Hector Banana-bread and the Prison of Banger-Hunting
Tracing the dismal history of banger-hunting from Ellen DeGeneres to the present
For longer than anybody cares to remember, the most retweeted post in Twitter history was a selfie taken by Bradley Cooper and posted by Ellen DeGeneres from the Oscars. It was a cheap gag, essentially—a hack bit in which Ellen intentionally set out to create the most-retweeted post of all time and correctly predicted that a photo of a group of movie stars, their siblings, and associated pedophiles would make people lose their minds. At risk of sounding like the type of person who uses the word “oneshotted,” the photo is imbued with a real demonic energy. And yet as much as the selfie feels like both the high water mark of the 2010s High Cringe Era and a POV shot from Little Saint James, it helped set the meta for the internet’s next decade. A good half of a year before Kim Kardashian’s nude photoshoot for PAPER set out to “break the internet,” Ellen DeGeneres gave birth to banger-hunting.
I’m talking, as much as I’d like not to, about the Hector Banana-bread psy op. Cutting to the chase so that you and I can forget this as soon as possible: this week, a Reddit poster named “Rafe_Cameron_OBX” posted a sort of riddle to the Reddit page “NBATalk” in which they purported to crowdsource the name of their boyfriend’s favorite NBA player in furtherance of a surprise birthday gift. The post’s style reads as immediately earnest; the poster offers up bits of biographical information about her boyfriend before leaving the breadcrumb that every basketball internet drone has made their recent obsession: they purport to vaguely remember the name sounding like “Hector Banana-bread.” People decided that they must have meant Victor Wembanyama, they offered an update claiming to have ruined the surprise by confirming that Wembanyama was, in fact, the Banana-bread in question.
I don’t care about the post in and of itself, which smacks of being written by a 21 year old and is, as such, none of my business. What I care about is the way that NBA Twitter, by which I mean to say the videos, pictures, and occasional words that my phone shows me because Elon Musk has figured out that I like professional basketball, has come together to collectively soyface about Victor Wembanyama’s totally epic, Internet-winning, best-thing-you’ll-see-all-day new nickname. Point being, the stupid Banana-bread post and nickname broke containment almost immediately—there are now explainers, jersey edits, and troves of AI slopaganda. The whole ordeal will be forgotten in a week’s time, maybe less, and so there’s no good reason that I should find a harmless, corny joke so grating and existentially frustrating even if it’s momentarily inescapable. And yet it feels like the Banana-bread meme is worth discussing if only for how shamelessly it exemplifies the way in which banger-hunting totally disintegrates the internet-mediated mind.
The thing, you see, is that the Banana-bread Reddit post is totally fake. The inciting post’s untruth is the sort of thing one can sort of intuit in their bones (I’ve found there is a sort of corniness threshold beyond which any anecdote on the internet must be fake—we might call it “The Ruthkanda Line”), but if you’re in the business of needing proof: among the original poster’s extremely limited Reddit post history is another obviously fake provocation regarding their boyfriend. In that one, which was posted to the Reddit page “NoStupidQuestions,” the poster again assumed an earnest posture to ask whether it was odd that their film major boyfriend spent 9 to 15 hours a week watching Oppenheimer.
The Oppenheimer post is, as far as I’m concerned, conclusive evidence that the Banana-bread post was meant to go viral insofar as its existence permits only two interpretations. The more likely theory is that this poster is the sort of person who likes to ham up traditional gender roles as they have come to be codified on the internet in order to hunt viral content—I’ve taken to calling this “boyfriend mad libs.” By this account, the Banana-bread-poster fabricated both posts whole cloth in a way calculated to best scheme online engagement: one positioning them as a clueless, earnest girlfriend to whose aid men could run, another as the eye-rolling custodian of a stereotypically autistic boyfriend. The other possibility, however, is far grimmer: that both wildly popular Reddit posts are in fact based in reality, meaning that this person is in the business of massaging their life experiences in the manner most reasonably likely to create bangers on the internet. Either way you slice it, this poster is a banger-hunter. As of this week, they are a successful one.
A definition: banger-hunting is the act of posting something, usually lowest-common denominator engagement-bait, in the hopes that it ripples throughout the internet in the form of likes, reposts, screenshots, and references. A banger is not, spiritually, something that has gone viral. Numa Numa went viral. The dreadful tweet about liking pancakes being misinterpreted as hating waffles is a banger. Point being: if something going viral is a serendipitous oddity, a banger banging is its very function.
Since Elon Musk purchased and then failed to sue his way out of purchasing Twitter, the number one shift in the site’s discursive practice (outside of the preposterous rise in overt racism) was one toward mass banger-hunting. Twitter, and the engines of culture downstream of it, operates by a new logic now: accounts make money based on their engagement, the accounts that pay for engagement get boosted in the algorithm, the algorithm boosts engaged-with tweets more than it used to, and the people who pay for engagement tend to chase engagement through the type of tweets they might expect to go viral. As
wrote in his newsletter , Elon’s Twitter algorithm is more or less Reddit plus paid engagement. And so it should come as no surprise that this new Twitter gives rise to Reddit-ass humor like Hector Banana-bread.
In other words, Elon’s Twitter has become a banger-hunting wasteland due to a combination of algorithmic design and structural incentives. And yet still, while banger-hunting can resemble bag-chasing, the two are not coterminous. People banger hunt because having a post bang feels good to them in some meaningful way; they receive from it a psychic wage separate and distinct from whatever cold-hard monetization they have simultaneously managed to wring. Case in point: the Banana-bread-poster did not, as far as I can tell, have a path to monetizing their banger-hunting. They did it for the love of the game.
Which, I guess, brings me to the point of this analysis. On the recent
, toyed with, then began to sincerely adopt the notion that Hector Banana-bread was an elaborate psy-op by the basketball deep state—in other words, a shady cabal of both Nike and league higher-ups—to manufacture consent for Wembanyama as the emerging face of the league. As fun as this line of thought is to engage (the official Never Hungover position is that every conspiracy theory is real), the reality is far bleaker: banger-hunting culture encourages its participants to act simultaneously as brands and shareholders. In other words, whether or not a banger is secretly a corporate ad campaign is a sort of false dichotomy. Banger hunting turns all of its adherents into little Don Drapers, trying to suss out what will make the algorithm and its subject tick not to keep an account but because that’s what they do to feel—what?—fulfilled?The thing about the Ellen selfie, as much of a meme as it’s now become, is that it did represent a vibe shift. Ellen said, in public, some version of “let’s make this bang,” and Internet users stepped up to the task. The post was retweeted not because of its inherent worth, but because retweeting it made one a part of something. That the photo was full of, and posted by, celebrities was incidental to the fact at hand: people liked making something bang as much as they liked authoring the banger. Banger-hunting has territorialized Twitter because it is, regrettably, a participatory sport. To retweet an incipient banger is to become a sort of investor—not, of course, in the payout to come, but in the perhaps more powerful brain-scratch that reposts and likes somehow deliver.
Put simply, to exist now on the Internet is to live in the wake of one of the greatest feats of cringe, hack humor ever recorded. And so it’s okay to feel like you’re losing your mind watching everybody clap like seals about Hector Banana-bread or whatever the meme du jour might be at any given time; such humor is an unwelcome reminder that we have all been transformed into little Ellens.
late to this banger (a banger borne not out of hunting, but of pure perspiration of course) but i'm curious as to your thoughts on people's desperation for and reliance on banger hunting in the digital economy to prop up whatever it is they want to be known for. almost every successful bang is followed by some repost about their music, their art, their comedy, and when they're not highlighting themselves they're posting a thread of gofundmes. feels kind of grim that everyone believes the only way to thrive is to appeal to the lowest common denominator then pull a bait and switch in the hopes that enough people are still looking at you