Nov 12, 20265 min read

Today in Viral Internet: November 12

A context free tweet account, a puppet the internet renamed, a console nobody could find and an embassy that closed for one day. November 12 keeps breaking the feed.

OMYGOTTI

Toronto hip-hop artist | 730K+ Facebook

2013

NYT Minus Context Is Born

On November 12, 2013, the account NYT Minus Context appeared on Twitter, built on a simple and durable joke. It lifted single phrases out of New York Times articles and posted them alone, where perfectly normal reporting suddenly read as surreal, ominous or very funny. Know Your Meme week in memes review for November 2013 calls it one of the platform most beloved accounts and credits it with starting a wave.

The format outlived the account. Sports broadcasts, television shows, song lyrics and group chats all got the minus context treatment, with fans posting lines stripped of the framing that made them sensible. It was an early proof that on the social internet, removing context is not just a failure mode. In the right hands it is a comedy engine, and November 12 is the day that engine turned over.

My take: My take: every out of context account on your timeline today is paying quiet rent to an idea born on this date in 2013.

2019

Disney Plus Launches, Baby Yoda Lands

Disney Plus launched in the United States, Canada and the Netherlands on November 12, 2019, and its flagship series The Mandalorian premiered the same day. At the end of that first episode, the bounty hunter opened a pod and the internet met a 50 year old infant of Yoda species. Disney called him The Child. The internet, within hours, called him Baby Yoda, and the internet name is the one history kept.

The numbers behind the meme were serious business. Disney reported 10 million sign ups on day one, and by the end of 2019 the service had reached 26.5 million subscribers, growth that Digital Trends and Fast Company both tied directly to Mandalorian and Baby Yoda pull. ScreenRant anniversary writing notes the character became a viral sensation almost overnight. A streaming service is an app and a library. Baby Yoda gave it a face, and the face fit in a meme.

My take: My take: Netflix spent years teaching people to stream. Disney spent one evening teaching them to post. The green kid did what a century of catalogue could not do alone.

2020

PS5 Launch Day Breaks The Timeline

Sony launched the PlayStation 5 on November 12, 2020 in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, North America and South Korea, with the rest of the world following a week later. PlayStation own history calls it the biggest console launch in history at the time, achieved in the middle of a global pandemic, when most consoles were sold online in drops that vanished in minutes.

That scarcity is what made launch day a viral event rather than a retail one. Timelines filled with crashed carts, queue screenshots, bot complaints and the lucky few posting the console on their stands like a trophy. Reviews of the era put the two models at 499 and 399 dollars in the United States, numbers that mattered less than the simple question dominating every feed that week. Did you get one. For months, almost nobody did, and the hunt itself became the content.

My take: My take: the PS5 was the first console launched by refresh button. November 12, 2020 taught every brand after it that a drop is a show.

2024

DOGE Goes From Meme To Letterhead

On November 12, 2024, President elect Donald Trump announced that Elon Musk would lead a new Department of Government Efficiency, shortened to DOGE. The name was a direct reference to the Doge meme, the Shiba Inu photograph that became one of the defining jokes of 2013 and later lent its name and face to the Dogecoin cryptocurrency launched that December.

Whatever a person politics, the internet history point is hard to argue with. A picture of a dog, captioned in broken English in Comic Sans, travelled from blogs to Reddit to a joke currency to the name of a proposed arm of the United States government in eleven years. Meme scholars at Know Your Meme had named Doge the top meme of its year back in 2013. Nobody at the time, on any side, predicted the letterhead.

My take: My take: this is the longest distance any meme has ever travelled. From a dog photo to a government acronym, with a stop at a currency on the way.

2026

Finland Embassy Meme Reaches The Presidents

The newest November 12 entry is still warm. The Embassy of Finland in Canberra posted a routine notice that it would close on Tuesday, November 10 for an internal planning day, set to northern lights footage, and the internet decided to treat a one day closure as an international incident. Europe Says coverage counts more than 11 million views on Instagram, while other reporting put the embassy recent posts far higher, and the comments filled with people joking that their whole trip had been planned around the visit.

On November 12 the joke reached the top of two governments. Finnish President Alexander Stubb posted a selfie with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the COP31 summit in Türkiye confirming that the embassy was open, and the embassy itself marked its reopening with a ribbon cutting and a statement about 24 harrowing hours and an outpouring of solidarity. A planning day notice is the least viral document an institution can produce. The algorithm disagreed, and two heads of government ended up doing the punchline.

My take: My take: nobody can manufacture this. An embassy, a piano track and the northern lights beat every planned campaign on the internet this week.