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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   21599 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 25, 2026

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Yesterday marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Harambe.

The White House has remarked on the occasion.

On this day in history, Harambe would have celebrated another birthday. An icon that became part of internet history, American culture, and an entire generation’s timeline.

Gone, but never forgotten. Rest easy to a true patriot. 🕊️🇺🇸

How much credence do you put on the idea that Harambe represented an actual sea change in American culture? At the time, it felt like a joke, but in hindsight, it feels like the first time that internet memeing bled over into real space. A lot of the people making jokes about a gorilla ended up making jokes about a former real estate developer and steak salesman that propelled him into the public eye. Was Harambe a watershed event, or just one where we look back and project meaning?

I thought I was very online but I have absolutely no idea what y'all are talking about.

I don't remember Harambe ever being anything other than an annoying internet meme.

Maybe it was different on-the-ground in America, but certainly over here, it was just the dumb internet thing of the hour. It was around briefly, then people got bored and move on. I don't think it had any significance whatsoever.

Yeah, it was a meme, it went away, and then it was occasionally resurrected as a "the timeline went insane afterwards" meme.

The thing that broke the timeline was the Cubs winning the world series and Leicester winning the EPL. After the writers paid off those storylines, it was clear the series had jumped the shark.

Leicester winning the EPL.

Leicester winning the PL is the sort of saccharine nonsense you expect to see in Ted Lasso or some other American product.

These memes were a way to very subtly attack the political culture of the period. Because the basis of the meme was, “we are going to pretend that this gorilla was just as important as whatever supposed human tragedy we see on the news”. That’s what made it funny. The memes were not about caring for Harambe, but the idea that you are treating a gorilla like a globally newsworthy martyr like Michael Brown.

Anyone remember the affair of Cecil the Lion that was also around that time (seems like about a year before the affair of Harambe)? I recalled that it caused a bunch of drama online similar to Harambe, and then suddenly no one ever talked about it again. I'm always reminded of it when I run into Jimmy Kimmel on the news or social media, because he famously shed tears on his show while talking about the affair. I think these and Kony, referenced in another comment, stick to memories for being some of the earlier examples of social media hot flashes that tore through the internets and then went away, which became very common and even the default in the past decade.

With 2014 online drama being defined by the affair of reproductively viable worker ants, I wonder if future historians will think we just had a really strange animal-loving phase in the mid-2010s.

I remember 2014 being the year of Gamergate and Ferguson, but I don't recall anything about ants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(ant)

We had to use "reproductively viable worker ants" as a euphemism after Scott banned the term from Slate Star Codex (much like we had to call neoreactionaries "death eaters", and HBD "muggle realism", and... actually, now that I think about it, Scott was kind of a dick).

There is a kind of ant called a 'gam·ergate' (from the Greek words 'γάμος' [marriage] and 'ἔργον' [work]) which is, unlike many ant species, capable of both work and reproduction.

I remember 2014 being the year of Gamergate and Ferguson, but I don't recall anything about ants.

(Emphasis added) Evidently, you do.

What I remember about Cecil is the doctor who shot him totally being dragged for it, but a few people interviewed some Africans and they were like "Lions? They suck, dude. They eat my friends. Americans will kill them and pay us for the privilege? Cool!" (OK, not in those exact words)

According to the Wikipedia article, it seems that there was a "Cecil Effect" in Zimbabwe after the affair, where westerners hunting lions there became less common than otherwise would have been expected, resulting in less pleasant lives for the locals due to more lions and less money. I don't know much about the trophy hunting business, but what little I know about it from podcasts and radio shows makes me not surprised; it always seemed to me that westerners paying huge sums of money to hunt exotic animals in Africa was almost an unalloyed good, with the only significant downsides being for the individual animals themselves and other westerners who care more about optics or suffering of animals than about the suffering of other humans. The "I consent! I consent! I don't!" meme comes to mind.

Trophy hunting big five animals costs the equivalent of over a decade's labour in local salaries and employs far more local servants than you'd expect- in the west trophy hunting would usually be limited to guides and taxidermists(the guide field dresses), but lower African labour costs also justify skinning teams, personal servants, etc etc.

Add to that that subsistence farmers generally do not like charismatic megafauna very much, including apex predators(which eat their stock and occasionally them). Rural folk in the US hate wolves too(and would probably hate mammoth if they still existed), but lions are much more likely to hunt both livestock and humans.

Yes - when done responsibly, it's both wildlife management and local economic injection. But a lot of people cannot conceive of hunting as being anything other than cruel and harmful. Probably part of a general idea of humans being "outside of nature", part "exploitation of poor minorities in 3rd world countries", part "hating anyone rich enough to do so", and part "poaching in Africa is what Victorian British people did".

In Cecil's case, the lion was "critically wounded" with an arrow and survived another 12 hours before finally being killed. 12 hours of pain and suffering with a critical wound sounds pretty cruel to me.

Hm, perhaps the trophy hunting business could be improved with a sort of minimum caliber/destructiveness requirement on all weapons used for the hunting.

Those exist, bowhunters are just presumed high-competence enough for nobody to worry if they slip through the cracks.

I don't know if there's a rule for lions, but elephants definitely have requirements in most countries.

Though I think that has less to do with humane harvesting and more with keeping the clients alive.

Can't wait for big game hunting with FPV drones.

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What kind of lunatic bow hunts a lion? You wouldn't catch me dead with anything short of a .375 H&H, and even then I think I'd be nervous.

There are a surprising number of well heeled maniacs in the world. Bowhunters take fairly large exotics in Texas(and Bison elsewhere in the country) all the time, and I suspect the reason lions and tigers aren't on the list has to do with laws against introducing big cats for exotic game purposes.

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I mean I find it highly unlikely it was done intentionally to be cruel. Sometimes animals get injured by an arrow or bullet instead of killed and run away rather than let you put them out of their misery because of that pesky survival instinct.

It's basically just part of the nature of hunting. It's also why most states have restrictions on using too small of a caliber bullet to hunt certain animals. For example I wouldn't trust .22LR to reliably kill anything bigger than a raccoon, even though a lady once killed a grizzly with it (according to some accounts it wasn't even.22LR, it was .22 Short, which is even more impressive).

https://bear-hunting.com/2022/7/grizzly-with-a-22-c

I don't see why intention factors into the cruelty of the fact.

I'm not a hunter, but I'd expect a dentist from Ohio would have an easier time quickly killing a lion with a gun rather than with a bow and arrow as part of a paleolithic LARP.

Another thing that complicates the 'wildlife management ' story is that, as far as I can tell, Cecil had never interfered with humans. It's one thing to cull animals that are killing livestock or humans due to being near pastures or villages, quite another to kill animals that are not.

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I do remember the Harambe incident from my Lived Experience.

It was pretty funny. When it was unclear with plausible deniability as to the identity of the child and parents—thus it was assumed by default that the child and parents were white, possibly out of hopium—there was much raging that a Karen's carelessness and White Privilege led to a member of an endangered species being shot to death. Then, it inconveniently emerged that the child and parents were black, and from there a seething retreat and sudden silence were had.

No charges against the mother over the incident, naturally.

Genuinely didn't know that. My mental image of the child has always been a pale brunette but think I just never looked up the actual footage

10 years? Man, time flies. Dicks out, everyone. Ladies of the motte, you'll have to improvise something. I have faith in you.

“Tits out for harambe” has a kind of ring to it.

Was it a big Culture War issue? It doesn't seem like it, since the White House remark and leftists I know are pro Harambe. If not, I don't consider it part of the Big Shift: the Internet's slow descent from mainstream light-heartedness into meanness and negativity.

The culture war hadn't planted its flag on my front lawn in 2016, so I can't say for sure, but I do remember that the people in my social circle who had the strongest reactions went on to become staunch culture warriors.

Harambe is definitely a real 'canon event' for a certain generation of people.

All major events after that point have felt very 'unreal' and usually gets twisted to someone's agenda right away.

It is also one of the last times we had a major cultural event that virtually everyone, of every ideology, agreed on the valence of, and didn't turn political. Everyone agreed the death of the gorilla was tragic and likely unneeded, a result of human irresponsibility.

It didn't trigger a gender discourse (although the "dicks out for Harambe" meme got people some errant looks), it wasn't co-opted as a weapon against political opponents, there were no racial undertones, it was just half-sincere meming about a low-level tragedy. I can't off the top of my head think of any recent events like this which weren't immediately converted to culture war fodder.

I dunno if that gorilla was cosmically important, but as a marker of the boundary between one cultural era into another, it works extremely well.

The only other event I'd offer as a marker of passing from one epoch to the other, also from 2016, was Alphago beating Lee Sedol. That one actually DID portend a massive sea change, and if I had been a bit smarter/braver/wealthier around that time, I could have made a lot of money placing bets on future AI development.

By comparison, there is no way I know of anyone could have traded on the death of Harambe to make a real profit.

(Ah the good old days, when we were young...)

But yeah, before that, there was a wholesome-but-also-edgy, "Internet culture", 9gag, advice animals like Bad Luck Brian and Overly Attached Girlfriend. A couple of years before that, we had memes like the Chocolate Rain song, the Numa Numa guy, etc. It was definitely detached and ironic, in the South Park sense. The world wasn't necessarily more unified but the sort of people who hung out online were mostly middle-class young guys, gamers, nerds etc. with mostly compatible values and tastes.

I think the big break was the shift to phones and mobile internet. Before that, going online was an intentional thing you did mostly at home, when you had time, or on your laptop in college. Even if your phone had a camera, you had to transfer the pictures with a USB cable, then intentionally upload them on a social media site. This required intent and patience, it was friction. To discuss, you had to be told about some forums by (online) friends, you had to register on a php board, then you carefully curated your signature, your avatar, your nickname (obviously you had to use a cool pseudonym, your real world identity wasn't supposed to matter, you were supposed to leave all that behind at the doorstep). People got to know each other in those communities, people developed reputations behind the nicknames, they discussed off-topic issues in misc forum sections with the same set of people, instead of hopping between subreddits or being at the mercy of the algorithm regarding which random user's content you're going to see today.

After that, suddenly the internet escaped from the home, out into people's pockets in the streets, at parties, at festivals, everywhere, suddenly it wasn't just nerds, but people with dense social lives and the friction mostly disappeared. Uploading a picture was a single tap of the finger. Notifications started pouring in in all contexts. You were expected to know what's going on online, FOMO started etc.

I do not believe that "Harambe represented an actual sea change in American culture" but i do believe that it sticks in a lot of people's minds as the last time that all the different tribes agreed with each other about something. And that makes it a milestone or inflection point of sorts, something that people will naturally think back to, and contrast against what we see now.

That said, as a fan of urban fantasy I am a bit enamored with the idea that "the seventh seal" would be a gorilla in a zoo somewhere.

The idea of "otherwise unremarkable thing that we'd have no reason to consider anomalous was actually vitally important to the sanctity of our entire planet" is always a funny trope to me when it surfaces in fiction.

There was a funny bit in the first episode of new Doctor Who along those lines.

DOCTOR: How can you hide something that big in a city this small?

ROSE: Hold on. Hide what?

DOCTOR: The transmitter. The Consciousness is controlling every single piece of plastic, so it needs a transmitter to boost the signal.

ROSE: What's it look like?

DOCTOR: Like a transmitter. Round and massive, slap bang in the middle of London. A huge circular metal structure like a dish, like a wheel. Radial. Close to where we're standing. Must be completely invisible.

(Rose stares over his shoulder pointedly.)

DOCTOR: What? What?

(The Doctor turns and looks at what Rose is staring at on the south bank but the penny doesn't drop.)

DOCTOR: What? What is it? What?

(He finally catches on to what Rose is looking at. It's called the London Eye, it's on the south bank of the Thames, it's lit up like a Christmas tree, and it was the biggest Wheel in the world when it opened in 2000.)

DOCTOR: Oh, fantastic!

In Lilo and Stitch the only reason they can't gas the whole planet to get at Stitch is because they consider Mosquitos an endangered species.

It'd be absolutely MASSIVE irony IRL if we manage to genocide mosquitos and in turn this gives aliens the clearance to finally genocide us.

You might have lost a lot of that money. Almost none of the tech used in AlphaGo lead to LLMs and it produced a frenzy of research and startups that mostly looked in the wrong direction. I guess RL for behaviour tuning made it in.

That's like saying I'd have lost money betting on electric cars because most of them have been massive failures.

But if you put $10,000 in Tesla stock at its high in 2016, it'd be worth (approximately) $250,000 today. Not bad ten year turnaround, and probably a big enough win to make up for a dozen other losses.

Granted, a lot of that is due to Quantitative easing pumping ALL stocks like crazy in that time.

One of the biggest 'regrets' I carry is NOT putting at least a few thousand dollars worth of excess student loan money into Tesla circa 2013, actually.

My point is that as soon as it became clear that AI was now becoming a serious field with possible industrial application, I should have started looking at companies that would stand to be lead players.

But lo, I tried being financially responsible.

Almost none of the tech used in AlphaGo lead to LLMs, but as I understand it a lot of the principals pioneered by AlphaGo ended up being used in the sort of autonomous targeting systems that are currently being used to kill Russians in the Donbass.

The obvious investment in response to AlphaGo would have been Google. So, although you'd have lucked into it, 10xing your investment over ten years isn't terrible. Maybe you'd also have seen that a fleet of TPUs were used for training and made the jump from that to Nvidia.

I guess the main learning would have to have been "you can convert massive compute into narrow but superhuman performance" and speculated that it could be successfully extended to human language by AIAYN, published the next year.

Yes, I think the ‘bitter lesson’ is the other thing that came out of this, but AlphaGo’s intelligence didn’t generalise to simultaneously learning even a single other game.

Finding that sufficient data could lead to expertise in massively distributed domains came as a huge shock to me, professionally, and completely destroyed my notion of how intelligence could work.

Yes, I think the ‘bitter lesson’ is the other thing that came out of this, but AlphaGo’s intelligence didn’t generalise to simultaneously learning even a single other game.

The AlphaZero engine inspired by AlphaGo and released about two years later learned chess (better than Stockfish), go (better than AlphaGo) and shogi (better than the best human players or computer engines then existing) and a closely related engine reached grandmaster level in tournament Starcraft.

AlphaGo is also proof-of-concept for the "big dumb neural net" approach to artificial intelligence which had previously been in the doldrums, which I think was critical for the approaches that eventually worked for LLMs to be taken seriously and attract the funding they needed.

Both Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowsky correctly called AlphaZero as the "AI fire alarm" - i.e. the first hard evidence that smarter-than-human AI was something we needed to start worrying about as a realistic possibility rather than as a philosophical debate.

Yes, later self-play could be used to learn different games (and the original DRL was applied to many Atari games) but AFAIK nobody successfully made one of these agents learn chess and Go.

I dunno if that gorilla was cosmically important, but as a marker of the boundary between one cultural era into another, it works extremely well.

I think that's the heart of what I've been wondering. 2015 - 2017 was a wild ride. Things definitely aren't the same anymore. If it happened today, I can't help but imagine that the aftermath would be far more polarized and ugly than it was at the time.

The night Trump won his election is indelibly engraved in my head. Driving home from work expecting to wake up in Hillary land, then suddenly driving over to my buddy's house to drink and laugh at the intrinsic ridiculousness of what we were observing. The moment he won Florida was when it kicked in as "wow this is real."

This video encompasses the feeling well.

The night he won it a second time is also burned in there but not quite as deeply.

I don't even remember what I was doing the night Biden 'won.'

Now President Trump is just a facet of reality. I can't imagine the timeline without him.

Wild ride indeed.

How much credence do you put on the idea that Harambe represented an actual sea change in American culture?

Not much. Weird to see the White House remark on it, even if it's only on Xitter. I don't really remember much bleed over into reality.

I think Kony 2012 is the first event I remember as internet mass hysteria where people acted like a freakout on the internet would somehow change real-life conditions on another continent.

It's interesting you mention Kony 2012. It rgas always felt to me like something broke in the world around 2010 - 2013. I can't exactly nail down what it was, the Kony phenomenon definitely comes to mind when I consider it. It was the first time I ever saw social media drive consensus in my social group to such an extent. In some ways, it felt like the prototype of ${CURRENT_THING} activism. It didn't matter that you had never heard about it yesterday - you had to have an opinion on it right now.

It’s Twitter, which started earlier but didn’t fully breach containment until the recession.

Okay, fine, it’s the broader social media paradigm represented by Twitter. Closing the feedback loop between commenting on something and getting responses vastly increased the appeal, and thus supply, of amateur punditry. Status competition ensued.

It rgas always felt to me like something broke in the world around 2010 - 2013.

Maybe we owe the Mayan Calendar people an apology....

(What does 'rgas' mean? I couldn't find any relevant results....)

What does 'rgas' mean? I couldn't find any relevant results....

It means I shouldn't try to type on my phone in between sets.

(What does 'rgas' mean? I couldn't find any relevant results....)

Probably a "fat-finger" typo of 'has' on a phone.

I think what Kony and Harambe did was mark the rise of the social media based reaction to news as the primary way people interacted with the news. Before that, they might talk about the news on social media, but the news came from other sources like CNN or local news. Harambe and Kony started online and were talked about online. It was the beginning of everyone being able to be sort of not only journalists but commentators, and that they not only could but should influence the outcome of the story.

I suspect Kony 2012 was some kind of test program to see if a moral panic could be astroturf generated out of nothing.

It was the latest incarnation of Eternal September.

Never heard of it, for what that’s worth.

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