🎉 Announcing: The Meme in the Moment Festival - Make It Spoopy 🎃
NYC's Festival of Memes Returns to Caveat on Wednesday, October 27. Tickets now available! 🎟
Digital Void: The Meme in the Moment Festival: Make It Spoopy 🎃 & Meme Costume Party 🎈🎊
Meme Magic. Ethically Sourced Bones. Skeletor. Dancing Pumpkins. Memes have taken center stage in the world — but are we influencing memes, or are they influencing us?
The Meme in the Moment Festival: Make it Spoopy is an interactive Halloween-themed festival with the internet’s most critical, fun, and engaging meme thinkers. We’re bringing together academics, journalists, and speakers to help us understand how memes influence our daily lives, how memes travel from the internet into physical spaces, how we can speak about them in our daily lives, and how we can strengthen our cultural immune response to memes at a moment where memes are central to discourse.
From political movements to group chats and Gamestop stocks to identifying dangerous, extremist dog whistles, the Meme in the Moment will leave you wondering what memes *really* mean in the moment, and make you consider how we can become more resilient from discussing them in physical spaces.
Plus: The audience is also encouraged to attend wearing an internet-themed costume. Audience members can win free drink tickets and surprise spoopy gifts.
Featuring:
Ryan Broderick is a journalist, video producer, podcaster, and community moderator. He's the writer of the Garbage Day newsletter and the host of The Content Mines Podcast.
Dr. Jamie Cohen is a digital culture expert and a writer, speaker, educator, and producer. He founded a college degree in internet studies, wrote a textbook on the subject and is the co-author of the first peer reviewed paper on Pepe the Frog.
Kalhan Rosenblatt is a 31-year-old teenager and NBC News Digital’s youth and internet culture reporter, covering all things memes, teens and social media. She specializes in covering TikTok, including both the trends that have emerged from the platform and the ways in which those trends influence the behavior of young people. When she’s not working, she spends way too much of her time — you guessed it — scrolling TikTok.
Makena Kelly is a policy reporter at The Verge, covering companies like Facebook and Google and how lawmakers might regulate them for the past three years. Kelly is also interested in the ways politicians and advocates leverage social media to run for office and organize.
Rachel E. Greenspan is an editor on the Digital Culture desk at Insider with expertise covering online misinformation and disinformation, far-right extremism and right-wing media, and conspiracy theories like QAnon. In 2021, she won an inaugural American Journalism Online Award from NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute for her coverage of QAnon.
Moises Mendez II is a freelance culture writer covering digital culture and entertainment through the lens of race, gender, and sexuality. With that, he covers celebrity controversies on social media, influencer drama, LGBTQ+ online culture, and the adult entertainment industry.
Costume Policy: Caveat and Digital Void maintain a strict sensitivity policy. No blackface, yellowface, or culturally/racially/sexually appropriating or sensitive costumes allowed. Caveat and Digital Void work to promote an open and inclusive space to make learning fun for all.