(Roughly) Daily

In his invaluable newsletter, Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick unpacks the full– and forlorn— story of the online travails of Kate Middleton (AKA Catherine, the Princess of Wales) and considers its implications…

… As Charlie Warzel wrote, “It was always going to end this way. The truth about Kate Middleton’s absence is far less funny, whimsical, or salacious than the endless memes and conspiracy theories suggested.” But this also wasn’t a simple case of the unruly masses being Bad Online.

Yes, the #WhereIsKate hashtag was initially spread by the Sussex Squad, a royal fandom subculture that hates Prince William and believes Kate is, at best, sort of racist. And a lot of the early gossip was motivated by an impulse to give Kate a taste of what Meghan Markle is still experiencing at the hands of the UK media. But if you’re looking for someone to blame all of this on, it’s clearly Kate’s press team and, by extension, everyone in her life that supposedly cares about her. There were countless moments where her press team could have squashed all this, but they didn’t. Instead, they let a woman who had just discovered she has cancer become a global laughing stock and, at one point, made her apologize for it! Absolute sicko shit. 

But this is also just how our various institutions work — or more accurately do not work — now. Over the last 25 years we have slowly uploaded every part of our lives to a system of platforms run by algorithms that make money off our worst impulses. Well, the ones brands are comfortable advertising around. And for years we have wondered what the world might look like when we crossed the threshold into a fully online world. Well, we did. We crossed it. This is what it looks like. And it is already too vast and complicated and all-encompassing to blame any one individual for how it functions. If we want something new, we’d have to smash the whole thing and I don’t think that’s going to happen. So let’s hope PR people, at the very least, can figure out how to deal with it going forward…

Those of us in post-colonial North America, might ponder the implications of this sad tale for matters closer to home– public health, meme stocks, and perhaps especially our looming elections…

The saga of #WhereIsKate: “How we got here,” from @broderick.

* Eleanor Roosevelt

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As we lean back and think, we might recall that it was on this date in 1881 that a celebrated hoaxster took on partners: “P.T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Circus: The Greatest Show on Earth” joined forces with James Bailey and James Hutchinson. By 1887, the re-branded circus went by the name “The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth.” 

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