Because Internet

by Gretchen McCulloch

  This community was about to get a lot bigger. The meme generation websites that had popped up towards the end of the lolcat meme brought in a whole wave of new animal memes from 2008 to 2014. These Advice Animal memes contained a stock character archetype in the center, either a person or an animal, and a two-line narration of either the character’s actions or internal monologue, invariably in black-bordered white Impact. Some of the stock images are cut-out faces in the center of a multicolored pinwheel, especially the earlier examples, while later stock images are often full photos. For example, Philosoraptor is a velociraptor drawing in a pinwheel that ponders hypothetical questions, Scumbag Steve is a full photo of a frat bro in a distinctive patterned hat who engages in irresponsible or unethical behavior, and Grumpy Cat is a cat with a characteristically unamused facial expression.

  What was interesting about Advice Animals was how they democratized and fragmented the meme space. Lolcat was based around a more or less unified set of linguistic references, a single kitteh grammar of “oh hai” and “I can has” and “k thx bai.” Advice Animals were open-ended: they were a meme family that different subgroups engaged with at different levels. Some had linguistic stylization (the “ermahgerd” version replaced all vowels with “er,” as in “ermahgerd” for “oh my god,” and the Ryan Gosling version began every caption with “hey girl”), but many, such as those above, were unremarkable when not in the two-part format on top of an image. Indeed, some of the captions predate the memes entirely: people pondered the quotes about pens and swords versus actions and words long before the meme was created.

  Because of this democratization, Advice Animals ran the gamut from very well-known to very obscure. I picked Philosoraptor and Scumbag Steve above because I’d expect anyone familiar with memes to have heard of them, but others were popular in a single community. For example, Linguist Llama is only (but tremendously) popular among linguists, where it joined a medium-sized trend for Advice Animals themed around academic subjects, such as Art Student Owl and History Major Heraldic Beast (“You aren’t a real goth / until you sack Rome”). Still others were popular only within a single friend group, such as the truly obscure Linguist Lingcod, which a group of friends and I made in 2011 based off the fact that there really is a fish by that name. We had a fun time, but it remained obscure even within the linguistics community, and for several very good reasons: few people have heard of the lingcod, they definitely didn’t realize that our hideous picture of a fish was supposed to be one, our captions were only funny if you’d been there, and we didn’t know enough other linguists to spread the meme very far.

  Despite how much our fish meme, uh, flopped, it was an important milestone for me. I’d encountered lolcats and participated in text-based memes before, such as “answer a list of questions and tag some friends to do the same,” but if I’d known anyone who was originating image memes, they weren’t going to tell me about it. Lolcats were made by people “out there” on the internet, and the most I could do to participate was imitate the language; Advice Animals were the first memes where some were made by people I knew offline. In retrospect, this was part of a broader shift in memes as a thing of Old Internet People, people who went online to interact with strangers, to memes as a thing of Full Internet People, people who went online to interact with people they already knew. ROFLCon, an internet culture conference that started in 2008, also grappled with the changing relationship between online and offline culture. Its organizers ultimately decided to make the 2012 conference the last: as creators Tim Hwang and Christina Xu explained, “In 2012 we were on the phone with Grumpy Cat’s agent, and it was like, ‘This cat has an agent.’ I think that fact alone was a really big indication of how the space of internet culture had changed in a four-year time period.”

  My next brush with participatory memedom further blurred the line between internet and non-internet culture. Early in 2012, I’d been active in competitive debate for a number of years, and late one night I decided that what the world really needed was a mashup of debate jargon and the Ryan Gosling “hey girl” meme. I made a couple examples, sent the link to a few debate friends, and went to bed. The next morning, I had dozens of messages and a couple thousand hits on my fledgling memeblog. People I didn’t even know sent in their own versions! It was thrilling and short-lived: at the debate tournament that weekend, I felt like the coolest person in the whole (deeply nerdy) place, and yet ten days later, I’d stopped updating the blog entirely. But I bring it up because this is the perfect scale to see the power of an in-joke: general enough that it spread a step or two beyond my personal acquaintances, insidery enough that it stopped there. I went back and tried to find one of these memes to give here as an example, and I couldn’t find a single one that wouldn’t require at least a full paragraph of context, but danged if they didn’t still make me laugh after all this time. The debate memes were only funny to maybe a few hundred people, half of whom I knew offline, but that handful of people felt purely understood.

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  A year later, I was spending more and more time on the internet, a necessary diversion from the master’s thesis I was supposed to be writing. I started seeing a new style of image meme, one that avoided the one-two setup and payoff in black-bordered white Impact for a series of smaller phrases scattered around the face of a round-faced dog in Comic Sans. One with—joy of joys—a new and peculiar grammar. I started analyzing it in my head, vowing that I’d write up a description of this new meme the moment my thesis was in. This was a meme known as doge, based on a photo by Japanese teacher Atsuko Sato of her shiba inu, and I ultimately wrote a linguistic analysis of it for the eclectic and now sadly departed website The Toast in 2014. Doge was one of several memes that sprouted with this scattered interior monologue caption style, which draws on the minimalist typography that we saw in Chapter 4. A later example was snek, which was based on multiple photos of snakes and often featured softened swear words like “heck” and the phrase “doing you a [verb].”

  I spent the entire time writing the doge article in a state of barely contained glee, and again, people shared my joy. Only this time, as it turned out, the group of “people who enjoy academic analyses of internet culture” is rather larger than “people familiar with the in-jokes of the Canadian University Society for Intercollegiate Debate.”* A few days later, I was talking about doge on the BBC, and I occasionally hear from fans of the article even years later.

  What was the difference between making the Linguist Lingcod, the debate Ryan Gosling, and the grammar of doge? It wasn’t my mental state: the experience of making a meme and the experience of analyzing one feel very much the same from the inside, the same fizzing ebullience that I get when any kind of writing is going really, really well. (In many ways, the irresistible lure of analyzing memes is simply a meme itself, one that mashes up the conventions of academic and internet cultures.) The difference also wasn’t individual people’s reactions to the memes: my short-lived 2012 memeblog is probably one of millions of obscure internet mashups made by individual people aiming to strongly appeal to their particular subcommunity. What was unique about the memes that took off was not the in-jokes, but the scale: in a world where in-jokes happen all the time and distribution costs are zero, a few of them can get really big because their in-groups are actually very large, like “people who use the internet,” “people who agree that this particular cat looks very grumpy,” or “people who saw the previous very popular in-joke.” The beauty of memes that are predicated on internet culture itself is that they can bring the internet together; the hardship of them is that they draw boundaries around who gets to be an insider and who doesn’t.

  Even as the internet briefly united around doge, the meme space was fragmenting further. Advice Animals had been enabled by meme generation sites, which also hosted the memes once they were made, meaning that you could browse them directly to keep up. Doge and snek lost that consistent aesthetic by
virtue of further advantages in custom image labeling, and were no longer spread by meme generation sites. Understandably, this freaked out two then PhD students who were writing dissertations about memes. In their subsequent books, they grappled with the idea that they might be obsolete before they were even published. As Ryan Milner put it, in his book about memes, “My moment of reckoning also came in 2014, when I was discussing my PhD dissertation with a student. ‘I remember memes,’ the college sophomore said. ‘They were really big in high school. Junior year.’ The thought that my two-year-old dissertation was now a historical analysis of a dead communicative genre prompted some angst.” Whitney Phillips described similar shifts in her book about internet trolls, and stated one of the causes to be the rise of the website Know Your Meme, a sort of Urban Dictionary of memes: “Know Your Meme was written with the novice in mind, with detailed, almost clinical explanations of the Internet’s most popular participatory content. [It] helped democratize a space that had previously been restricted to the initiated.”

  But that’s not the end of the meme story. During the 2016 US presidential election, memes became more popular than ever, often as a way of making abhorrent beliefs look appealingly ironic. This phenomenon spawned serious op-eds about political memes from mainstream outlets like USA Today and The Guardian, a Know Your Meme entry considerably more extensive than the ones for the previous two elections, and even an official HillaryClinton.com meme explainer of why the Pepe the Frog meme was linked to white supremacy. Mike Godwin himself felt the need to clarify that Godwin’s Law only applied to frivolous Holocaust comparisons, not to calling out genuine similarities, tweeting, “By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I’m with you.” Around the same time, “wholesome” memes of cute doggos and puppers rejuvenated social media feeds that seemed daily filled with fresh horrors.

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  In 2017, an article for the news site Mic reported on a trend in prestigious US college admissions: students were making and sharing memes on college-specific Facebook groups, as a way of bonding with fellow students or making friends before arriving at school. Some prospective students even assessed the quality of a college’s memes in deciding whether to go there. As the then eighteen-year-old Brandon Epstein, founder of MIT Memes for Intellectual Beings and Spicy Memelords, put it, “We’re the ones that have been most immersed in meme culture. When last year’s freshmen became freshmen, memes weren’t the cultural monolith they are now. Considering that memes really rose to mainstream prominence during the time when we were in high school, I think there’s a bigger focus on memes for people my age.”

  At first glance, this looks contradictory. How is it that we have a college student in 2014 claiming that memes are dead and, three meme-filled years later, a different college freshman claiming that the students only a year older don’t truly understand memes? (Both students were mere children during Peak Lolcat in 2007, and neither of them was even born when Mike Godwin started seeding counter-Nazi memes on Usenet in 1990, if we want to really put our harrumphing hats on.)

  It doesn’t make sense if we think of memes as a single, unified phenomenon. True, lolcats and Godwin’s Law are now historical memes, but there were certainly remixed images and texts and videos of various kinds that were being shared throughout these years. In fact, a new category of image meme was born during this very time period: where the animal-based memes from lolcat to snek used superimposed text to narrate the interior monologue of the animal, the newer memes used superimposed text to label objects in some sort of relation to each other, such as Distracted Boyfriend, a stock photo showing a boyfriend looking interestedly at another girl while his girlfriend looks on, aghast, with the people labeled, or Galaxy Brain, a series of expanding neon diagrams of the brain, each diagram labeled. Where, in this hubbub of activity, did the meme have time to die?

  If we think of memes as a claim on internet culture, things become clearer. Memes periodically shift away from one of their founder populations. Those particular memes, to that particular group, are indeed dead. But as long as people are creating culture on the internet, a different group will emerge with a different format to take up the mantle of “meme.” Memes had shifted yet again, from the Full Internet People to the Post Internet People, the ones who had no recollection of a life without internet.

  The meme is not dead: it’s reborn.

  Long Live the Meme

  On my wall hangs an embroidered meme. It consists of an embroidered peasant with arms outstretched and the stitched, faux-old-timey caption BEHOLD THE FIELD IN WHICH I GROW MY FVCKS. LAY THINE EYES VPON IT AND THOV SHALT SEE THAT IT IS BARREN. It’s based off an internet meme which reads the same thing, created with a meme generation site that turns your words into an imitation of the Bayeux Tapestry, placing stitched-looking letters on a fabric-looking background.

  The Behold the Field meme is an item of internet culture, but it’s also an item of English culture, dating back nearly a thousand years to the Norman Conquest. The unnamed women who stitched the nearly 230-foot-long Bayeux Tapestry were also combining images and words, dealing in stock characters (mustachioed Anglo-Saxons and clean-shaven Normans), reifying and mythologizing current events of the era (our impression that Harold Godwinson, last king of the Anglo-Saxons, was killed by an arrow to the eye in the Battle of Hastings is based on this tapestry). The tapestry has been remade at other times, often by stitching: a full-sized copy was created by the members of the Leek Embroidery Society during the Victorian era, and a Game of Thrones Bayeux Tapestry was unveiled in Northern Ireland in 2017.

  The Behold the Field meme even has a stylized sort of language, a creative distortion that draws on, rather than internet slang, our shared understanding as English speakers of what “old-timey English” sounds like, with “thou” and a “u” that looks like “v” and vocabulary like “barren” (even though the original tapestry was in Latin).

  I can’t claim to be original: I made it because I’d seen other people’s embroideries of the same meme, via photos that they put online. I looked at several versions while making mine, but I also changed several features: I used backstitch instead of cross-stitch because it looks smoother, and I made the dude peasant gesturing at the field into a lady peasant who looks kind of like me. After all, this is my personal field in which to grow my fucks, and this is my personal claim on internet culture.

  But what exactly am I claiming? I reproduced this particular meme in this particular format, rather than, say, painting a lolcat, because it fascinates me in its juxtaposition of old and new, of oral culture and digital culture, of domestic and profane, of the aspiration to give fewer fucks and the reality that delicate stitchwork requires many fucks indeed. Even the circumstances under which I made it were a juxtaposition: at a gathering of crafty internet people who I knew because I’d written those Toast articles on meme linguistics, who gave me advice on how many strands of floss to use and how to avoid lumps on the back of the fabric (I also snuck out my phone and googled diagrams of how to do a French knot).

  Embroidering the meme was the most digital kind of art I’ve ever done in physical form. The canvas of the fabric is a grid of small threads going sideways and down, a grid of pixels that you can count and balance much like you’d do in Photoshop. I later learned that Susan Kare, who designed most of the original Apple computer icons, cited her experience with needlepoint and mosaics as preparation for creating icons from small arrays of pixels. The thread was surprisingly friendly to my novice embroidery skills: if I didn’t like a stitch, I could just unpick it and start again. The fabric would retain just a couple small pinprick holes, which closed up again as I kept handling it—more like the endless “undo” of a computer program than a canvas that gets stained or a sheet of paper that retains smudges and dents after being erased.

  Both memes and needlework are collective folk texts that spread because people remix and remake them. Th
e words “text” and “textile” have a common origin, from a Proto-Indo-European root teks, “to weave.” Writing and weaving are both acts of creation by bringing together. A storyteller is a spinner of yarns, and the internet’s founding metaphor is of a web. If we go far enough back, before printing presses and cameras and photocopiers introduced the notion of faithful reproduction, all transmission is re-creation. Teks is also the root in the word “technology,” which at one point meant a systematic treatise on an art or craft, or even a grammar, before it referred to a study of mechanical or industrial arts (a 1902 dictionary gives the examples of “spinning, metal-working, or brewing”) and then to digital tech.

  Memes have coexisted with and been made possible by technology for a long time. Physically mailed chain letters such as the Send-a-Dime “Prosperity Club,” which made headlines in 1935, and chain emails (“Every time this email is forwarded, Bill Gates will donate a dollar to cure cancer”) are fairly well known. Less well known is a precursor that came in between chain letters and emails, known as “faxlore” or “Xeroxlore”: jokes, stories, and warnings that circulated via email, fax, and photocopy. The most famous of these was Blinkenlights, a mock-German warning to stick on the wall above any fancy equipment saying that it “ist nicht für der gefingerpoken und mittengraben. . . . Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.” As Michael J. Preston described in his article coining the term “Xeroxlore” in 1974, this genre tended to feature mock memos and other workplace humor, since most people didn’t have access to a photocopier at home. But while the photocopier and fax machine enabled these stories to spread, it was harder to remix them when copy-pasting involved literal photocopiers and jars of paste.