It now takes minutes to make a product out of a popular meme, and days to get that product shipped out to anyone who wants it.In many ways, producing physical objects now looks as memetic and decentralized as production digital ones.
They do for products what meme generator sites have done for GIFs and images, making the process of getting an idea out into the world is accessible to more people.
Sites that make it easy to design your own merchandise like Teespring, Zazzle, and CafePress help streamline the production and distribution process for popular items like T-shirts and hats. This meme-to-product-to-meme-again cycle may increasingly seem normal to us now, but it wasn’t always this way. On the right, a similar set of #deplorables memes emerged in response to Clinton referring to many Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables.” These memes in turn inspired a variety of hats and T-shirts which circulated online and offline. Within days, these T-shirts started shipping to new owners (and helping fundraise for certain causes too), and, soon, returned to the internet via selfies. (An Xiao Mina / Civicist)Ĭonsider, for example, the #NastyWoman memes that emerged on the left during the third presidential debate-a response to Donald Trump calling Hillary Clinton “such a nasty woman.” Hashtags quickly popped up, as did a number of jokes in the form of images and image remixes, and within hours, the first Nasty Woman T-shirts were for sale, many of them with the phrase, many with the hashtag. A protester at the Women’s March on Washington holds up a sign that evokes “This Is Fine,” a widely remixed meme based on an illustration by the artist KC Green.