“Good Morning Hank, It’s Tuesday”: The VlogBrothers, Slow Circulation, and Social Movement Rhetoric

Chicago Marriott Downtown Magnificent Mile 

Since 2007, writer-YouTuber-philanthropist brothers John and Hank Green have built up a following and audience through their presence on the internet. That following, made up of anywhere from 100,000 to 3.5 million "Nerdfighters" has been built around the concepts of "decreasing worldsuck" and "imagining people complexly," while always following the cardinal rule of Nerdfighteria: "Don't forget to be awesome." In 2023, John, made a video that asked Nerdfighteria to help with the fight against tuberculosis by reaching out to the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson and asking them not to renew their patent on the TB drug bedaquiline and thus allow countries with a high burden of tuberculosis to produce generic versions of the drug to help treat the disease. The pressure was so quick and so intense that within a week Johnson & Johnson announced a deal with the Stop TB Partnership to allow the production of generic versions of bedaquiline in these countries. Two months later, John again asked the Nerdfighters to turn their collective power on Cepheid and Danaher to pressure them to lower the cost of TB diagnostic tests. In response to the wave of pressure, Cepheid and Danaher announced cost reductions for one of their TB test cartridges in high TB-burden countries. In this presentation, I will explore the rhetorical force enacted by the Nerdfighters and the Green brothers' seeming understanding and utilization of both "viral" and "slow circulation" (Bradshaw) as well as their emphasis on education, storytelling, and engaged citizenship to build a fan base and community that are willing to quickly and decisively put their collective powers to use for a cause that likely does not directly affect most of them, and to apply that power in order to continue their mission of "decreasing worldsuck" in whatever ways they can.