August 20, 2020 - 7:00am
Triller doesn’t like to be described as a ‘TikTok rival’, but that’s exactly what it is. Their short videos of pranks, singalongs, micro-skits, life-hacks and nano-celebrities are very much in the same ballpark as the Chinese-owned Zoomer favourite.
Triller now claims 250 million downloads, which feels more like a press release fib. But what can’t be doubted is that the app hit number one on the iTunes store in over fifty countries this month, as, following Trump’s intended ban, the social media lifeboats went out for a post-TikTok world. Both Instagram and Snapchat have also launched their own extensions, aiming to hoover up some of the app’s expiring glory.
Now, Triller have done what Twitter’s Right-wing rival Parler hasn’t yet managed: securing the buy-in of Donald J. Trump. Lately Triller’s owners have been plying various TikTok influencers with venture capital cash to lock them into exclusive deals. Whether or not they consider the President an influencer, he’s definitely a scalp.
But what stands out in the six videos posted under his tag so far is how incongruous they feel on a site designed for apolitical larks.
The most recent is Trump pumping his arms, under which someone has dubbed The Village People’s YMCA. It’s not clear quite what the message is, except that it feels as though it has been beamed down from, well, a man in his mid-70s trying to drum up Big Meme Energy.
It’s easy to forget that, for all his mastery of Twitter’s capacity to channel the tectonic plates of controversy as a form of natural energy, all of Trump’s best memes on there were artefacts that others had created in his honour, and he merely re-tweeted.
Every election since 2008 has billed itself as the biggest social media election ever. With TikTok-style video clips in the ascendant and Facebook increasingly confined to the olds, you’d think it might be the turn of the video meme apps.
But so far, these spaces seem to naturally repel these kinds of conversations. Indeed, one of the key appeals of TikTok is quite how walled-off it is from the personal-is-political world of adult-oriented social media. Its private garden of daftness offers a hopeful view of a Zoomer generation who don’t seem to care quite so much for being angry online.
Historically, the short video has been delivered to US voters in the form of the political attack ad. These won’t stop: Biden has already made hay with ads attacking Trump’s pandemic response. But these are increasingly reserved for the same over-60s who watch Fox: they come wrapped in the same starchy grammar of US television, with its endless run-on sentences of prescription drug contra-indications.
In 2016, Trump’s Pepe Army definitively won the meme wars. But most of those Pepe Twitter accounts are defunct now, frozen in internet ammonite. Whether he can find that same energy twice will depend on whether he can again galvanise his own followers, to the extent that they make the content that amplifies the message. It’s a subtle challenge, one that involves trusting the broiling soup at the bottom of the internet to crowd-source some sticky genius.
The opposite is what Mike Bloomberg did in his short flail for the Democratic nomination: employing a brains trust of paid meme-makers. That’s the Harvard MBA solution. It failed, dismally. And if there’s one key insight that Trump has over his rivals, it’s that the social class that comprises Harvard MBAs are generally terrible at their jobs. Keep it simple, stupid.
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SubscribeThe illegal immigrants are coming to the U.K. to obtain economic benefit and the pretence of suggesting this flood is of families fleeing oppression is wrong. The majority of people of the U.K. want less migrants illegal or legal and the U.K. government needs to get on with the necessary means especially dealing with so called refugees. The whole system needs changing with no individual allowed permanent residence if they arrived illegally.
‘And if there’s one key insight that Trump has over his rivals, it’s that the social class that comprises Harvard MBAs are generally terrible at their jobs.’
So true, so true.
> frozen in internet ammonite
Maybe change to carbonite? “Ammonite” is not a rock but a prehistoric animal.
I have on Unherd several times described myself as a Vlad the Impaler socialist. Human Rights types may scream at me for suggesting, Eunuchs have no sexual desires/urges. SO! Why can’t these people be surgically castrated?
The 4000 people, mainly young men, are in addition to something in the order of half a million immigrants already here illegally (it is a disgrace that neither the Government nor the ONS can accurately number the people in this country). That is vastly in excess of the numbers that accompanied William the Conqueror at his invasion. Farage calls this one better than Bloodworth. We are a small island and more densely populated than any comparable European Country – more so than Germany, over twice as much as France and Turkey and three times as much as Spain. Large scale immigration is destabilizing and unpopular, it is time to tackle a problem another age would have referred to as an invasion. We must do the best with the many disparate elements that comprise the modern UK and continue to contribute to the support of refugees in other countries but refuse to accept an unending influx of people when other countries have more available living space.
Our judicial system fails again and the writer wrings her hands in not wanting to confront that real change is needed. We have murders, peadophiles, terrorists and rapist all go under punished, does not one of our legislators or judiciary have the clarity of thought that the experiment of rehabilitation is a failure and we need to reduce our prison population in a more drastic way.
How would you do that?
This category of insight is the most important thing to understand about twenty-first century Western civilisation.
‘And if there’s one key insight that Trump has over his rivals, it’s that the social class that comprises Harvard MBAs are generally terrible at their jobs.’
Closest thing to “truth” I’ve seen on the internets today. The best “meme masters” (and other social media noise) was/is made by the outsiders, the fringe friends, class clowns…even the random person with a moment of brilliance. NOT the MBA kids. There’s no business plan or masters degree of meme that creates outside the lines.
I read as far as the final sentence of the second paragraph where I was told that these people are fleeing from armed conflict. They’re obviously not doing any such thing as they’ve come from France. Their sole goal is to enter the country illegally and take illegal advantage of its health system, education and economy. The fact that they don’t apply to come here legally is evidence enough that they are not going to benefit any of us. They are neither wanted nor needed here.
I’ve not much time for them either. Far less than Giles. So I haven’t bothered to read beyond the first paragraph.
Not sure castration automatically reduces ‘feelings’.
There are no simple answers to this.
Bloodworth falls at the first hurdle through his inconsistent and inaccurate use of the words refugee, migrant and asylum seeker. The great majority of those illegally crossing the Channel are young males – economic migrants. A few are terrorists.
For a more informed account of who is coming here and why, read: https://twitter.com/_edward…
To quote one of our recent war criminals, and great moralist, Gen. Colin Powell: “It’s Pottery Barn rules: ‘You broke it, you own it’.” Try as you may to confound the issue, there’s no escape; Imperial blowback, ancient and recent, is the at the root.
So the moral obligation is patent; only the degrees are debatable. And here it is plain the imperial class bares vastly the largest share. Which, in a true and just republic would require it be utterly discredited, displaced, and appropriated for reparations.
Well some of them will end up working in third world sweatshops in the UK, or as lumpenproletarian small time crooks. Wellcome.