The WIRED Guide to Memes – Angela Watercutter and Emma Grey Ellis

Memes and the internet—they're made for each other. Not because they’re digital visual
communication (though of course, they are that), but because they are the product of a hive
mind. They are the shorthand of a hyper-connected group thinking in unison. And, friends,
the web hive mind is a weird (often funny, sometimes dangerous) place.

The term “meme” comes from evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. For Dawkins, cultural
ideas were no different than genes—concepts that had to spread themselves from brain to
brain as quickly as they could, replicating and mutating as they went. He called those
artifacts memes, bits of cultural DNA that encoded society’s shared experiences while also
constantly evolving.

But Dawkins coined the term in 1976, in his book The Selfish Gene, long before the modern
internet, before memes morphed into what they are now. Back then, Dawkins was talking
about passing along culture—song melodies, art styles, whatever. Today, denizens of the
internet think of memes as jokes passed across social media in the form of image macros
(those pictures of babies or cats or whatever with bold black-and-white words on them),
hashtags (the thing you amended to what you just wrote on Twitter), GIFs (usually of a
celebrity, reality star, or drag queen reacting to what you just wrote on Twitter), or videos
(that Rick Astley video people used to send you).

Memes, then, have evolved into something much different than what Dawkins originally
envisioned, and that evolution happened fast, shape-shifting from goofy animal images on
4chan to tools used for political gain and back again.

The Evolution of Memes

Memes as people understand them today didn’t really take off until the mid-1990s, when
now small-seeming groups of average folk began gathering on the internet and populating its
message boards and Usenet groups with things the group(s) found funny. Back in the early
days, pixelated images of dancing babies or hamsters was all it took to get meme famous.
As the internet moved from dial-up to DSL, and meme-swapping destinations like eBaum’s

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World gained traction, things got more sophisticated. Soon photographs of kittehs with
captions written in their own special grammar, which eventually became known as LOLcats,
were a thing, largely thanks to sites like the wildly popular imageboard 4chan. The LOLcat
eventually came to exemplify the image macro: a simple image captioned with bold Impact
font at the top and bottom—the top sets up the joke, the bottom pays it off. Typically, other
image macros—like the infamous “I Can Has Cheezburger?” or the ones created using the
catchphrase “All your base are belong to us”—just had a single caption.

Video memes, which theoretically go back to the days of emailing actual video files like
badday.mpg in the late ‘90s, really took off after the launch of YouTube in 2005. YouTube
and other video-sharing sites made using a video as the punchline to a joke much easier.
Rickrolling—the practice of making someone click on a link to the music video for Rick
Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”—became massively popular. So did sending people
links to the Trololo Guy, Russian baritone Eduard Khil singing the Soviet-era song “I Am
Very Glad As I’m Finally Returning Back Home.” Neither of these videos was explicitly funny,
nor was it inherently funny to be on the receiving end of them, but, as is the case with nearly
all early-era memes, the humor lived in their repetition. It was trolling, but a mostly good-
natured kind, the kind that feels more like an inside joke than a joke made at someone else’s
expense.

YouTube also led to an outbreak of viral videos, including everything from Psy’s “Gangnam
Style” and “Chocolate Rain” by Tay Zonday to “Evolution of Dance” and “Charlie Bit My
Finger.” (We’re not linking to those, they have enough views already.) Video sharing also led
to meme fads like “Turn Down For What” and “Harlem Shake,” which involved very simple
concepts that people could interpret however they saw fit. “Shake,” for example, simply
involved filming a group of people dancing erratically, often in costume, to Baauer’s track
“Harlem Shake.”

As Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms began to shape online discourse in
the late 2000s and early 2010s, images—particularly reaction GIFs—gained a massive new
significance. And, as was the case with GIFs, older formats like image macros found all new
uses. Meme generator sites made it easy to make macros on the fly, and soon memes like
Awkward Moment Seal and Scumbag Steve seemed to arrive almost daily. (Times were
simpler then; the humor was goofier, gentler—and the memes came easily.)

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In the early days, memes started slowly and stuck around longer. (Seriously, Nyan Cat was
around for literally years. Years.) But the speed of social media meant memes could blow up
and be over in the span of a week, if not a day. Moments like #TheDress could come and go
almost overnight. (Do you remember where you were when that happened?!) Events like the
Olympics or political debates could launch memes that would be over at the conclusion of a
24-hour news cycle. Ideas, as Dawkins had noted decades ago, could launch an online
inside joke instantly—and have a Twitter account, Tumblr, and dedicated hashtag in mere
hours. And then they were gone.

The Future of Memes

These days, memes are about more that just LOLs. They’ve picked up two new purposes: to
pledge allegiance to your in-group and to make you lots of money. Memes used to appeal to
humanity’s fundamentals—everyone feels awkward sometimes, everyone likes watching a
kitten acting a fool. But now people flash political memes like gang signs. Modern-day
American memes are about political correctness or the Second Amendment, about the
emptiness of offering thoughts and prayers to shooting victims or the satisfying inclusiveness
of Black Panther. These memes are seen as a public declaration of your political positions
and cultural identity, and, increasingly, an invitation for people with opposing viewpoints to
come sass (or harass) you in the comments. Is combativeness a symptom of how
contentious and polarized the internet has become? Heck yes. Memes are just snapshots of
culture. Does it seem likely to stop anytime soon? Heck no.

Letting everyone enjoy their own jokes in peace doesn’t sound so bad, and to a point, it
wouldn’t be. But both ISIS and the so-called alt-right also use their memes to recruit new
followers. Cartoonish in-jokes turn out to be an effective, nonthreatening entry point for even
the most extreme ideologies. If you’re an isolated person looking to feel a sense of
belonging, there’s no better way to project that you’re in the know than sharing a meme. The
trouble is that it doesn’t end with taking “the red pill” and sharing a Pepe the Frog meme or
two. Once you’ve swallowed one idea, your internet landscape and the algorithms
generating it change. Suddenly you’re seeing memes about threatening to throw Jewish
people out of helicopters, and gradually, that will stop shocking you.

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The success of memes like the alt-right’s Pepe the Frog and ISIS’s one-finger salute points
to political memes’ probable future function: spreading propaganda. They’re visual, and
pictures often skip right over reason and punch your brain right in the truth center. Images
and videos will only become easier to manipulate as AI gets smarter. Furthermore,
something isn’t shareable because it’s objectively true. It just has to be relevant, to feel true.
That space between truth and truthiness is where both memes and propaganda live. (If
you’re thinking that you’d never share propaganda, remember this: Thanks to Russia, you
probably already have.)

It’s not just propagandists: Every brand wants a slice of the hottest new meme. If it trends,
it’s instantly a cheap Halloween costume, a catchphrase on a Forever 21 T-shirt, and all over
fast–food company Twitter. Their reasons are pretty obvious. Companies like making things
that project how socially adept they are, and people like buying those things for the same
reason. Don’t expect that to slow down any time soon—the rise of cheaper bespoke
manufacturing and 3-D printing will make it even easier to churn out a tsunami of short-lived
trendy products, and it’ll thus only get easier to turn memes into money.

Meme creators sometimes make money too—both Grumpy and Nyan were major cash cats
for their humans—but you’re probably going to want a backup plan. Sometimes you get
Ellen appearances, scholarships, and lifetime supplies of whatever product you included in
the meme. Sometimes you get zilch. Meme-makers of color in particular tend to lose out—
partly because they tend to have less access to influence, partly because majority-white
companies and booking agents aren’t spending time in spaces dominated by people of color,
and partly because white America tends to think of black people’s creations as belonging to
the entire black community rather than an individual. For example, Kayla Lewis, the
originator of the phrase “on fleek,” never saw a cent of the profits from any of the gazillion
‘on fleek’ products various companies made.

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If there’s any justice at all, meme making will become a job, and companies will hire the
people who have been making you snort at your laptop screen for years. Some already are,
like Instagram star k@5sh. Might that kill the fun? Possibly. But our appetite for memes is
virtually unlimited and there’s room for professional and amateur memes alike, and memeing
thoughtfully and often may be the only antidote to those toxic political and fake news memes
we were talking about earlier. Engaging trolls never works. The only way to beat them is to
drown them out. So here’s to the future meme masters keeping Pepe the Frog way down at
the bottom of your feed.