ICYMI x NP: How Kate Middleton's Disappearance Redefined Monoculture
Friends, hello, and welcome to Neverpost. A podcast about and for the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Rugnetta. And this week, we have a very special episode. A very special set of episodes, in fact.
Mike Rugnetta:What you are about to hear is the first in a 2 part series, the collaboration with Slate's Internet culture podcast, Icymi, which if you are not listening to it, if you are not subscribed, you gotta. It is so good. It is one of the favorite shows amongst all the staff at Never Post. Icymi wherever you get podcasts. In this first episode, which you can also hear in their feed, I join ICYMI hosts, Rachel and Candace, to develop a way of understanding monocultural events online.
Mike Rugnetta:Think about things like, Ocean Gate. Think Ever Given, Stuck in the Suez Canal. Think, Kate Middleton. When these events happen, why do they become so pervasive online? What elements do they need to become so impactful?
Mike Rugnetta:That's what we talk about in this episode. In the second episode of this 2 part series, which will be out on both the Never Post and the ICYMI feeds on Saturday, I chat with an expert about conspiracy theories that pop up around these events, and Rachel, Candice, Jason, and I talk about the merriment and social hangover of posting about these things. What it feels like to be caught up in these moments, posting up a storm about these sometimes low information events. It's a multi part Internet extravaganza. I think you're gonna love it.
Mike Rugnetta:We had a blast making it. And once it's all done, please again, make sure you go subscribe to IC 1MI.
Rachelle Hampton:Hey. I'm Rachel Hampton.
Candice Lim:And I'm Candice Lim, and you're listening to Icymy.
Rachelle Hampton:In case
Candice Lim:you missed it. Sleep's podcast about Internet culture.
Rachelle Hampton:And this week, we've got something super fun cooked up for y'all. Today, we've got Mike Rugnetta in the studio with us. Mike is an audio extraordinaire. He created the sound studies podcast, Reasonably Sound. He's consulted, produced, and executive produced on a number of podcasts, including the Long Reads podcast, and he's the cohost of Neverpost, an incredible new podcast about the Internet that launched this year.
Rachelle Hampton:We are collaborating with Mike and the Neverpost team to bring you this week's episode. But before we get into the magic we have made together, let's welcome Mike to the show. Mike, hello. Hello.
Mike Rugnetta:It's very, very nice to be here.
Candice Lim:We're so excited to have you here, Mike. And we do have to ask you the question we ask all of our first time guests, which is, what's your first Internet memory?
Mike Rugnetta:So knowing this was coming, I racked my brain trying to figure out, you know, what comes before what? They're so old at this point, they all kinda like glom together. And I think my earliest memory is my cousin, his family, his house, they had Internet before we did, and he lived, like, half a mile down the street from me. So we were in the computer room on what browser I couldn't tell you. Maybe Internet Explorer?
Mike Rugnetta:Like, this would have been, like, 1993, maybe 1994, just literally like typing things into the location bar, trying to see if they were websites. Oh. Random, just like words and phrases dot com, just to see what was out there.
Rachelle Hampton:I have been there. My first website that I went to consistently was a website that me and my older brother found called stupid.com, which lets you know that we were doing the exact same thing that you and
Rachelle Hampton:your husband were doing.
Rachelle Hampton:We have one other question for you that we think is probably relevant to today's episode, a little teaser, which is what is your first memory of the British royal family?
Mike Rugnetta:I have an early memory of being, like, maybe 9 years old, visiting London with my parents and seeing Buckingham Palace, and knowing that, like, important people live in there and that they're royals. But I think probably my first memory of a member of the royal family as an individual person was it's gotta be the death of Diana. I don't think it's anything else. It's gotta be that.
Rachelle Hampton:Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I actually wanna ask you that question as well, Candace, because both of us were perhaps not holding our heads up at the time that Princess Diana died. And you've said on the pod before that you were up at the ass crack of dawn to watch Kate and William's wedding, which, you know, suggests to me that you had some familiarity with them before that auspicious day.
Candice Lim:Yeah. I've been a royal watcher for about 13 years now, and I will say, I think this all started near the womb for me because the first rule of immigrant culture is you never get over princess Diana. And so I was born the same year she died. It has been trained into me that you just never stop talking about it. It is a thing that will unite all immigrant mothers and women together.
Candice Lim:It's in the fabric of our lives. But what about you, Rachel?
Rachelle Hampton:I've been thinking about this for a while because I'm pretty sure I encountered news about the royal family while, you know, browsing tabloids in the grocery store line while you were waiting for your mom to check out or while you were panicking because she left you at the line to go pick something else, and you're like, I don't have money. I'm a child. Gotcha trust thinking about that. But, honestly, the moment that I think I first fully recall might have been Kate and William's wedding, honestly. Sure.
Rachelle Hampton:I really don't think I started tapping in until Meghan Markle arrived on the scene, and despite the fact that I feel like a lot of black women, like, American black women also feel a deep kinship with princess Diana along with, like, immigrants of the British Empire. I just I wasn't really paying attention for a really long time, and I don't think my family cared that much either.
Candice Lim:Yeah. Well, we're talking about the royal family today because that is the topic of today and Saturday's episodes.
Mike Rugnetta:So I see YMI and Never Post. We have been tossing around, an idea for a collaboration since February. And over the course of a bunch of meetings, emails, all the calendar invites you can imagine, The thing that we keep coming back to, which I think was the first thing that we ever even talked about Yeah. It's the royal family. Specifically the massive hullabaloo around the whereabouts, the mystery surrounding the princess of Wales, Kate Middleton.
Rachelle Hampton:Yeah. I think it was it really got all of us interested as soon as we brought it up in the meetings.
Mike Rugnetta:It was definitely like a spark of a moment. Very clear that we all had something to say. So it's been at the time that we're recording this, it's been just over a month since Kate announced that she started chemotherapy treatments following a cancer diagnosis, which means that it's also been just over a month since conspiracy theories about the princess ran rampant across the Internet, inspired by the fact that before her March announcement, Kate hadn't been seen publicly since Christmas of 2023. So a long, long time disappeared.
Candice Lim:And the palace had forewarned that due to an abdominal surgery operation planned for January, it wasn't likely that Kate would resume her public duties until Easter. And as Constance Grady over at Vox wrote, quote, although Kate stuck to her schedule, the long pause in her public appearances and the lack of concrete information about her health created a fertile breeding ground for conspiracy theories. When prince William canceled a planned appearance of his own on February 27th, citing a personal matter, rumors began to fly. Mhmm.
Rachelle Hampton:Rumors that y'all might remember we touched on here on ICYMI. Famously, I thought she was getting a BBL, and we promised to discuss this more in-depth. But in light of Kate's cancer announcement we wanted to take a step back and really think about how and why things shook out the way they did. Why did Kate's disappearance from public duties engender so much speculation? How did the royal family, one of the longest enduring institutions in human history, managed to successfully manage a news cycle around Charles's cancer diagnosis and so spectacularly fuck up the one around Kate's.
Rachelle Hampton:And my personal most important question Am I a bad person for taking joy in the rumors that suggest Kate was off getting a BBL?
Mike Rugnetta:The question that our teams keep coming back to are really broad, which are basically, it's like in an increasingly algorithmic Internet, as we get siloed further and further into our own little content niches, all consuming events like Kate Middleton's cancer diagnosis, these events that capture the attention of broad swaths of the public, those feel like those are fewer and further between. So we were just wondering, like, what does it take in 2024 to do that? What is the recipe for these rare monocultural moments?
Candice Lim:Mhmm. And we're gonna answer all of these questions after a short break.
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Rachelle Hampton:And we're back. So one of my favorite discussions we had about figuring out this episode was kind of ruminating on what a moment needed to be monocultural, both historically and in this current Internet age. And we came up with this taxonomy of sorts, which I'm obsessed with. Basically, 5 to 6 key ingredients that are needed for an event to go from sort of a big deal to something that it seems like everyone is talking about. Think ocean gate, think fire festival, think big boat stuck in the Suez Canal, words or phrases that immediately conjure a memory of feverishly scrolling Twitter or TikTok for more information, more jokes, more theories.
Mike Rugnetta:Right. Which brings us to the first ingredient of the monocultural moment recipe that we came up with. The gap. Not the one in the mall, but the one in understanding. An information vacuum, something that feels increasingly rare online.
Mike Rugnetta:If anything, I think often the opposite is true. I wanna know less about the stuff that I see in my feed.
Rachelle Hampton:Same. We should all know less about each other.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. There's just it's too much. With Ocean Gate, for example, the viewing public had 4 days between the submersible losing contact with its mother ship to then divers finding the debris field. News outlets, however, ran with the story immediately. The New York Times had a live blog.
Mike Rugnetta:There were countdown clocks for oxygen levels. Countless experts conveyor belted by to explain everything from the mechanics of an implosion to the history of deep sea rescues.
Rachelle Hampton:There was a sort of perfect paradoxical moment in those 4 days where we were being bombarded with or in my case, seeking out a lot of information on concepts like the abyssal zone and the difference between, you know, a giant and a colossal squid, the family tree of king princess. But none of the information was about what we kind of actually cared about, which was the fates of the passengers on the submersible. Mhmm.
Candice Lim:And I wanna hone in on that paradox for a moment because like Mike said, the overwhelming experience of being on the Internet today is being bombarded with too much information. I think there's this real way that people's brains break a little bit when something isn't discoverable on the Internet. And they go, well, maybe you haven't found the answer, but I will. And I think that's kind of where the theory start forming.
Mike Rugnetta:Yes. Exactly. Which brings us to the second ingredient in the recipe, clear and recognizable characters. So with Ocean Gate, there was the company CEO, Stockton Rush, who you might have heard was married to the great great granddaughter of Ida and Isadore Strauss, one time owner of the Macy's department store, and both of whom died on the Titanic. Mhmm.
Mike Rugnetta:The wreckage of which was, of course, the sub's Final Destination. James Cameron himself could not have scripted a better character to be at the center of this deep sea tragedy. Also, Final Destination, too much? Okay? Too much?
Rachelle Hampton:I love it. I mentioned the boat stuck in the Suez Canal at the top of this segment. I think in lieu of any immediate hero or antihero, the boat itself, the Ever Given ended up taking on some anthropomorphic qualities during the 6 days when it was run aground, which can we pause and remember that that only lasted 6 days? I thought it was a month. I looked back and was like, oh, that lasted for a whole month.
Rachelle Hampton:Right? No. It was it was 6 days.
Mike Rugnetta:You felt
Mike Rugnetta:like an age. Yeah.
Rachelle Hampton:But the girlies were out here writing fan fiction about the Ever Given and the Suez Canal together. So even if there aren't human characters as compelling as Stockton Rush, we will make some up.
Candice Lim:Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And the next two requirements we have on our list, I think, actually fall under the heading of characters because for every hero, you need an anti hero, which means for every monocultural event, it's even better if there are perpetrators and if those perpetrators are rich people. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Rachelle Hampton:Yes. Totally.
Candice Lim:Yeah. You know, you mentioned Fyre Festival as one of these monocultural Internet events. You know, the perpetrator there was clearly Billy Mcfarland. And he somehow managed to give us a golden moment where a rich person was scamming other rich people. Like, I don't think that would have been nearly as big of a deal if the people involved hadn't spent 1,000 of dollars to go to this festival.
Candice Lim:There was a real eat the rich vibe.
Mike Rugnetta:And, I mean, you know, what else would they have eaten on that island? We all saw pictures of those sandwiches.
Rachelle Hampton:We did.
Mike Rugnetta:The sad salad really is stuck in my brain. Yeah. Ocean gate also had a similar vibe, I think. There wasn't a lot of love lost as far as the public was concerned for the hubristic, founder heir to dual fortunes, both Macy's and, Stockton Rush's, I think, great grandfather was the one time director of Standard Oil, or his passengers who were paying a quarter of a $1,000,000 to do something that most people wouldn't do if you paid them a quarter of a $1,000,000. And the counterexample I think is, like, a lot of interest in the Key Bridge collapsing, disappeared as soon as it became clear that most of the victims were undocumented immigrants, the men who were working on the bridge, at the time that it collapsed.
Mike Rugnetta:And I think, you know, you could argue that that's because people don't care about the working class. They don't care about the immigrant population. But I think you could also argue that, like, the story didn't really have legs because people aren't interested in a tragedy that doesn't have imminently dunk honorable characters.
Rachelle Hampton:I think you're right. We wanna kinda feel guilt free in our dunking, which makes me wanna ask, do we still think the ever given counts is one of these monocultural moments? Because I don't know if there were perpetrators or rich people necessarily involved in that one.
Mike Rugnetta:I could see it both ways. I think there is maybe something fundamentally hubristic about global logistics That it's like, you know, the giant container ship moving massive amounts of product is it really gives you an insight into how fragile the things that we think of as being very normal really are, And the, like, structures that allow those things to exist are just like these massive, massive companies that are putting a giant boat in probably a slightly too big canal. And so, like, you know, you could get this sense of like, listen, everybody's just gotta calm down a little bit. You you know, we're we're doing too much.
Candice Lim:Yeah. There's definitely this idea of, like, all of these people involved who are quote losing money from this are like shipping magnets. They're fine. They have other boats. They have other big boxes.
Candice Lim:I will also say as we go through this list of tenants, I think as long as you hit, like, an 80% mark, you know, you hit at least 80%, then we're gonna give you the monoculture status. And therefore, I think it counts.
Rachelle Hampton:I love it. We're grading on a curve here. I have one more question, which it seems like we as a culture are really interested in seeing rich people suffer. Like, what we're talking about here is that for a monocultural moment to really succeed, there has to be a rich person perhaps dying, but definitely flopping publicly. Mhmm.
Rachelle Hampton:Why do we think that is?
Candice Lim:I think lack of empathy is one thing. This idea that if you have everything in the world from privilege to the riches to just like a safety net onto which you can fall, can you really flop so hard it would destroy you? Can you really?
Mike Rugnetta:I think a lot of people feel really powerless, in the world, and they feel like there's nothing really they can do to escape their lot, and that they are constantly shown images of people who are doing a lot better than them. And especially as far as, like, finance and corporate culture is concerned, it's like these are people who control a lot of the world, and you hear a lot about the things that people who run large companies do to maximize profits at the cost of the, livelihoods of their employees, their quality of their life, you know, their working conditions. It feels like it's just so hard to fix. It doesn't feel like it's something that you can, like, ever really do anything about. And it feels like for a lot of those people, especially for the ultra wealthy, there are no consequences.
Mike Rugnetta:So the moment that there's like any kind of consequences, especially if they're related to something that seems like a bad idea to begin with, I think all bets are off. I think people just feel like, you know, you you get you got what you deserved. You should've known better. You shouldn't have played. You fucked around.
Mike Rugnetta:You found out. Like, there's there's no other way to put it.
Candice Lim:As we ponder why rich people do what they do, I do wanna ask, what is next on our taxonomy?
Rachelle Hampton:Okay. So this is my personal favorite on this list, and I think my most strongly held requirement on this list for what makes a monocultural moment, which is someone needs to be stuck inside something. Someone needs to have disappeared. Fyre Festival, they were on an island. There's literal movies about this.
Rachelle Hampton:Castaway, ocean gate, the boat stuck in a canal. One of it we haven't talked about that I also think that's within this rubric is the rescue of that soccer team that was stuck in a cave in Thailand in 2018, which I fully remember taking over my entire social media timeline.
Candice Lim:Mhmm. And we cannot forget about balloon boy, which by the way, even though Rachel and I were kind of in high school or something, we were definitely using the internet. I don't remember the details of this. But Mike, by any chance, do you have like a SparkNotes version of what happened?
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. I think, actually, I was working at know your meme the year that this happened. So this was something that I thought, like, was thinking about and watching unfold as it was occurring. In 2009, 2 parents in Colorado released this, like, saucer type looking balloon into the air. And one of their kids says, hey.
Mike Rugnetta:I think I saw my brother Falcon get in there, which is this is the detail of the story that, like, has really stuck with me. Actually, there's 2. The first is the father was like a notorious, showman. Like, he always had a lot of schemes and plans that he was gonna get rich. Anyways, so one of the kids says, I think Falcon is in the balloon.
Mike Rugnetta:Parents freak out. They call the authorities. The FAA launches a search for the balloon. Like, they literally they're scrambling jets. This, of course, becomes a news story.
Mike Rugnetta:So people are watching the escort that this balloon has potentially with a kid in it, you know, with all of these jets. At some point, there's questions about whether or not Falcon had fallen from the balloon. So, like, do we have to go search for him in the woods? Eventually, the balloon lands. It glides down to Denver international airport it gets opened people get to it and there is no boy in the balloon.
Mike Rugnetta:Sand's boy. Wow. And that is because he was hiding in the house the entire time. Oh my god. So the sheriff, the police in the district declared this a hoax, and both of the parents got jail time.
Mike Rugnetta:If this were to happen today, like, can you imagine Balloon Boy on TikTok? What's what's balloon boy talk like?
Candice Lim:I think it would be everyone's Halloween costume.
Rachelle Hampton:100%. We would be getting photos, videos of people saying the balloon just went over my neighborhood. I feel like this just further proves my point, which is we, as a species love when someone is stuck inside something just waiting to be rescued. I mean, Rapunzel, come on. Little Timmy down that well.
Rachelle Hampton:Lassie, you saved him. I'm sure. Balloon boy, Thai soccer team, ocean gate. What more do you need? We love the drama of being stuck.
Candice Lim:And, Rachel, why do you think that is?
Rachelle Hampton:So I'm gonna put on my psychologist hat and say I think it taps into a primal fear of enclosed spaces, but more importantly, I think it taps into our desire to backseat drive. I think we love to watch an expert expert do something, like rescue someone else and think I could do that better. Like, most of us ignore that urge, but if y'all remember the rescue of the soccer team, there was one person who couldn't shut their goddamn mouth about how they would do it better.
Mike Rugnetta:Which brings us to our next ingredient in the recipe, which unfortunately is Elon Musk. The moment that Elon enters the chat on any given event is the moment that it has escaped containment or is a symbol that it very recently has. There's 2 parts of this. Like, Elon is a well known figure. He's famous.
Mike Rugnetta:He's got a large audience. So, you know, his reach is broad. I think the other part of it also is that a lot of that audience is very sycophantic. They are obsessed with Elon, what he has to say. They think that his approach to things is impeccable, unimpeachable.
Mike Rugnetta:They hang on his every word. They repeat a lot of what he says. So I think, you know, his fame is very Internet based. His fans are terminally online. So I think he's a powerful force for forcing something into the limelight.
Rachelle Hampton:Yeah. I think that's a really good point. I don't know if there's anybody else that I can think of who has an audience whose primary characteristic is being terminally online like Elon does. So there is just a real quality to him talking about something that just means, well, I guess that's not just national news, but international news now.
Candice Lim:Yeah. Okay. So Elon has to enter the chat. And now for the final ingredient needed for a monocultural moment in 2024, which is the inflection point into tragedy. Importantly, almost none of the moments we've mentioned thus far have been, like, positive.
Candice Lim:Like, you know, yeah, the big boat, it got unstuck. Yeah. The kids made it out of the cave. No one died at Fyre Festival. But all of these events either have a whiff of tragedy about them or they eventually become tragedies like Ocean Gate.
Rachelle Hampton:I have a feeling that positive moments just don't hold our attention for nearly as long. Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta:But I
Rachelle Hampton:wanna test this theory out and ask, do y'all feel like Harry and Meghan's wedding was as big of a deal as Megxit was, which I feel like they both have 80% of the things we're talking about in our rubric, or maybe do royal weddings just kinda break our rubric, because it's a royal wedding.
Candice Lim:Yeah. This is interesting because I think underneath both of these events, the subtext is that they are both political, they are both economic, and the perpetrators switch. So what I mean by that is I think both were covertly political in a way where, like, the wedding was seen as this politically positive event. You know, we are 2 years into Trump. Boris Johnson is about to become prime minister the following year.
Candice Lim:And so this is kind of this, like, international event that everyone could agree was a transatlantic union. It was a celebration, you know, for someone that came from here, America, and married this boy whose mother we all loved. Then you go to Mexic, which became this very politically negative story that had been kind of brewing for a while until the British tabloids named it, and I think the wedding needed to happen for Mexic to happen, meaning the British tabloids have this tendency to, like, love you one day, tear you down the next. And I think Mexic was just more controversial than the wedding because of that longer tale, the way that it was so clearly defining this rift in, like, British American Unions the way that the 2018 one was. Mhmm.
Candice Lim:Although, I do wanna note that, like, there was a lot of racist and sexist commentary happening leading up to the wedding. This time, though, I think it gave validation to those people coming out for a second time.
Rachelle Hampton:Well, I think now is as good of a time as any to really, really put our taxonomy to the test, which, you know, just to repeat, what we have decided we needed for a monocultural moment in 2024, it's about 5 or 6 events. There needs to be an information gap, compelling characters, hopefully, rich people, and hopefully, those rich people are perpetrating a crime that we can all point and laugh at. My personal favorite, someone trapped in something, and then the bonus a plus, Elon Musk chiming in. The final necessary step, the inflection point into tragedy. So that's what we've got so far.
Rachelle Hampton:And I feel like Kate Middleton has almost all of these, but we'll find out after a short break. And we're back. So we just broke down the 5 or 6 ish components that we came together as a brain trust and figured out that we need to make a perfect monocultural event. There's the information gap, compelling characters, preferably rich people. We need perpetrators, someone trapped inside something, the Elon Musk appearance for, you know, the gold star, and the inflection point into tragedy.
Rachelle Hampton:Mhmm.
Candice Lim:Which brings us to what will probably be 2024's most talked about monoculture event, Kaydenon.
Mike Rugnetta:The 2 months when Kate Middleton went missing.
Rachelle Hampton:Right. And to be fair, as we all try to forget, 2024 is an American election year, so historians will probably be writing a lot of books about that. But this event, as in the 2 months when k Middleton went missing, Candace, as I would say, the royal watcher in the chat, Candice, as I would say the royal watcher in the chat Mhmm. Can you walk us through the Kate Middleton timeline?
Candice Lim:Absolutely. So I'd say the story started back Christmas day 2023, which was and still is as the day of this taping, the last time we have seen Kate Middleton live in public. Now, this was the annual royal family walk when they go to church on Christmas morning. It's a whole thing. Then we go to January 2024, when Kensington Palace announces that Kate has undergone a planned abdominal surgery.
Candice Lim:She'll be in the hospital for 10 to 14 days before recovering at home. They say she'll have to postpone some events, so she'll be back after Easter. So she'll be gone for like 10 ish weeks.
Mike Rugnetta:And to be honest, it is not wild for royal family members to lay low for long periods. They're not in the public eye 247. So Kate could get away with making herself scarce for a little while.
Candice Lim:Mhmm. Until February 27th when suspicions arise. Because prince William pulls out of a funeral for his godfather only, like, an hour before the ceremony starts. You know, his reps are claiming it's a personal matter, and then the theories start jumping out. Why did he pull out?
Candice Lim:How personal was the matter? Wait a minute. Where's Kate? We haven't seen it for, like, 63 days. Now I wanna throw in here that I recently had a British citizen talk to me, and they told me that they personally believe that the Kate conspiracy theories peaked on, like, February 29th because it was leap day.
Candice Lim:And their whole thing is like, we had this extra day. We didn't know what to do with the extra time, so therefore we spiraled. But back to the timeline. Look, speculation is rising. BBL theories are growing.
Candice Lim:And on February 29th, Kensington Palace gives a statement to page 6 saying, Kensington Palace made it clear in January the timelines of the princess's recovery, and we'd only be providing significant updates. That guidance stands.
Rachelle Hampton:I feel like now is a good time to start matching this timeline with our monocultural checklist. So first off, was there an information gap?
Candice Lim:Yes.
Mike Rugnetta:Absolutely. I would say that that gap started when prince William pulled out of the funeral, which is just generally kind of suspicious. In any situation, that raises a lot of questions. But then the palace says, everything's fine. Don't worry about it.
Mike Rugnetta:This is definitely where the gap starts to open and also where we start to get literal palace intrigue.
Candice Lim:Yeah. And maybe we should start taking down some names, aka talking about the characters. Because while this is going on, for like one second, the bigger news was that King Charles had been diagnosed with a form of cancer.
Rachelle Hampton:And that's a big deal. He is, you know, not just a head of state, but the head of state for, you know, a top five world power.
Mike Rugnetta:And even though the king being ill is, like, logistically, politically, economically significant, You know? It's interesting how he becomes kinda like a side character to Kate's plot line. Right? So, like, this is the thing. It's like they kinda switch them.
Mike Rugnetta:So to some, he becomes an extra. To others, he becomes a villain. He's trying to take the focus off of himself as he tries to deal with his own illness. You know, is this all kinda like on purpose? You know, are these the the gears of the royal family turning?
Candice Lim:Yeah. So we have Kate, King Charles, Prince William, who has also kind of been cast as both victim and vilified. Meaning,
Rachelle Hampton:I think Prince William
Candice Lim:got a real beating in the press ever since Prince Harry got married from cheating allegations to I threw my brother into a dog bowl allegations to Catenan where he was hit, yet again with cheating allegations. That information gap we are speaking of gave us characters, but it didn't give us narrative. So everything we've ever thought about William, anything you've ever felt about him was now considered evidence when we started like filling in the blanks. Then we have Camilla, who I think weirdly came off quite innocently in this whole kerfuffle. Like, yes, there was that very funny tweet about her salt burning the royal family.
Candice Lim:But the thing is she has been, like, laying low, taking care of her man, kind of waiting for the palace to deploy her as needed. To me, I I think the reason no one's really checking for Camilla or, like, trying to place her in this narrative is because she never gets the good information. You know, she started off as, like, a liability to the palace, especially when Charles was still married to princess Diana. So to me, she doesn't have the tea.
Rachelle Hampton:And I think we should also maybe strike prince Harry and Meghan Markle from this cast list of characters. Right?
Candice Lim:Yeah. I'm a little shocked about how uninvolved they became in this because, you know, Prince Harry did fly to the UK for, like, 24 hours when his father announced his diagnosis. We later found out that Harry and Meghan were never personally notified of Kate's well-being. They found out via the news like us. But they somehow kind of excluded themselves from the narrative, which I guess is good because Meghan needs to harvest her jam.
Mike Rugnetta:So there's a a missing portion here, I think, and that's the Middleton side of the family. Right? They they had a part in this?
Rachelle Hampton:Yeah. I mean, Pippa, Carole, the mom. What what are they doing?
Candice Lim:Yeah. So let's jump to the timeline a bit. On March 4th, it's been about a week since Prince William dropped out of that funeral. Kate is seen for the first time. She is wearing sunglasses in the passenger seat of a car driven by her mother, Carol.
Candice Lim:And, look, it is this telephoto paparazzi photo of them in an Audi near Windsor Castle. But do you guys remember the reaction to this photo?
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. This is the one. There was the massive argument online about whether or not it was actually her. And all of the stories that you could fit within that, like, is that just not her? Is that someone pretending to be her?
Mike Rugnetta:Is it her but she's, like, wearing something that's hiding some sort of medical procedure that she's had? It's like every question you could possibly fit into grainy photo.
Rachelle Hampton:I feel like I saw everything from it's a body double to these pixels. They aren't matching up. That's a clear Photoshop job. I will admit the photos were blurry, and I don't know how sanctioned they were by the palace, but this photo of Kate that was probably supposed to clear the she was gone girl allegations, I feel like only added to the flame.
Mike Rugnetta:It's the yeah. It's the rare piece of media that in this situation, like, tries to answer questions, but just creates so much more of them.
Rachelle Hampton:Mhmm.
Candice Lim:Yeah. So now we have the theories that the mom is complicit, helping drive a body double across the UK. And And then let's talk about Pippa, who is her sister, because one small sub character that kinda pops up is a family friend named Thomas Kingston, who died of suicide before William dropped out of the funeral. So for a second, people were like, did William drop out after hearing that news? Because they are technically related.
Candice Lim:Thomas was married to the daughter of queen Elizabeth's cousin, but they weren't just friends, and they weren't just family.
Mike Rugnetta:They were a secret third thing.
Candice Lim:They were roommates. Close. Thomas allegedly used to date Pippa. So now the conspiracy theory is, did the palace allow Kate Intrigue run rampant to cover up the suicide of a low level family member?
Rachelle Hampton:Which is maybe unlikely because it's usually the other way around where they use low level drama to cover higher level drama like when Meghan Markle stories were being planted to cover the William Chumbley cheating allegations.
Mike Rugnetta:So is there anyone else that we need to bring into the story?
Candice Lim:I mean, perchance. But I think to wrap up the container of these characters, I think it's important to note that everyone involved is rich, wealthy of high society in the upper echelons of Britain's ruling class. And that is another monoculture moment signifier that we tend to care about rich people more than normies because we want to eat them without feeling bad about it.
Mike Rugnetta:So in that case, who would the perpetrators be?
Rachelle Hampton:I feel like perpetrator implies someone did something wrong, a kind of villain of sorts. And it seems like we're casting about in this cast of characters for a villain. We haven't mentioned anyone yet who are, like, innocent.
Candice Lim:Yeah. And I think people were definitely looking for that villain. They were trying to figure out, okay, who's hiding Kate? Who put her away? Who gone girl ed her?
Mike Rugnetta:So then this is where we can start talking about the Instagram photo. Right?
Candice Lim:Because on March 10th, Mother's Day in the UK, Kensington Palace, post a photo on Instagram of Kate sitting on a chair with her 3 kids around her. And the caption says, quote, thank you for your kind wishes and continued support over the last 2 months. Wishing everyone a happy mother's day. Dash c. And this is when things explode.
Candice Lim:Why?
Rachelle Hampton:I mean, people started taking a microscope to this photo and saying, hold up a second. My familiarity with Photoshop was honed on Tumblr, but even I know something's wrong here.
Mike Rugnetta:There was a lot wrong with that photo. Yeah. Like, really, like, Bush League hilarious Photoshop errors. What, back in my day, we we would say you could tell from the pixels.
Rachelle Hampton:And you can tell from the pixels. There were pixels missing.
Candice Lim:Charlotte's hair is off.
Rachelle Hampton:There's a sleeve that's wrong. Photo It it's giving AI generated photo. And the worst part is that all the people noticing this aren't random cranks on the Internet. I mean, they are, but they
Candice Lim:were right. Mhmm. Because soon after the Associated Press issues a kill notification on the photo saying that upon closer inspection, it appears that the source has manipulated the image. No replacement photo will be sent.
Rachelle Hampton:Which means in, you know, non journalistic language, don't use the photo. It's
Mike Rugnetta:bad. And it gets worse. Mhmm.
Candice Lim:Because the Palace confirms it. Kensington Palace tweets, quote, like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother's Day. See?
Mike Rugnetta:So, I mean, this is the moment where the whole thing goes off to the races because there's so many questions about what is happening that it's not whether you believe a conspiracy theory, it's which conspiracy theory at this point have you chosen to believe. Because top to bottom, tip to tail, like, the whole thing is really suspicious. There's obviously something going on here, and I think, you know, everybody's natural curiosity just kicks in. You start to look for, like, what could possibly be actually happening? But I think we still haven't really, like, pinned down that one thing.
Mike Rugnetta:Who's the villain? Who's the bad guy?
Candice Lim:Well, the caption of this altered photo claims that it was taken by prince William. So even though c, which stands for Catherine, her real name starts with a c, claims to have taken credit for the bad photoshop, This adds to the prince William pile of, like, oh, he definitely congealed her. You know, he's behind the Photoshop. He is behind it all. And I think he did emerge as, like, the prime perpetrator number 1.
Rachelle Hampton:Because speaking of photos, should we mention that video posted about a week after the Photoshop disaster where someone claimed they saw Kate Middleton and Prince William walking through a farmer's market?
Mike Rugnetta:I do I think it's Kate Middleton now. At the time, I was willing to be convinced that it was not. Same. I was open to the suggestion that something nefarious was happening. But now I'm like, that's that's that's probably that's probably Kate.
Candice Lim:Other than Prince William, do you guys have any other perpetrators we should list?
Rachelle Hampton:I mean, the palace, like, capital t, capital p, the palace t m. Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. I mean, I think I have a very similar answer, which is just like monarchy. You know, like, the the whole arrangement sort of forces this sort of very strange palace intrigue, power jockeying, secrecy. It's kinda like required for the whole setup.
Candice Lim:Yeah. And here's the thing. I kinda wanna move on to the next monoculture signifier, which is, does this story include someone who was trapped in something?
Rachelle Hampton:I mean, if you consider being trapped in a marriage as being trapped, I would say yes. Trapped within an institution, yes.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah. Again, I agree with Rachel on all accounts. I think that, you know, when the mystery was at its highest, you could imagine all sorts of places that, you know, she might have been trapped either against her will or for any kinds of reasons. You know? Not choosing to not leave, medical reasons, personal reasons, emotional reasons.
Mike Rugnetta:And I think, yeah, like, trapped within an institution, trapped within the royal family, trapped within monarchy, trapped in a lot of ways, like, behind a veil that forces a kind of opacity of communication. It feels like if she actually did have a conduit to speak, earnestly, with the public, that that might be easier, but that's just not how this works. And I think that that really comes across as a kind of being stuck or being trapped.
Candice Lim:Yeah. And to be trapped is not repression, but suppression. And I think that trapped. Because a lot of people were like, there are outside forces controlling this. Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta:Yeah.
Candice Lim:Now I do have to ask the other question, which is, does Elon Musk ever enter the
Rachelle Hampton:chat? I don't think so. I mean, other than obviously Twitter, the site that he owns that is allegedly now called X, being rife with conspiracy theorists, including our own beloved coworkers and me. So sort of. Yeah.
Mike Rugnetta:I went and looked I looked last night. I went and searched all of his tweets to see whether or not he had issued any statement regarding the royal family, Kate Middleton, like, any of this. He hasn't said he he never tweeted anything. I think the last time he tweeted about the royal family was, like, 2018. So, yeah, he didn't he didn't say anything.
Mike Rugnetta:So I think this brings us to the final recipe item, which is the turn to tragedy. Mhmm.
Candice Lim:So I would say all of this kind of ends around March 22nd when we get a video from Kate Middleton herself. It is her sitting on a bench telling us that she was diagnosed with cancer.
Clip: Kate Middleton:In January, I underwent major abdominal surgery in London. And at the time, it was thought that my condition was non cancerous. The surgery was successful. However, tests after the operation found cancer had been present. My medical team therefore advised that I should undergo a course of preventative chemotherapy, and I'm now in the early stages of that treatment.
Candice Lim:I would actually like to ask you guys specifically, Mike, where were you when you saw this video and, like, what did you immediately feel?
Mike Rugnetta:I was writing for Never Post. I was writing an intro where I knew that we were gonna have to talk about Kate Middleton. And I saw the thing. And I think Hans and I both posted the exact same link, like, to the post in the never post Slack at the exact same time because we were like, oh, this changes everything. Because we had made a joke about it in the previous episode, and now we're like, well, now we gotta talk about it and maybe not make a joke this time.
Rachelle Hampton:Yeah. I think we were in a similar position here on IcyMI. I think we had honestly joked about it a fair amount leading up to the video coming out. And I think we were actually in a meeting when the video came out, and we were just getting slacks of people saying Kate released a video. And I remember asking our coworkers to please summarize their live watch because I was doing something else.
Rachelle Hampton:And I remember thinking at that moment, goddamn, the palace fucked this up. Yeah. Yeah. I felt a moment of guilt, and then that very swiftly vanished. Because why did they do it like this?
Rachelle Hampton:This is not my fault for speculating. They could have managed this so much more effectively and they chose not to. Because reminder, the monarchy are heads of state. They're not just regular celebrities or rich people, and you can, of course, argue about how big of a role they have or how the monarchy functions, but they're still heads of state.
Candice Lim:Yeah. I think the crown, specifically queen Elizabeth the second, is notorious for having this phrase, which is never complain, never explain. They say it in the crown. And to me, I felt this was so true in the way that that institution conducts everything because when we talk about the page 6 Kensington Palace, don't talk to us as per my last email. When we talk about the Photoshop and all that stuff, those were defensive, but they were not explanatory.
Candice Lim:And so that was them being like, I'm not gonna explain this, but I will defend us for a little bit saying get off my back. But the thing is in this era, you can't really go with the never complain never explain thing. Look at Prince Harry. It's his book, not an entire book of HR complaints. And then look at never explain.
Candice Lim:Kate's video was a very clear explanation, and that was the thing that ended all the speculation. And so guess what, guys? Sometimes the queen is wrong.
Mike Rugnetta:It's funny. It's like it makes me think of this is fine. Right? Like, they're trying to this is fine, the whole situation. But, like, that is a ubiquitous meme of a room on fire, like, you can't this is fine things anymore because I think people's base understanding of the world is that things are not fine.
Mike Rugnetta:It's not fine. We know it's not fine. You should just tell us the ways in which it's not fine.
Candice Lim:Yeah. And I do think this video in itself kind of effectively cleared the decks of basically all speculation. It kind of cleared everyone's names. You know, she says in the video that William has been a great source of comfort and was by her side, and so they are clearly still a united front. So, unfortunately, he is not the perpetrator no more.
Mike Rugnetta:It's interesting to compare all of this to something like Ocean Gate, which was received less sympathetically pretty much immediately and, like, almost all the way across the board. Would we have reacted differently to OceanGate if anybody had lived? If the CEO had lived, there was a teenager who was on there because, it was like he was going as a, I think, father's day present to his dad who was also on, but he, like, really didn't wanna go. I wonder, like, if he had survived, like, would our reaction to this have been different? Is it easy to just really kinda like victim blame, honestly, because, like, no one came back and there's no one to, like, hold the public accountable?
Mike Rugnetta:It's just all of us being like, you fucked up,
Rachelle Hampton:You done goofed? Mhmm. I think the reaction to Ocean Gate would have been much different had someone survived, especially, I think, the 19 year old passenger. I think there would have just been far more sympathy. And I think even when it was revealed that this 19 year old was on the submersible, the conversation shifted like a little bit within the realms of the Internet I was on.
Rachelle Hampton:There was a little bit more sympathy allowed for the people who were on there because there was at least one person that we were like, you
Mike Rugnetta:know what?
Candice Lim:Actually, this
Rachelle Hampton:is sad. This is a tragedy. This isn't just rich people.
Candice Lim:Yeah. Yeah. And I think that the monoculture moment isn't so much what happened to Kate, but what happened to us as a collective society where everyone just, like, became a conspiracy theorist for 3 months and just accepted the delusion juice we were drinking.
Mike Rugnetta:Oh, delusion juice. And that is something actually that we're really interested in over at Neverpost. So if it's okay, I would like to bring in the Neverpost team to talk about what this moment did for our collective online empathy. Do we all want to retract half of our jokes? Like, what percentage of the jokes do we want to have stand once we have all of the information of these various monocultural events?
Mike Rugnetta:And, like, you know, after Kate, how do we decide what's okay to speculate on? You know, what's the appropriate reaction to a monocultural event going forward?
Rachelle Hampton:And I'm really excited to get into that. So come back on Saturday, y'all, where we will all be talking about human empathy online and how we will remember Kate Gate in the years to come. And, Mike, we will see you on Saturday.
Mike Rugnetta:See you on Saturday.
Rachelle Hampton:Alright. That's the show. We wanna thank Mike Brunetta for joining us on today's show. You can find him and the Never Post Podcast wherever you get your podcast. We will be back in your feed on Saturday with the second part of today's conversation, so definitely subscribe.
Rachelle Hampton:That way, you never miss an episode. Please leave a rating and review in Apple or Spotify, and tell your friends about us. You can follow us on Twitter at icymi_pod, and you can always drop us a note at icymi@slate.com.
Candice Lim:Icyymi is produced by Sierra Spraguely Ricks, Rachel Hampton, and me, Candice Lim. Deja Rosario is our senior supervising producer, and Alicia Montgomery is Slate's vice president of audio. This episode was made in collaboration with the Neverpost team, which includes Hans Buteau, Jason Oberholtzer, Mike Rugnetta, and Will Williams. See you online.
Rachelle Hampton:Or on the Neverpost podcast.
Creators and Guests
