#FlashbackFriday: The ice bucket challenge, Fyre Fest
Everything old is new again.
In Wednesday’s PHONE TIME, I took a look back at the Kardashian-Jenner apps. Building on that thread, I’m starting an ongoing newsletter series called #FlashbackFriday (a cousin to #ThrowbackThursday), revisiting iconic—and sometimes infamous—moments in internet history and how they remain relevant to culture today.
I recently read Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s essay "The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is A Memory.” Using weblogs (blogs) as an example, she writes that “The ever-updating, inhumanly clocked time in which our machines and memories are embedded and constantly refreshed makes its material stale. The chronology, seemingly enabled by this time is also compromised by these archives and the uncertainty of their regular reception. An older post can always be ‘discovered’ as new; a new post is already old.”
Material posted online is ephemeral, often lost and imperfectly archived, but it’s also always lying in wait for a new generation, subculture, or group of people to stumble across it and bring it back into the zeitgeist. At any time, we can remember something we forgot and view it with fresh eyes. It’s usually not the entire internet doing this at once, but different pockets and groups of people. To me, this helps explain why 2014 trends seem to be perpetually back.
The ice bucket challenge
The ice bucket challenge—the viral social media challenge where participants poured ice water over their heads to raise over $115 million, according to the ALS Association—is back. It has been “resuscitated by a group of US college students who lost two friends to suicide, using the hashtag #SpeakYourMIND to raise mental health awareness,” Amelia Hill reported in The Guardian today.
The revival has also faced criticism for using the same fundraising method as the original, as Zoey Lyttle reported for People.
I think the decade-long distance between the original challenge and the revival is key to the latter catching on: it allows a new generation to participate in something that feels nostalgic yet fresh.
In a 2018 study of “viral challenge memes” like the ice bucket challenge, Adam Burgess, Vincent Miller, and Sarah Moore wrote that “the acceptance of a new VCM is partly determined upon perceived continuity with previous phenomena.” They further describe that a challenge’s participants negotiate within the boundaries of what seems like acceptable performance—and for most, “negotiating these boundaries and tensions produced an enjoyable, creative and fleetingly shared moment.”
Fyre Festival
In an Instagram post Wednesday, Billy McFarland announced that the Fyre Festival brand is for sale, “including its trademarks, digital assets, media reach, and cultural capital—to an operator that can fully realize its vision.”
The revival of the infamous failed festival—originally scheduled to take place at Playa Del Carmen from May 30 to June 2—was postponed last week. McFarland told NBC News in a statement that the new date is dependent upon securing a new location.
“Playa is on Fyre,” declared a March 21 Instagram post on Fyre Festival’s Instagram account. The last post before that is from April 2017. Scroll further back to find the infamous orange square also posted by other influencers and celebrities, including Bella Hadid, to promote the festival.
Fyre Fest set the tone for the ultimate social media-era epic event failure (although not the first): see Tanacon, Willy’s Chocolate Experience, and the Bridgerton Ball, to name a few that have drawn comparisons.
Niche internet corners
Wednesday’s issue looked at weird tiramisu content—people putting tiramisu in glass purses, car consoles, suitcases, etc. I noted that I didn’t think there was anything significant about tiramisu specifically, but rather another iteration of food-focused trends and memes. I’ve come across some more weird food content, particularly from brands.
Cookie company Taylor Chip’s Instagram Reels almost entirely consist of this kind of content: a tackle box filled with milk and cookies, cargo shorts filled with milk, an iced pickle juice latte. Many of the videos have over a million views.
Cleveland Kitchen has similarly posted Instagram Reels of a purse full of pickles, pickle wine, and Easter eggs filled with pickles.
Weird food of varying degrees of visceral grossness has taken many forms over the years—Epic Meal Time, Pinterest fails, r/ShittyFoodPorn, unlikely food brand collabs, cursed cakes, and the like. I don’t see it going away anytime soon.
Memes of the day (follow my Instagram for more)
I wrote about microtrends back in 2021 for Wednesday Zine: “On TikTok, specific items and styles can gain and lose popularity extremely fast, thus accelerating the fashion cycle and creating a constant revolving door of microtrends. Perhaps the most notorious microtrend on TikTok, and social media as a whole, is a green knit dress from House of Sunny, which quickly gave rise to similar patterns and knock-offs on Shein and AliExpress,” I wrote.
