Meeting Harambe online

If you’re online much at all, you’ve likely run lately into Harambe.

Yes, the gorilla shot at the Cincinnati Zoo this year before he could harm a toddler who fell into his cage. He’s become a popular, weirdly all-purpose Internet meme.

In a piece headlined, “How Harambe Became the Perfect Meme: The slain gorilla signifies nothing — except maybe our increasingly weird post-everything world,” The Atlantic observes: “Harambe marks the emergence of something akin to a true stock market for culture, where price movements cannot always, or even often, be narrativized. To be outraged by a Harambe meme — as those focused on the original conversation around animal rights and parenting continue to be — is to confuse Harambe the meme, a stock in a memetic marketplace, with Harambe the gorilla who died a tragic and pointless death. It is perhaps the sheer meaninglessness of the original episode that made it an ideal candidate for memetic perfection.”

Stuff just gets weirder. Email me at rrollins@coxohio.com.

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