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Yesterday marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Harambe.
The White House has remarked on the occasion.
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?
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.
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