Nobody showed up to the NYC AirPod Owners Meetup, and it only made the meme better

A Facebook event for an “AirPod Owners Meetup” on Saturday in New York’s Union Square had over 500 people slated to attend. That's not what happened.

I was in Union Square during the hours the meetup was supposed to happen and it remained nearly empty. The people who were passing through definitely weren’t there to discuss their headphones.

The meetup that didn’t actually occur is part of a larger series of independently organized Facebook events for AirPods owners. The original, which was slated to happen in Boston on January 19 but most likely didn't attract a real crowd, drew more than 8,000 “interested” or “going” responses on Facebook — mostly from people who do not actually live in Boston.

Airpod meetup facebook commentCredit: Screenshot/Facebook

Another meetup, which like the Boston event is listed under the category of networking, is set to occur in Oslo, Norway, on April 19. More than 7,000 have said they’re “interested” or “going.”

So why are these “meetups” even happening? And, even weirder, why are people with no intention of ever attending responding to them?

Well, AirPod owners, the joke goes, are members of an exclusive club. They’re wealthy and well-connected, and they need events where they can network. Responding to these Facebook events is a way of declaring to the world that you’re part of this club, and it's also a way of promoting the joke further.

Whenever you respond to a Facebook event, your friends see your response in their timelines. They then click on the AirPod owners meetup, laugh, and respond to it themselves. None of these people actually plan to spend their Saturday afternoon talking to strangers who happen to own the same headphones they do. But the idea of doing so and publicly promoting the concept is nothing short of hilarious for many.

The making of a meme

Two years ago when AirPods were released, a series of events — even ones that are fake — dedicated to people who owned the $159 headphones would have seemed impossible. When they debuted in December 2016, AirPods were widely seen as weird-looking, and many people actively avoided buying them.

Now, they’ve become something of a fashion staple.

In the past couple of months, a storm of viral tweets and YouTube videos have played into an ongoing joke about the wealth of AirPod owners and, strangely, made the headphones increasingly popular.

Perhaps the most well-known is comedian Trevor Wallace’s two-minute “*Wears AirPods Once*” segment. “I didn’t know it was legal to rain on rich people,” Wallace says to the camera at the start of the video. The shot features a close-up of his face with an umbrella over his head and AirPods in his ears. Wallace goes on to wipe his nose with a $100 dollar bill and cut the wire off of someone else’s traditional headphones.

Wallace’s video, released in December, has so far racked up more than 1.7 million views. A lot more than the few hundred thousand he typically gets.

Kurtis Conner, a Toronto-based YouTube comedian, tweeted a large picture of his face attached to a small body. AirPods rest in his ears, and he's leaned back in a chair like a king, holding a martini in his hand.

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“This is how it feels when you use airpods,” Kurtis captioned the photo, which received more than 4,000 retweets and over 26,000 likes.

Tweet may have been deleted

AirPod owners have money and they’re not afraid to flaunt it, the meme goes. Alternately, those who don’t own the headphones are deemed poor.

Memes IRL

The joke has reached beyond social media. On March 7, George Caram, a 27-year-old lobbyist in Washington, D.C., claims he was harassed by a group of young students for his wired headphones.

“I was walking to my office down Pennsylvania Avenue and began putting my headphones [in] to make a call. A group of 20 or so middle school students passed by me with one loudly proclaiming ‘nice headphone[s]’ and another exclaiming ‘POOR,’” Caram told Mashable.

These students were joking around, Caram confirms. But the incident shows just how ubiquitous AirPod memes have become.

Trevor Wallace says this trend can be linked to the fact that the AirPod meme is just so relatable to real life.

“Everyone had a friend who owned a pair; thus, that friend got shamelessly tagged in those memes, only growing the culture, until virtually everyone bought a pair,” Wallace told Mashable.

That’s largely how Caragan Thiel, a 19-year-old student at George Washington University, decided to purchase her headphones. She said she wanted AirPods before they became popular. But her decision to actually buy them was driven by “the fact that people constantly talk about them on social media and [they] had become a kind of status symbol.”

The Guardian, too, has called them a “millennial status symbol.” But as with any trend, there are exceptions.

Nick Barclay, a 23-year-old engineer based in New York City, said he “was actually hesitant to buy them because of how people looked with them and all of the attention they had on social media.”

Of course, not all AirPod memes are positive. In fact, many have a negative message. Some call AirPod owners too rich and show them mocking poor people. Other memes insert AirPods into anything and everything. The meme is pretty adaptable, which gives it more staying power.

Tweet may have been deleted

Of course, no matter how you feel about the memes, not everyone’s willing to invest in a pricey piece of technology just because Twitter tells them to. Caram admits he looked into AirPods when he arrived at his office on the day of the roasting, but he couldn’t justify the price tag for the item he would be receiving: “I’d rather put that $160 towards a different product.”

Daniel Guerra, a student at Yale, thought the same way. He explained to Mashable, “My $30 headphones are fine, and if they break, I can take them to Apple and get new ones free.” He added, “Why spend [$159] on headphones that sound the same as the $30 plug-in ones?”

Memes don't live forever

Jacob Chang, the Director of Insights at JUV, a consulting firm that teaches brands how to market to young people, says the AirPods phenomenon all comes back to Gen Z’s need for relatability and community.

“People who [have AirPods feel] like they were part of something special,” he explained in an interview.

AirPods are a status symbol. For those obsessed with getting the newest and best thing, maybe owning them connects them in some way to AirPod culture.

But easily shareable online events like the most recent “AirPod Owners Meetup” are where the more interesting community is formed, even if unwittingly. They don’t bring anyone together for in-person networking, clearly. But the people who promote these so-called online events — whether through actively sharing them on Facebook, texting their friends, or just responding “interested” — end up being part of something larger. They're like miniature niche Facebook meme groups, but only temporary.

And who doesn’t like feeling part of a movement greater than themselves — even if it’s just an online joke about headphones?

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