YESTERDAY, I INSTALLED the Drumpfinator. This is the famous Chrome extension, launched by John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, that replaces the word “Trump” with “Drumpf”—his ancestral name—everywhere it appears in your browser. I wanted to understand the appeal of these extensions, and why they have emerged as a cultural force over the course of the last few weeks. You can install extensions that replace Trump’s name with “your drunk uncle at Thanksgiving,” or that add actual Trump quotes every time his name appears, or that remove any mention of him whatsoever.
This goes beyond Trump: such target text-swap extensions first started about five years ago as a means of scrubbing away celebrities’ names from your news feed. By now, you can also change “millennials” to “snake people,” or scrub any reference to Hillary Clinton or Kim Kardashian, or substitute a list of words, suggested by xkcd’s Randall Munroe, to better reflect the true nature of the news. (“Witnesses” becomes “these dudes I know”; “allegedly” transmogrifies into “kinda probably.”) You can also install an extension that lets you replace whatever words you like. (Swap “Jason Tanz” with “the world’s greatest living writer,” just for instance.)
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This train of thought was interrupted this morning, when a member of our art team worked on a story of mine while an anti-Trump extension was installed on their browser. The result, unbeknownst to us, was that every instance of Trump’s name got replaced with the sobriquet “someone with tiny hands,” a reference to the candidate’s famed defensiveness about his finger-length. Our production team thought the phrase was a meta-gag, and let it through. The story—or, to be fair, the correction we ran on it—delighted the Internet. Someone’s personal joke had just become very public.
http://www.wired.com/2016/03/political-chrome-extensions-donald-trump/
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