Spreading poison
The Tide Pod meme — posts and videos in which people joke about or pretend to eat detergent pucks because they have been designed to look like candy — has been around since at least 2015, when The Onion published this piece, a parody op-ed called "So Help Me God, I’m Going To Eat One Of Those Multicolored Detergent Pods," with a toddler pictured in the author photo. But it has recently seen a spike in prominence, as Brian Feldman details here, and seems in demand of an explanation.
But like many memes, the point of the Tide Pod meme is to be inexplicable. Every new deployment of it enhances the overall absurdity. Feldman likens the Tide Pod meme to the Harambe meme, which he describes as "a parody and referendum on online outrage culture." Tide Pod–eating, similarly, is a meta-meme in which the joke is on anyone who tries to interpret it or extract cheap conclusions from it. Indeed, I am falling into this trap by writing this.
As much as that trap obtains for writers, it appears to be worse for Tide's manufacturer, Procter & Gamble. Though it seems as though the meme has grown beyond the implicit critique of P&G's questionable design approach here — making poison look like a snack is probably as bad an idea as making it look like a fruit drink — there are still what the advertising industry refers to as "brand safety" concerns. The Tide Pod meme craze is in some ways just a vindication and celebration of P&G's design approach — make something that's dull as detergent into something that excites people. Now P&G supposedly must deal with the strategy being too successful, the Pods being too seductive.
When they were launched, the pods were heralded as a marketing coup, praised in this Ad Age piece for the "trust" they appeared to generate, thoughtfully allowing consumers not to waste detergent. But that reading is far more absurd than the explanation being that people want to eat them. It's clear that the Pods put a dainty patina of convenience and cleverness on what is basically a generic commodity: In an image-driven culture, why shouldn't detergent look delicious? The Pods looked like a lifestyle accoutrement, a pure expression of design for design's sake, and now people are accordingly flooding social media with them.
Now, as Feldman chronicles, P&G is using its social media accounts to ostensibly try to discourage this sort of engagement with its brand — viral marketing in reverse. Feldman suggests that this is the future of the old Situationist tactic of détournement, bombarding a targeted brand with too much love: "Tide Pods are the first step in a new age where — instead of resisting corporate meddling in the meme world — the established norms of social media are manipulated to force a company to participate in the culture in ways that run counter to its own interests." When companies try to go viral, make them viral with a vengeance.
But it is hardly too cynical to wonder if Tide is trying to foment discussion of the phenomenon it is supposedly trying to counteract, getting publicity for its product and the company's earnest good intentions in hoping children don't eat them. (Again, I am guilty of falling into the trap.) I can't imagine sales of Tide Pods are suffering. By seeming concerned online, P&G can stoke participation in the meme, and sustain the fantasy that this sort of culture jamming threatens brands instead of doing their marketing teams' work for them. As Feldman notes, the Tide Pod meme is "a global inside joke for fans of light trolling" — and corporations can safely volunteer to be the target of this sort of buffoonery in the schoolyard. But it is no longer a matter of rambunctious youth trying to mystify their parents — older people are giddily Tide Podding, a safe neutralizing outlet for any subversive impulses.
It makes more sense to regard the Tide Pod memes less as satire than nostalgia. They celebrate a kind of childish gullibility, the time in our lives when we didn't instinctively see everything as a marketing ploy, and might have innocently tried to eat a delicious looking cleaning product. The meme plays on a dream of willful stupidity, or what Baudrillard called "hyperconformity" — a sort of overload of obedience to marketing messages that turns them inside-out. It is a way to escape the consumerist pressure to perpetually want things, to evade having one's desire turned into a rationalized economic resource (consumer demand).
In "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media" Baudrillard likens our relationship to media-driven consumerism to a child's relation to their parents. "They are at the same time told to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free, and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive objects, inert, obedient, and conformist. The child resists on all levels, and to these contradictory demands replies with a double strategy. When we ask the child to be object, he or she opposes all the practices of disobedience ... when we ask the child to be subject, he or she opposes just as obstinately" with "exactly the opposite: infantilism, hyperconformity, total dependence, passivity, idiocy."
One can understand the Tide Pod meme, and many similar online games, in these terms — a deliberate willful regressiveness, a playful idiocy that feels defiant. The infantile reaction to anything beautiful is to stick in our mouth. But this mimed childishness is also a savvy attempt to resist being a savvy, discerning consumer; an attempt to play the rigged and unworthy game of consumerism to win and lose simultaneously. Eating to clean one's inner self, having one's mouth washed out with soap. Fantasies of the cleanse. If the present "argument of the system is to maximize speech" — as social media platforms explicitly demand we do, for their benefit — then one strategy of resistance, Baudrillard insists, is "hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is another form of refusal by overacceptance."
Participatory brand culture always walks this line of overacceptance, of parody, of endorsement carrying over into effacement. Tide Pod meme-ing is more like fan fiction than trolling, or brand trolling is always a kind of fan fiction. To love Tide Pods so much that one loves oneself more for loving them, and the new and more devotional ways to use them.