be really interested in working with someone to track that the logistics of that are very difficult because you need people who can work go to factories, visit them see how those are made and then track that online and then start tracking the global distribution much of the production out of Shenzhen is designed not for US markets in Africa parts of Asia and Latin America so you need a pretty broad research network to really follow that but I'd be thrilled to work with people on that if there's any interest I have a question about language because in the 1800s studies of the demographic transition showed that patterns of changing fertility went by language groups very fine language group divisions and I wondered if anyone's looked at the role of language in Africa or in places where there's a wide variety of languages in pretty low bandwidth that's another core interest of mine is actually language barriers on the internet and how that language barriers exacerbate existing inequalities and so there's actually a big challenge with Shanzhai makers most of them only speak Chinese obviously and if they do speak English it's not necessarily vernacular or fluent English and so there's a strong interest from Shanzhai communities that can make things but it's very hard for them to kind of market it and get it out there to the broader world just in English, English alone so a lot of Shanzhai makers will just make something but it won't necessarily see the light of day because you kind of have that gap from production to distribution and marketing so certainly in other contexts we can extrapolate I don't have specific examples but everything I've looked at have been typically majority languages of a given country so it might be English, Spanish, Indonesian but not the indigenous languages or local languages and so on the other hand because there's physical objects because digital meme culture is often language agnostic these things tend to spread regardless and so but yeah that's largely speculation I haven't dived into that specifically during your talk you spoke briefly about how companies use Instagram to market their products can you speak a little bit more about that absolutely yeah so the way that an Instagram marketing might work is a company and typically there are small shops who have a physical stall so this is an extension of the idea of physical stalls which is very common in China where a small individual will have a small shop with their products but to extend their network they'll often use a place like Instagram or WeChat to market specific products they have and then test that with likes and see if people are interested and they're responsible to the idea so this becomes a low cost way to test it very similar and again I use this analogy of headline testing for newspapers for online newspapers because it's a very similar process to that where newspapers will test 10 different headlines and they'll see which one really percolates and it's very similar to that with Instagram and the Instagram strategy is very common in the global south and part of the reason it is that common is because people are already there on Instagram on their mobile phones so the hassle for someone to just scroll through Instagram then it is to go to a dedicated website that might not be mobile already great let's have another round of applause for An thank you thank you