'Just Gave My Name In Starbucks…' Is The Perfect Dumb Meme For The Dog Days Of Summer
It's August, and the luckiest and smartest among us are logging off and hitting the beach. Those of us who remain online, either by necessity or by choice, have decided to spend these dog days of summer writing tweets about giving complicated names to Starbucks baristas in the hopes of eliciting enthusiastic responses from other Starbucks patrons. It's a fittingly dumb meme for a dumb time of year to be on Twitter, and it comes, like so many great cultural inventions, from across the pond.
It all started on Saturday, when the Twitter account for EU Flag Mafia — a site that sells anti-Brexit merch — tweeted an implausible account of a purchase at Starbucks.
This anecdote, understandably, raised some eyebrows. Let's just say that it's hard to believe that an entire Starbucks "erupted in to [sic] applause" because a barista shouted out a political slogan related to a complicated policy slog that's been going on for more than two years. But even if this event went down exactly as @EUflagmafia describes it above — is a Starbucks really an ideal site for political organizing? What political objectives are served by getting a room full of Frappuccino drinkers to cheer over how much they dislike Brexit? And what exactly do we suppose would "result" if a critical mass of people were indeed to "try it" and give "stop Brexit" as their name at Starbucks, apart from a lot of very annoyed baristas?
As @EUflagmafia's tweet spread across Twitter, so did imitators. The first tweets mocking @EUflagmafia substituted other unwieldy political slogans for "stop Brexit."
Others went for silly entertainment references in their "Just gave my name in Starbucks" parodies.
And, finally, the meme took on a life of its own as a conveyor for esoteric knowledge and in-jokes.
Here's one reason we know it's a good meme: It lends itself very nicely to cross-referencing other memes.
Here's another reason we know it's a good meme: You don't actually have to know anything about @EUflagmafia's original tweet, or have strong feelings about Brexit, in order to appreciate, and participate in, "Just gave my name in Starbucks…" Just come up with a little-known, long-forgotten or entirely made-up cultural reference and think of a highly unlikely response to said cultural reference from a bunch of strangers at a Starbucks, and voilà, you've got a "Just gave my name in Starbucks…" tweet. It turns out @EUflagmafia did blaze a trail when he gave his name as "stop Brexit" at that fateful Starbucks, albeit not quite in the way he intended. Result. Try it.
