One member is the editor of a prominent music site. Another is an art director at an LA ad agency. Some are unemployed. A favorite meme is to uphold contrarian ideals that are typically seen as wimpy or “not very metal” and proclaim them as “so fucking metal” (Steely Dan being the example that comes to mind). The group’s appreciation for schlocky heavy metal music is not dissimilar from 4chan’s obsession with cute cats. SoM is actively antagonistic to outsiders, telling any confused onlookers to “delete your Tumblr.” It relies heavily on an impenetrable, multilayered network of metal slang, ever-changing puns and recurring meme gags that ward off most people who wander onto the blog wondering what it’s all about. It’s said that if you’re following SoM, you’re missing the point. More recently members have taken to switching up the URL of the site so the casually interested have difficulty finding it. According to insiders, all the real action is happening in the back channel, a legendary email thread only accessible to the blog’s mysterious contributors.
One contributor named Rendit described the site’s aesthetic:
It’s really quite simple. Someone dumb (me) comes up with an almost-funny joke and represents it in the basest, most simplistic, and talentless way. Then! Someone smart does it again much better, making actual reference to the source of the comedy and his or her work. After that, one of our members . . . will apply the image to an incongruous situation, perhaps making a comment on the tumblrtroversy of the moment. Hours later, [the aforementioned member] will show us all up with something like what you see above [a clever photoshop], but by then we’ve all forgotten what the joke was in the first place. And yet it lives on!
Like 4chan, it takes effort to appreciate Summer of Megadeth’s nuances. You have to possess both a deep cultural understanding (and a knack for looking things up quickly when you don’t get the joke) in order to make sense of any of it. Wordplay stacked on wordplay. Jokes are twisted, rearranged, recontextualized, self-referenced, connected to ancient, obscure callbacks. But when the meme du jour hits, and you really get it, there are few things more rewarding. They are drawing on a rich tapestry of rapidly evolving cultural tradition. If Tumblr has a /b/, it’s right here.
There is a meme that states that 4chan users aren’t supposed to like Tumblr users, because they’re a bunch of artfag hipsters who steal 4chan’s memes. This antagonism peaked with a “war” in November 2010, when /b/tards launched Operation Overlord, perhaps the dumbest and most ineffectual among the raids that were able to grab press. They planned to set up a bunch of dummy Tumblr accounts, build huge follower bases, and then flood users’ dashboards with festish porn and gore, ultimately hoping to take Tumblr down with a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack. Some Tumblr users retaliated even more ineffectually by spamming 4chan with references to Tumblr, Twilight, Harry Potter, and other cutesy imagery they knew would annoy /b/. But as one /b/tard put it, “Raiding /b/ is like pissing in an ocean of piss.”
ROFLCon
For the last two years, hundreds have gathered at MIT to attend a very silly conference called ROFLCon (ROFL, which means rolling on the floor laughing, is a stronger variant of LOL). Reputable academics mingle with cosplayers. Internet nerds meet the stars of memes gone by. The conference attempts to host careful analysis of memetic culture and promotes the collection and preservation of Internet ephemera. Most of all, it’s a lighthearted celebration of all things webby.
The primary organizer of the event is Tim Hwang, a researcher for the Barbarian Group, the meme-friendly digital agency. He’s also part of the Web Ecology Project, an organization dedicated to the preservation of digital culture and folklore. The Web Ecology Project’s latest project is a complete, downloadable archive of Encyclopedia Dramatica.
The germ of ROFLCon began when Hwang attended an event built around the popular nerdy webcomic xkcd in nearby Somerville, Massachusetts. xkcd is drawn and authored by Randall Munroe, who, before he was able to make a living from his stick-figure doodles, worked for NASA as a roboticist. xkcd is a powerhouse in the memesphere (for example, Munroe once created a site called http://www.wetriffs.com after bemoaning a lack of “guitar-in-shower” pornography on the web—a nod to Rule #34), and nearly all of Munroe’s comics get the kind of hits most newspapers would kill for. The event was a simple meet-up based on nerd culture, but way too many people showed up.
So in 2008, Hwang and his friends decided to put on a legit convention for Internet nerdery. They brought in academics to comment on Internet culture and invited meme stars to hang out too. It was a big success, garnering glowing press. Even Tron Guy showed up!
Tron Guy, aka Jay Maynard, was a flabby programmer whose spandex costume inspired by Disney’s Tron went viral in 2004 via Slashdot and Fark, reaching a peak with appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Tron Guy can be seen as a representative for people who display their unassuming quirkiness on the web. There’s Peter Pan impersonator Randy Constan, Michael Blount of “Hello My Future Girlfriend,” Ginger Kid, and countless more, but Tron Guy was one of the first. Like many meme celebrities, his appearance on the web was initially met with derision. But his appearance at ROFLCon was met with rapturous applause. Here was a guy who was doing his thing and simply could not give a damn what anyone else thought. Welcome to the Internet, where nerds are free to self-actualize to their hearts’ content.
ROFLCon had a panel that included the guy who designed the Three Wolf Moon shirt, along with the first Amazon reviewer, drilling down to deep levels of what Hwang calls “micro-micro-microfame.” The Three Wolf Moon is a kitschy t-shirt that would not look out of place on your stereotypical basement dweller or, these days, worn ironically on a hipster bass player. The shirt got thousands of reviews on Amazon, far outpacing sales. Reviewing the thing became a lightly competitive game. The goal was to come up with funny, creative ways to describe the Three Wolf Moon shirt. The top-rated review begins:
This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it on, that’s when the magic happened. After checking to ensure that the shirt would properly cover my girth, I walked from my trailer to Wal-mart with the shirt on and was immediately approached by women.
The shirt became a meme, parodied by CollegeHumor and covered by several major papers. This is the sort of phenomenon that the ROFLCon folks love to pick apart, analyze and commemorate.
Hwang’s fascination with meme-dom began with early memes like Hamster Dance, Zombocom, and other single-destination sites. He recalls that Hamster Dance, like many sites of the day, had a stats ticker at the bottom of the page, so you could watch how big the thing was getting, and how quickly. He first recognized that Internet culture had bled into the mainstream when he saw Rick Astley perform “Never Gonna Give You Up” at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2008.
Hwang first encountered 4chan in middle school. He claims that at the time, a big part of the attraction to the Internet was finding nasty things to send to his friends. At the time he and his buddies were passing around a lot of Rotten and Stile Project links. At some point, this gave way to 4chan content.
As an informal meme historian, Hwang recognizes the cultural import of 4chan.
The content 4chan produces is so powerful. We are increasingly moving away from the Internet as it existed in the mid-90s. There was no one trying to commercialize or police it. We are also moving towards non-anonymization. On 4chan, you have to shape who you are by what you’re doing. It also brings it back demographically to the way things were when I was first discovering the web.
According to Hwang, 4chan matters for two reasons. First, its users are “white blood cells” of the Internet, because they perform vigilante justice—against people who harm animals, for instance. He points to the increasing role that 4chan users have in geopolitics, as they have successfully brought down the sites of massive multinational corporations. Second, Hwang claims that although 4chan exists as this “other” state outside of the rest of life online, it is
an important part of the web’s cultural production.
Hwang laughs at the raw visual power of the Xzibit meme, which 4chan kick-started in 2007. You may know Xzibit as a rapper and host of the MTV show Pimp My Ride. But on the Internet, he’s become so closely linked with his meme that the usual words used to caption image macros are no longer necessary; his smiling face says it all.
Pimp My Ride featured Xzibit and his gearhead crew retrofitting jalopies with outlandish accoutrements like flat-screen TVs or fish tanks. Xzibit would often say something along the lines of, “Yo/Sup dawg, I heard you like Xbox so we put an Xbox in your car so you can play Xbox on the road.” A clever Photoshopper recognized this recurring line and made an image macro featuring a grimacing Xzibit captioned with, “Yo dawg, I herd u like cars so we put a car in yo car so you can drive while u drive.”
The meme was a massive hit straight out of the gate. It’s gotten to the point where just the picture of Xzibit’s smiling face sans caption suggests recursion. The meme culminated two years later with a fuming Twitter response from an understandably frustrated Xzibit (I mean, the guy was a respected gangsta rapper at one point):
Everybody with the “sup dawg” shit can find the highest place in your house and jump on something sharp to kill yourselves.it’s fucking old.
No matter how trivial memes like this may seem, millions of people participate in them every day. Tim Hwang’s trying to figure out why. This kind of humor is just a sliver in the wider world of meme culture that he hopes to explore through ROFLCon and the Web Ecology Project. Naysayers look at something like the Xzibit meme and see a corny joke at best, but folks like Hwang see nothing less than tiny revolutions in entertainment, media, and human social interaction. Even moot showed up at the last ROFLCon after giving a TED Talk.
In his book Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky argues that the web is making us smarter, collectively. Humanity is working together like never before, each individual contributing something so minute as a single correction to an obscure Wikipedia entry or a photograph uploaded to Flickr. Even our Google queries help the search giant perfect its algorithms. Whether we realize it or not, we are behaving as a hive mind, and those tiny trivial inputs add up to monumental social change.
Reddit
4chan’s influence in the memesphere isn’t going anywhere soon, but Reddit is definitely catching up. Reddit is currently the biggest social content aggregator, recently taking the reins from Digg after that site’s troubled redesign. Reddit users post pieces of content and “upvote” ones they like or “downvote” ones they don’t. Even comments can be upvoted or downvoted, which makes browsing comment threads sorted by vote count half the fun.
For our purposes, the Condé Nast–owned but still very nerdy Reddit is interesting for three reasons. First, it acts as a gateway between 4chan and the rest of the Internet. Second, it’s a place where the mainstream media has recently gone to routinely scrape through content for news. Third, it facilitates meme creation that rewards users in a way that 4chan doesn’t.
Reddit is a good gatekeeper for 4chan because its users are immersed in a meme-saturated environment—but it’s not anonymous and everything is archived, so its users don’t act like sociopaths. There’s also an incentive to be nice, or at least comprehensible, since everything that’s said can be rated by fellow Redditors.
What truly sets Reddit apart is subreddits, which are tiny communities for infinitely granular subject areas. Where most sites would create tags for topics like “Tech,” “Gaming,” “News,” and “Sports,” Reddit allows its users to create their own tags, which quickly turn into tiny little communities that in many ways have replaced special interest blogs. For instance, I’m not into video games so much anymore, but I still play Starcraft, so I follow the Starcraft subreddit. It’s very specific Starcraft news, all the time. I follow several dozen other subreddits, each pulling content from hundreds of blogs across the web, each sorted for the most interesting and funny content, and each appended with scintillating conversation. It’s a fantastic platform that combines a high-level overview of the web with magnified looks at only the things I find interesting. I typically check Reddit every few hours to see what’s going on in my world.
Reddit has become nearly as adept at creating memes as 4chan. Consider the Inglip mythos. Inglip is a RageToon-based series of comics built on the random pairings of words spit out by reCAPTCHA, a Google-owned user authentication service that forces users to type out squiggly words in order to let web pages know that they’re not SPAM robots. It all started when one Redditor found the words “inglip summoned” in a reCAPTCHA. He made a comic alluding to an ancient Lovecraftian deity (“Inglip has been summoned. It has begun”). Then another user followed up with the reCAPTCHA result “called gropagas,” which he preceded with a question:
I hope our dedication to your lordship has been satisfactory. Tell me, oh great Inglip, what should your followers call themselves?
“called gropagas”
“As you wish, my lord. We are the gropagas and united, we will take the world in your name!”
Hundreds of responses followed, fleshing out the Inglip mythos. And it’s all based on randomly generated words. A few years ago, this sort of collaborative metahumor would have been found only on 4chan (or maybe Something Awful), but the rest of the Internet, with Reddit leading the charge, has caught up.
Reddit has also reappropriated 4chan’s Ask Me Anything, or AMA threads, which have attracted some major celebrities in addition to nerd icons like moot.
The all-time top verified AMA threads include those of 74-time Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings, actor Bruce Campbell, Columbine shooting survivor Brooks Brown, and a former Marine One crew chief. Unverified AMA threads, which are often even more interesting, include a military whistleblower, a girl who spent 16 months as a full-time BDSM slave, a person who was caught and tortured during recent rioting in Egypt, a man who only answers questions using MS Paint, a brain cancer victim with 2–6 months to live, and a four-year-old girl (with help from her dad). After a few controversies in which AMA posters were revealed to be trolls, Reddit has taken steps to integrate a verification process.
Canvas
When moot gave an AMA on Reddit on March 29th, 2011, most of the questions about Canvas, his new startup, dealt with his team’s decision to integrate Facebook Connect into the site’s private beta-testing period. Basically, if you wanted to be a part of Canvas, you had to reveal your identity. 4chan diehards felt betrayed. Their patron saint of anonymity had given up the good fight in order to cash in.
The top comment, which received over thirteen hundred votes, read, “How do you justify rallying against the lack of anonymity that Facebook provides and then requiring it for your next project?”
moot replied:
I think it’s important to understand the difference between advocating for anonymous contribution, and a pro-anonymity-is-the-only-way!!!!! zealot. (I’m the former!)
I want the public to understand the importance of having the option to contribute anonymously. At SXSW, I focused on anonymous authenticity, and the creativity that anonymity allows for. The ability to fail quietly without having that failure associated with your name/identity allows for more experimentation and limit pushing. People also contribute in a totally raw, unfiltered way, that I’d argue is more authentic than real-ID [An ID authentication measure taken by game developer Blizzard to link players’ in-game and forum identities with their real names].
He went on to outline some times when identity is preferable, such as places that experience lots of low-quality comments, like YouTube and TechCrunch. One detractor replied:
His worldview is balanced, if that’s what you mean, but he answered nothing at all. Nothing proves to me that he won’t use information from my account, just as nothing proves to me that Facebook itself won’t. And we know they do. So his answer was the same as saying “please trust me”. Well I won’t.
But most respondents we
re OK with it. Of course, this was Reddit, not 4chan.
4chan uses basically the same software that it did when it started out, which itself was antiquated by the standards of the day. moot’s vision for Canvas is a web community that takes advantage of faster browsing capability as well as the lessons he’s learned from eight years of running 4chan. To fill that community with users who are going to push the platform forward, he’s going to have to weed out trolls. The Facebook Connect integration is probably a good start. Canvas isn’t 4chan 2.0.
It’s basically a user-friendly, browser-based image-editing tool connected to an imageboard with light social networking features. It’s simple for people who don’t have editing ability or don’t have a copy of Photoshop, and because it’s hosted online you don’t have to upload and download and reformat and resize in order to move content from your computer to the web. Ninety-nine percent of the people remixing images on Facebook (or 4chan, for that matter) don’t need tools as robust as Photoshop because they’re mostly only adding text or slapping a layer over an existing image. Canvas’s remixing tool allows users to do these things. What’s more, it’s all archived, so users can post an image and watch their friends create genuinely clever remixes over time, without having to worry that it’s going to fall off the edge in a few hours. Everything is shareable on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Surely they’re working on integration with Reddit.
I’m looking at Canvas as I write, in May 2011. Someone has posted a blank page with the words “What is Canvas?” written on it. It was posted five days ago in the #drawing thread, so it’s encouraging other users to draw response images. The first reply has written “a website” in the blank space and earned 9 stickers. The stickers represent basic emotional responses (happy face, sad face, heart, question mark, etc.). This response has earned some of each, but it looks like the smarty face, represented by a smiley with a distinguished mustache and monocle, is winning out.
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