EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS

by Stryker, Cole

  Huh’s initial annoyance gave way to curiosity. If this goofy site had crashed his server, it must be getting a ton of traffic. So he helped Nakagawa manage the site for a while, and then offered to buy it.

  The blog was already hugely popular, but Huh spun the thing into a network of meme-oriented blogs that had the sort of numbers major newspapers would envy, with the flagship site achieving over ten million daily hits.

  Huh insists that he wasn’t buying a site so much as the potential for a vibrant community. He’d seen the way online communities like 4chan work together to create a vast canon of something approaching modern folk art. The trick was getting the fad out of /b/ and into mom’s and dad’s laps.

  Huh expanded the network to include a site for loldogs called I Has a Hotdog. There’s Daily Squee, a site for cute pictures of all kinds (not just animals). You can probably guess what My Food Looks Funny is about.

  Then there’s FAIL Blog. The use of fail as a noun began to pop up on the web in 2008. It derives from a bit of Engrish from a video game called Blazing Star. If you lose, the game tells you, “You fail it! Your skill is not enough! See you next time! Bye bye!” The term eventually evolved to include the mirror term win, and related terms epic fail and—you guessed it—epic win.

  FAIL Blog is one of the biggest sites in the Cheezburger roster, essentially an America’s Funniest Home Videos–style clearinghouse for videos and images illustrating extreme human stupidity. This expansion of the Cheezburger brand has itself spawned Failbook (Facebook fails), Engrish Funny (self-explanatory), There I Fixed It (dangerously lazy or inept repairs), and After 12 (party fails).

  There’s also The Daily What, a tremendously popular Tumblr blog, which in just a few years cornered the market on meme-oriented news with its staggering publishing speed, though much of its coverage is scraped directly from Reddit. TDW has recently diversified into TDW Geek and TDW Tease, which cover geek news and racy content, respectively.

  A handful of other random meme-oriented sites rounds out the Cheezburger Network. Advice animal memes, demotivational posters, GIFs, trolls, RageToons, and more. Basically, if Huh sees a meme trending on 4chan or Reddit and he thinks it’s strong enough, he builds a blog around it. These blogs print money, and this is where Huh starts to draw criticism.

  “You’re stealing our memes!” screams 4chan. “You’re profiting off our hard work!” cries Reddit. That’s a big question guys like Ben Huh are facing right now. Who owns these memes? The person who created the source material? The person who Photoshopped or otherwise augmented it? The community where it was originally posted? The community that helped it go viral? These are questions that content producers and intellectual property lawyers are currently wrestling with.

  The Hitler biopic Downfall features a scene in which Adolf goes on a tirade, realizing that he’s lost the war. Hundreds of YouTube parodists used the video and audio footage from the scene, but changed the subtitles to suggest Hitler was freaking out over something else, like the price of the iPad. As the meme spread, the producers of the film tried to have the clips removed. But the more they fought to suppress the meme, the faster it spread. The conflict between the memesters and the creators of the source material ended with the creators throwing up their hands in defeat. It was simply impossible for YouTube to keep the stuff down. One particularly meta iteration of the meme showcased Hitler bemoaning the takedown notices. Today, the meme is recreated in the wake of every major controversy or hot topic. If something’s big in the news, there almost certainly will be a Downfall parody.

  Imagine a guy spends two hours creating a Downfall parody video that gets posted all over Reddit and eventually Gawker, which doesn’t give the remixer credit. The guy sends a furious complaint to Gawker, claiming that he put his heart and soul into that remix and he should receive credit for his work. But what about the community that made the clip go viral? And while we’re at it, what about the original film studio? The actors, director, producer, makeup artist, and on and on down the line? Who deserves credit when there are so many people involved in meme creation, even some who never wanted to create a viral hit?

  Huh admits that he’ll catch flak no matter who gets credit.

  People say, “I am part of this community, which had a hand in making the meme, it’s to our credit, even though I personally had nothing to do with it” [or] “Hey, that image came from Reddit!” It didn’t come from Reddit. We do the best we can; even though, in this example, Reddit is the popularizer, credit belongs elsewhere.

  Ben Huh can’t remember life before the web. His father was computer savvy, teaching his young son how to take apart a computer and put it back together. But it wasn’t until Huh saw ICHC that he recognized something special was happening online. It was while he worked for Eric Nakagawa that Huh discovered 4chan.

  I initially assumed it was just another forum, but it was like, “Oh my God.” Very eye opening. It gave me some insight as to how memes formed there and why it’s such a breeding ground. You would post something and have to rely on the digital and psychological memory of someone else.

  I asked Huh why he thinks his sites have been such successes, and he draws from an offline analogy, the celebrity sighting.

  Think of you telling a friend, “I just saw Brett Favre.” There’s no benefit to you sharing that information, but there is, biologically speaking, when you associate yourself with something greater than you. Not because you’re giving them a piece of advice. I can tell you something funny or show you what’s popular; therefore my status in the community increases somewhat. There’s that powerful association.

  This powerful association is what drives the memesphere.

  Buzzfeed

  In the mid-2000s, pretty much every media portal came up with some kind of web 2.0 strategy that would help it harness and monetize user-generated content. No site pulled this off better than Buzzfeed, though it had the advantage of starting from scratch. Co-founder Jonah Peretti was also responsible for the Contagious Media Festival and for cofounding the web 2.0 news blog The Huffington Post, where he learned a thing or two about viral content.

  Peretti coined the term, the Bored at Work network, which he considered to be a vast untapped demographic made up of millions of cube farm drones, already sitting at computers, looking for quick bits of distraction while their bosses attend meetings. And not only looking for viral content, but also already on Gchat, Twitter, or Facebook too, ready to forward content to their buddies. The key to tapping this far-reaching market, according to Peretti, is letting them decide what’s popular.

  Buzzfeed, launched in 2006, is powered by an algorithm that monitors over 120 million unique pages across hundreds of media portals like Time, Aol News, and TMZ, taking into account social sharing on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Stumbleupon. When the algorithm determines that a piece of content is going viral, it sends a red flag to Buzzfeed’s editorial team. Buzzfeed also opens up its site to direct submissions from Buzzfeed users, who have the ability to tag and vote on pieces of content.

  Buzzfeed Senior Editor Scott Lamb started out at an alternative weekly in San Francisco after graduating, and was immediately drawn to working on the website rather than the paper. He first recognized viral content as something new and interesting when he was introduced to the All Your Base Are Belong to Us phenomenon.

  They say you can’t force a meme. And that’s true. What you can do, though, is create the right environment for one to take off. And memes, most of them, have some element of social imperative, something inherent in them that makes you want to share. We’re at this cool point where we all have access to easy social sharing, which I think mimics a lot of the roots of meme culture in boards, where people could easily and quickly read and respond to one another.

  Buzzfeed also employs an in-house editorial team of meme-meisters, all with keen eyes for what could go viral. The editors monitor places like Reddit and Tumblr, spotting content that their robot might miss. They also cr
eate their own custom content, such as a list of pop starlets with chiseled male chests, and approve submissions from the algorithm and the users. Of course, everything is integrated into major social networks so users can easily share content and spot what’s already trending where. Each piece of content submitted to the site has the potential to earn badges that say things like LOL, OMG, or Fail, which give the site a colorful, fun vibe.

  And so every day, editors, users, and machines team up to create a steady drip of simple, shareable, and sticky content that’s easy to consume in bite-sized chunks. They are constantly trying new things, tweaking the algorithm, and killing what doesn’t work.

  Though Lamb recognizes the influence of 4chan, he’s quick to concede that Good Morning America–type mainstream content still pulls tremendous weight on the Internet. But those big media entities are increasingly waiting for content to percolate on the web so they can pounce on buzz-worthy content.

  I also asked Lamb the obligatory “future of journalism” question. While he recognizes the power of Buzzfeed’s model, he reminds me that Buzzfeed does not do any actual reportage—no interviews, no articles, nothing. They’re curators, and we’ll always need people doing the journalistic legwork, even if serious news sites trend toward a Buzzfeed-like model.

  Know Your Meme

  Google any meme. Chances are, within the first page of results, there’s an entry for it on Know Your Meme. That’s because it’s the best place to figure out the who, what, when, where, and why of memetic culture.

  Kenyatta Cheese, Jamie Wilkinson, and Elspeth Jane Rountree were working at Rocketboom, a web video company that produces a daily web news show. They were on 4chan every day, spending a lot of time on Encyclopedia Dramatica, and talking about the weird little subculture. Over time they started to notice that a lot of the stuff in that world was showing up in the mainstream. They’d notice an Adult Swim ad here, or a commercial there, that referenced somewhat obscure memes that in most cases weren’t being credited to the original creator.

  Thus was born the Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies, a tongue-in-cheek laboratory conceit wherein the institute analyzed memetic culture as video segments under the Rocketboom brand. Meanwhile, Jamie Wilkinson built a database platform in order to store information that would supplement the existing Know Your Meme video series. The database’s popularity would eventually outstrip not only the Know Your Meme videos, but the Rocketboom series as well. It’s a wiki site like Encyclopedia Dramatica, but generally safe for work, approachable for noobs, and with an added layer of straight-faced analysis and editorial control provided by a staff of Internet culture experts.

  The typical KYM entry begins with a short introduction to the meme, along with a video or image representation. Then it sources the meme as best it can, along with charts representing Google search trends and social media stats. A description of why the meme is funny or interesting within the context of the memesphere usually follows. Finally, a few dozen examples of derivatives and mashups, followed by a place for commenters to discuss.

  KYM is driven by user submissions, but on most entries at least one staff member is listed as one of the editors. Cheese believes the ease of use for the random user is integral to the site’s value.

  There’s the person who comes to us and says ‘I saw this one image macro appear on a thread on such and such a forum back in 2003, and here’s the link.’ Sometimes that bit of information is more important than the high-level analysis from someone who’s an expert in cultural theory.

  According to Cheese, you have to be somewhat familiar with 4chan to be able to wrap your head around meme culture.

  Most of the real rules of 4chan are not explicit. They’re things that you only understand after being a part of the culture. You have to hang around lurking for months before you get a handle on what’s acceptable, or what will be successful. And you can only be a part of the culture if you’re willing to be infected by it. You can’t go in as a journalist or a marketer hoping to figure them out. You won’t.

  Of course, that doesn’t stop social media “rock stars” from trying. Cheese says that about a quarter of the submissions at KYM are suspected of coming directly from content producers and creative agencies hoping to make their stuff go viral, but weeding out these forced memes is easy if you know anything about how Internet culture works.

  There has been some tension between Know Your Meme and 4chan for a few reasons. /b/tards don’t like it when anyone explains their subculture to NORPs (or normal ordinary respectable person; shorthand for someone whose mind hasn’t been warped by the horrors of 4chan). And while /b/tards are happy to contribute to the memesphere anonymously and for no pay, when someone else starts selling T-shirts, people can get nasty.

  4chan thought KYM wanted to commoditize, but we loved this stuff. Most of us had artist backgrounds, who were hyperaware of the market commoditization of culture. That’s not what we wanted for web culture.

  Of course, it’s not like Know Your Meme was ever hugely profitable (but it was acquired in March 2011 by Ben Huh’s Cheezburger network, so that’s probably going to change). Cheese sees KYM almost as a public service that sustained itself in order to properly archive and analyze stuff that no one in academia seemed willing or able to preserve properly.

  We think of the Internet as being this place for information to live permanently, but if there’s no market value in keeping something online, it could be lost forever.

  Tumblr

  I started a Tumblr blog three years ago, when it was being positioned as a place for creative types to easily upload and share their stuff. At the time there was a little corner of the social network made up of New York media types who used their Tumblr blogs to post writing they couldn’t sell. These bloggers were witty, insightful, and happy to engage with people (like me) who didn’t have impressive media credentials, as long as they had something interesting to say.

  Tumblr is a simple, streamlined blogging platform that allows users to follow one another, like on Twitter. The posts from the people you follow are collected in a feed, viewable in the Dashboard. Integral to the site’s design is the Reblog function, which is used in lieu of comments. It copies someone’s post to your blog, allowing you to add your comments. Then the original poster can re-reblog your post, if she wants. This creates a conversation, and allows people to riff on each other’s creative work. It’s a perfect platform for meme creation.

  Tumblr was founded in 2007 by David Karp, a high school dropout who taught himself to code, and a small group of developers in New York. One member of the team, Christopher Price, is tasked with managing the community of communities and facilitating its growth. No easy task, considering that people use Tumblr for as many different purposes as you can imagine. Price’s enthusiasm and knack for creating things that people wanted to share caught the attention of the Tumblr team, and they hired him. His personal Tumblr blog reads, “I work at Tumblr. I live in Manhattan. Dinosaurs are awesome,” underneath a googly-eyed close-up photo of his face. His goofy online persona has become something of a Tumblr mascot.

  Price tells me that the democratizing effect of the Internet excites him the most about the present age. Everyone now has the ability to find a huge audience for their work, whereas just a few decades ago the reach was limited to those who could buy the biggest radio towers.

  Most of the Tumblr employees post a few times a day, but Price, going by “Topherchris,” outpaces them all by far. This is a man who unabashedly loves memes, and he spends a sizable portion of his workday experimenting with them—seeing what works and what doesn’t, tapping the community to create interesting new things. Unlike his coworkers, Price’s online persona is silly, reflective of his childlike love for his medium of choice.

  I asked him why he’s so interested in memes.

  There’s a spot in Argentina called Cueva de las Manos, or Cave of the Hands. About 9,000 years ago, humans started painting images of their favorite food there, the g
uanaco. It’s like a llama. It’s no lolcat, but they’re cute. Then, about 7,000 years ago, something happened. People started putting up hand stencils. You’d put one hand up on the wall, hold your bone-made pipe in your other hand, and blow paint through it towards the wall and your hand.

  Why did people do this? Maybe it was an adolescent rite of passage. Maybe there are religious implications. Maybe they just thought it looked cool. What we do know is that somebody did it first. And then it was copied. And so on. Scattered amongst all these negative relief stencils of hands are a few paintings of positive relief hands. (That is, instead of a painting of the outline of a hand, it’s a painting of a hand itself.) Think about that. Somebody approached this wall of stencils and said, “Here’s another way to do that.” That right there was the apex of meme technology at the time. Today we open things in Photoshop and hit “invert.” Memes are our culture. Memes are our language. Memes use whatever technology is available.

  Price lives and breathes Tumblr. He says it “pokes a spot in my brain that feels good,” because it’s so rewarding to share something he’s made with others, to know they’ve appreciated it and to watch them share it with their friends.

  With over 3 million users, it’s safe to say that Tumblr is mainstream, though pockets of the Tumblrverse are still as bizarre as can be. Consider Summer of Megadeth, a collective of NYC media malcontents who started a group blog (or glog) with no clear editorial mission other than to crack vaguely heavy metal–related jokes, mainly at the expense of New York media fameballs and random celebrities/pop personalities. Other times it’s a place to complain about Tumblr. Or talk feminism. Or post twenty images of Warren Zevon in a row. The Calvinball concept is truly at play at SoM.