A Vaccine Is Not a Personality
S1: They’re called covid-19, they have four cans and they’re coming for cans. He’s.
S2: Hi, I’m Rachel Hampton,
S3: and I’m Madison Malone Kirchherr, you’re listening to ESI, why am I,
S2: in case you missed it,
S3: Slate’s podcast about Internet culture. Today’s the day, Rachel. I finally understand. NTIS I am fully up on unfindable tokens and I’m going to explain them honestly.
S2: Thank you so much. I, I don’t understand what they are and I feel like it’s an important part of my job to know what they are. So thank you Madisen.
S3: I felt the same way, which is why I took it upon myself to learn what they’re all about. And I really found that there was a single tweet that sum them up for me perfectly. And I’m excited to
S2: just one tweet.
S3: Yeah, it is from a user whose handle is at Girl Mode and the tweet is, yeah I have NFTE. Nice fucking tits matterson. I bet you actually good. No I’m not. This is the last we’re going to talk about NFTE on the podcast. That’s probably a lie. And I reserve the right to change my mind, but you should know what they are. But OK, I just it was a really good tweet but we’re not actually talking about NFTE today. We’re going to talk about vaccines and all the ways that Instagram is built to convince you to shop and all the weird shit it convinced us me you to buy in. The last year while we were stuck at home, I sort of like to think of Instagram as QVC on my phone.
S2: It’s QVC, but with an algorithm that knows exactly what to serve you. But before we get into the stuff that I actually want to buy, we’re going to get into some stuff that I wish didn’t exist on the Internet at all. There’s been a recent wave of vaccine means that has apparently convinced somebody somewhere with access to Etsy that what we really need right now are a crossover of Hogwarts content and vaccine meme content. And by content, I mean t shirts that you can buy to put on your actual physical body.
S3: OK, don’t check your mail medicine.
S2: No, I’m burning it. But if there’s anything the Internet is really good at besides giving medicine things to buy me that I don’t want, it’s convincing people that doing free spanton for major corporations is a personality. And the corporation talking about this week are pharmaceutical companies.
S3: If you’re not familiar with the sort of personalities the vaccines have developed online, Pfizer is the hot girl vaccine. Moderna is the Dolly Parton shot. And then there’s the redheaded stepchild, the J and J. One shot vaccine.
S2: If you’ve been online or watching cable news, you might have heard that the use of Johnson and Johnson vaccine has actually been put on pause in the United States this week. Regulators are further investigating adverse effects of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which, to be clear thus far appear to be very, very rare.
S3: Right. The numbers right now are about one in a million. And experts across the board are saying the benefits of protecting yourself against the ravages of covid far outweigh these potential adverse side effects. I got to say, though, isn’t it so fun to watch people around the world suddenly get very concerned about women getting blood clots from necessary medication?
S2: It’s been it’s been so fun. I couldn’t think of any other medication that might cause these kind of adverse effects that could also use this attention. No other medication
S3: at birth control doesn’t exist. But these sorts of discussions require a kind of nuance that you don’t necessarily get in Meems or on.
S1: Ticktock, only hot people get the Pfizer vaccine. If you got Moderna, then I’m going to tell you clean. This message is brought to you by Pfizer gang.
S3: You’ve seen that tick tock before, right?
S2: Yeah, I have. Basically a Pfizer has somehow become like the elite vaccine. I’ve seen so many people on the lines of all my friends have gone Pfizer and I got my turn it I don’t know how to feel about it. And then, you know, the Moderna girls are just over there,
S3: the thoroughly modern amylase, if you will.
S2: I won’t. But OK,
S3: so what we’re describing here is the meme fixation of vaccines. But something else that has arisen is the question of whether or not these vaccine personality bits and jokes, whether or not they’re actually harming the vaccine effort. You know, it’s all fun and games until no one gets a shot. The concept of herd immunity feels so tangible and close, or at least like closer than it did even six months ago. I I was thinking about that the other night. I was lying in bed watching tick tock. And I came across this this tick tock that a. It made me laugh and then started to kind of make me angry. I’m like 95 percent effective. So am I. We’re both Amarone, so we’re basically the same. No, we’re not. You’re so high maintenance or to be stored at like negative 70 degrees Celsius, I can be stored at room temperature. Johnson This tick tock is a comedian who is cause playing as all of the different vaccines and she’s having a conversation between them. And every time she switches between a character, she changes clothes and pins a different index card with the vaccine named to her chest. So there’s like a green index card in a green T-shirt. When she’s Fizer and when she’s Moderna, she’s in yellow.
S4: You’re basically emergency. Yeah, an 85 percent effective against severe disease. And I’m cheap. Well, it’s hard to charge
S3: for that doesn’t work. There’s a lot of good information in there. But for me, what made me sort of sit up in bed and say that doesn’t sit quite right is there’s a joke in there that says it’s well, it’s hard to charge for shit that doesn’t work. The implication there being that the Jay and Jay shot doesn’t work, but it led me as watching tick tock does. It pretty much broke my tock algorithm such that I’m all I’m only getting vaccine content now. Have you seen any sort of anthropomorphic vaccine content in your your tick tock?
S2: Yeah, it feels kind of inescapable at this point. I’ve seen this one, which is significant, actually seemingly worse than the one that you just showed us. And there wasn’t even a moment where I was like, ha ha, that’s funny. I was just immediately like, why are we doing this?
S1: OK, what do we have ourselves here? Fizer? Have we got ourselves a high roller?
S2: OK, so it’s kind of this club skit, which is actually the format that I’ve seen most often, like it’s this club bouncer and they’re allowing people in and it’s like, here’s the Johnson and Johnson vaccine.
S1: Wait a minute. Johnson and Johnson, what type of establishment do you think this is? A God damn brothel? The JMJ line’s over there. You’re going to wait your turn behind the red rover.
S3: Honestly, initially, the Memphis occasion of vaccines seemed like a really good idea. I don’t know. Are you familiar with the the vaccine slut song?
S2: Oh, you know, I am. But for those unfamiliar, we’re going to play perhaps the best song ever.
S4: You can call me the vaccines like you take the needle, stick it in my back pocket. The help to see me I because I like not to die cacp I can get immunized. We need another job.
S3: I love that. It’s about. Yeah it’s a bop, it’s brand agnostic. I remember seeing this though as one of I think like the earliest tick tock vaccine audios that at least came across my first page. And I remember thinking, oh this is fun. What an interesting new genre we’re entering. But now my doomsday Internet brain sees the tick tock of the vaccine bouncer and thinks, oh, no, what if somebody internalizes this for real? Which is not to say that people who watch Tic Tacs aren’t smart enough to get that. This is comedy and it’s largely funny, but this is how efficacy rates get cemented in people’s brains as quote unquote, good or bad.
S2: Yeah, I mean, I don’t think either of us is suggesting that anybody who would watch, like the club bouncer skit is like this is where I’m going to get my health information. But I mean, we’re all kind of susceptible to the ways in which social media kind of just like I don’t want to call it propaganda, but like it it just sticks in your brain.
S3: I was looking in the comments of the video of the woman playing, and there’s someone who says, as a tired doctor, please take this down. I know it’s a joke, but so many people get their information this way and yours is not really accurate. I can see the effect from some of your commenters and I see it with my patients. Videos like these cause vaccine hesitancy way more than you think.
S2: It takes so little to make someone so hesitant. It’s just not great. I don’t like it.
S3: I don’t either. And I’m I’ve gotten sucked into it like it’s a talking point. Now you’re getting your vaccine. Do you know what you’re getting?
S2: Yes. Yes. I’ve also known as the conversations where it’s just like this. When are you getting do you know? And it’s like we’ve turned what is ultimately like medication in the very American way that we always manage to do into this, like, brand war where we were just trying to comparison shop, which is like ultimately just a reflection of our medical system. But in the case of the vaccines, it is, I think, ultimately going to do us more harm. And it just ends up turning into this really weird thing where people are like capping for pharmaceutical companies, which I think we all collectively agreed at least two decades ago were not good. But like I thought, we had fully just realized the pharmaceutical industry was like one of the great evils in America. But now people are wearing shirts that say team Pfizer, house Pfizer, like it’s turned into actual merchandise and people doing free spawn con
S3: for pharmaceutical companies. Twenty, twenty one. I mean, it’s it is the next. Step in like the logical cycle of the application of the vaccine, right, the let’s call it merchandise Asian of memes, to be clear, I don’t care if you want to spend money on a sweatshirt to tell the world that you got a free vaccine. You do you. But what I do care about is that that sweatshirt is feeding into this notion of what a reporter named Callon Rosenblad at NBC News called vaccine rivalry’s. The idea that this sweatshirt might give somebody out there who is on the fence about vaccines or believes that there’s a superior vaccine or is maybe holding out for a certain type of shot. I don’t want anyone to think that that is the
S2: move, just the idea of splitting vaccines into teams, which is if you look on Etsy very much a thing, there is an entire genre of vaccine content and they’re like innocuous shirts that are just like I got vaccinated or vaccinated, caffeinated, educated, like, listen, live your best mom, short life. However, I take issue with the fact that people are literally turning Fizer and Moderna into Game of Thrones houses with logos.
S3: I just saw a tote bag. It has Rosie the Riveter or a person stylized like Rosie the Riveter with the shirt rolled up and just a bandaid on the upper arm.
S2: I mean, there’s really no way to tell if it’s just the meems that are changing people’s minds. But this L.A. Times piece by Erica de Smith, which was really great, she volunteered at Kedron Community Health Center. And she says during her time volunteering, she lost track of how many people requested a specific brand and wanted to argue when they were told no, who knows what will happen when doses of Johnson and Johnson. So which is not great. And I can only assume that those people were not just purely swayed by videos on ticktock.
S3: Of course not. But it all feeds into creating a person out there who’s going to go to a vaccine clinic and ask for Pfizer or ask for Moderna.
S2: And it’s really striking because so many of the people who are on Tic-Tac, in fact, I think majority of users, something like over 35 percent of users on Tick Tock, are under the age of 20. And so it’s turning into this thing where in which people are not that skeptic, but will perhaps delay getting the vaccine so they can get the one that they want, which is capital in capital G.
S3: Not great. Yeah, I was going to say, obviously we are not medical professionals, but actual medical professionals who have offices like
S2: Dr. Foushee have been concerned about this from the beginning. Foushee has said in February to get what’s available to you.
S3: It’s also tough because there are also really big structural things at play here about how vaccine rollout is being done and access for white communities versus predominantly black communities, Latino communities, vaccine rollout across socioeconomic groups. Right. And this idea that there’s a superior vaccine like it flattens.
S2: This is, I think, kind of what annoys me the most about the brand because of what’s happening is that there’s legitimate concern and a lot of communities that have been particularly hit hard by the pandemic. And the concern they’re expressing is over getting what’s been described as a quote unquote, second class vaccine. That concern is one that’s borne out of decades of medical mistreatment, lack of access, doctors not caring about their concerns. But with the brand wars, it’s getting flattened into this weird meme which does not help anybody. And it makes it easier for people to dismiss the concerns of people who are worried about access and just say, oh, like, get whatever you can get, which you should. But we should know why that’s important. Like, people should be able to ask questions about why it’s good.
S3: I feel like lest we appear to be anti tick podcast for even a brief moment, I should say that the thing that finally got me to like, fully understand how fully understand as a doctor myself, but to conceptually grasp how MRSA vaccines work was actually a tick tock.
S1: You need to make this what is it, it’s a part of a
S3: virus, it’s a tick tock from user at Hot Vic Krishna in which he is role playing as a ribosome and MRSA. They have
S1: four kids and they’re coming
S3: for kids. The RNA is telling the ribosomes like covid is coming, the Fork’s are coming, and you have to be ready. And here’s how. So our immune systems create antibodies to fight against the stork handed covid-19. And so what we see at the end of the Tic-Tac is when the Faulkes descend, the body is prepared and can tackle it.
S1: Sees the fox.
S5: Nice body. Going to make
S1: this place my new. Sees that.
S3: Oh, OK, OK, as good as this video is, we will recommend that you probably should not get all of your public health information from Tic TAC.
S2: Coming up, we’re going to be talking about all the dumb shit that we did buy during quarantine that wasn’t at the merge, including some really fancy cat pants.
S3: Thank you. Targeted Instagram ads. Rachel, I don’t know about you, but I have been convinced to buy several things over the last year via Instagram ads that I ultimately just had no right purchasing Madison.
S2: I feel like I’ve sent you a specific Instagram, but I almost made just based off of EV. I think that Instagram ads are my personality. Now, if we’re going to make things that we can consume personalities.
S3: I was really convinced that this manicure set I bought last summer was going to change my life, that the ads looked so great. It’s easy to use. The bottles are designed. So you can OK. Yeah, the Polish is great. The file is great. The top coat super shiny. You know, it was not included in the box talent, the ability to give myself a manicure. It is sat largely unused since
S2: the thing is, which I think is maybe the worst part about this entire thing is I have not regretted a single Instagram ad purchases I’ve made. They’ve all been incredible and it only encourages me to keep making them. Case in point, I bought this sweater. I thought it was going to be absolute trash, but I was just like, I think I was depressed. But it’s this, like pastoral scene. It’s like largely sky blue. But the bottom is green. It’s like the rolling hills. And I have cows on it, like real actual black and white cows. It’s so fun. It’s like an impressionist painting. But on your body. I love
S3: it. Bragge We however and this comforted me. We’re not the only ones who had impulse Instagram purchases dotting our credit card statements over the last year. And we wanted to know whether people’s Instagram impulse buys actually sparked as much joy as they had hoped for. So we asked around our office. Turns out some of our colleagues had some tales of Instagram shopping gone right. But there were also no shortages of stories where it went terribly, terribly wrong.
S6: Hi, I’m DenTek and I bought three quarter length elastic waisted cap pants on the Internet.
S3: The specificity,
S2: where were you in your pandemic life that brought you to this decision?
S6: Where I was was in a period of my life where I kind of felt like having hard pants, as they are now known for pants that have like buttons and really only accommodate waists that are uniform in size over time was like not the right choice for me anymore. And so I wanted the pants that could grow with me. And these are those pants.
S3: These pants find you via a targeted ad.
S6: Yes. It was that uncanny feeling of ads on Instagram like responding to you are like you’re just like subconscious desires, like, oh, that’s perfectly targeted. That’s that’s for me. Even though I couldn’t tell you exactly how or why it would wind up for me for sure.
S3: So you’ve, like, fully walked your dog in these pants is what I’m getting.
S6: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve definitely been places and been like, huh, I’m wearing these pants to the supermarket. That’s what’s happening. And I there is actually like a moment where my wife was like, wow, you’re going to wear this outside. And I was like, yeah, yes, I am. You know, I guess that’s what’s happening.
S4: Hi, I’m Shannon Thalis and the senior editor at Slate, and I bought a lively bra on Instagram not one time, but twice, and I bought four of them and I hit you.
S3: Well, the twist ending there,
S4: I should say, to the first time I bought it, it was a pretty good bra for like three or four weeks, maybe a little bit longer. And then all of these little elastics started coming out to the point where someone all at one time was like that all. But the thing is, the issue is it was still pretty comfortable. And then during quarantine around Black Friday, Instagram ads started haunting me again. And I was like, OK, this bra is not a good bra, but it’s comfortable. And it just felt like the entire Black Friday policy of like, well, if I buy a lot of brown look like they will be cheaper. Yeah, I used to work at a wire cutter, which is a product review site. Like, I’m not naive when it comes to advertising get you bought.
S3: How many bras
S4: think this is this is part of who I am though. Yeah. Socketed.
S7: I’m Christina Quattrocchi, and the item I purchased is a wooden spoon with a large marble sphere on the end of it. I weighed it just before this recording. It weighs about two thirds of a pound, which is more than an appetizer spoon or serving spoon should weigh.
S2: What is the purpose of this spoon and how much did it cost?
S3: So there’s a company that
S7: makes such one chili, chris sauces, what have you that has been advertising to me on Instagram for probably years
S3: now. Was the the Instagram ad particularly like aesthetic. Yes. That sold you on the spoon. OK, talk to me about the energy of the kitchen you thought you were going to be in while using the spoon.
S7: It it was more like a nightclub vibe.
S3: So sorry. What.
S2: I’m sorry.
S7: Look, it was like dark background, like bright colors, maybe some lush greenery and then like a flashbulb aesthetics.
S3: Christina, I think you you need to describe the dimensions of your spoon a little bit more concretely.
S7: So it fits it actually fits perfectly into my mom. It’s probably like two and a half inches wide. Again, I must emphasize that it weighs two thirds and it’s already broken. It’s already.
S2: Oh, I thought that was intentional. I thought that was a part of the
S4: design, like dried up glue on the wall. It’s not even properly affixed to the marble. So I already have a repair about this. Thirty dollars.
S3: Thirty dollars.
S7: I still think it’ll look cute on an appetizer tray, but if it wasn’t well thought through at all by the people who designed it or the turkey border.
S1: I’m Oliker Frank, and once upon a time, Instagram convinced me to buy an item that I still have never receives, any time I go to a clothing store or anything that has tchotchkes, including necklaces or bracelets, I end up walking out with one at least, which is where Instagram comes in, because its ads are basically like stumbling upon something. So I bought this necklace. They sent me like a payment confirmation after that. No, not only did I never get a tracking number, I have never seen ads from this company ever again. Like, that’s how I don’t know what it’s called. I’ve never seen ads from them. I have no idea what happened. And I thought about it again, like three months later. And I found the order confirmation email that I got. So emailed them. And of course, I never heard back. And overall, it’s been like six months now. Probably never getting that. Beckwith’s probably never buying anything from Instagram again.
S2: What have you gone to the website since you’ve not received your purchase? Like, does the website still exist?
S1: So OK, so I sent the email to the support line and it didn’t bounce back. So like, even though they never replied, Oh, here it is. Oh, it’s still on the website. Wow. They have three left in stock and two are in cards. OK, so you still have them in stock.
S2: I want you to have this necklace. I want
S1: it to maybe I should actually try it
S2: again because the website is
S3: still there. If you don’t buy it again.
S2: No, if you’re going to, if you’re going to try again, follow up with them again. Don’t just
S3: buy. That one actually has kind of a happy ending because we were so persuasive, Alegra, hey, pal, I got her money back.
S2: It was truly, I think, the best ending that could have happened in that scenario. Like, I think if she had got the necklace four months later, it just wouldn’t have quite hit as good as getting that PayPal refund. Hopefully now that, you know, we’re all vaccinated
S3: or getting towards it,
S2: we’ll be able to go back to making these kind of rash shopping decisions. Iroh, where at least you you know what you’re getting into when you buy it.
S3: More nail polish. Here I come.
S2: All right, that’s the show will be back on your feet on Saturday, so definitely subscribe. It’s free so you never miss an episode and please leave a rating on review an Apple podcast and tell a friend it really helps us find new listeners. In the meantime, though, if you’ve got an Internet rabbit hole, you want us to go down.
S3: There is a tweet that several of your friends have texted you about and you cannot explain
S2: or you just want to know why everyone is talking about Natasha Bedingfield. But drop us a note. I see why Maya played Dotcom or find us on Twitter at the hashtag isoo. I am I.
S3: But this is an ass podcast now. I see Why Am I is produced by Daniel Shrader, our supervising producer is Derek John Forrest. Wickman is Slate’s culture editor and Gabe Roth is editorial director of Audio Seyou.
S2: Online or not.
