The Bernie Sanders Meme Proves the Internet Is Resetting | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/bernie-sanders-meme-shift/#intcid=_wired-homepage-right-rail_2a2574f2-aac7-4e19-b884-7f9a4e833eb6_popul
Wednesday’s inauguration of President Biden and Vice President Harris was full of fashion moments: Lady Gaga’s golden bird, Harris’ pearls, Michelle Obama’s everything. But it was senator Bernie Sanders, decked out in his coat and mittens and holding a manila envelope (and maybe a cashier’s check?), who captured the attention of meme-makers everywhere. Before the swearing in even happened, people were tweeting out images of the senator, commenting on his accessories and give-no-fucks demeanor. By the time the sun set, he was being Photoshopped into all kinds of scenes, from New York City subways to the Iron Throne.
It was a cultural reset but not in the traditional sense; no one is really thinking about memes, or Bernie Sanders, or even mittens differently now because of this. Instead, it was a realization that, occasionally, during the Biden/Harris administration there will be flip, inconsequential memes about politics. That in the absence of reacting to tweets from President Trump, social media will get to react to something else.
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He Made a Viral Bernie Meme Site. Now He Has to Keep It Going | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/bernie-sanders-meme-street-view-site
The site gained traction on Twitter slowly at first; friends retweeting, then friends of friends. A few verified accounts joined in. And then, as wonderful and perfectly timed internet creations do, it snowballed.
“If I had known this was going to be the traffic, I would have made every single decision completely differently,” says Sawhney. “When it blew up I realized that a website is more than just writing the code and putting it on there.”
In fairness, that the site was thrown together on a whim adds to its charm. It’s not flashy, and it delivers precisely what it promises: pictures of Sanders anywhere in the world that Google’s Street View cars have roamed. To create it, Sawhney simply tapped into the Google Maps API, created a text entry field for queries, and decided where specifically the senator should pop up in the returned location images.
“Generally the Street View API will give you a relatively similar angle from the sidewalk, unless they couldn’t get that angle,” Sawhney says. “So if I don’t try to change that field of view or the angle, and generally know what Bernie will look like on the sidewalk, it works most of the time.”
Also the more expensive, from Sawhney’s point of view. Every time someone makes a request on his site, Google charges him a small amount to return the appropriate image. When the visitors are mostly his friends and small Twitter circle, that’s one thing. But throughout the night, his site averaged between 22 and 32 requests per second. By Thursday afternoon, that had spiked to around 70 requests per second. The bill for the API calls alone is closing in on $2,000; the server space required to keep the site functional and online tacks on another several hundred for the month.
To be clear, Sawhney’s not complaining. “This is an awesome situation to be in,” he says. “It’s been really wild trying to keep this thing going.” Early into the traffic surge, a friend recommended crowdfunding; more than 750 people have contributed to his Buy Me a Coffee page. Heroku has thrown in some monitoring services gratis to help keep things stable. Sawhney says he has enough cash on hand to keep the site alive for another week after this, assuming interest starts to die down. (It’s the internet; it’ll move on soon if it hasn’t already.)