TBH I think it's because people mostly use news for entertainment and everything gets old.
solarpunk memes
For when you need a laugh!
The definition of a "meme" here is intentionally pretty loose. Images, screenshots, and the like are welcome!
But, keep it lighthearted and/or within our server's ideals.
Posts and comments that are hateful, trolling, inciting, and/or overly negative will be removed at the moderators' discretion.
Please follow all slrpnk.net rules and community guidelines
Have fun!
I actually saw her in the news 2 weeks ago about her trip to gaza. Must just be your echo chamber that stopped caring about her.
As a 'climate activist' she started as a parody, passionate and articulate about a hot topic but dismissable as a child. But when you start to say certain things, you lose broad appeal. You can go out and rail against the 'elites' 'rigging the system' to 'keep us down' but the moment you say the 'bourgeoisie' are 'exploiting the workers' and 'using capital to wage a class war,' you are not getting broadcast, and not being listened to by many people. People love Marxism by other terms but if you use the Marxist words, you won't be taken seriously.
It seems in general that attention isn't even On climate change like it was before covid. The news platforms are filled with populist governments wars and genocides. Eve. Though climate change is the greatest existential threat it's ability ro grab attention has faded
Climate change is brought to you by lobbying networks that spans multiple industries. Why stop us when we can convince you to just let us.
We don't want to actually fix the causes of climate change, that would be silly and harm to the poor billionaires.
We want you to think its your fault, and to stop using plastic straws.
Because the people that own the media platforms that would provide coverage are greedy capitalists and Greta just doesn't bring in the viewership.
She's always made that connection.. since day one. The whole "How dare you!?" Speech was about people still only talking about making profits of climate change rather then doung Everything to prevent more change from happening.
The reason she's not the center of media attention any more is because she's been the center of attention for years already and viewers/readers aren't as interested in her any more. Her name doesn't pull as much attention any more.
What a mystery…
It is kinda like with Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Hampton. It is very sus that they are killed once they started organising for class solidarity, regardless of colour, and speaking about wealth inequality.
What is the name of the Arab girl that advocated for girls education on the Arab world? She was also blocked out by the media the second she started talking about socialism and the injustices that the capitalist system brings in.
Indeed, first time I hear about this aspect of Malala Yousafzai's activism. Thank you, wow.
For context: https://socialistworker.org/2014/10/15/the-malala-you-wont-hear-about (Compare also this thread, where someone makes clear that her being involved with socialism is no misunderstanding.)
Malala Yousafzai
Edit: a couple corrections.
She's Pashtun (Pakistani), not arab, but she is a practicing Muslim. She was fighting against the Taliban's ban on girls from education, which is not a feature of the rest of the muslim world. It's a feature of extreme fundamentalism, of any religion, not of Islam.
Did you read her book? I have it on my TBR list but it is a long list. I usually like to read fiction but try to do a nonfiction/memoir in about every 3-4 books (I read about 5/wk which varies d/t length).
Wasn't she on those topics pretty much from the beginning? I think it really just boils down to the media (and people in general) just moved on to the next story. Greta's initial appeal was that she was a kid who was effecting change and reactions. These days she's just another 20-something that shows up at protests and people upvote on social media.
A lot of people in the comments are talking about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. as comparisons, but where they differ from Greta is that they started with protests but were able to successfully fold that into movements and action. X and King didn't just protest, they didn't just yell at the walls of the establishment and demand change. King was the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference which organized protests, but also helped mobilize voters, lobbied congress, and helped to draft legislation. X was part of the Nation of Islam which was a particularly powerful group in the 1960's which challenged Civil Rights issues in the court system.
For a long time Greta really hasn't had much to add to the discussion on climate change other than to say stop doing what we are doing. She's not part of some powerful organization, she's not lobbying governments, she's not challenging issues in the courts, and she's not proposing solutions, she's just pointing out the problems everyone already knows exists and powerful governments are already ignoring.
I think she's closer to Rosa Parks - she's a symbol fighting the good fight, but not the leader of the movement
FWIW Rosa Parks was part of an organization with a plan to achieve its goals. I wish the same were true of Greta.
True, the whole bus sit ins were planned. She wasn’t even the first one to do it.
I dunno but I think originally she was riding the "kid activist" clout. No offense but there are plenty of disaffected adults who dont have the media up their ass for no particular reason.
I think the media coverage drop off is due to her getting older (and thus more "ordinary" - less newsworthy), and due to her not changing her issues or opinions much (and thus there is nothing "new," to report). Our newstainment system wants new and fresh and cute. Not serious and persistent.
The ship she was planning on boarding to Gaza was literally attacked by Israel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Gaza_Freedom_Flotilla_incident
There is plenty newsworthy here.
Counterpoint: Israel attacks absolutely everything around it for no fukken reason, so nit newsworthy.
Counter-counter-point: Greta is a story of violence against a pretty white girl which all else being equal would normally mean big media attention in western media. But it isn’t getting much attention because it doesn’t play into the interests of the western corpo-state.
Contrast the coverage of what happened to Greta to the recent shooting of the Israeli diplomats.
You are not wrong, but I don’t want to admit that you are right since it’s so depressing
Our newstainment system wants new and fresh and cute. Not serious and persistent.
Don't derail the attention somewhere else. News are mostly about the same popular people who have been under the spotlight for decades, there actually no much space for neither fresh or cute. It is implied in the picture why the media coverage drop.
I see her on reddit every month with whatever new thing she got arrested for. Those are news articles links.
When Martin Luther King Jr. moved beyond equal rights for black people into protesting the Vietnam War and capitalism in general, he took a bullet to the face. I suppose Greta can consider herself lucky - so far.
Dr. King, Malcom, JFK, etc. etc.
There is no justice in this world. If youre out there believing in people I'm out here looking for you. Please give a sign.
Because governments were only using her for greenwashing and control public opinion.
Greta Thunberg's name will be penned next to Malcolm X and Mahatma Gandhi in the history books of the future.
I wonder if those books will have a note how Thunberg's name was one of the earlier examples of large-scale manufactured character lynching.
It was clear early on how capital felt about Thunberg that every media outlet seemed keenly interested in reporting not on what her message was, but about how people online hated her and were making memes about her, and the threats and backlash she received for doing things like... checks notes ...traveling places.
She has been and continues to be objectively correct, her early messages where she said "shame on you" to the world's economic giants have been made out to sound "cringe" in young people's media circles and people still share and distribute images her making a funny face.
People are SO FUCKING SUSCEPTIBLE to this manufactured attitude, I had endless arguments on reddit on left-leaning, environmentalist communities with people who were like "Yeah we need to care about the environment, but do we really need her speaking for us? She's all kinds of problematic" without being able to cite a single fucking thing she said that was wrong or bad.
You ALL need to understand this: When you see someone react to someone or something, you internalize that reaction whether you realize it or not. Your brain looks for patterns constantly. When you see things that repeat, when you see things that fit a pattern already establishing, your brain solidifies these associations.
When some right-wing chud shares an image of Thunberg or any activist making a weird face and say "total cringe" it doesn't matter if you're currently chained to a tree while you're scrolling, your brain will attach to that association unless you make active efforts to de-conflate it in your mind. This is why so many people move right when we have a right-wing leader, this is why we have so many people dying on whatever hill Elon Musk points at. This is why most voters decided that it was "more interesting" to vote for Trump or just stay home. This is being done to you all on purpose.
As you add more and more issues to the protests, the set of people that have the same opinion on every single issue gets smaller and smaller, until your movement falls apart.
In Germany around the same time, climate protests started to take stances on immigration and cultural approbation and also fell apart as a result.
The movement is stronger than ever. The coverage has disappeared, but there are more and more people willing to seek out every right answer and give up every privilege.
Centrists and right-wingers keep pretending that solidarity and radicalism makes movements weak, when it has always made them stronger. The moment Labor parties abandoned radicalism and chose the Third Way, their voter share dropped off a cliff. The moment movements abandon their most radical left-wing contributors to appeal to the lowest common denominator they collapse from in-fighting and the hardest workers moving off.
There is no Schelling point for less-than-complete justice. Nations, religions, ethnicities, even capital is just one of countless different ways to slice the pie and pretend that the hurt you suffer is more urgent and in-scope than someone else's. If you morally accept rallying to one subgroup, then you have no defense against others you depend on from rallying to another subgroup and coming into opposition with you. There is no way around it:
None of us are free until all of us are free.
Brother I don't even know how you plan to sit here and pretend like those are separate issues. You can't separate capitalism and climate change. You simply cannot.
That's not the point they're making.
As you add more issues, then the Venn diagram of overlap of all the issues gets smaller and smaller. It doesn't matter if you think this is an obvious objective truth. What matters is what other people think, because you won't have much of a "movement" without other people who agree and join you.
I remember smear pieces from German press after October 7 2023, where they claimed Greta would have fallen in the eyes of the world. The idea that "the world" may not follow the same narratives as Germany seemed to be beyond comprehension for those writers.