GameStop, a video game store, saw its stock go from about $18 a share to $325 over the course of January 2021. AMC movie theaters also saw a ridiculous run-up in their stock prices. The cause was young goofy, very online investors having fun wreaking havoc on a lark.
These became known as “meme stocks.” That is, their price was set by the frivolity of internet dwellers.
Now it’s spread, and March 2022 saw what could be called a “Meme Bill”: The Senate unanimously passed a bill with basically no debate or research or hearings, because (LOL) senators liked to complain about changing their clocks.
Yes, social media gripes about time changes fueled the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body to pass a bill establishing permanent daylight saving time.
Social media has always been good mostly for people expressing their petty gripes or inane opinions. I hate the word “moist!” Die Hard is a Christmas movie! Candy corn is the worst! Thanksgiving turkey is too dry!
Sometimes those gripes lead to real-world individual action, such as finding ways to make our Thanksgiving turkey moister. Sometimes, those gripes end up as legislation, though.
Back before social media, adults loved to groan about waking up an hour earlier on the first Sunday and Monday of daylight saving time in the spring. Usually, you heard it only from your roommates, your wife, your husband, or your colleagues. By Tuesday, most grownups had adjusted their sleep schedules, though, and quit griping.
Parents would notice that the end of daylight saving time provided another bother: Young children didn’t get the memo, and there was no such thing as “an extra hour of sleep.” This messed up a single Sunday morning a year in exchange for maximizing, throughout the year, the amount of daylight that fell between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m.
But Twitter and Facebook provided a place for these small semiannual gripes to get together, multiply, and start to look like something bigger. For politicians, griping on social media about petty annoyances of ordinary life is an easy way to seem relatable. Followers chuckled and laughed along. Soon we all forgot it was a joke.
The next thing we knew, the Senate passed a bill (sponsored by a senator from Florida, which has nearly the least variation in daylight hours throughout the year) that would relegate children in the Northern states to walking to school in the pitch black. Even in the mid-Atlantic, many places wouldn’t see the sun rise until close to 9 a.m. if we switched to permanent daylight saving time.
Why would a big decision like this pass so easily? Our brains have been altered, it turns out, and made incurably frivolous by social media. LOL!
