this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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In 2010, reddit had a popular sub called Random Acts of Pizza that had people being kind to one another and donating an ordered pizza to a stranger. Here's a news article about it: https://abcnews.go.com/US/random-acts-pizza-donate/story?id=13950694
The next year, Mars chocolate filed for a trademark on a new ad campaign "Random Acts of Chocolate" aiming to convince people to "buy an extra pack of chocolate for a friend." Here's an article about it: http://www.oneincomedollar.com/2011/04/mars-random-acts-of-chocolate-campaign_01.html
This is about how corporations steal anything interesting from the public sphere, co-opt it, and make it a shell of what it was, to shill their products. This goes for things like Random Acts of Pizza, but it also goes for memes.
The second corporations start using memes as an ad to sell shit, the meme is effectively dead, because who fucking cares about what some bullshit ass marketing team thinks about it?
Another way to describe it is Capitalistic Recuperation. From Wikipedia:
If there is one thing capitalism excels at, it's taking ideas from the public and claiming them as their own, twisting them to their own ends.
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