#backegg

Sure thing! If I recall correctly the whole thing started around December when Phil jokingly reblogged a Fabergé add (it’s a very expensive jewellery company), saying that he’d ask for a Fabergé “Back Egg” for Christmas (link), which bizarrely led to the Fabergé @ mentioning him on a later Back Egg tweet (they actually called it that, so Phil effectively named their product for them) and then asking him how they could contact him (link). Phil said on a later liveshow that he was never contacted and didn’t know what the whole thing was about, but the stunt gave Fabergé some exposure, and the thing became a bit of a meme within the phandom. Probably a really niche company saw that an influencer with a lot of followers retweeted them and they got a lot more likes and reblogs than usual on a post advertising their newest product, so they tried to milk the free advertising.

Now, for a luxury company like Fabergé, which is known for its extravagantly expensive jewellery-encrusted Eggs and jewellery, to contact a youtuber whose brand is clearly not at all related to luxury jewellery and whose audience is not exactly the kind of people buying Fabergé products (read: millionaires), the whole thing was understandably weird af, and the phandom started making jokes about Phil selling out and possibly getting a sponsor/brand deal from Fabergé and getting a whole lot of money from it (can you imagine Phil trying to tell his audience to go buy ridiculously overpriced luxury jewellery in an amazingphil video? Yeah, me neither). 

With the jokes came also the discourse, from people who genuinely thought Phil might get a brand deal of some sort and were upset he might “sell out” and “betray us” or something to that effect. I was not impressed with that particular bit of discourse.

Anyway, the jokes about Phil making a lot of money and developing a taste for a life of luxury somehow coalesced into the meme that we now know as capita£ester, the money-loving capitalistic parody of the man we all know and love.

I’ve seen two versions of it: capita£ester the conspicuous consumer who loves spending money on ostentatious or luxury items (with a phan subtrope of Phil being Dan’s sugar daddy), and capita£ester the miser who hoards money and is very tight-fisted about any potential expense.

And so the meme evolved, and any reference we get about Phil spending or making money (for example, new merch coming out or a spon,) is viewed as a fresh opportunity to joke about capita£ester and make more memes. 

tldr: Phil tweeted about getting an expensive piece of jewellery as an obvious joke and the company retweeted him and implied they wanted to talk to him leading us to believe that they might offer some spon/brand deal. The company makes luxury items and the juxtaposition of our loveable nerd Phil and this high end jewellery company was hilarious so the memes about Phil going nouveau riche on us and becoming an ostentatious spender was too good for the phandom to pass up and thus it became a meme.

phil is not stupid. the marketing team running pr for a billion dollar company is not stupid. if they do come to a sponsorship agreement, it won’t be done on a whim.

phil’s twitter following is not only composed of people in their teens and 20s who have < $100 in the bank accounts, but also of many, many millionaires, celebrities, and big social media influencers.

fabregé does not have to sell thousands and thousands of back eggs or whatever other jewelry to phil’s subscribers to turn a profit off this deal. just a few will more than cover it.

capita£ester is funny as a meme, but making brand deals and doing sponsorships is also a big and real part of having an online career.

rose…….ily

also, all i could think of is phil exposing his freckly back to the world while modeling his high end brand deal oops