Grimes's TikTok About AI And Communism, Companies During Pride Month And This Week's Other Best Memes, Ranked
Here at Digg, we try our best to cover the most important and confounding memes that come across the timeline. But the web is littered with tons of great memes that never quite hit the mainstream and instead just bounce around the weird corners of Twitter or Reddit.
Enter our recurring feature, Memes, Ranked. This week, we've got Cruella de Vil's origin story, Irish uncle Matt LeBlanc, companies during Pride Month and Grimes's TikTok about AI and Communism.
4. Cruella de Vil's Origin Story
The meme
We always knew it would be tricky for Disney to portray Cruella de Vil in a more sympathetic light, which it set out to do in the recently released "Cruella," the live-action film starring Emma Stone that chronicles the early rise of one of Disney's most iconic villains. How do you get audiences to understand why Cruella hates Dalmatians so much that, in the animated classic, she feels no compunction about killing them and skinning them for coats? How do you get people to be on her side? (Spoilers ahead)
The answer, as it often is with Disney movies, is a dead parent. The movie had to try to explain the character's hatred of Dalmatians and this is what it went with: Cruella's mom was actually killed by a pack of vicious Dalmatian dogs when Cruella was young. Specifically, Cruella had to witness her mom being pushed off a cliff by the dogs and plummeting to her death. Yes, you read that right. That is not a joke and is something that actually happens.
Internet reactions to Cruella's mom's death were merciless. Many people had hilarious reactions to Disney's far-fetched solution to explain Cruella's motivations. We guess that while a dog may be a man's best friend, a CGI dog is a mother's worst nightmare.
Examples
BJ Pang-Chieh Ho
3. Grimes's TikTok About AI And Communism
The meme
Yesterday, Grimes (or, on TikTok, @Waarnymph) posted a TikTok describing how AI could be the fastest route to an ideal communist existence.
"I have a proposition for the communists," she begins, and goes on to say:
If implemented correctly, AI could actually theoretically solve for abundance. Like, we could totally get to a situation where nobody has to work, everybody is provided for with a comparable state of being, comfortable living. AI could automate all the farming, weed out systematic corruption, thereby bringing us as close as possible to genuine equality. So, basically, everything that everybody loves about communism, but without the collective farm. 'Cause let's be real: enforced farming is really not a vibe.
Look, I don't pretend to understand communism beyond its basic tenets — which is exactly why I'm not posting videos explaining to actual communists how one of the most uncertain and possibly existentially threatening technologies is "actually theoretically" the answer to a communist society.
Grimes, however, attempted to do just that. Because Grimes herself is a self-proclaimed non-communist, and because she is currently dating the literal richest man in the world, and because she and Musk named their child after a CIA spyplane (and also some other letters), and because the TikTok just generally made very little sense, people responded with a big collective "lol."
Examples
Long story short: you can make whatever TikTok explainers you want, but that doesn't mean you won't get dragged for them.
Molly Bradley
2. Companies During Pride Month
The meme
At the stroke of midnight on June 1, social media managers everywhere logged on in unison to update the profiles of the accounts they manage, swapping out their companies' normal logos for ones cloaked in the LGBTQ pride flag. By 10 AM, visual merchandisers had done the same, installing rainbow-themed displays in store windows far and wide. There they would remain until precisely midnight on July 1, when the decor would be ceremoniously stuffed into a box in the back room.
Indeed, the corporate world's stark, often superficial embrace of Pride each June 1 — and its equally stark return to normal each July 1 — has become something of a meme online, with critics roasting not only the companies but capitalism itself.
And while the memes are funny, they underscore a difficult truth, which is that Pride Month has become a "branded holiday," as Vox's Alex Abad-Santos put it in 2018.
[I]t's hard to shake the feeling that this commercialized mass appeal has helped further dampen Pride Month's fiery political roots, and helped obfuscate the less-pleasant, less-talked-about issues that matter for many people in the LGBTQ community — and will continue to matter long after the rainbow T-shirts, socks, water bottles, and cute retail disappear from store windows.
Examples
Jon-Michael Poff
1. Irish Uncle Matt LeBlanc
The meme
When the "Friends: Reunion Special" premiered last week, Matt LeBlanc made a splash among Irish viewers who jokingly thought his folded arms and striped shirt on the show epitomized the middle-aged Irish uncle trope.
Netizens began adding witty captions to screenshots of the "Friends" star, some with Irish-isms sprinkled in.
Examples
The Irish Embassy in the United States bested everyone by inserting LeBlanc into a pub.
James Crugnale
And if you're hungry for more memes, here's last week's "The Week's Best Memes, Ranked" article, where we rank millennials listening to Olivia Rodrigo, "the scene/the camera man" and Brooks Koepka rolling his eyes at Bryson DeChambeau.
