Another COVID-plagued year has come to a close. Lockdowns came and went, and screen times went up excessively, creating a fertile environment for memes.
The year began with an insurrection and an inauguration and ended with the extremely transmissible Omicron variant and the dissolution of the unions of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West—and even more surprisingly, Elon Musk and Grimes.
Here is a look into 2021 and the culturally significant viral moments that sum up this wild year.
Bernie’s mittens
Joe Biden became the 46th president on Jan. 20 in an inauguration that was overshadowed by a photo of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, sitting cross-legged on a folding chair, wearing a Burton Snowboarding coat and fluffy mittens hand-knitted by Vermont elementary school teacher Jen Ellis.
This meme lasted far longer than perhaps it should have and had the side effect of increasing visibility for Bernie Sanders and mittens themselves. Images of Sanders were photoshopped into scenes of The Last Supper and Where’s Waldo?, merch was dropped, and Sanders himself sold sweatshirts featuring the photograph to raise money for charity.
The GameStop story
Users of Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets came together at the start of the year to short-squeeze the stock of troubled video game retailer GameStop, using memes to organize themselves against hedge fund shorts. At its height on Jan. 28, the squeeze caused GameStop’s stock price to hit a premarket value over $500 a share—nearly 30 times the $17.25 its shares fetched at the start of the month.
The push by retail investors came wrapped in a culture of vengeance against the big banks that users blamed for the 2008 financial system crash, not to mention a dollop of YOLO spirit that in the end caused Melvin Capital, an investment fund that heavily shorted GameStop, to lose 53% on its investments in January, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Here is one example of the memes driving the movement forward.
The Suez Canal block
One of the most disruptive events of the year came when the Ever Given, one of the biggest container ships in operation—it is longer than the Eiffel Tower is tall—got stuck in Egypt’s Suez Canal on March 23. The blockage lasted five days, until March 28.
Over on Twitter, many felt the Ever Given reflected the state of the world, where lockdowns were still in place and people found themselves stuck.
The ocean is on fire
Jumping to July, the ocean surface’s west of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula literally caught fire. According to state oil company Pemex, the fire was caused by an underwater gas pipeline that burst, and the company extinguished the fire within five hours—but not before it had been dubbed “eye of fire” on social media and gone viral.
Billionaires’ rockets
Despite this being the most lucrative year for billionaires on Earth, two left.
Jeff Bezos, with a net worth of $200 billion, shot into space on July 20 on his Blue Origin New Shepard rocket, experienced a few moments of weightlessness, and then descended homeward in a capsule wearing a cowboy hat.
It was impressive—though it would have been more impressive if Richard Branson hadn’t done the same thing eight days earlier. As it was Jeff Bezos shooting into space, however, Twitter took the moment as an opportunity to remind the world about Amazon’s spotty labor record—and poke fun at the phallic shape of the rocket itself.
The Delta variant
First emerging from India, the Delta variant took the world by storm over the summer, and by fall it had become the dominant strain of the virus and one of the most transmissible respiratory viruses ever known.
Hospitalizations and deaths swung back up, and governments around the globe imposed greater restrictions. This was put succinctly in a meme with two images, one of the hopeful fall plans people tentatively made, thinking the pandemic was over—and what was left after Delta ruined them.
Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend
As COVID vaccines were rolled out globally, vaccine hesitancy naturally emerged with it. The hesitant offered many reasons for not being vaccinated, ranging from personal freedom to government overreach, but none were quite so strange as Nicki Minaj’s Sept. 13 tweet—which she has yet to delete.
The cheating boyfriend meme offered an easy reply.
Facebook Meta
On Oct. 28, just days after former Facebook employee Frances Haugen made major allegations against the company for choosing profit over safety, Facebook rebranded itself under a new name: Meta. The name change of Facebook’s parent company was unveiled by Mark Zuckerberg after an hour-plus presentation that highlighted Meta’s efforts to build out a VR-enabled “metaverse.”
The announcement, made in front of a bottle of Zuckerberg’s favorite Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce, was quickly ridiculed online.
The CDC just announced…
The latest Twitter trend arrived this December, spurred by the U.S.’s Centers for Disease Control and Protection decision to loosen restrictions while the Omicron variant ripped through the country.
After the CDC announced on Dec. 27 that Americans who tested positive for COVID should shorten their isolation from 10 days to five, Twitter was quick to respond.
To end a great year, we should all take CDC’s advice from this meme to ring in the New Year.
Never miss a story: Follow your favorite topics and authors to get a personalized email with the journalism that matters most to you.
