Capybaras are over. If you’re a seal, you should probably delete your socials. In 2024, there’s a new adorable animal taking the world by storm: Moo Deng, a two-month-old hippopotamus who lives in a zoo in Thailand, whose name translates to “bouncy pork”.

But Moo Deng did not achieve viral fame solely because she is cute, although she certainly is that. This is the internet – we see cute animals all the time. What made Moo Deng resonate so widely is not just that she’s adorable, but that she is angry: we don’t just love her for wholesome antics like pretending to eat solid vegetation in imitation of her mum, but for her screaming, biting and sullen stares. 

She has become a canvas on which the world can project its suffering: how it feels when someone tries to talk to you before you’ve had your morning coffee; how we react when a cis gay man claims that Chappell Roan’s love for drag is “performative”; the existential terror occasionally inspired by the fact of having been born at all. When Moo Deng screams, she screams for everyone. She has given expression to the inchoate rage and dissatisfaction of life under late capitalism. In a cruel and unjust world, in which daily life alternates between crushing tedium and pulverising stress, we can each of us point to her and say: “this baby hippo is meeee.”

But if you thought, as we did, that Moo Deng would inspire us to rise against our oppressors and usher in a new dawn of liberation, you were sadly mistaken. She has already been captured, co-opted and commodified by the very forces she seemed to be railing against. As soon as she was caught in the crossfires of the attention economy, she was doomed to become a meme as vapid and inane as any other. As one of the characters in The Matrix Resurrections says, “They took your story, something that meant so much to people like me, and turned it into something trivial.”

The jokes became increasingly less funny as corporate accounts got in on the act, online stores began to sell tacky merchandise, and journalists wrote contrived articles about her, attempting to stretch a flimsy premise to 1,000 words in the grubby pursuit of clicks. As Mark Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism, capitalism absorbs and neutralises critiques against it, so that popular culture “performs our anti-capitalism for us”. There could be no clearer illustration of this tendency than Moo Deng’s journey from revolutionary symbol to online marketing tool. The ruling classes recognised her power and did everything they could to destroy it. Not by imprisoning her or having her assassinated – as much as they would like to, that would cause far too much fuss! – but by turning her into just another quickly disposable online joke.

This commodification is already exacting a terrible cost, not just on us – and it is surely a kind of spiritual punishment to see something so precious squeezed for every last drop of profit – but on Moo Deng herself, who risks being destroyed by the system which elevated her to stardom. The security around her enclosure has had to be tightened, after she was “harassed” by roves of tourists, throwing food at her and disrupting her attention – treating her like some kind of zoo attraction! The downsides of fame are by now all too apparent, but they seem particularly unjust and sad when dished out to an innocent animal who wanted no part in any of it.

Under neoliberalism, nothing can remain sacred for very long: not art, not community, and certainly not a mischievous little baby hippo who only ever wanted to nip at people. Moo Deng set the world a challenge, she tried to show us the way to a more emancipatory future, and we failed her. The sound of her screams should haunt us all.