24 October 2020 | New Scientist | 31Don’t miss
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Future Sea sets out
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The War on Wildlife is
a new podcast featuring
birdwatcher Charlie
Moores and conservation
film-maker Ruth Peacey.
Episode 1 follows the
start of the UK shooting
season and the release
of 50 million pheasants
and partridges.Hunting Pepe?
The real story of super-meme Pepe the Frog
makes a surprising new film, finds Elle HuntDocumentary
Feels Good Man
Arthur Jones
Ready Fictions, streaming;
BBC 4 Storyville, 26 OctoberOVER 25 years of the internet,
memes have evolved from a
one-note online sight gag – a
dancing baby, say, or a cat with
an irreverent caption in Impact
font – to a muscular means of
communication, capable of
nuance and complex irony.
Yet no meme has had as
strange and storied a journey
as Pepe the Frog. The laid-back
amphibian from cartoonist Matt
Furie’s cult hit Boy’s Club was
wrested from that context to
become the face of anarchic
bulletin board 4chan. The
beatific Pepe of Furie’s comic,
with his catchphrase “Feels
good, man”, became sorrowful
(“Feels bad, man”) and then,
unexpectedly, fascist.
Feels Good Man, Arthur
Jones’s debut documentary,
follows Pepe from the web to
Donald Trump’s White House
as a smirking alt-right symbol,
and Furie’s battle to reclaim him.
As 4chan’s meme culture
spilled over into the mainstreaminternet, with pop stars Katy
Perry and Nicki Minaj sharing
Pepe memes, the community
set out to ward off appropriation
by “normies” by making Pepe
as shocking as possible.
During the contentious 2016
US elections, Pepe became
so associated with racism,
anti-Semitism and other forms
of bigotry that both Hillary
Clinton and the Anti-Defamation
League defined him as a hate
symbol – much to 4chan’s glee
at being taken so literally.
Yet in among the juvenile
provocation (4chan’s founder
was a 15-year-old boy), there
was a strand of sincerity. Pepe,
like Trump, was being embraced
by a fringe but growing far-right
movement that masked its
intent with irony online.
Furie’s attempt to capitalise
on his creation’s ubiquity came
too late: there is a scene in Feels
Good Man where he looks over
thousands of dollars’ worth of
Pepe merchandise that can’t
even be donated, lest it end
up with white nationalists.
At the film’s heart is Furie’s
relationship to his creation
as it is repurposed as a hate
symbol, collectible art, occultist
iconography and even as a
cryptocurrency by an implacable
internet. Against that, Furie
stands as a quirky, quietly
principled figure, resolutely
trying to “save Pepe”. However,
as the film’s coda reveals, the
frog’s emergence at Hong Kong’s
pro-democracy protests last
year shows the hunt for its
meaning continues. ❚Elle Hunt is a freelance writer
based in LondonPepe the Frog has
had many incarnations,
FE from beatific to fascistic
EL
S^ GOOD^ MANtargeted voters in swing states
with customised messages.
Supporters of Black Lives Matter,
for example, saw memes that
encouraged them not to vote,
while other messaging persuaded
right-leaning voters to turn out.
Did Russian interference really
flip the US election against Hillary
Clinton in 2016? We need more
research, says Aral. As for the
upcoming 2020 US election, last
month, Facebook took down a
small network of fake accounts
linked to Russian operatives.
This was no surprise. Intelligence
officials had warned that Russia
has adopted less detectable tactics.
And Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg’s recent blog on
the company’s election-related
policies has left Aral thinking the
company has not done enough
to make the 2020 elections safe.
To stave off the threat of
digital manipulation, we need
to understand it and legislate
to neutralise it, writes Aral. The
US lacks even a basic federal law
to protect consumer data. The
question of how to maintain
privacy while feeding more data
to machines emerged in the 1960s
with the People Machine, but a big
opportunity to do something was
missed, says Lepore.
If Then and The Hype Machine
are both eminently relevant now.
Lepore’s page-turner about a
forgotten chapter of US history
resonates today, and Aral’s
nuanced, slower read offers hope
that we can re-engineer social
media to better serve society.
The books’ biggest service,
however, is to make us rethink
our attitudes to big data and social
media. This can only be good:
after all, it is still humans who
cast the votes, not machines. ❚
Vijaysree Venkatraman is a science
journalist based in Boston