The Calgorithm
Cal Football’s Take Over of Twitter, As Told By Twitter Users
My beat is typically existential angst, but Cal football fans are having a fun moment and it combines my two favorite things: Twitter and “the woke agenda.”
For the uninitiated, the California Golden Bears are on a three game win streak made remarkable by a surprise road win over the strongly favored Auburn Tigers. The Bears pulled this off by forcing four—count ‘em, one, two, three, four—interceptions, and a fumble to boot.
But if you looked to Twitter, what beat Auburn wasn’t the turnovers. It wasn’t Cal’s immovable defense, and it wasn’t the efficient play of quarterback Fernando Mendoza.
No, the key to the success was the woke agenda.
Posts like this, all playing on Berkeley’s reputation as a bastion for progressive and left-wing causes and exaggerating it by a factor of a million, filled up the Twitter timeline of college football fans in a phenomenon dubbed the “Calgorithm.”
Among other things, across various posts Cal fans called Auburn’s stadium “PROPERTY OF ANTIFA,” instructed Auburn students to “line up to get their new pronouns first thing Monday,” and stated Auburn’s war eagle must now be renamed the “Peace, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Eagle.”
Upcoming opponents, like tonight’s Florida State and November 8’s Wake Forest (or should I call them Woke Forest?), are also subjects of ridicule. One post features a Photoshopped image of Cal’s mascot, Oski, “coming to Tallahassee to spread the good word of Karl Marx and Derrick Bell.”
Football fans joking at the expense of a recently defeated foe or an upcoming opponent isn’t altogether unusual. Every fan base has a legion of internet posters, largely but not exclusively anonymous burner accounts, who go online to share memes and talk trash. To borrow an old Harmontown bit about the exaggerated inflection of TV news reporters: “it’s called ‘shitposting,’ and all the kids are doing it.”
But this particular streak is impressive. Don’t take my word for it. Just ask The Daily Mail, who covered it in an article. Ask Nicole Auerbach of NBC Sports, who tweeted, “the Calgorithm has taken over my Twitter feed, and I cannot stop laughing.”
Or maybe ask Jessica Smetana, who said on Gen CFB, “we’re burning down rainforests for [AI images of] a bear with a suitcase saying ‘DEI agenda’ and they’re walking into Doak-Campbell [Stadium] and renaming it ‘Woke-Campbell’ Stadium and I love it.”
What makes this moment stand out as media fodder, of course, is the culture war aspect of it. Cal’s reputation precedes it, and Auburn and Florida State are both based in deep red states. Auburn’s coach in particular is very public about his conservative and Christian beliefs and, like many a born again evangelist, has a sex scandal and a sex-scandal-adjacent scandal in his closet.
“Berkeley is a pretty liberal place, but in my view the whole ‘woke’ thing is a fun way to poke at our opponents,” Cal fan Michael Kee told me via Twitter’s direct messaging (DM) feature. “Especially those in the more conservative areas, playing on their idea of what Berkeley is.”
Mighty Golden Bears pointed out that the university counts 500,000 alumni, and any group that large is bound to include a multitude of political persuasions, but having traded DMs with a handful of Cal supporters on Twitter, it’s clear that Cal fans are on the whole open minded, generous, and enjoying the way they’ve been needling opponents.
“I think [the Calgorithm started] mostly organically from bickering with burner accounts from Auburn who tried to get on us for being stereotypically woke or at least an academic school rather than a ball school,” AJ told me. “Seeing the progressive energy of campus culture in Berkeley be weaponized in a tongue in cheek way puts a smile on my face.”
“This kind of humor is something we've been doing for years,” said Liberal Calgorithm. “The only difference is we've been keeping these jokes to within our own social circles. Now, we're weaponizing these jokes to massively great effect.”
In terms of identifying a starting point for the latest iteration of the Calgorithm, a Twitter user who goes by the handle Cal Sports pointed me to a post by Light The Beam, who asked, “can any Auburn fans recommend bars safe for us California liberals? Masks would be nice, NO Trump flags, and ideally has CNN playing instead of the football games.”
There were a few earnest and kind replies, some answers from people who understood this was a bit, and then some replies from people who didn’t seem to understand it was a joke and just wanted to be nasty. “Stay home,” wrote one user. Another wrote, “California is the only safe place for snowflakes like yourself,” and another said, “Masks?????? Hahahaha stay in Cali.”
Another posted a picture of California’s crime rates and said, “stay home where it’s safe,” which is confusing for multiple reasons but is in line with the feelings of a user who goes by the handle California Bears. “I think a lot of Cal fans are more on the liberal side in general but [the posts are] definitely playing on the fear mongering by the rest of the country. California isn’t some commie state but if it means we can use it to bait the other fanbases and use it to propel Cal along, why not?”
The good cheer amongst the Cal fanbase isn’t the result of some flukey performances. Their football team is on the upswing. Cal’s defense is in a four-way tie for first in turnovers gained, their running back room is in the capable hands of Jaydn Ott and Jaivian Thomas, and the team as a whole just feels well prepared and cohesive.
Additionally, Cal’s remaining schedule is manageable, with only one ranked team on it, #8 Miami. The Bears moved to the now extremely geographically confused Atlantic Coast Conference over the offseason. It is largely southern, a fact clearly fueling this online renaissance, and the teams that usually lead its standings are in a downward spiral.
Most Cal fans I traded messages with are optimistic about their team’s prospects, but they’re cautious. They want and are expecting somewhere between a 7 and 9 win season, seemingly traumatized by the program’s notorious reputation for “routinely disappointing its hopeful supporters,” as Cal Sports put it, noting that “the parts are there. I'm feeling more upbeat than ever this season, and that's mostly because of that big Auburn win.”
And as user PUT YOUR HAT ON put it to me: “We’re undefeated until further notice.”
On the whole, the Cal fanbase is experiencing an extreme “anything is possible” moment. It’s a mentality similar to what the Democratic Party’s base went through when Kamala Harris became their presidential nominee.
It was AJ who brought up that comparison, writing that the Calgorithm might be an offshoot of “the meme renaissance that happened over the summer with Kamala Harris” in reference to a slew of online jokes about Harris’s 2023 rhetorical question “you think you just fell out of the coconut tree?” This in turn led to the palm tree and coconut emoticon combination now being used as a shibboleth by Harris-Walz supporters online.
I put AJ’s theory about what I call “coconut pill energy” to a Twitter user, MtnMeister, who has this emoticon combo in his bio.
He wrote back, “without anything beyond anecdotal observation, it seems a fair hypothesis that the Cal meme energy is related to, or at least correlated with, ‘coconut pill energy.’
“The Harris campaign has brought energy and hope to those that I would generally associate with the Cal fan base—liberal, educated, optimistic, and—if you've been a Cal fan for any time at all—equipped with a sense of self-effacing humor.
“In my experience, Cal fans (and graduates who aren't fans) have always enjoyed good-natured cultural rivalries. Think ‘Beat Stafurd’ and teasing UCLA, etc.
“Trump and the MAGA movement turned good-natured cultural teasing into a wedge cultural war, and got us to hate each other. I see the Cal memes (and the brilliant Wake Forest response) as maybe us trying to go back to the days when we could celebrate our cultural differences, even those we find annoying, rather than address them with vitriol. A grassroots groundswell representing a pendulum swing away from those that foster division.
“But I'm an optimist :)”