• Someone makes meme
• People like it and join in
• Brand sees attention and wants to be ‘hip’
• Brand co-opts meme and draws in other brands
• Meme is no longer cool, now it’s just brand memeing at brand

In 2010, reddit had a popular sub called Random Acts of Pizza that had people being kind to one another and donating an ordered pizza to a stranger. Here’s a news article about it: https://abcnews.go.com/US/random-acts-pizza-donate/story?id=13950694

The next year, Mars chocolate filed for a trademark on a new ad campaign “Random Acts of Chocolate” aiming to convince people to “buy an extra pack of chocolate for a friend.” Here’s an article about it: http://www.oneincomedollar.com/2011/04/mars-random-acts-of-chocolate-campaign_01.html

This is about how corporations steal anything interesting from the public sphere, co-opt it, and make it a shell of what it was, to shill their products. This goes for things like Random Acts of Pizza, but it also goes for memes.

The second corporations start using memes as an ad to sell shit, the meme is effectively dead, because who fucking cares about what some bullshit ass marketing team thinks about it?

Another way to describe it is Capitalistic Recuperation. From Wikipedia:

In the sociological sense, recuperation is the process by which politically radical ideas and images are twisted, co-opted, absorbed, defused, incorporated, annexed or commodified within media culture and bourgeois society, and thus become interpreted through a neutralized, innocuous or more socially conventional perspective. More broadly, it may refer to the cultural appropriation of any subversive symbols or ideas by mainstream culture.

If there is one thing capitalism excels at, it’s taking ideas from the public and claiming them as their own, twisting them to their own ends.

Corporations ruin everything