DC people! I’m on a panel about the meme-ification of politics at The Royal Sonesta on October 17. It’s free to attend! Details here!—Kate

At my first job in digital media, there was one go-to when traffic slumped: The Kardashians. When the going got tough, covering Kim’s latest selfie or Khloe throwing shade in the comments of a post was a surefire boost to engagement. Not because people were interested, necessarily. It was almost exclusively because they weren’t.

“Am I supposed to care about these people?” the Facebook comments would read. “And this is news…why?” went another common refrain. And then the most prevalent: “Who?” 

On every platform, choruses of “Who?” piled up beneath these posts, all from people wanting to assert their superiority via their indifference to pop culture, in a way that, ironically, only pushed the post further up the feed. At no point does one of these people look at the already overwhelming pile of identical comments and think it’s been covered. They need to say the same thing, in the same way.

Last week, The Hollywood Reporter released their list of the top 50 most influential online creators. The tweet, however, read “Hollywood, meet your new A-List,” provoking exactly the same response I remember from those early Kardashian days: “What am I looking at?” “I know nobody, and I’m proud of it.” “Is the A-List in the room with us right now?” “no real idea who i'm looking at” “you made these people up”—shut UP! Shut the fuck up! Shut up! Enough! ...