EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS (17 page)

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 guanaco. 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.

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.