HarambeGuess I’ll DieDogeI Can Haz CheezburgerRain Drop Drop Top AnothaOne Pepe the FrogDrakeRunning ManYou Vs The GuyEvil Kermit Meryl Streep SingingSnek Marge KrumpingPrimitive SpongebobThicc Roll Safe Conceited ReactionArthur’s FistThis is Fine DogDamn Daniel Snoop DogDat BoiDabbing Squidward Distracted Boyfriend Crying Kim KardashianGavinDog FilterIm Rick Harrison and This Is My Pawn Shop Confused Mr. KrabsThe Floor isWhat In TarnationElf on the ShelfCash Me Ousside Howbow DahJoe BidenMath Lady Grumpy Cat Hurricane MariaPope FrancisHow Italians DoThingsShrekGabe the Dog Donald TrumpSalt BaeKanye WestFirst of AllDistracted Boyfriend Expanding BrainYou Know I Had to Do it To EmKen BoneIf Young Metro Don’t Trust YouBut Thats None of My Business Don’t Talk to Me or My Son Ever AgainPersian Cat Room Guardian Bee MoviePokemon Go60’s SpiderManAyy LmaoDank Memes Aint Nobody Got Time For ThatBye FeliciaNut Button You Could Stop At FIve Or Six StoresThe FitnessGram Pacer Test You On KazooSuh DudeThe DabIf A Dog Wore PantsHotline Bling Confused TravoltaHello Darkness My Old Friend Graphic Design Is My Passion Netflix and ChillSlide Into Your DMsLebron James KidMLK Didn Die For ThisLeft Shark9+10=21I Came Out To Have A Good Time And Honestly I’m Feeling So Attacked Right NowHarambeGuess I’ll DieDoge I Can Haz CheezburgerRain Drop Drop TopAnothaOnePepe the Frog Drak eRunning ManYou Vs The GuyEvil KermitMeryl Streep SingingSnek Mar geKrumpingPrimitive SpongebobThiccRoll SafeConceited Reaction Arthur’s FistThis is Fine DogDamn DanielSnoop DogDat BoiDabbing Squi wardDistracted Boyfriend Crying Kim KardashianGavinDog Filter Im Rick Harrison and This Is My Pawn ShopConfused Mr. Krabs The Floor isWhat In TarnationElf on the ShelfCash Me Ousside Howbow DahJoe BidenMath Lady Grumpy CatHurricane MariaPope Francis How Italians Do ThingsShrekGabe the DogDonald TrumpSalt Bae Kanye WestFirst of AllDistracted BoyfriendExpanding BrainYou Know I Had to Do it To Em Ken BoneIf Young Metro Don’t Trust YouBut Thats No of My BusinessDon’t Talk to Me or My Son Ever AgainPersian Cat Room GuardianBee MoviePokemon Go60’s SpiderManAyy LmaoDank Memes Aint Nobody Got Time For ThatBye FeliciaNut Button You Could Stop At FIve Or Six StoresThe FitnessGram Pacer Test You On KazooSuh DudeThe DabIf A Dog Wore PantsHotline Bling Confused TravoltaHello Darkness My Old Friend Graphic Design Is My Passion
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table of contents 09 19 35
Steal this Meme
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How Pepe The Frog Became a Nazi Trump Supporter and an Alt Right Symbol
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The Internet Won’t Let Harambe Rest in Peace
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The ‘Distracted Boyfriend’ Meme’s Photographer Explains All
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The Future of College Is Facebook Meme Groups
Dogs are Doggos The Dank Memes that are Distrupting Politics
What Do You Meme?
First of all...
maim mee-mee may-may mee-muh meh-meh
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It’s pronounced
mee-m
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What Do You Meme?
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Steal this Meme: Why Understanding Internet Culture will make you Sexy, Rich, and Powerful by Aaron Saenz I’m here to talk memes. Internet memes. And if you think they’re just about trendy videos, cute cats, and dancing babies then think again. Memes are serious business: they shape elections, change the way we talk about our lives, and offer insight into where we’re headed as a global society. The internet never sleeps, and the culture that has arisen around its popular use is evolving every second of every day. Somewhere in that evolution we crossed a very, very weird line.
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What Do You Meme? The last decade has seen the arrival of lolcats, fails, trolling and dozens of other phenomena whose sophomoric exteriors bely subtle tones of social complexity and etiquette. Some pioneering scientists and historians have struggled to track and understand memes, but we’ve all got to start paying more attention to them soon. As our digital lives take on greater importance, cultural capital is becoming an increasingly relevant currency, and memes could be the investment opportunities that could make you rich and famous. Quick question, how much do you think a picture of a cat is worth? Millions of dollars. Eric Nakagawa, Kari Unebasami, and Ben Huh has parlayed images of kitties with silly captions into an online empire. The I Can Haz Cheezburger Network has over forty linked sites that do one thing and do it extremely well: selling memes. Icanhazcheezburger. com features user generated images of the aforementioned kitties with silly captions. Failblog does the same for public mistakes. My Food Looks Funny…well, that’s pretty much self explanatory. These sites are popular. Absurdly so. The I Can Haz Cheezburger Network enjoys 375+ million page views, and 110+ million video views each month – that’s in the same league as major news outlets like the New York Times or
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Huffington Post. More importantly, it features 500,000+ pieces of user generated content – images, graphs, GIFs, videos, etc that the network receives for free, and uses to attract its legion of followers. They have special online tools (such as the LOLbuilder) to help their users craft bits of folly and become contributors. In this system, bits of intellectual detritus can generate a following, soar to epic popularity, and become cultural icons of our times. This is one of the factories where memes are made, and where they will continue to thrive. According to TechCrunch, Pet Holdings, the company behind the I Can Haz Cheezburger Network, has raised more than $30 million in funding and is actively seeking to expand its 50 employee base to help wrangle its growing popularity. As instrumental as I Can Haz Cheezburger has been, it’s just a small piece of a much larger meme-pie. Imageboards (4Chan being a notorious example) have organically created hundreds of memes in the course of anything-goes discussions while many content-driven sites try to consciously create the next big meme, knowing that viral sharing can generate millions of page views for little effort. Marketing strategies have arisen around this new kind of ‘word of mouth’. YouTube and other video sharing
Steal this Meme
How much do you think a picture of a cat is worth?
Millions of dollars.
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What Do You Meme?
In some cases,
$ $ $
$
$
$
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$ $ memes are 10
money
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sites can turn everyday people into instant celebrities. Sometimes the payout for these meme-success stories is nothing but passing glory, sometimes it’s very tangible profit. Forgive me, but I’m going to share a very annoying video with you that illustrates this concept better than any other in recent memory. It’s a little ditty you may have seen before: Rebecca Black’s “Friday”.
the means of creating and sharing cultural context is the same, and most of what we experience publicly online is being recorded automatically. Earlier this year at Web Expo 2011 in San Francisco, the Know Your Meme team expounded (in their own lovely comic fashion) upon the unique challenges and opportunities faced by modern folklorists.
Information overload doesn’t even begin to describe what we’re facing when you try to track memes. We have no way to predict which random picture or video will become mega-famous. There’s no accurate threshold below which we can ignore a trend, either. Ideas can lay nearly dormant for years before exploding into memetastic glory, as the Know Your Meme panel demonstrated with the Keyboard Cat phenomenon. The glut of data we experience But they’re more than that, too. now is only going to increase as Let’s take a look at I Can Haz billions more people around the Cheezburger’s latest acquisiworld are set to come online in tion, Know Your Meme, which the next few decades and begin was reportedly sold for seven to view, share, and generate their figures. Know Your Meme tries to own cultural trends. We haven’t do what folklorists have been ateven come close to peak-internettempting for centuries: understand meme production yet. and chart how culture unfolds. Unlike previous generations of More and more, I think we need to historians, however, Know Your view memes as an intangible but Meme doesn’t struggle against a very valuable resource. They can lack of cultural artifacts, but the translate into financial gains, grant exponential growth of them. For us historical perspective, or even perhaps the first time in history help us wield political power. Jure So yeah…that video may be lacking in all artistic merit but it has 154 million views and counting and many tens of thousands of dollars generated on ads alone. Like AutoTune The News’ hit “Bed Intruder Song“, another video that reached widespread fame and meme status, “Friday” made considerable profit from related sales on iTunes. In some cases, memes are money.
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What Do You Meme?
Internet M are just the forms o Leskovec, Lars Backstrom, and Jon Kleinberg, computer scientists at Stanford and Cornell, created MemeTracker.org – an attempt to chart the lives of memes in a way fit for data analysis. Sifting through a million online sources each day, MemeTracker gives us a quantitative look at the strength of keywords and phrases that are the backbone of non-graphic memes, specifically those revolving around news and politics. What good is this data? It grants politicians the same advantages as recordings of sports games give to coaches, or forensic evidences gives to detectives. With well tracked political and news memes we can see which ideas rose to
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dominate the public consciousness. Did your spin on events get discussed more than your opponent’s? Do scandals around bastard children get more press than those around shady campaign contributions? When did the tone of an election shift from domestic to foreign concerns? Understanding these factors will let us shape propaganda like no one has ever done before. Not with the heavy iron fist of an authoritarian tyrant, but with the subtle and deadly grace of a master spy. There’s real power there, waiting to be used. The public face of internet memes is the silly one – the cat photos with ridiculously spelled captions and the weird videos that somehow gain popularity against
Steal this Meme
Memes e latest of slang all good taste. Unsurprisingly, the upcoming generation has done the same thing that all previous generations have done: put their own stamp on the world; and on the surface, internet memes are just the latest forms of slang. Yet the current zeitgeist is built on a new media that will fuel real and important change. Just as the radio generation crafted global wars, and the TV generation cemented the bond between appearance and power, the internet generation is already starting to change the way we deal with truth. Take a look at the 24 hour news networks, partisanship in the US and the world at large, and the rise of smaller more special-
yo dude bruh hyped lit addy ratchet woke bae thicc ized news feeds (Singularity Hub included). Everyone gets their own opportunity to express themselves, their own point of view, and these versions of the truth are spammed out into the world with little to no vetting. Which perspective should we believe? I don’t know. Which perspective DO we believe? The answer is in memes. When a phrase or term or idea gets repeated often enough, even if no one really claims it’s the complete truth, it still becomes powerful enough to shape the way we think and act. Memes are not the truth, but they are how we discuss and express the truth, and now that the internet allows us to track them we can control the perception of truth like never before.
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What Do You Meme?
Memes are not the truth, but they are how we discuss and express the The more people who venture online, the more memes we create, and the stronger the most popular memes will become. So, whether you seek to translate them into fame, money, knowledge, or power, internet memes represent a growing opportunity. Their impact extends into our offline activity, and indeed are informed by it, but the distinction between our digital and physical selves is diminishing anyway. That means that very soon, perhaps it has already happened, managing memes through the internet will be just as important as managing real world goods and services. Cultural savvy has always been valuable, but now you can see it being made. That’s a game changing step in its evolution, and one that is likely to shape the future in ways we can’t predict.
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TRUTH
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What Do You Meme?
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Memes are serious business.
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What Do You Meme?
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Dogs are Doggos: An Internet Language Built Around Love for the Puppers
by Jessica Boddy for NPR Some dogs are doggos, some are puppers, and others may even be pupperinos. There are corgos and clouds, fluffers and floofs, woofers and boofers. The chunky ones are thicc, and the thin ones are long bois. When they stick out their tongues, they’re doing a mlem, a blep, a blop. They bork. They boof. Once in a while they do each other a frighten. And whether they’re 10/10 or 12/10, they’re all h*ckin’ good boys and girls.
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What Do You Meme?
borkwoofer pupperpupperino corgodoggo Are you picking up what I’m putting down? If not, you’re probably not fluent in DoggoLingo, a language trend that’s been gaining steam on the Internet in the past few years. The language most often accompanies a picture or a video of a dog and has spread to all major forms of social media. It might even change the way we talk out loud to our beloved canines. DoggoLingo, sometimes referred to as doggo-speak, “seems to be quite lexical, there are a lot of distinctive words that are used,” says Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch. “It’s cutesier than others, too. Doggo, woofer, pupper, pupperino, fluffer — those have
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all got an extra suffix on the end to make them cuter.”McCulloch also notes DoggoLingo is uniquely heavy on onomatopoeias like bork, blep, mlem and blop. It’s no surprise DoggoLingo is made up of cutesy suffixes and onomatopoeias. “You’re taking on characteristics of how people would address their animals in the first place,” McCulloch says. What’s more, DoggoLingo is spoken by humans online, as opposed to in memes like LOLcats, doge and snekwhere the animals themselves do the talking. This makes DoggoLingo much more accessible, McCulloch notes, and perhaps more likely to find its
Dogs are Doggos
flufferthicc longboismlem blepblop way into spoken human speech. It wouldn’t be surprising if people started to call their Samoyeds fluffers, point out a Labrador’s mlem or call an overweight pug a fat boi, as in this Facebook post. In fact, they’re probably saying these out loud already. “A new cutesy word for a thing you’re already used to using cutesy words for? That’s such an easy entry to vocabulary,” McCulloch says.
A menagerie of meme-speak DoggoLingo’s array of words is a hodgepodge of existing Internet language. For ex-
ample, the phrase “doing me a frighten,” used to describe startled dogs, comes from an image posted in late 2015 according to KnowYourMeme.com. In it, a tiny Rottweiler puppy shocks its parent with a flurry of borks. The parent replies: stop it son, you are doing me a frighten. The origin of “bork” itself is less clear, but it’s clearly onomatopoeic. It’s perhaps most well-known thanks to Gabe the Dog, a tiny floof of a Miniature American Eskimo/Pomeranian whose borks have been remixed into countless classic tunes. Jurassic Bork, The Bork Files, Doggos of the Borkribbean, Imperial
stop it son, you are doing me a frighten 21
What Do You Meme?
bork 22
Dogs are Doggos
blop 23
What Do You Meme?
mlem 24
Dogs are Doggos
floof 25
What Do You Meme?
Borks — the list goes on and on. Gabe the Dog popularized the term “bork,” which is synonymous with bark. Tongue sounds have been floating around the Internet for a few years now, but seem to have finally found a home in DoggoLingo. They even have precise meanings. As Redditor blop_cop points out in a comment, “A blop is when a dog pokes his tongue out due to tiredness/forgetfulness and it often is only a small portion of the tongue. A mlem is basically any time a dog is licking their chops, or sticking their tongue out!” Not all of DoggoLingo is caninebound. “Blep” is commonly used for cats sticking out their tongues, too, as demonstrated on the feline-focused subreddit /r/blep. The constant use of “heck” in DoggoLingo might come from the snek meme, McCulloch says, where snakes try to act tough but are really just loveable losers. Sometimes heck is censored as h*ck. Matt Nelson, who runs the WeRateDogs Twitter account (@ dog_rates), says tweets from WeRate popularized h*ck and its derivatives. “I’m sure someone else did that before,” he says, “but it was something original to me and I used it to such an extent
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that people associate it with [@ dog_rates] now. @dog_rates currently has 1.77 million followers. Nelson rates submissions to the account with such lighthearted humor that, when combined with the power of a bombastically cute pup, often go viral.
Internet circles define DoggoLingo McCulloch thinks DoggoLingo may have become popularized and perhaps even solidified in this way thanks to accounts like WeRateDogs on Twitter, and also to dog-devoted groups on Facebook with thousands of members. One such group is called Dogspotting. At more than 500,000 members — and gaining around 10,000 a week — it’s one of the larger dog-devoted groups on Facebook. The rules are simple. ...Well, OK, they’re not that
simple. Essentially, members around the world post photos and videos of dogs they happen across in their daily lives. The No Known Dogs rule makes sure people don’t spam posts of their own pets, the No Selfies rule keeps the posts dogs-only (no humans!), and the
Dogs are Doggos
Don’t Drive and Spot rule keeps spotters safe. The result: thousands of doggos and puppers flood the Dogspotting group — and members’ newsfeeds — every single day. Of course, with members constantly posting and writing captions, the group is a breeding ground for DoggoLingo. “We can’t help but be socially influenced by each other,” McCulloch says. “The fun part of a meme is participating in something that other people recognize.” So, if one person calls a fat Corgi a loaf (like in the Dogspotting Facebook post shown here) and others find it funny, it›s easy for terms like that to proliferate and eventually become part of a language like DoggoLingo. Though created in 2008, Dogspotting really took off in the summer of 2014, particularly in Australia. This is significant because, as McCulloch points out, adding “-o” to words is very Australian. For example, where we’d say def to abbreviate the word definitely, Australians would say defo. So were Australians posting in Dogspotting saying “doggo,” which English-speakers around the world picked up on and turned into a viral Internet word?
“That makes a shocking amount of sense,” says John Savoia, who founded Dogspotting and runs the page with Reid Paskiewicz and Jeff Wallen. “I bet you anything [doggo] was used before Dogspotting and we just made it part of the lexicon,” Paskiewicz says. James Moffatt, a performance artist who grew up in Adelaide and is not a member of Dogspotting, says he remembers doggo being used “as an affectionate diminutive to refer to dogs throughout my childhood.” All in all, it’s possible that doggo got a boost shortly after more Australians joined Dogspotting. Pages like Ding de la Doggo may have also assisted its slingshot into meme stardom.
A canine oasis Dogs’ wholesomeness could be why groups like Dogspotting and accounts like WeRateDogs have become so popular. They’re an escape from a news cycle that’s become terrifying and depressing for so many. Nelson isn’t sure why exactly dogs are so genuinely heartwarming.
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What Do You Meme?
“Maybe they represent this sort of unconditional love that we strive for,” he says, “or they just embody this innocent perfection that we can’t really find in ourselves or immediately in other animals.” “Dogs in general are wholesome and uplifting,” says Dogspotting moderator Molly Bloomfield. “Irrelevant of your political views, your gender, your socioeconomic status; everyone loves dogs and dogs love everyone.” To preserve this oasis and prevent conflict among members, Dogspotting doesn’t allow its members to take political stands in their posts. “We try our hardest to be fair to
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everyone,” Wallen says. “We allow spots from rallies, protests and such, but we don’t allow people to project their agendas onto the spotted dogs.” For example, a Dogspotter could say, “I spotted this pup at the anti-Trump rally,” but not, “This dog hates Trump.” Rule breakers are banned, but can appeal to the Dogspotting People’s Court for re-entry. «We want everybody to get back in,» Paskiewicz says, “as long as they don’t do it again.” As WeRateDogs followers are constantly reminded, all dogs are good dogs. And just about every
Dogs are Doggos
dog posted on Dogspotting is accompanied by a tone of wonder, gushiness, or pure elation. “In this time of politics hijacking our social media, people need dogs to smile and enjoy the good things in life,” Paskiewicz says. “I feel honored to be a part of this social happening.” “Dogspotting is relentlessly positive,” says Joey Faulkner, a Dogspotter and Ph.D. student at the University of Edinburgh who’s blogged about the group in the past.
Even the way Dogspotting is run is wholesome. Other dog-devoted Facebook groups like Cool Dog Group and Big Hecking Group of Dang Doggos aren›t seen as competition to Dogspotting, Paskiewicz says. “The more dogs, the better.”
Dogspotting YouTube
And if Dogspotting ever becomes profitable, Paskiewicz says a fixed percentage of profits will go to a As Bloomfield puts it, “Dogs are here! respected dog charity. How can the world be evli when dogs exist?”
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What Do You Meme?
Dogspotting is so positive and complex that Paskiewicz has felt the need to specify during interviews that the group is not a cult. The phrase “we are not a cult” has even spread to posts and Tshirts. It’s one of many Dogspotting mottos, along with “the dogs must flow,” a reference from the novel Dune, and “be excellent to each other,” from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
DoggoLingo in the dictionary This dog-centric positivity has driven the popularity of DoggoLingo to new heights. Even Merriam-Webster is aware of terms like doggo and pupper. Though they have a long way to go before they’re eligible for dictionaryentry — they need to be used in published, edited work over an extended period of time — they’re definitely candidates.
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“I personally like both,” says Emily Brewster, an associate editor at Merriam-Webster, Inc. “I think it’s great when people play with their language, and the new ‘doggo’ is way more fun than the unrelated adverb meaning ‘in hiding.’ McCulloch thinks some DoggoLingo terms have staying power, too: “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see ‘doggo’ around in 50 years and people never realize it came from a meme.”
Dogs are Doggos
Dogs are here!
How can the world be evil when dogs exist?! 31
this is the future
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liberals want
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Make Make Memes Memes Dank Dank Again!! Again!!
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The Dank Memes that are “Disrupting” Politics by Hua Hsu for The New Yorker It was around the time when Jill Stein acknowledged the existence of the “Jill Stein Dank Meme Stash” that this surreal election tipped into a new dimension of weirdness for me. The stash is actually a Facebook page where supporters of the Green Party Presidential candidate share enthusiasm for and information about Stein, as well as bafflingly absurd and occasionally funny “dank memes” about her and the other candidates.
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What Do You Meme?
In late August, Stein’s Twitter account tweeted a picture of her with her hand over her mouth, giggling politely at one of the stash’s popular memes, an old image of a Dave Chappelle character protectively hoarding fistfuls of cash, bearing a new caption: “trump and clinton watching jill like.” Whether enthusiasts of this Facebook page wield clout as a voting bloc is beside the point. It was one of those strange moments when the stodgy, humorless, official world was acknowledging an insular corner of the underground. To those who aren’t zealots of this particular stash—and Facebook has plenty of other choice meme repositories—the Stein tweet felt like a blatant ploy to court a young, fringe constituency. But who could blame her for this picture, or a follow-up tweet in which Stein saluted the gorilla Harambe,
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late of the Cincinnati Zoo, who lives on as a cause célèbre on the Internet? After all, this has been a year when very serious newscasters parsed the origin myths of Pepe the Frog, when Donald Trump took to Twitter while most Americans were asleep to implore us to seek out a (nonexistent) sex tape, when a semi-legitimate candidate for President was dogged with rumors that he was the Zodiac killer. I feel sheepish admitting that I’ve laughed a lot during these past few months. More often than not, it’s been because Twitter and Vine are some sort of apex of human creativity, and I’ve come across something genuinely funny. But sometimes it’s been purely out of shock, a laugh as a placeholder for anxiety that feels inexpressible
Distrupting Politics Memes don’t circulate because they’re true. They circulate because they’re funny. They’re about reappropriating the culture around us and short-circuiting meanings. Maybe at their best, memes bring power or celebrity or influence down to the level of the crowd. Usually they’re just about flinging something against the wall and seeing what might happen next. It’s a function of modern life and its technology that everything serious can be made into something arresting and viral, and with relative ease. One of the notable features of this election cycle has been how the instinct to ridicule the powers that be has drifted from legible political interests, whether it’s party or ideology, toward a purely nihilistic view of the world. A couple of weeks ago, it was reported that the virtual-re-
ality billionaire Palmer Luckey had been quietly bankrolling an online group responsible for generating and spreading anti-Clinton memes of similarly “dank” quality. While Luckey’s stated goal was to get Trump elected, the candidate’s appeal was less about ideas than his ethos of negativity. The broader goal, Luckey explained, was to prove that “shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real”—maybe to create something that might be the inverse of Shepard Fairey’s catalyzing “Hope” or “Change” posters. Maybe, Luckey hoped, they could bring the disruptive, trollish possibilities of online mayhem to “real life.” This nihilistic approach to humor has played an enormous role this election cycle; in fact, the desire to entertain one another online
Memes don’t circulate because they’re true, They circulate because they’re funny. 37
What Do You Meme?
seems to constitute an entire subset of our political discourse. The challenge has been figuring out who’s in on the joke. By the time NBC announced that Alec Baldwin would make a guest appearance on “Saturday Night Live” this past weekend, playing Donald Trump, it felt like part of an election -cycle ritual, and a somewhat old-fashioned one at that. Saturday’s season première featured a ten-minute cold open dramatizing last week’s first Presidential debate. Kate McKinnon brought a jagged energy to her portrayal of Hillary Clinton. Baldwin depicted Trump with a scornful enthusiasm. He demonstrated keen obser-
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vational skills, finding Trump’s timbre, exaggerating all the right mannerisms, hitting on a few of Trump’s key verbal tics, like the accusatory vigor with which he leans into “China.” But given the cycle as a whole, as well as the revelations about Trump’s taxes that dropped a couple of hours before, it felt quaint, a bit too professional, yet far less strange than the real thing.
Disrupting Politics
It felt far less strange than the real thing 39
What Do You Meme?
Everything is
bullshit Making fun of politicians often serves as a release valve, a way to make difficult truths into something digestibly viral. The problem with “S.N.L.”-type parody in a time of Trump is that the truth no longer feels sufficient; it will not set us free. Maybe this helps explain why television’s exasperated, pretend-news anchors are having a tough time keeping pace with real life. Over the past few months, it’s been hard to discern whether Trump’s campaign is a series of disasters and happy accidents or a disinformation drive carefully mapped by a team of semiotics majors. In other words, it’s hard to expose bullshit when the baseline suspicion is that everything is bullshit.
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Baldwin’s Trump is unlikely to sway any undecideds away from the Republican candidate, which seemed a clear goal, and the obvious precedent was Tina Fey’s portrayal of Sarah Palin, in 2008. Back then, Fey shrugged off accusations of editorializing by pointing out that she was often repeating the candidate’s words verbatim. The implication was that hearing Palin’s words askance might reveal something vital to those paying attention. It’s impossible to quantify, of course, what effect any “viral” moment can actually have on the course of history—even more so now, when we have the means to bury those moments under thousands of words of commentary. But if
Disrupting Politics campaigning is about the projection of image, and if modern campaigns are built to capitalize on gaffes, stumbles, and glimmers of visible weakness, Fey’s impression certainly disrupted the flow of things. And it was a reminder that the enormous machine of politics could still get twisted up by the actions of individuals, sometimes by accident. From Baldwin to Luckey, from dank-meme magicians to people cracking wise on Twitter: it’s a shoot-the-moon logic that’s come to define this moment. The possibility that a joke might cohere into a seeming movement.
Maybe a joke could even win the Presidency.
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What Do You Meme? I'm too good to you I'm way too good to you You take my love for granted I just don't understand it
wanna feel old? this is ed sheeran and taylor swift now 42
Now I’ve had the time of my life No I never felt like this before Yes I swear it’s the truth and I owe it all to you
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What Do You Meme?
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How Pepe the Frog Became a Nazi Trump Supporter and an Alt Right Symbol by Olivia Nuzzi 4chan’s Pepe the Frog meme was wildly popular among ‘normies’— until white nationalists decorated him with swastikas and gave him a Trump button.
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What Do You Meme?
Like all great art,
Pepe was open to endless interpretation 46
Pepe
The green frog was behind the United States side of the metal fence at the country’s southernmost border, smirking and holding a Donald Trump campaign button up to his chin. A caricature of a Mexican couple—the man dressed in a sombrero and poncho, the woman with braided hair and an infant in her arms—looked out at him through the barricade and cried. Then the frog was someplace else entirely, this time covered in Nazi insignia: above his smirk, the phrase “SKIN HEAD” and a swastika; over his left eyelid, “14,” the numeric shorthand for “we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”; and over his right eyelid, “88,” which stands for “Heil Hitler.” And there the frog was yet again, standing at a lectern stamped with the presidential seal, a red tie hanging from his green neck, Trump’s iconic hair arranged on his head and an American flag at his back. This is Pepe, a cartoon amphibian introduced to the world sans swastikas and Trump associations in 2005, on Myspace, in the artist Matt Furie’s comic strip Boy’s Club, and popularized on 4chan in the ensuing 11 years, culminating in 2015, when teens shared
Pepe’s likeness so many times he became the biggest meme on Tumblr. Like all great art, Pepe was open to endless interpretation, but at the end of the day, he meant whatever you wanted him to mean . All in good fun, teens made Batman Pepe, Supermarket Checkout Girl Pepe, Borat Pepe, Keith Haring Pepe, and carved Pepe pumpkins. But he also embodied existential angst. Pepe, the grimiest but most versatile meme of all, was both hero and antihero—a symbol fit for all of life’s ups and downs and the full spectrum of human emotions, as they played out online. On social media, Pepe became inescapable. Katy Perry tweeted a crying Pepe with the caption “Australian jet lag got me like,” racking up over 10,000 retweets. Nicki Minaj posted a twerking Pepe on Instagram with the caption “Me on Instagram for the next few weeks trying to get my followers back up,” which 282,000 users ‘liked.’ And then, recently, things took a turn: Pepe became socially unacceptable. Turns out that was by design. @JaredTSwift is an anonymous white nationalist who claims to be
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What Do You Meme?
19 years old and in school someplace on the West Coast. He told me there is “an actual campaign to reclaim Pepe from normies.”
“We basically mixed Pepe in with Nazi propaganda, etc. We built that association,” @JaredTSwift said.
Normies are basics—agreeable, mainstream members of society who have no knowingly abhorrent political views or unsavory hobbies. They are Katy Perry, and when they latch onto a meme, the meme dies the way your favorite band dies when it sells out and licenses a song to Chevrolet. When mainstream culture gets in on the joke, in other words, the joke is ruined forever.
He sent me a “rare Pepe,” an ironic categorization for certain versions of the meme: Pepe, his eyes red and irises swastikashaped, against a trippy rainbow backdrop. “Do with it what you will,” he said.
The campaign to reclaim Pepe from normies was an effort to prevent this sort of death, but it also had the effect of desensitizing swaths of the Internet to racist, but mostly anti-Semitic, ideas supported by the so-called alt-right movement. It began in late 2015 on /r9k/, a controversial 4chan board where, as on any message board, it can be difficult to discern how serious commenters are being or if they’re just fucking around entirely. Nevertheless, /r9k/ has been tied to Elliot Rodger—the UC Santa Barbara shooter who killed six people in 2014—who found fans there, and GamerGate. There, Pepe transformed from harmless cartoon to big green monster.
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Building the Trump association came next, after which @JaredTSwift said the images got crossover appeal. They began to move from 4chan to Twitter, which is when “journalists were exposed to it via Trump memes.” On Jan. 7, Cheri Jacobus, a Republican consultant and pundit who is suing Trump for defamation and has been harassed by Trump supporters, tweeted, “The green frog symbol is what white supremacists use in their propaganda. U don’t want to go there.” #FrogTwitter considered Jacobus, the first prominent person to be duped, its first scalp and inundated her with ever more Pepe images and Trump memes, some of which were violent and sexually explicit. In one, a blond woman is decapitated before Pepe has intercourse with her headless body. In
Pepe
Katy Perry Tweeted a Crying Pepe.
Nicki Minaj posted a Twerking Pepe. 49
What Do You Meme?
the green frog symbol is what the white supremacists use in their propoganda. U don’t want to go there.
Does anyone know what that green face is? Does that make it OK?
another, Jacobus’s face is photoshopped onto a topless woman kneeling before Trump, who is himself photoshopped to wear a Nazi uniform. “When they adapt Pepe the green frog and turn it into an anti-Semite, staring into the screen with the World Trade Center behind it, is that cute or funny?” she asked when reached by phone Wednesday. “Does that make it OK? I don’t know,” she said. “Violent and disturbing images are violent and disturbing images regardless of what their stated reasons are.” Jay Nordlinger, a senior editor at National Review, a conservative publication opposed to Trump’s candidacy, asked Twitter on Jan. 30, “Does anyone know what that
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green face is that ‘alt’ and ‘cuck’ people put in their avatars and their other images?” @TopKanker replied with an image of Pepe dressed as a Nazi soldier and holding a Star of David. On May 16, Ben White, a reporter for Politico, tweeted a drawing of Pepe and asked, “What/who is this character and why do I see it associated with Trumpsters/Alt-Right types all the time?” #FrogTwitter descended on White’s mentions, with predictable results. @DonaldjBismarck, a selfdescribed “Nationalist,” replied with a meme of Hillary Clinton, squinting at a computer screen and asking, “WHO THE HELL IS PEPE?”
Pepe is that cute or funny?
Who is that character and why do I see it associated with the Trumpsters/Alt-Right types?
WHO THE HELL IS PEPE?!? “Turns out asking about Pepe was a bad idea,” White tweeted, in conclusion. But Pepe’s twisted transformation wouldn’t be complete until a few hours after White’s foray down the froghole, when Margarita Noriega, an executive editor at Newsweek, tweeted a Pepe at Marco Rubio. Benny Polatseck, who runs the public relations firm Colossal PR, accused Noriega of employing an image “used by racists to make fun of latinos.” Noriega deleted the Pepe. “Most memes are ephemeral by nature, but Pepe is not,” @ JaredTSwift told me. “He’s a reflection of our souls, to most of us. It’s disgusting to see people (‘normies,’ if you will) use him so trivially. He belongs to us. And
we’ll make him toxic if we have to.” @JaredTSwift said some of the support for Trump was in jest, but for most of his cohorts, it’s sincere. He even claimed to have voted for Trump in the primary himself, wherever it is he lives, and said he’d vote for him in the general, too. “In a sense, we’ve managed to push white nationalism into a very mainstream position,” he said. “Trump’s online support has been crucial to his success, I believe, and the fact is that his biggest and most devoted online supporters are white nationalists. Now, we’ve pushed the Overton window. People have adopted our rhetoric, sometimes without even realizing it. We’re setting up for a massive cultural shift.”
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What Do You Meme?
Another anonymous white nationalist, @PaulTown_, claimed to be “in my late 20s,” but declined to say where he exists geographically, other than to confirm that, every few months, he meets the members of his community in New York City. He estimated the broad #FrogTwitter movement to consist of about 30 people but said 10 core members helped plot it out over drinks in late 2015, before taking to /r9k/. “We all do some weightlifting, so we met through friends involved in that scene,” he said. “Turning Pepe into a white nationalist icon was one of our original goals, although we’ve had our hands in many other things.” One of those things has been helping to turn Taylor Swift into an “Aryan goddess.” When several publications (Broadly, Slate, and The Washington Post) this week reported on the alt-right’s fixation on the pop star, #FrogTwitter was somewhat triumphant. “I never thought that would work,” @
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JaredTSwift said, “but they finally noticed.” @PaulTown_ characterized Pepe as “an experiment” the group used “as a test.” “As you can see,” he said, “it went better than we could ever have imagined.”
Pepe
As you can see, it went better than we could ever have imagined.
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What Do You Meme?
Nothing but respect for my president
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What Do You Meme?
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The Internet Won’t Let Harambe Rest in Peace by Abby Ohlheiser for The Washington Post Harambe was a 17-year-old gorilla who died in May after a child climbed into his enclosure. During the peak of the frenzy of online outrage that followed his death, you probably read about him in the news, including on this website. The news cycle faded away, but on the Internet, Harambe is not at peace. The gorilla’s name is a meme that has transcended the outrage cycle that spawned it and is outlasting our expectations for the lifespan of most online jokes.
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What Do You Meme?
#Justice for Harambe For weeks now, certain parts of the Internet have hosted a steady parade of ironic Harambe tributes, in a bunch of different permutations. With one exception (which we will get to) they all share the same basic approach: paying tribute to Harambe’s life to the point of absurdity. And a self-awareness about the major problems with the Internet’s intense reaction to stories like this. The meme began in the days after Harambe’s death, then was absorbed by Weird Twitter and a whole bunch of teens. It’s still around. How did we get here? First, it’s worth reminding ourselves of what it was like on the Internet when Harambe died.
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Worse than Murder A zookeeper at the Cincinnati Zoo shot Harambe on May 28, when the gorilla picked up a boy who fell into his enclosure and dragged him; Harambe died, the child survived. Within hours, the Internet was worked up into an earnest fury at Harambe’s death, the zoo’s decision, and the mother of the boy who entered the enclosure. The scrutiny she faced was particularly intense. Someone created a change.org petition originally calling for her and the boy’s father to be “held accountable for lack of supervision and negligence,” even though
RIP Harambe
no evidence existed to support a claim that the parents had done anything wrong. The petition amassed hundreds of thousands of signatures before its creator revised the petition and softened the language. The accounts of several witnesses said the mother was watching her children closely at the time.
As all this happened, earnest images started showing up on the Facebook page that served as an epicenter for outrage at the gorilla’s death. Artists drew portraits of Harambe in tribute, the rage and sadness continues. And then the visual slippage into meme began.
A Facebook page, “Justice for Harambe,” gained tens of thousands of followers within a day (it now has more than 150,000 of them). The page filled up with grief and rage. “Shooting an endangered animal is worse than murder,” one commenter claimed. People started writing threatening things about the mother online.
Particularly on Black Instagram, a whole bunch of over-the-top tributes to Harambe started showing up in the days after the gorilla’s death. A lot of those images were reposted to Twitter and re-circulated, based on our search of Twitter references for phrases like “RIP Harambe” in the days after the gorilla died.
How the Meme Started
#DoIt ForHarambe 59
What Do You Meme?
..which I’m going to have a hard time explaining here at the Washington Post These jokes are pretty similar to the ones that started taking over the meme world at large about a week later: jokes about mourning Harambe, jokes about the intensity of the Internet’s reaction to Harambe, jokes where the teller left the ironic impression that their inner monologue was just a single word, “Harambe.”
about Harambe. Others involve photoshopping a particular picture of Harambe into places of honor:
The Weird Twitter version of the tribute, the Daily Dot noted, appears to have emerged about a week after Harambe died, give or take.
Anyway, the main one keeps escalating. There’s this graffiti remix, which uses both the Harambe meme and the Primitive Spongebob meme in one image.
The earlier versions of the meme closely mimic some of the more cliched ways the Internet pays tribute to the dead.
And last Friday, a bunch of teens successfully tricked Google into re-labeling the street outside their high school Harambe Drive.
One later version of the meme involved rewriting the lyrics of every song on Earth to make them
“WE SENT COMPLAINTS TO GOOGLE MAPS SAYING SHANKLAND ROAD WAS ACTUALLY
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There’s also a sub-meme, “d—-s out for Harambe,” which I’m going to have a real hard time explaining here at The Washington Post given that the first word is unsuitable for our website.
RIP Harambe
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What Do You Meme?
“WE SENT COMPLAINTS TO GOOGLE MAPS SAYING SHANKLAND ROAD WAS ACTUALLY HARAMBE DRIVE
AND THEY CHANGED IT I’M SCREAMING HARAMBE DRIVE,” Chris Gallagher wrote on Twitter (in a very appropriate capslock) “AND THEY CHANGED IT IM SCREAMING” The idea is, the more intense and more sincere-seeming the expression of mourning is, the funnier the joke. Twitter and Weird Facebook have both, in the ensuing months, made an art out of it.
The other Harambe Meme As Know Your Meme notes, the Internet’s ever-present racists started making bad Harambe memes pretty quickly, too. On June 1, a
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bunch of trolls posted memes to Facebook comparing an Australian rules football player named Adam Goodes, who is an Indigenous Australian, to Harambe. In the past, Goodes has been called an “ape” and told to “get back to the zoo” by the game’s fans. The racist use of Harambe isn’t quite its own meme — it’s more a variation on a theme of the longstanding racist meme of comparing black people to primates. It’s the same hateful stuff that was tweeted at actor Leslie Jones last week, and that has long been the basis of racist photoshops of President Obama.
RIP Harambe
Why the Meme Still Exists New York Magazine — which scooped us on trying to thinkpiece the Harambe meme into oblivion — observed that the meme’s borderline offensiveness plays a very specific role in its staying power, arguing, ” ‘Harambe’ is still a funny punchline because brands will never touch it.” The brands that try to participate in meme culture can’t use all of the Internet’s jokes, and Harambe is definitely one of those.
that creates a phenomenon like the outrage at Harambe’s death. It’s like the meme lords’ version of a jeremiad against the Internet’s outrage cycle, one that feels nearly the same every time. If the Internet never lets Harambe rest, it will be because we can’t seem to stop treating each of these stories in the exact same way.
But also, the meme persists because it is, at its heart, a criticism of the online cultural environment
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here come dat boi!!!!!
o shit waddup 64
Excerpt by Brian Feldman for NY Magazine
Is it possible to explain Dat Boi?
Step 1: You see the frog, who is “Dat Boi,” the titular boi Step 2: You greet Dat Boi with a studiously casual “o shit waddup” Dat Boi is funny because the frog does not look like the kind of person you’d call “Dat Boi.” He’s a frog, and he’s on a unicycle. And yet, his relaxed demeanor projects the kind of imperturbable mellowness you would expect in someone called Dat Boi. This is about as good an explanation as I can muster.
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What Do You Meme?
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The Distracted Boyfriend Meme’s Photographer Explains All by Brian Barrett You’ve see it by now, maybe enough times to be sick of it: A man walks down a city street with his girlfriend, head turned backward, face curved into a Tex Avery ogle directed at a woman walking the other direction. This is the “distracted boyfriend” stock photo, an image that launched a thousand memes. And no one’s more surprised at its popularity than the man who took it.
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What Do You Meme?
Antonio Guillem is a 45-year-old photographer from Barcelona, Spain, who spends his days on shoots specifically destined for stock image companies. For most of that time, he’s worked with the same three models, though he says he parted ways with one of them a year or so ago. (Guillem declined to name his collaborators out of concern for their privacy.) His portfolio largely consists of people—some combination of two women and one man—in the sort of reactive poses that makes stock photography such an uncanny delight.
to diversify his look. “We decided to take a few risks, planning a session representing the infidelity concept in relationships in a playful and fun way,” he says over email. He and his models took to Gerona, an idyllic city in Catalonia, Spain, chose a spot on the street, and started shooting. “It was quite challenging to achieve face expressions that were believable,” says Guillem. “Mainly because we always have a really great work atmosphere, and almost all the time one of the models was laughing while we were trying to take the picture.”
But in mid-2015, spurred by successful sales, Guillem wanted
While multiple shots came out of that session—and countless have
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Distracted Boyfriend
featured the same trio over the years—it was “Disloyal man walking with his girlfriend and looking amazed at another seductive girl” that would go on to set the internet ablaze with infinite spins on the same formulaic joke. The Meme Documentation Tumblr—yes, there is one, and you should follow it—traces “distracted boyfriend” back to the above late-January post in a Turkish Facebook group devoted to prog rock (the group’s name translates to “Great Answers to Prog Enemies”). After that, it laid dormant until this month, when Twitter ran amok with it.
For Guillem, the explosive popularity of a photo snapped two years ago presents more of a curiosity than any kind of milestone. “I never thought that one of my images will be that popular,” he says. “I didn’t even know what a meme is until recently, when the models started to tell me about the memes that people were doing with our work.” As any number of verified accounts can tell you, popularity on Twitter does not directly translate into real-life gains. “Our top-selling images get more than 5,000
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What Do You Meme?
to 6,000 sales a year, while the meme photo is sold around 700 times a year,” says Guillem. His best-selling photo, a solo shot of one of the “distracted boyfriend” women smiling, has sold over 13,000 times. Besides, it’s not like Tumblr and Twitter users are forking over fees to Shutterstock before they fire up Photoshop. “Memes haven’t given us any kind of economic profit, because most of the images haven’t been sold on the microstock agencies,” says Guillem. “They are being used without the proper license on those agencies.” Not that he minds, particularly. Guillem says he’s “not worried about the meme situation,” and understands that social media remixers are acting “in good faith.” He does plan to pursue legal action in cases where the images could reflect poorly on himself or the models. Mostly, Guillem says, he’s too busy with his stock photography pursuits to keep close tabs on this particular cultural moment. It’s a job he fell into; in his previous life, before Spain’s economy suffered a crippling crash, he had made a living creating 3-D designs for construction companies. After an unemployed stint, he decided to pick up a camera.
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“We started without having any kind of idea of this business, and I didn’t even know a thing about photography,” says Guillem. After three and a half years, he says, he was selling 1,600 photos every day. In Guillem’s view, a few weeks of virality doesn’t connote any sort of success that he hasn’t already achieved. Besides, he rightly acknowledges that he can’t take credit for the meme-ification of his work. “Regarding what I think about the photo has gone viral, I think the image was a good foundation to whoever had the great idea to turn it into a metaphor that works for almost everything,” he says. Even, it turns out, for itself.
Distracted Boyfriend
The conclusion we’ve all been waiting for
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What Do You Meme?coming If homeboy’s
through with
these?
It’s quiet, yeah, no; it’s quiet for him.
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,
But, like, if he comes through in, like
theeeeeese…
homeboy’s gonna, like, get iiiit. 73
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What Do You Meme?
No matter what, I will always be able to tell my children that I watched Martin Shkreli invade a college meme Facebook group. Though, the truth is, I didn’t even realize it was him. This was back in April, when Columbia Buy Sell Memes, the unofficial official meme page of Columbia University, was in its prime and — despite only being created a mere five months ago — boasted well over 20,000 members. Shkreli, the infamous pharmaceutical entrepreneur and Wu-Tang auction-winner currently on trial for fraud, published a basic text post that read: “are columbia women better looking than barnard or is the premise of the question disgusting plz discuss.”
It turns out that nearly every elite academic institution in America has a booming Facebook group dedicated solely to the creation and sharing of school-related memes — and Martin Shkreli has somehow invaded almost all of them. Membership figures range from the respectable 30,000 of Harvard Memes for Elitist 1% Tweens, to the almost absurd 102,000 of UC Berkeley Memes for Edgy Teens.
I first got into these groups late last year, when — after receiving countless screenshots of “totally hilarious” posts from Columbia Buy Sell — I caved and sent a join request of my own. That’s when I realized that this seemingly low-key meme-sharing group was actually a fascinatingly complex operation. I became obsessed with I assumed that it was a parody the logistics of it — How did this account meant to stir the pot — all begin? Who were these 20,000 I mean, surely Shkreli himself members? — and started tracing had better things to do? As it the lineage of the collegiate Faceturns out, no. As the day went book meme group back as far as I on, one post turned into 20; could, in an attempt to find some 20 posts turned into a series of livestreamed AMAs; AMAs eventu- answers. But, as I fell deeper and deeper into this (poorly Photoally led to a confusing attempt at shopped) rabbit hole — which a counterrevolution from within involved groups with names like the group itself. It had became impossible to ignore the facts: The Princeton Memes for Preppy AF Teens, Yale Memes for Special real Martin Shkreli had invaded a college meme group. And, weirder Snowflake Teens, and Official still, this wasn’t the first time this Unofficial Penn Squirrel Catching Club — the number of questions sort of thing had happened.
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Facebook Meme Groups
I had about this secret world of strangely popular, semi-public Facebook groups only grew. Where did they come from? How did they get so popular so quickly? And where the hell did Martin Shkreli fit into all of this?
The Great Collegiate Meme Rush of 2016 Unlike most actual memes on the internet, the trend of elite college meme-sharing groups (and Shkreli’s subsequent invasion of them) has a surprisingly easy-tofind beginning. All roads lead back to one group: UC Berkeley Memes for Edgy Teens and its founder, Chris Tril.Tril, a Berkeley student, created the group back in May of
2016 after growing frustrated with his friends’ lack of understanding when it came to memes. He wanted to create a community where he and other like-minded Cal students could share quality content without having to anonymously navigate through back channels of the internet, like 4chan and Reddit. The group began with just a handful of members — and, for a while, Tril was essentially the only active poster — but within just a few short months, it grew to become one of the largest memesharing groups on Facebook. By 2017, UC Berkeley Memes for Edgy Teens had grown so famous that it began to attract thousands of members from outside the UC bubble. Students from other
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What Do You Meme?
colleges, like Stanford and UCLA began to flood the group with join requests. Then, one fateful Sunday evening in February (10:37 p.m. on Sunday, the 19th, to be exact), the unthinkable happened: Martin Shkreli joined the group — and then promptly left. Tril and his team of moderators went into overdrive as they realized the bounty of possible meme opportunities they were missing out on. Pages like UC Berkeley Memes for Edgy Teens thrive on the chaos and drama of online conflict, which attracts more comments, shares, and submissions, and Shkreli was as close to the human embodiment of a meme as one could get. He had already achieved widespread notoriety, and his name alone incited the sort of infighting that drove com-
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ment chains into the hundreds. They quickly changed the title of the group to RIP IN PIECE MARTIN SHRKELI (1983–2017) in the hopes that it would prompt him to rejoin. To their delight, it did, and after he was re-added to the group, they decided to capitalize on the absolute absurdity of the situation: They promoted Shkreli to moderator, changed the group’s name to UC Shkreli Memes for Edgy Teens, and sat back to see what would happen. What followed were the most insane 24 hours in the group’s history, during which Shkreli used his mod powers to completely remake the group in his image. He deleted posts that he thought were lame, and pinned Shkreli-approved content to the top; he gave out his phone number to the thousands
Facebook Meme Groups
of members who participated in the group, and actually accepted the majority of calls they made; and he did a series of AMA-style livestreams where he took questions from commenters, told stories, and even brought out his nunchakus and a guitar (though he refused to play “Wonderwall”). Today, UC Berkeley Memes for Edgy Teens has over 100,000 members, but it is fair to say that the Shkreli Incident was one of the group’s catalyzing moments. The news of his reign caused a huge membership spike, and it is this impressive level of growth and fame that spawned the birth of nearly every other large collegiate meme group on the market today. (University of Pennsylvania’s Official Unofficial Penn Squirrel Catching Club is the sole page
that can’t trace its lineage back to Tril’s group, as it was actually started three months earlier by then-sophomore Anton Relin, but the group didn’t gain a sizable following until after the Great Collegiate Meme Rush of Late 2016, so it can’t be considered the true founder of the movement.)
What does it all meme? However, shedding some wellneeded light on the origins of the elite collegiate meme craze does not fully explain the bizarre nature of these groups’ sustained popularity. Why do so many students flock to these dedicated groups to share such oddly specific memes publicly when more well-established platforms like
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What Do You Meme?
Well, of course, the more relatable your meme is,
college got me like
the more successful it is 80
Facebook Meme Groups
Tumblr, Twitter, or Reddit exist? Why haven’t supergroups like UC Berkeley Memes for Edgy Teens died out over the past year — or at least stopped growing — like every other thing on the internet eventually does? I reached out to a number of the admins and moderators of some of the most popular collegiate meme groups to see if they had any insights. And to be honest, I wasn’t expecting much — clear logic and memes don’t exactly go together — but, surprisingly, nearly every response I got mentioned a similar trend. “My friends and I always say that memes come from a place of stress and anxiety,” said Ephraim Sutherland, co-founder of Yale Memes for Special Snowflake Teens. “There’s definitely the tropes in college, especially at Yale, that everyone — even if it’s not true — complains about their GPA, struggling in classes, and getting too little sleep.” “Well, of course, the more relatable [your meme] is, the more successful it is — that’s true for all of the pages,” said self-declared memelord of Columbia Buy Sell Memes, Rafael Ortiz. “In schools like Columbia, the ones that do the best are definitely memes about sadness or stress.”
“We do have a large issue with mental health at our university,” said Relin, the founder of Official Unofficial Penn Squirrel Catching Club. “And I’ve found that people actually like to use the page as a way to comment on [it] and a wide range of other issues.” While this penchant for memes that come from an obvious place of depression and anxiety could easily be dismissed as being mere jokes, or overexaggerations — especially in rigorous institutions like those in the Ivy League — it’s worth noting their likely connection to recent events: Within the last academic year alone, Columbia University was rocked by a disturbing wave of suicides, and mental-health-related issues have been on the rise for college students nationwide. Inside these hyperpressurized, rigorous academic environments, students often lack an outlet through which they can channel their stresses. And while the idea of collegiate Facebook meme groups (of all things) filling this void may seem a bit ridiculous, in practice, they’ve actually become surprisingly fitting platforms for discourse.
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What Do You Meme? “Before the page, I had never seen anyone get together and talk about these issues,” Tril of UC Berkeley Memes for Edgy Teens recalled. “Now, I feel like people aren’t afraid to talk about them out in the open. I like that the page gets the conversation going, as I don’t think it would have even started without it. The fact that these types of important conversations are taking place through the posting of memes — a comically named, online cultural fad — doesn’t matter. For the young adults who frequent these platforms, memes aren’t merely a niche, sometimes-funny byproduct of the cultural whirlwind that is the internet, but rather, a legitimate, respected mode of communication that these students are using to talk about difficult subjects. And interestingly enough, when making these sorts of posts, people aren’t hiding behind usernames and throwaway accounts, they’re actively tying their name (and their Facebook page) to this surprisingly intimate form of expression and shoving it into the faces of 30,000 of their closest peers. The startling lack of anonymity found here runs contrary to the very conditions that the form of expression was created under. For essentially all of meme history, the posting and sharing experience has been an unabashedly impersonal one. On sites like
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Tumblr and Reddit, the identities of posters and commenters alike are hidden behind the veil of usernames, and on 4chan, there isn’t even that — users are instead assigned a random string of numbers to distinguish one post from another, and there’s no archive of data to look back on. This was all meant to be equalizing — a way to liberate content from the uncomfortable weight of titles and identity — but it has also been neutralizing. When we think and talk about online activities, like posting memes, there’s this tendency to construct some distinction between the “real” and the “virtual” self — to think of digital actions as disembodied in one way or another — yet this could not be more wrong, as the social situations users find themselves in online are, in many ways, just as real and valid as those offline. By eschewing anonymity, members of supergroups like UC Berkeley Memes for Edgy Teens prove their innate understanding of this false assumption. To borrow a quote from Bane: While others may have merely adopted the meme, this generation of students was born in it — molded by it. Memes and the internet culture from which they spawn have been present in these young adults’ lives for the majority of their formative years — and it shows.
Facebook Meme Groups
The distinction between the on and offline self has disappeared
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What Do You Meme?
If you don’t want to be thought of as a shitty person,
stop doing and sharing shitty things.
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Facebook Meme Groups It’s hard to not see this as progress. If this tendency toward a more holistic form of online expression — one that publicly displays our worst digital habits alongside our best — spreads outside the confines of these seemHowever, this carries with it its ingly irrelevant groups, a new sysown complications. The Harvard Memes for Horny Bourgeois Teens tem of behavior could arise: one where users everywhere consider debacle — which resulted in ten their online actions to be just as pre-frosh students losing their meaningful and reflective of their admissions offers after posting some extremely distasteful memes character as their physical ones. — is only the most recent example Yes, most people would probably end up Milkshake Ducking themof the real-world consequences selves. (We are all, more or less, of losing this distinction. Introterrible, shitty people online.) ducing accountability is difficult — especially in a sphere that had But eventually, (hopefully) people previously been defined by the op- would learn the same lesson that the students of these collegiate posite. Yet, the longevity of these meme groups did: If you don’t want groups and their ever-growing to be thought of as a shitty person, popularity seem to suggest it’s stop doing — and sharing — shitty more than possible. things. It’s hard to not see this as progAs for Shkreli, he seems to be doress. If this tendency toward ing more than all right in this new a more holistic form of online world. His popularity in Columbia expression — one that publicly Buy Sell Memes led him to tempodisplays our worst digital habits alongside our best — spreads out- rarily rent out a burger joint on campus (which — according to side the confines of these seemingly irrelevant groups, a new sys- those who attended — was quite popping). And his presence in tem of behavior could arise: one groups nationwide only continues where users everywhere consider to grow. As strange as it sounds, their online actions to be just as I find it kind of comforting to see meaningful and reflective of their Shkreli’s face pop up from time character as their physical ones. to time — just another face in the Yes, most people would probably sea of competing posters. Alend up Milkshake Ducking themthough, he’s probably more than a selves. (We are all, more or less, terrible, shitty people online.) But little preoccupied at the moment. eventually, (hopefully) people The distinction between the onand offline self has disappeared, and in its place rests a refreshingly authentic reclamation of personhood.
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What Do You Meme?
the floor is successful study habits
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Me: I’m gonna go to sleep early this week Heading Me Tuesday @ 3am
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B
Skya, du-d you dun know
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pap pap
ka-
the ting goes
SKRRAHH
pap pap ka-ka-ka
BOOM poomBOOM Skidiki pap-pap
Poom
Skya, du-du-ku-ku-dun-dun du-ku-ku-dun-dun
ka-ka
and a
PU-PU- PURRRR
pap pap ka-ka-ka
89
When you realize the book is over
90
91
What Do You Meme?
92
Colophon
Y’all consider this a colophon?
This dank book is a compliation of essays on memes. Concept and Design by Abby Murray Body Text: Trade Gothic 9pt/12pt Subheadings, Quotes, and Captions: Trade Gothic, Various Sizes All content found in these pages is the original property of its creators and owners. Articles, interviews, photographs, and other texts were collected and organized for the compilation of this book, which was created as a student design project. Some texts have been condensed, reformated, and edited to increase readability. Photographs have been edited to optimize their printed appearance.
93
*mic drop*
94
HarambeGuess I’ll DieDogeI Can Haz CheezburgerRain Drop Drop To AnothaOne Pepe the FrogDrakeRunning ManYou Vs The GuyEvil Kerm Meryl Streep SingingSnek Marge KrumpingPrimitive SpongebobThic Roll Safe Conceited ReactionArthur’s FistThis is Fine DogDamn Danie Snoop DogDat BoiDabbing Squidward Distracted Boyfrien Crying Kim KardashianGavinDog FilterIm Rick Harrison and This Is M Pawn Shop Confused Mr. KrabsThe Floor isWhat In TarnationElf on th ShelfCash Me Ousside Howbow DahJoe BidenMath Lady Grumpy Ca Hurricane MariaPope FrancisHow Italians DoThingsShrekGabe the Do Donald TrumpSalt BaeKanye WestFirst of AllDistracted Boyfrien Expanding BrainYou Know I Had to Do it To EmKen BoneIf Young Metr Don’t Trust YouBut Thats None of My Busines Don’t Talk to Me or My Son Ever AgainPersian Cat Room Guardia Bee MoviePokemon Go60’s SpiderManAyy LmaoDank Meme Aint Nobody Got Time For ThatBye FeliciaNut Butto You Could Stop At FIve Or Six StoresThe FitnessGram Pacer Tes You On KazooSuh DudeThe DabIf A Dog Wore PantsHotline Blin Confused TravoltaHello Darkness My Old Friend Graphic Design Is M Passion Netflix and ChillSlide Into Your DMsLebron James KidMLK Didn Die For ThisLeft Shark9+10=21I Came Out To Have A Good Time An Honestly I’m Feeling So Attacked Right NowHarambeGuess I’ll DieDog I Can Haz CheezburgerRain Drop Drop TopAnothaOnePepe the Frog Drak eRunning ManYou Vs The GuyEvil KermitMeryl Streep SingingSnek Mar geKrumpingPrimitive SpongebobThiccRoll SafeConceited Reactio Arthur’s FistThis is Fine DogDamn DanielSnoop DogDat BoiDabbing Squid wardDistracted Boyfriend Crying Kim KardashianGavinDog Filte Im Rick Harrison and This Is My Pawn ShopConfused Mr. Krab The Floor isWhat In TarnationElf on the ShelfCash Me Ousside Howbow DahJoe BidenMath Lady Grumpy CatHurricane MariaPope Franci How Italians Do ThingsShrekGabe the DogDonald TrumpSalt Ba Kanye WestFirst of AllDistracted BoyfriendExpanding BrainYou Know Had to Do it To Em Ken BoneIf Young Metro Don’t Trust YouBut Thats Non of My BusinessDon’t Talk to Me or My Son Ever AgainPersian Cat Room GuardianBee MoviePokemon Go60’s SpiderManAyy LmaoDank Meme Aint Nobody Got Time For ThatBye FeliciaNut Butto You Could Stop At FIve Or Six StoresThe FitnessGram Pacer Tes You On KazooSuh DudeThe DabIf A Dog Wore PantsHotline Blin Confused TravoltaHello Darkness My Old Frien Graphic Design Is My Passio