Who The Hell Want Me?

Against the sports quote graphic industrial complex

Some housekeeping: I cheated on my dear readers here at Never Hungover and wrote a piece over at Passion of the Weiss about the implications of the Timothée Chalamet’s Just Like You Oscar campaign. To mark the occasion, I launched the Never Hungover chat here on the Substack app. It might be stupid, but it could be fun, I don’t know, don’t be a stranger, sound off and riff about whatever, if you’d like.

Also went on again with the

Nothing But Respect

boys and talked about Marcus Smart as collateralized debt obligation. Fun as always, like and subscribe…

Mid Level Exceptionalism with Ock Sportello

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I have been making a sincere effort to not let the things I see on the internet impact my mood as much as they currently do. The internet, and specifically Twitter as it is currently constituted, has meaningfully hardened my heart against the world around me. It is easy to lay blame at the feet of algorithms, conspiratorial forces, and the dictates of engagement-based-profit—all do, of course, shoulder some blame. But to the extent that this regrettable situation might be made reversible, I—and likely you, the person reading this—need to take some accountability for how exactly I spend my attention and regulate my emotional reaction to the stream of stimuli I subject myself to for hours on end.

All of which is to say: I’m not exactly happy to be writing about what the proliferation of meme-farming quote graphics across the sports internet portends for humanity’s relationship to itself in the social media age. My hope is that this post can serve as a sort of exorcism.

Yesterday, the Bleacher Report Twitter account posted the sort of content that has become standard fare for aggregation-bait social media accounts. The post, which was accompanied by a caption so as to conform with conventions, featured a proprietary Bleacher Report graphic stylizing a quote pulled from, jaw-droppingly, the gambling podcast hosted by the veteran NBA player Morris twins.¹ The quote, purportedly Markieff Morris’s reaction to learning he had been traded: “Who the hell want me?”

On its face, this quote is the sort of mildly amusing esoterica that one might collect by sifting through hours of the refuse generated by the NBA player-podcast-industrial-complex. It is both inessential and harmless. What’s insidious about the whole episode, rather, is the quote graphic generated as if by course. The graphic, which shows a mildly disaffected, disoriented Morris over the text, was generated as a naked attempt to introduce a new bit of language into the memetic lexicon. Put simply, it is meme-farming. Despite this farming being so overt as to make even naming it sort of vulgar, you don’t need to take my word for it. Look, instead, to the quote tweet from “sports content creator” and Bleacher Report employee Molly Morrison: “had to give y’all a little gift before valentine’s day.”

In just about 24 hours, the “who the hell want me?” graphic has accumulated 95 thousand likes, 7.5 thousand bookmarks, and 4.9 thousand reposts. The first quote tweets I see as I click in this moment: “This one might go to the moon,” “we’ll be seeing this quote graphic for years to come,” “sometimes you see a graphic and start visualizing the use cases in your head like a highlight reel,” “2 days before feb 14th. Impeccable timing. What a graphic,” and “incels on feb 14.” I stop repeating these responses not because I encounter even a single exception to prove the rule, but because making the point starts to feel tedious. The whole process is offensive precisely because it is obvious. Still, let’s name it: Bleacher Report, specifically the Twitter-addled human beings who are responsible for its editorial decisions, such as they are, de-contextualized and rendered into graphic form a quote from an NBA player for the explicit purpose of other Twitter users seeing the graphic, thinking to themselves that the graphic might serve nicely as garnish on a Tweet about single people on Valentine’s day. Whether you consider this astroturfing, meme-framing, or communitarian seeding, the point remains the same: watching someone successfully create a meme in real time is as off-putting, embarrassing, and upsetting as walking in on someone in the bathroom. Simply: it is something you know happens, and yet not something you are meant to see.

As someone whose algorithm skews significantly in the direction of sports conversation, my sense of humor has been to some extent seeped in quote-graphic memetic language for the last half-decade. The first sport quote graphic I recall seeing portrayed French soccer superstar Kylian Mbappe’s (as it turns out, widely applicable) promise: “I will be there no matter what.” Insofar as most sport-world memes tend to find their roots in soccer Twitter, it comes as no surprise that this trend first became observable to me in the soccer context. Before long, the Mbappe quote graphic became a part of my internal monologue and daily vernacular, as real and legitimate a form of communication as words like “hello” and “goodbye.” Much to the chagrin of my loved ones, there was a roughly two-year period during which the image served as my sort of one-size-fits-all RSVP.

Of course, there were others. An aged Vince Carter, beating his chest: “I got one more in me.” A humbled Shaquille O’Neal: “I owe you an apology. I wasn’t really familiar with your game.” Darvin Ham on LeBron James: “I just want to ride him.” A funereal Mark Jackson: “What happened to the game I love?” A personal favorite, from David Aldridge lamenting Kyrie Irving’s idiosyncrasies: “We have lost the impact of shame in our society.” These images colonized my brain and lexicon in as real and complete a way as, say, emojis have. It would not be an overstatement to say that they materially reconstituted the ways that I perceive and shape reality insofar as they became both a lens through which I viewed the world and a hungry burden upon my meaning-making abilities, demanding that I find more situations upon which a quote graphic meme might be fitted. These graphics were stupid, surely, and they almost certainly marked a step back from, say, standard linguistic development in adult humans, but they exemplified the intoxicating draw of any great meme. To deploy, or understand, a sports quote graphic was to feel both like a member of an irony-fried, erudite, intertwined online community and a sort of pioneer singularly able to push language and humor forward. A balanced meme, in other words, allows you simultaneously to belong and to stand out.

And yet the joy in sports graphics as a genre of humor was that they were necessarily being repurposed toward inconceivable ends. They were neither self-aware nor self-referential. And so somewhere along the line, what once felt like a sincerely delightful form of memetic humor degenerated into the lowest fate of internet activity: a ceaseless, churning content mill. The combination of pay-to-play blue check accounts, the moron Elon Musk’s prioritization of images over text-based posts (one suspects he is too ketamine-sick and stupid to focus on words for all that long), and the banger-hunting-motive that has put humorous creativity in a chokehold all seem to have swirled together to inundate timelines with lazy, uninspired quote graphics from the least funny people on the planet. Perverted by the forces at play—by heavy hands, by late-adopters, by people who can’t tell when a party’s over—the modern quote-graphic-industrial-complex has laid bare the slop incentive that animates the contemporary internet’s operating logic. The point with much memetic humor is no longer to signal belonging to any discrete community or to genuinely attempt to offer a semiotic innovation; rather, it is to be led to the same water, over and over again, and to watch the number go up as you do it. Get ready to learn Chinese, buddy. Hawk Tuah. Big dog. Who the hell want me?

1. Seriously, I cannot fucking believe this podcast exists.