We Should Not Have Killed That Gorilla.

The problem arrives at six in the morning on a lock screen. A serious security disclosure. A startup’s claim to have changed artificial intelligence. A game preview. A fatal crash. A notification that someone liked an old reply. The phone does not say that these things are equal. It does something more effective: it arranges them as though they deserve the same immediate piece of you.

That is the particular exhaustion of the feed. It does not merely show the world. It turns the world into a stack of prompts. A real event, an advertisement, an argument, a tragedy, and a small social reward all speak in the same imperative voice: look now.

I do not need less of the world. I need the world to stop arriving as though every item has the same right to interrupt me.

This is why pacing can feel like a lost cultural skill. There was a time—not a pure or innocent one, but a different one—when watching an episode of television and then stopping was ordinary. You could watch one or two, think about them, talk about them, do something else, and return next week. The gap was not an inconvenience between installments. The gap was where memory, anticipation, and judgment had room to form.

The late-2000s and early-2010s television model had plenty of defects: filler, hiatuses, network cancellations, seasons that should have ended three episodes earlier. But it offered friction. Streaming has been sold as the liberation from waiting. Sometimes it is. It can also turn a story into a queue-clearing task. After hour three, the next episode may be available, but another mode of thought may be more necessary.

That distinction—between what is available and what is worth receiving now—is the distinction between signal and noise. It is not a plea for asceticism. It is a demand for proportion.

Availability is not urgency. Popularity is not importance. A notification is not a moral claim.

The joke that became a timeline

This is where Harambe enters, and where the joke is often misunderstood.

Harambe was a seventeen-year-old western lowland gorilla killed at the Cincinnati Zoo in May 2016 after a child entered his enclosure.¹ The event was immediately serious and morally tangled: animal welfare, public safety, zoo design, parental responsibility, and a lethal decision made under pressure. Then it became a meme on a scale that could no longer be contained by the event itself.²

But the cultural logic of the meme was not simply, “A gorilla died and the internet made jokes.” Its deeper structure was counterfactual causality.

We should not have killed Harambe. We did. Now everything is wrong.

The joke imagines a point of divergence. There was a moment of decision. Humanity chose incorrectly. Reality forked into a worse branch. Every absurdity afterward—political, technological, cultural, personal, planetary—becomes evidence that we are living downstream of that break.

Of course, no one seriously believes that Harambe’s death caused every later disaster. The point is not history. It is folk metaphysics. When the true causes of a broken-feeling world are too numerous, too technical, too distributed, and too impersonal to hold in the mind, a culture invents a concrete wound it can name.

There is also a non-mystical reason 2016 feels like a hinge. In March of that year, Twitter made algorithmic curation its default timeline. A later study found that the change increased engagement and, especially in retweets, benefited sensationalist material more than quality news.³ That does not prove that a feed—or the internet by itself—caused polarization; demographic research directly cautions against that easy story.⁴ It does show that the machinery sorting public attention was changing at the same historical moment the Harambe joke supplied a myth for the rupture.

Harambe becomes the patron saint of the bad timeline: the animal whose death gives diffuse regret a face, an event, and an origin story. The absurdity is why it works. A gorilla at a zoo becomes the missing keystone of reality. It is funny because the alternative is to explain platform capitalism, political spectacle, institutional distrust, climate fear, and permanent online unreality every time someone asks why everything feels slightly cursed.

Gorilla-flavored karma

There is a temptation to make the joke too solemn, to extract the meme and discard its vulgarity. That would miss the point. The phrase “gorilla-flavored karma” works because it is ridiculous enough to carry the real charge.

We killed the gorilla. We turned him into the patron saint of the timeline that followed. Then we continued building systems that transform grief, argument, identity, care, and death into material for circulation. The karma is not supernatural. It is structural. A culture that repeatedly turns meaningful things into engagement matter eventually loses confidence that meaning can survive contact with the feed.

Harambe was not the origin of that system. He was the moment it became hard to ignore what the system did to events. A genuine animal death became mourning, then joke, then anti-joke, then political reference, then merchandise, then ambient cultural debris. The public did not merely fail to take the event seriously. It became increasingly difficult to tell what taking it seriously would even look like once every available response had been absorbed into the same reaction machine.

That is why Harambe is not simply an inverse animal ambassador. He is the rupture marker. An ambassador is meant to direct attention toward an animal—to ask the public to look, learn, recognize relation, and become responsible. Harambe was made central only through loss, and then the loss was used mostly to keep human attention circulating around itself.

Koko asked whether we could recognize an animal’s interiority. Harambe became the joke through which we admitted that the feed could replace interiority with circulation.

The people who taught us to look

The Harambe meme matters because it stands against another, older lineage: figures who taught a public how attention might become care.

Jane Goodall represented duration. Her life’s work made a simple but demanding claim: knowing another species requires time. You stay long enough to learn individuals, social bonds, tool use, conflict, care, and change. You let the animal exceed the story you had prepared to tell about it. Goodall’s death in 2025 mattered because the public lost a rare, globally understood advocate for patience, humility, and ecological continuity.⁵

Koko represented recognition. The claims about her signing and the research practices around the Gorilla Foundation have long been debated, and no honest account should turn popular accounts into settled proof of human-equivalent language.⁶ But Koko still occupied a real cultural space. She made millions ask whether an animal could grieve, remember, prefer, play, and meet a human being as something other than a specimen.

Robin Williams’s 2001 meeting with Koko remains emotionally powerful because it appears to show play without extraction. According to the Gorilla Foundation, Koko had not smiled in more than six months, since the death of her longtime companion Michael, and smiled with Williams during their encounter.⁷ After Williams died in 2014, an autopsy revealed advanced Lewy body dementia that had not been correctly diagnosed during his life.⁸ The foundation attributed visible sadness to Koko after she learned of his death; Koko died in 2018.⁷⁹ The scene is not proof of every claim ever made for Koko. It is a public image of something the feed is very bad at holding: mutuality without a winner.

Steve Irwin represented enthusiasm. He could make people lean toward animals they had been taught to recoil from—crocodiles, snakes, spiders, bats, and other creatures the public often encountered only as threats or pests. His television persona was huge, comic, physical, and unapologetically built for mass attention. But it pointed outward. The animal was not a prop for Steve. The animal was the reason to care.

Steve died in 2006, at forty-four, after a stingray injury while filming.¹⁰ That loss feels early because it came before the modern feed finished swallowing public life. His kind of sincere exuberance now has to survive an environment trained to turn every expression into a clip, a reaction, a brand artifact, or a reason to perform detachment.

Steve made people look. Terri made it last.

That should not become a story in which the great man dies and the audience lights a candle forever. The important fact is continuity.

Terri Irwin had been Steve’s partner in conservation work from the beginning; together they founded Wildlife Warriors in 2002.¹¹ After his death, she did not merely preserve a public image. She helped preserve the work: Australia Zoo, Wildlife Warriors, the family’s conservation mission, and the conditions in which Bindi and Robert could grow into advocates rather than becoming mascots of bereavement.

The cosmos may have paired Steve and Terri Irwin. Continuity, however, was not cosmic. It was built through grief, labor, institutions, and the refusal to let a legacy become only a memorial.

This is the answer to the bad-timeline joke. A better world is not restored by discovering one past moment to undo. It is built by refusing to let care die with the person most associated with it. Steve created public attention. Terri defended the possibility that attention could become an institution rather than a memory.

That is why Robert Irwin matters now. Not because he is “Steve 2,” and not because inherited celebrity is a conservation credential. He matters because his present work at Australia Zoo and Wildlife Warriors combines conservation, photography, television, and advocacy inside a far worse attention environment.¹² He still attempts to use visibility for its proper purpose: to lead people outward, toward animals, rescue, habitat, research, and obligation.

The new king of conservation

Robert’s task is not to restore an old television era. It is harder than that. He has to prove that charisma can still direct attention beyond itself.

The feed wants an animal to be a moment: an image, a clip, a cute interruption, a horror story, an argument token, or a meme. Conservation asks for a future. It asks viewers to become participants in something that continues when the video ends.

That does not make Robert a savior, and it does not absolve the public from its own habits. It gives the essay its necessary counterweight. The line did not end with Steve. It persisted because Terri carried it, because the work had institutions beneath its personality, and because the next generation inherited a mission rather than a costume.

The lock screen is still there. The stack is still there. The systems designed to borrow urgency from everything that matters will not correct themselves.

But a person can still restore hierarchy. A story can wait until it can be read. A season can be watched at the speed that allows it to remain art. A meaningful reply can matter more than the count attached to it. A living animal can be more than an image. A dead animal can be mourned without becoming raw material for an endless reaction machine.

Harambe was the warning, not the final word. Jane taught people to stay. Koko and Robin made recognition feel possible. Steve made care exciting. Terri made care durable. Robert carries the work forward.

Signal is not the loudest thing in the stack. Signal is what survives long enough to become stewardship.