After a campaign underpinned by memes and shitposting, the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, announced yesterday on X that he is backing out of his campaign for reelection.
Biden wasted no time in naming Vice President Kamala Harris as his desired successor on X, and neither, seemingly, did his campaign team. The ink had barely dried, so to speak, before BidenHQ on X rebranded itself to the KamalaHQ.
In just 24 hours, the follower count for KamalaHQ nearly doubled, and pop star Charli XCX herself remarked that “kamala IS brat.” In response, KamalaHQ decked itself out in ‘bratty’ lime green aesthetics.
But what is a brat summer? And what’s all this about a coconut tree?
If you listen carefully, you can almost hear the click-clack of keyboards as SEO explainers are churned out to answer those very questions. (Brat is the new Charli XCX album, coconut memes refer to this infamous clip of Kamala Harris, in case you were wondering.)
But the truth is, the ins and outs of these particular jokes don’t matter. What matters is the ‘memeification’ of U.S. politics. Our brains are fried and frazzled to the point where we can’t assume anything is official until we’ve seen it on the Pop Crave or ‘Liza Minnelli Outlives’ X accounts.
In a Substack newsletter about Biden’s resignation, internet culture journalist Taylor Lorenz put it best.
“Our information system has split into an endless number of micro communities,” she wrote, “from group chats to online fandoms, all learning about news and major events through increasingly bizarre digital formats.”
What about X?
It’s true that growth has stagnated on X. And since Elon Musk’s takeover of X, questions have been raised about the platform’s political neutrality. Soon after Trump was shot, for instance, Musk personally endorsed the candidate on X.
According to the Washington Post, the platform also added custom icons for Republicans at the Republican National Convention. And overall, data from Pew shows that the platform’s user base has become more right-leaning.
With all this in mind, it’s questionable if X is the right platform to be having these all-important political conversations. But Biden chose to announce his departure there for a reason, and pop stars and Democrats alike are turning their attention to X for a reason.
For better or worse, X is still the beating heart of the internet. Even if we do spend way too much time trying to differentiate between ‘Pop Crave’ and ‘Poo Crave.’
