Forum & Image Board

2000 — 2006. The image board defines the medium's grammar. 2chan (Japan, 1999) inspires 4chan (Christopher Poole, 1 October 2003), which inherits the anonymous post-and-vanish architecture and weaponises it. Something Awful's Goons, Fark's headline rewriters, YTMND's audio loops, and ebaumsworld's content laundering split the labour of meme production across thousands of unpaid hands working in parallel. The image macro hardens into a fixed form: stock background, Impact font white-on-black with thin black outline, top-line setup, bottom-line punchline. LOLcats systematise the grammar with their own pidgin (I can has cheezburger?, oh hai). Pedobear, Trollface, Rickroll (originally a duckroll variant), Pool's Closed, Mudkips, and the original advice-animal templates emerge from /b/ and ride out to the surface web through aggregator blogs. The medium's defining ethical posture also calcifies here: deliberately ugly, ironic at all costs, hostile to outsiders, and structurally allergic to attribution. Memes belong to no one because their authors hide.

Part of The Meme Oracle

46 moments in this segment.

  1. — Something Awful Launches. Date: 1999 · Place: somethingawful.com, Richard Kyanka's apartment · Figures: Richard Kyanka (Lowtax), founder · Bruce Bowtied, early contributor · the Goons, forum membership · Tags: Forum, Goons, Genesis 01. Lowtax Opens the Door Richard Kyanka registers somethingawful.com in 1999 as a comedy site for bad-video-game screenshots and snarky reviews. He goes by Lowtax. In March 2000 he installs phpBB forums, and the forums immediately become the point. Membership costs ten dollars, payable by PayPal. The fee is a filter. It produces the Goons: a paying, self-conscious, in-jokey readership that treats the forum as a craft workshop rather than a public square. 02. The Workshop Model Photoshop Phriday and Comedy Goldmine turn forum threads into curated front-page galleries. Goons collaborate on image macros, fake screenshots, and reality-distorting raids years before /b/ exists. Many of the early 2000s viral artefacts (the All Your Base photoshop wave, the original Slender Man, early Let's Plays) originate in Goon threads. Something Awful is the proving ground for the entire image-board grammar that follows. 4chan inherits its tone, its hostility to outsiders, and its production model. /b/ is the Goons stripped of the ten-dollar fee. Sources • KnowYourMeme, Something Awful • The Verge, 'A history of Something Awful' (2017) • Wayback Machine, somethingawful.com captures 2000-2001
  2. — Diesel Sweeties. Date: January 2000 · Place: dieselsweeties.com, Providence, Rhode Island · Figures: Richard Stevens III, cartoonist · Tags: Webcomic, Pixel 01. A Pixel Robot Dates a Porn Star Richard Stevens III, a Providence designer, launches Diesel Sweeties on 1 January 2000. The strip is built entirely from his hand-pixelled character sprites. Clango, the seven-foot orange sex robot, dates Maura, the indie-rocker ex-porn star. Hipster signifiers and Cold War nostalgia run as background music. Stevens publishes 365 strips a year for over a decade. The pixel aesthetic is a deliberate counter to the smooth Flash vectors flooding the web. 02. The Webcomic as Subculture Map Diesel Sweeties gives the early 2000s indie-internet its self-image: cynical, music-obsessed, hyper-literate, sexually casual. The cast is the demographic that will populate Williamsburg, Silver Lake, and Vice Magazine. King Features syndicates the strip to newspapers in 2007. Stevens cancels the print run himself after eighteen months because the pixel art does not survive newspaper reproduction. The web is the medium. Sources • dieselsweeties.com archive, strips 1-365 (2000) • The Comics Journal, 'Richard Stevens interview' (2007) • KnowYourMeme, Diesel Sweeties
  3. — Homestar Runner. Date: 1 January 2000 (site launch) · Place: homestarrunner.com, San Diego and Atlanta · Figures: Mike Chapman, co-creator · Matt Chapman (Strong Bad voice), co-creator · the Brothers Chaps · Tags: Flash, Strong Bad 01. The Brothers Chaps Make a Website Mike and Matt Chapman launch homestarrunner.com on 1 January 2000, named for a children's-book character they invented in 1996. It hosts a sprawling cast: Homestar Runner, Strong Bad, The Cheat, Marzipan, Coach Z. The art is deliberately rough Flash with a hand-drawn line. Strong Bad Email, debuting 1 December 2001, becomes the breakout: viewers email Strong Bad, he answers on camera in a wrestling mask while typing on a Tandy 400. The format runs 209 episodes and pre-figures the entire YouTuber response-video genre. 02. A Web Cartoon Funded By Tee Shirts The Brothers Chaps support the entire project on merchandise sales. No ads, no pre-rolls, no investors. The model proves that a beloved web cartoon with a five-figure-strong fan base can be a full-time job for two people. The site goes effectively dormant 2010 to 2014, then returns. Strong Bad Email 209 (Trogdor!, January 2003) spawns its own meme that outlives the parent. Sources • Wired, 'The Brothers Chaps and Homestar Runner' (2005) • Polygon, 'Where is Homestar Runner now' (2018) • homestarrunner.com archives
  4. — Bonsai Kitten. Date: April 2000 · Place: bonsaikitten.com, MIT student server · Figures: Dr. Michael Wong Chang (pseudonym), MIT graduate student · Tags: Hoax, Outrage 01. A Site About Growing Cats in Jars An MIT student under the pseudonym Dr. Michael Wong Chang launches bonsaikitten.com in late 1999, going viral in April 2000. The site claims to sell kittens raised inside glass containers so their bones grow into decorative shapes. Diagrams, FAQs, testimonials, ordering instructions: all fake. It is satire pitched directly at credulous email-forwarders. The site contains no actual kittens and no actual jars. It is a Photoshop and a tone. 02. The FBI Investigates a Joke PETA mobilises. The Humane Society writes letters. The FBI opens an investigation, twice. MIT's servers receive enough abuse traffic that they ask the student to move the site. He moves it. The investigation finds, predictably, no kittens. Bonsai Kitten establishes the template for the rest of the decade: an obviously fake outrage object that mainstream institutions take literally, then a wave of forum users laughing at the institutions. The joke is the response, not the site. Sources • Snopes, 'Bonsai Kitten' (2001) • Wired, 'Kitten-in-a-jar hoax' (2001) • KnowYourMeme, Bonsai Kitten
  5. — More Cowbell. Date: 8 April 2000 · Place: Saturday Night Live, Studio 8H, NBC, New York · Figures: Christopher Walken, Bruce Dickenson · Will Ferrell, Gene Frenkle (writer) · Blue Oyster Cult, fictionalized band · Tags: Sketch, Quote, Pre-YouTube 01. A Fictional Recording Session Will Ferrell writes a sketch about the 1976 recording of Blue Oyster Cult's Don't Fear the Reaper, where producer Bruce Dickenson, played by Christopher Walken, demands more cowbell from session player Gene Frenkle. Ferrell pads the cowbell prop on purpose so it makes a louder, more absurd clang. Walken sells the line with total commitment. The sketch airs once on 8 April 2000. It is funny in the room and forgotten by the network. NBC does not push it. The clip survives in tape trades, on Kazaa, on early YTMND pages. 02. Quote Without Source I gotta have more cowbell becomes a 2002-2005 office quote, then a forum sig, then a t-shirt, then a stadium sign. By the time YouTube hosts the clip in 2006 the quote has already outlived its sketch by half a decade. Most people who use it have never seen Walken deliver it. The Cowbell sketch is the first viral SNL bit of the streaming era, distributed by everyone except SNL itself. It teaches the network that single-clip sketches travel further than whole episodes. "I got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell." — Bruce Dickenson (Walken), SNL, 8 April 2000 Sources • Saturday Night Live archive, S25E16 (8 April 2000) • Rolling Stone, 'How More Cowbell became SNL's biggest catchphrase' (2015) • KnowYourMeme, More Cowbell
  6. — Pivot Stickfigure Animator. Date: August 2000 · Place: Bideford, Devon, England · Figures: Peter Bone, programmer · Newgrounds stick-animator scene, audience · Tags: Tool, Newgrounds, Stick 01. A 14-Year-Old Ships a Tool Peter Bone, a teenager in Devon, writes Pivot Stickfigure Animator in Visual Basic and releases the freeware in August 2000. It does one thing: drag stick-figure joints between frames and export a GIF. No timeline, no tweening, no learning curve. The tool reaches the Newgrounds crowd within months. Suddenly any 12-year-old can produce a passable fight scene without owning Flash, without learning vectors, without paying Macromedia. 02. An Entire Genre From One .exe Stickdeath, Xiao Xiao knockoffs, sword duels, gun battles, infinite ragdoll loops. By 2003 a third of front-page Newgrounds Flash includes Pivot-exported sequences. The aesthetic is so identifiable that animators brag about NOT using Pivot. Pivot is the first creation tool aimed squarely at children that produces a global meme genre. It predicts Scratch, Roblox Studio, TikTok templates: lower the floor, the kids will fill the ceiling. Sources • Pivot Animator official site, version history • KnowYourMeme, Pivot Animator • Newgrounds Wiki, Stick Figure Animation
  7. — Newgrounds Flash Era. Date: 2000 onward · Place: newgrounds.com, Tom Fulp's bedroom (then Glenside, PA) · Figures: Tom Fulp, founder · the Flash animator diaspora · Tags: Flash, Animation 01. Tom Fulp's BBS Grows Up Tom Fulp starts Newgrounds in 1995 as a Neo Geo fan newsletter and turns it into a Flash-animation portal when Macromedia Flash 4 makes browser animation viable in 1999. Anyone can upload a .swf; users vote; surviving submissions go in the archive. The model is YouTube before YouTube, for animation only. By 2001 Newgrounds is hosting Pico's School, Stick Slayer, Decline of Video Gaming, and the early run of Joe Cartoon mirrors. A generation of animators (David Firth, FilmCow, Egoraptor, Edd Gould of Eddsworld) starts here. 02. Everything Forever Newgrounds' tag-line is Everything, By Everyone. It survives Flash's death (Adobe end-of-life, 31 December 2020) by reimplementing the runtime in JavaScript (Ruffle) and continues hosting the archive. Almost every notable 2000s Flash cartoon (Salad Fingers, Charlie the Unicorn, End of the World) either originates on or mirrors to Newgrounds. Sources • Tom Fulp, Newgrounds 25th anniversary post (2020) • Polygon, 'Newgrounds survived Flash' (2020) • KnowYourMeme, Newgrounds
  8. — Wikipedia Launches. Date: 15 January 2001 · Place: wikipedia.org, San Diego, California · Figures: Jimmy Wales, co-founder · Larry Sanger, co-founder · Ward Cunningham, wiki concept (1995) · Tags: Platform, Encyclopedia, Substrate 01. Nupedia's Bastard Side Project Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger are running Nupedia, a slow expert-reviewed encyclopedia, and it is going nowhere. Sanger proposes a wiki as a feeder for draft articles. They launch it on 15 January 2001 as a side experiment. Within a month it has more articles than Nupedia ever produced. Wikipedia is not a meme. Wikipedia is the substrate on which the next two decades of memes are documented, fact-checked, debated, and canonised. 02. The Meme Notability Wars By 2005 the Articles for Deletion debates over internet memes are themselves a meme. Editors argue whether Star Wars Kid, All Your Base, and Caturday deserve articles. The threshold is notability, defined by reliable secondary coverage. The result is a feedback loop: a meme covered by a newspaper becomes notable, becomes Wikipedia-eligible, becomes canon. Every meme historian who comes after, including this archive, owes Wikipedia the timestamps. Many of the only surviving primary sources for early 2000s memes are Wikipedia article histories from 2004-2007. "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." — Wikipedia masthead, 2001 onward Sources • Wikipedia, History of Wikipedia • Andrew Lih, 'The Wikipedia Revolution' (Hyperion, 2009) • Slashdot, Wikipedia launch announcement (17 January 2001)
  9. — All Your Base Photoshop Wave. Date: February 2001 · Place: Something Awful, Tribal War forums, the open web · Figures: Bad Sega Mega Drive translators of Zero Wing (1989) · the Goons · Bad_CRC, video compiler · Tags: Image Macro, First Wave 01. A Botched 1989 Translation Returns Zero Wing, a 1989 Toaplan shoot-em-up, has a Mega Drive intro with comically broken English: ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US. The clip circulates on Usenet through the 1990s as a curio. In late 2000 a flash animation by Bad_CRC, set to the techno track Invasion of the Gabber Robots, ships the line to a wider audience. Through January and February 2001, Goons on Something Awful and posters on Tribal War start Photoshopping the phrase onto billboards, road signs, the White House lawn, the Hollywood sign, NFL Jumbotrons, the Lincoln Memorial. 02. The First Photoshop Meme That Goes Everywhere USA Today writes about it in February 2001. Local TV affiliates do segments. Wired prints a feature. The phrase appears spray-painted on a Sturgis water tower, on signs at NHL games, on a real-life Toys-R-Us billboard. All Your Base is the bridge between the text-macro Usenet era and the image-macro forum era. The same joke, the same phrase, but the deliverable is now a JPEG, not a quote. Every meme format that follows assumes the image is the unit. Sources • Wired, 'When Gamer Humor Attacks' (February 2001) • USA Today, 'All your base...' (1 February 2001) • KnowYourMeme, All Your Base Are Belong to Us
  10. — YTMND Launches. Date: 11 March 2001 (site live in current form May 2004) · Place: ytmnd.com · Figures: Max Goldberg (maxgoldberg), founder, 19 · Tags: Audio Loop, Single-Serving Site 01. You're the Man Now, Dog Max Goldberg, a 19-year-old in Vancouver, sees Sean Connery in Finding Forrester (2000) say YOU'RE THE MAN NOW DOG. In March 2001 he registers yourethemannowdog.com: a single page with the still image, the line in caps, and the audio looping. The site goes viral as the first single-serving site joke. In May 2004 Goldberg reopens it as ytmnd.com, a platform where any user can create their own page in the same format: one image, one looping audio clip, one block of caps text. The unit becomes a verb. 02. A Whole Genre in Three Inputs YTMND pages multiply into thousands: Lindsay Lohan Likes Milk, NEDM (Not Even Doom Music), Brian Peppers, Conan O'Brian Reaches For Something, Picard Song. The format's constraints (looping audio, fixed image, big caps) become a discipline, and the discipline becomes its own taste community. YTMND is the first platform whose entire value proposition is a meme format. The site never figures out how to monetise. Goldberg shutters it in 2019, then revives it intermittently. Sources • Max Goldberg interview, Vice (2008) • KnowYourMeme, YTMND • Wayback Machine, yourethemannowdog.com 2001
  11. — Get Your War On. Date: October 2001 · Place: mnftiu.cc, hosted New York · Figures: David Rees, cartoonist · Rolling Stone, syndicator · Tags: Webcomic, Politics, Clip-art 01. Office Clipart Goes to Afghanistan Three weeks after 9/11, David Rees launches Get Your War On at mnftiu.cc. The format: 1980s Print Shop clip-art office workers on the phone, ranting in profane verbatim about the war on terror. No drawing, no animation, just panels of identical stock figures cursing. Rees is a temp at a paralegal firm in Brooklyn. The strip is what he writes when he should be working. The aesthetic flatness is the point: the bureaucratic dread of the post-9/11 office sounds exactly like clip-art people would sound. 02. The First Political Webcomic Anyone Forwards Rolling Stone picks it up in 2002. A book follows. Rees donates proceeds to landmine clearance in Afghanistan. The comic outlasts the war it was named for, running through the Iraq invasion and into the Obama years. Get Your War On invents the modern political webcomic: zero artistic skill required, voice is everything, dread is the punchline. Every Existential Comics and Reductress descendant routes through it. Sources • David Rees, 'Get Your War On' (Soft Skull Press, 2002) • Rolling Stone, 'Get Your War On' archive 2002-2008 • The Believer, 'David Rees interview' (April 2008)
  12. — Strindberg and Helium. Date: November 2001 · Place: strindbergandhelium.com, San Francisco · Figures: James and Jim, animators (real names withheld) · August Strindberg, deceased Swedish playwright · Tags: Flash, Absurdist 01. A Suicidal Playwright and a Pink Balloon Two San Francisco animators put a glowering caricature of August Strindberg next to a floating pink helium balloon with eyes. Strindberg monologues nihilist despair pulled from his actual letters. Helium responds in a Mickey-Mouse squeak: I love you Strindberg! Let's go for a walk in the park! Five short Flash episodes between 2001 and 2002. That is the entire output. They are perfect. 02. The Forum Quotable Strindberg lines spread through Something Awful, MetaFilter, LiveJournal. Helium is the proto-emoji: a single-frame avatar of unwanted enthusiasm. The pairing predicts every later sad-anime-girl meme, every Office reaction GIF, every juxtaposition humour built on emotional asymmetry. Strindberg and Helium proves that high-literary source material and broadband-era stupidity belong on the same screen. They run in parallel for the rest of the era. Sources • strindbergandhelium.com archive captures (Wayback Machine, 2001-2003) • MetaFilter thread 12451, 'strindberg and helium' (December 2001) • KnowYourMeme, Strindberg and Helium
  13. — Stickdeath. Date: 2001 · Place: stickdeath.com, hosted via Macromedia Flash · Figures: Sam Brown, founder · Newgrounds, parallel host · Tags: Flash, Violence 01. A Site About Killing Stick Figures Stickdeath.com launches as a Flash portal devoted entirely to short loops of stick figures dying. Crushed, exploded, bisected, run over. Pixel blood, no plot, no dialogue. The site adds a new clip every week or so through the early 2000s. It is the first portal organised around a single permitted emotion: cathartic stupid violence rendered abstract enough to laugh at. 02. The Permission Slip Stickdeath gives the 12-to-15-year-old boy demographic explicit permission to make and share violent Flash. Newgrounds follows. Pivot ships months later. By 2003 the stick-violence genre is so saturated that Xiao Xiao and Stickpage stand out by adding choreography. Stickdeath is the lowbrow root from which the entire Newgrounds animation pipeline grows. Every later Madness Combat, every JJBA stand-fight YouTuber, every Alan Becker Animator-vs-Animation owes the floor it stands on to Sam Brown. Sources • Wayback Machine, stickdeath.com captures 2001-2004 • KnowYourMeme, Stick Figure Animation • Newgrounds Wiki, Stickdeath
  14. — Pedobear Crosses Over. Date: Japanese origin 2002 (Kuma) · 4chan adoption 2003 onward · Place: 2chan (Japan) · 4chan /b/ (United States) · Figures: anonymous 2chan ASCII artists, original · anonymous /b/ posters, importers and reframers · Tags: Mascot, Transgressive 01. Kuma Becomes Pedobear On 2chan, the Japanese image-board predecessor to 4chan, an ASCII bear named Kuma appears around 2002 with a generic mascot function. When the character is ported to 4chan in 2003 via the /b/ board's general absorption of 2chan culture, the bear is renamed Pedobear and recontextualised as the chan's mascot for posts involving underage subjects. Pedobear becomes /b/'s warning sign, in-joke, and self-conscious indictment all at once. The bear appears in chan-produced fake Olympic logos, fake police-blotter graphics, fake news chyrons. The joke runs on the audience's discomfort. 02. Polish Police File a Report By 2010 Pedobear has escaped /b/ entirely. The Polish national police issue a public warning that the bear is a symbol of paedophile predators online. Newspapers and broadcasters worldwide repeat the warning earnestly. The misunderstanding is the joke /b/ wanted. Pedobear is the case study for a 4chan injoke becoming a moral-panic object. The chan-produced mascot generates more mainstream press coverage than most of its sincere products combined. Sources • KnowYourMeme, Pedobear • Guardian, 'Polish police warn of Pedobear' (October 2010) • Encyclopedia Dramatica, Pedobear entry (archived)
  15. — Ceiling Cat. Date: 5 January 2003 · Place: originally posted to laugh-out-loud cats forums, later 4chan · Figures: anonymous photographer · 4chan /b/, propagation venue · Martin Grondin, LOLCat Bible Translation Project (2007) · Tags: LOLCat, Deity 01. A White Cat Peers Through a Hole On 5 January 2003 a photograph appears online: a white cat poking its head through a hole in a drywall ceiling, staring straight down at the camera. The original poster and the cat are both lost to history. The image lands in cat-photo forums and sits dormant for two years. By 2006 it is circulating on 4chan with the caption CEILING CAT IS WATCHING YOU MASTURBATE in LOLcat lowercase. The voyeur framing turns a cute photo into a theological one. 02. The LOLCat Pantheon Ceiling Cat acquires Basement Cat as his Satan and Monorail Cat as a saint. Martin Grondin starts the LOLCat Bible Translation Project in July 2007: oh hai, in teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem. The project gets press in The New York Times. Ceiling Cat is the moment LOLcats stop being captioned pictures and start being scripture. The meme acquires lore, hierarchy, recurring characters. It is the first meme religion, and the model for every Pepe-as-Kek elaboration that follows. Sources • KnowYourMeme, Ceiling Cat • Martin Grondin, 'LOLCat Bible' (Ulysses Press, 2010) • The New York Times, 'Cute? Pictures of cats on the Internet are' (July 2008)
  16. — Oh No They Didn't Founded. Date: January 2003 · Place: community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt · Figures: Trent Vanegas, founder · the moderator collective · the LiveJournal celebrity-gossip readership · Tags: Gossip, Community 01. A LiveJournal Community for Tabloid Posts Trent Vanegas founds the LiveJournal community ohnotheydidnt (ONTD) in January 2003 as a place for fans to repost tabloid headlines and gossip with snark. Posts require an image, a source, and the user's own commentary tag. The post-and-comment LiveJournal architecture works perfectly for the format. By 2006 ONTD is one of LiveJournal's largest communities, with millions of pageviews a day. The community develops a distinct dialect (bb, flawless, mess, faves, no shade) that filters out into broader pop-culture vocabulary. 02. The Female-Coded Gossip Forum Where /b/ is masculine, hostile, and image-board, ONTD is feminine, communal, and journal-style. The two forms run in parallel through the 2000s and barely cross over. ONTD writes about Britney, Lindsay, Paris, the Hilton sisters, the early Kardashians; /b/ ignores all of it. ONTD's voice is the direct ancestor of Stan Twitter (post-2014), of TikTok's pop-culture community, of every later platform's women-driven celebrity-discourse layer. The dialect survives the dying platform; it now lives elsewhere. Sources • Trent Vanegas interview, NYMag's Vulture (2010) • KnowYourMeme, Oh No They Didn't • LiveJournal, ohnotheydidnt community archive
  17. — Trogdor the Burninator. Date: 13 January 2003 (Strong Bad Email 58) · Place: homestarrunner.com, sbemail 58 (dragon) · Figures: Strong Bad, voiced by Matt Chapman · Mike Chapman, animator · Tags: Strong Bad, Singalong 01. Strong Bad Draws a Dragon Strong Bad Email 58, dated 13 January 2003, has Strong Bad answer a viewer who asks how to draw a dragon. He doodles an S-shape, adds spines, a beefy arm, and Trogdor the Burninator is born. The cartoon ends with a NES-style fake game (Trogdor!) and a power-metal singalong about Trogdor burninating the countryside, the peasants, the thatched-roof cottages. The song is in caps. The song is sung at music camps. The song is sung in dorm rooms for a decade. 02. A Web Dragon Becomes a Real Game Trogdor playable in browser becomes the Brothers Chaps' most downloaded asset. Guitar Hero II (2006) ships with Trogdor as a bonus track. Trogdor!! The Board Game (Kickstarter, 2018) raises $1.4 million. Trogdor is the case study for a meme escaping its parent cartoon entirely. People who have never seen Homestar Runner know the dragon. The burninating outlives the website. Sources • homestarrunner.com, sbemail 58 • Guitar Hero II track list (Activision, 2006) • KnowYourMeme, Trogdor
  18. — MySpace Tom. Date: August 2003 onward · Place: myspace.com · Figures: Tom Anderson, co-founder · Chris DeWolfe, co-founder · Tags: Social, Default Friend 01. Everyone's First Friend MySpace launches in August 2003 with a default behaviour: every new user automatically becomes friends with Tom Anderson, the co-founder, whose smiling photograph at a desk in a white T-shirt appears on every new profile. By 2005 Tom has more friends than any person in human history (peak roughly 250 million). Tom is the era's first parasocial figure produced by a default-on social-platform mechanic. He is everyone's first friend by definition. He answers some support emails personally. 02. He Sells, Retires, Travels MySpace sells to News Corp in July 2005 for $580 million; Tom personally clears around $30 million. He retires, takes up landscape photography, posts genuinely accomplished work to Instagram for two decades. The figure of MySpace Tom remains a recurring meme: the man who left social media and won. Tom is the proto-template for every later platform-founder-as-mascot: Kevin Systrom, Evan Spiegel, even Zuckerberg's awkward congressional hearings. None of them get to retire. Sources • Wired, 'Tom Anderson Has Left the Building' (2009) • Forbes, 'How MySpace Tom Cashed Out at the Top' (2011) • Tom Anderson's Instagram (@myspacetom)
  19. — Badger Badger Badger. Date: September 2003 · Place: weebls-stuff.com · Figures: Jonti Picking (Weebl), animator, UK · Tags: Flash, Loop 01. Badger Badger Badger Badger Mushroom Mushroom Jonti Picking, a British Flash animator working as Weebl, posts Badger Badger Badger on weebls-stuff.com in September 2003. The loop: pixelated badgers doing calisthenics, a low-fi song chanting BADGER BADGER BADGER, occasional cutaways to a mushroom and then a SNAKE, IT'S A SNAKE. The page is set to loop indefinitely. Open it, walk away, come back, the badgers are still doing calisthenics. Office firewalls block it; office workers find proxies. 02. Weebl Becomes a Brand Picking follows with Magical Trevor (2004), Kenya (Africa), Weebl and Bob, Salad Fingers' cousin in the early-2000s Flash diaspora. He becomes one of the few Flash-era animators to make a sustainable living from the work; he later scores Adventure Time episodes. Badger Badger Badger is the proof-of-concept for the loop-without-payoff as an entire creative form. Two minutes of badgers, no story, infinite replay. "Mushroom, mushroom." — Badger Badger Badger, weebls-stuff.com, September 2003 Sources • weebls-stuff.com, Badger Badger Badger • Guardian, 'The cult of Weebl' (2005) • KnowYourMeme, Badgers
  20. — The Pirate Bay Launches. Date: 15 September 2003 · Place: thepiratebay.org, hosted Stockholm, Sweden · Figures: Gottfrid Svartholm, co-founder · Fredrik Neij, co-founder · Peter Sunde, spokesman (from 2004) · Piratbyran, parent collective · Tags: Platform, Piracy, BitTorrent 01. A Swedish Anti-Copyright Collective Ships a Tracker Piratbyran, a Swedish anti-copyright collective, hosts a BitTorrent tracker called The Pirate Bay starting 15 September 2003. Gottfrid Svartholm writes the original code. Fredrik Neij maintains the servers. Peter Sunde becomes the public face from 2004. The site indexes torrent files for movies, music, software, games, books. Within two years it is the largest torrent index in the world. By 2008 it serves twenty-five million peers. 02. The Legal Threats Become Mascots The Pirate Bay publishes its takedown letters from Hollywood studios and law firms, with snarky responses appended. The page becomes a forum thread of its own. The pirate-ship logo, the cheeky FAQ, the legal-threats archive: this is the first major platform that turns hostility from the industry into branding. Sweden raids the servers in May 2006. The site is back in three days. The founders are convicted in 2009. The site remains online through mirror after mirror. The Pirate Bay is the prototype for every later jurisdiction-resistant protocol-as-meme, from Sci-Hub to LibGen to BitTorrent itself as identity. Sources • Wired, 'The Pirate Bay defends itself' (June 2006) • TPB AFK documentary (Simon Klose, 2013) • Stockholm District Court, judgment B 13301-06 (17 April 2009)
  21. — 4chan Founded. Date: 1 October 2003 · Place: Westchester County, New York · christopher.poole's bedroom · Figures: Christopher Poole (moot), 15, founder · Tags: Image Board, The Engine Room 01. The Bedroom Server Christopher Poole, a 15-year-old high school sophomore in Westchester County, launches 4chan on 1 October 2003 from a server in his bedroom. The site is modeled on the Japanese imageboards 2channel and Futaba (the chan in 4chan being short for channel). Every post requires an image. Posts are anonymous by default. Boards are organized by topic: /a/ for anime, /v/ for video games, /b/ for random. /b/ becomes, for the next decade and a half, the cultural factory floor where most of the internet's image-vernacular gets made. The anonymity removes consequence; the image-required constraint forces visual literacy; the post-and-die ephemeral threading produces a culture obsessed with capturing, captioning, and circulating. 02. Where the Memes Came From If you can name an English-language meme of the 2003-2015 period, the odds favor 4chan as its origin: lolcats and image macros (industrialized on /b/), Rickroll (2007), Pedobear, Trollface, Forever Alone, Y U NO, Slowpoke, the entire rage-face genre. Pepe the Frog (originally Matt Furie's, but 4chan's adoption and politicization is what makes Pepe globally famous in 2016). Poole exits the site in January 2015 after running it for 11 years. By then the cultural function has long since shifted: 4chan stops being the place where most internet memes start; it becomes the place a smaller, more politicized subset of memes is incubated, primarily on /pol/. The engine room runs on a different fuel after about 2014. Sources • Christopher Poole, oral histories 2008-2015 • Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things (2015) • Wikipedia, 4chan
  22. — Facemash to Facebook. Date: 28 October 2003 (Facemash) · 4 February 2004 (Facebook) · Place: Kirkland House, Harvard University · Figures: Mark Zuckerberg, sophomore · the Harvard Crimson, complainant · the Harvard administration, disciplinary body · Tags: Lineage, Origin Sin 01. One Night, Stolen ID Photos On the night of 28 October 2003 Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard sophomore, writes Facemash in his dorm room. He scrapes Harvard ID photos from the nine residential houses' face-books, pairs them two at a time, asks visitors which is hotter. The site goes live; word spreads through Kirkland House; by morning Harvard's network has logged 22,000 votes. The administration shuts him down within 48 hours and threatens expulsion. The site is a direct knockoff of Hot or Not (October 2000). It is also a thesis: the photo of a person is the social object. 02. Facebook is Facemash Without the Rating Three months later, on 4 February 2004, Zuckerberg launches thefacebook.com from the same dorm. He keeps the photo grid and drops the binary rating. The friend connection replaces the score. The product scales. Facebook's origin is a hot-or-not knockoff that almost got its author expelled. The aesthetic lineage from forum joke to the largest social platform in history runs directly through Facemash. The Social Network (2010) opens with the scene. Sources • Harvard Crimson, 'Facemash creator survives' (19 November 2003) • Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network screenplay (2010) • David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect (2010)
  23. — The Burger King Wakes Up Beside You. Date: October 2003 · Place: Burger King US TV campaign, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Miami · Figures: Crispin Porter + Bogusky, agency · MJZ, production · Burger King, client · Tags: Advertising, Uncanny 01. The Plastic-Headed King in Your Bed Crispin Porter + Bogusky reboots Burger King's mascot in October 2003 as a man in a plastic king mask with a fixed grin. The first spot, Wake-Up, opens with a sleeping office worker rolling over to find the King silently lying next to him in bed, holding a breakfast sandwich. There is no jingle, no slogan. The King says nothing. He just hands you a sandwich. Then he is in your gym, your shower, your office cubicle. 02. The Mascot Becomes a Photoshop Within months SA, YTMND, and proto-/b/ are Photoshopping the King into horror movie stills, classical paintings, family photographs. The mask travels because it is already a meme template: a single rigid expression on a human body in any context. The Burger King is the first major brand mascot whose 2000s revival is calibrated to be screenshotted, not to be liked. He predicts the IHOP/IHOb gambit, the Wendy's Twitter pivot, the Duolingo owl, every uncanny-corporate-mascot-as-content move of the next twenty years. Sources • Adweek, 'CP+B reboots Burger King' (October 2003) • Crispin Porter + Bogusky case study, The King • KnowYourMeme, The Burger King
  24. — Foamy the Squirrel. Date: 2003 · Place: Newgrounds, Illwillpress.com, New Jersey · Figures: Jonathan Ian Mathers, animator and voice · Foamy, anthropomorphic rant squirrel · Tags: Flash, Rant, Newgrounds 01. A Squirrel Yells at the Coffee Shop Jonathan Ian Mathers, a New Jersey animator, launches Foamy the Squirrel via his Illwillpress site and Newgrounds account around 2003. Each episode is a stationary squirrel delivering a three-minute rant in a sped-up voice. Topics: coffee shop customers, fanboys, organised religion, traffic, hygiene. Mathers writes, animates, voices, and uploads weekly. The output is closer to a webcomic schedule than to an animation studio. 02. The First Parasocial Cartoon Mascot Foamy collects a fan army that buys T-shirts, quotes episodes verbatim, and tattoos the character. The rants are not really jokes; they are tribal markers. Watching Foamy is how you identify other people who hated their high school. Foamy predicts the YouTube rant channel by half a decade. He is the Filthy Frank, the Onision, the Nostalgia Critic, prototyped in a single Flash file per week. Sources • Illwillpress.com archive, 2003-2010 • Newgrounds, Jonathan Ian Mathers user page • KnowYourMeme, Foamy the Squirrel
  25. — Tron Guy. Date: March 2004 · Place: Jay Maynard's home page, Fairmont, Minnesota · Figures: Jay Maynard, computer programmer, 45 · Tags: Cosplay, Viral Person 01. A Programmer in Spandex Jay Maynard, a Minnesota programmer, sews a costume of the cyan-lit Tron suit from the 1982 Disney film, photographs himself wearing it on his home page, and links from a Slashdot comment in March 2004. The photos travel. Jimmy Kimmel Live books him; he does conventions; he becomes a recurring The Howard Stern Show guest. The suit is unmistakable and the photographs are unflattering in a way that lets the audience laugh comfortably. 02. The Volunteer Meme Person Where Star Wars Kid is made viral against his will, Tron Guy chooses. Maynard makes himself the meme, monetises modestly, attends conventions for a decade. He is the era's clearest case of the consenting viral person. He attends the Tron: Legacy (2010) premiere in his suit, by invitation of the studio. The meme survives because the meme cooperates. Sources • Jay Maynard home page, tronguy.net (Wayback, 2004-2010) • Wired, 'Tron Guy is in the building' (2010) • KnowYourMeme, Tron Guy
  26. — Subservient Chicken. Date: 7 April 2004 · Place: subservientchicken.com, agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Miami · Figures: Crispin Porter + Bogusky, agency · Burger King, client · The Barbarian Group, build studio · Tags: Advertising, Interactive 01. Type a Command, the Chicken Obeys Crispin Porter + Bogusky launches subservientchicken.com on 7 April 2004 to sell Burger King's TenderCrisp chicken sandwich. A man in a chicken suit and garter belt stands in a beige living room. You type a command. He performs it. The site pre-records 300 short clips and matches your input to the nearest one. There is no narrative, no game, no purchase flow. There is a chicken who will jumping-jack, lie down, moonwalk, or salute on demand. 02. The Viral Ad Becomes a Discipline Twenty million unique visitors in the first week. Forum threads compile the full command list. The site stays up for years. CP+B wins every advertising award available. The agency proceeds to industrialise the form for the rest of the decade. Subservient Chicken is the moment a brand campaign becomes indistinguishable from a viral Flash toy. The marketing department is now competing with Newgrounds, with Albino Blacksheep, with the SA Goons. They lose more often than they win, but they are in the game. Sources • Adweek, 'Subservient Chicken at 10' (April 2014) • Crispin Porter + Bogusky case study, Subservient Chicken (2004) • Wired, 'How the Subservient Chicken changed advertising' (April 2004)
  27. — JibJab This Land. Date: 9 July 2004 · Place: jibjab.com, Brooklyn, New York · Figures: Gregg Spiridellis, co-founder · Evan Spiridellis, co-founder · Woody Guthrie, original songwriter (1940) · Tags: Flash, Politics, Forward 01. Bush and Kerry Sing Woody Guthrie The Spiridellis brothers release This Land on jibjab.com on 9 July 2004. Cutout-puppet caricatures of George W. Bush and John Kerry trade insults to the tune of Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land. The animation runs two and a half minutes. The jokes are gentle, the rendering is craft-fair charming. It is the first Flash piece to be passed around by every American demographic at once: red, blue, parents, teenagers, news anchors. ABC airs it on World News Tonight. 02. The Election Goes Viral JibJab's servers crash and recover. The Guthrie estate sues for copyright infringement, then settles after the Electronic Frontier Foundation establishes fair-use parody. By election day This Land has been viewed over 80 million times, an unimaginable number for a single Flash file in 2004. JibJab proves that political satire can travel through email faster than through television. The 2008 cycle treats viral animation as table stakes. Every subsequent campaign cycle has its own JibJab equivalent, some made by JibJab itself. Sources • ABC News, 'JibJab brothers' (July 2004) • EFF, 'This Land' fair-use settlement filings (August 2004) • KnowYourMeme, JibJab
  28. — Salad Fingers Premieres. Date: 1 July 2004 (Spoons) · Place: Newgrounds · davidfirth.com · Fat-Pie · Figures: David Firth, animator, Doncaster, UK, 21 · Tags: Flash, Horror 01. Pale Green Man, Rusty Spoon David Firth, 21, uploads Salad Fingers: Spoons to Newgrounds on 1 July 2004. The cartoon is four minutes of a pale green man with elongated fingers stroking rusty spoons in a wasteland, speaking in an unsettling falsetto to imaginary friends called Hubert Cumberdale and Marjory Stewart-Baxter. There is no joke. The cartoon is genuine, original horror, produced in Flash 5 on a domestic PC. It does not cost a thing. It plays like nothing has before. 02. The First Time the Web Makes Real Horror Salad Fingers proves the Flash medium can produce work that is not stupid, not ironic, not aimed at twelve-year-olds. Firth follows with ten episodes through 2019 and a stack of darker work (Burnt Face Man, Spoilsbury Toast Boy, The Child). The first episode passes 100 million views. Firth becomes one of the few independent Flash-era animators with a sustained adult career. Every weird YouTube horror channel (Local 58, Petscop, Don't Hug Me I'm Scared) descends from Salad Fingers. Sources • David Firth interview, Guardian (2014) • KnowYourMeme, Salad Fingers • fat-pie.com, Salad Fingers archive
  29. — Encyclopedia Dramatica Founded. Date: 10 December 2004 · Place: encyclopediadramatica.com (later .se, .rs, .online) · Figures: Sherrod DeGrippo (Girlvinyl), founder · the LJDrama crowd, early editors · Tags: Wiki, Hostile 01. Wikipedia for the Cruelty Sherrod DeGrippo, a 26-year-old infosec analyst writing as Girlvinyl, launches Encyclopedia Dramatica on 10 December 2004 as a wiki spin-off from LiveJournal drama coverage. The brief is Wikipedia's format aimed at internet subcultures, with no neutrality, every entry written in maximum bad faith. Articles document /b/ raids, furries, otherkin, MySpace celebrities, and individual targets in vicious detail. The site is the era's hostile archive, the place where the chans' inside-baseball is written down. 02. The Reference Book for /b/ Encyclopedia Dramatica becomes /b/'s working memory. Rules of the Internet, Pool's Closed, the entire taxonomy of cancer-on-/b/-today: ED writes them up. The site is also a documented harassment vehicle. Multiple lawsuits, multiple defamation actions. DeGrippo sells the site in 2011; it has bounced between hosts and registrars for fifteen years since. The cultural function (a hostile dictionary for image-board culture) outlasts every individual domain. Sources • Sherrod DeGrippo interview, Wired (2007) • KnowYourMeme, Encyclopedia Dramatica • Wayback Machine, encyclopediadramatica.com captures 2005-2011
  30. — Numa Numa Guy. Date: 6 December 2004 (Newgrounds upload) · Place: Saddle Brook, New Jersey · Figures: Gary Brolsma, 18 · O-Zone (Dragostea Din Tei), original song · Tags: Webcam, Lip-Sync 01. A Webcam Lip-Sync of a Moldovan Dance Track Gary Brolsma, 18, records himself in his bedroom on 6 December 2004 lip-syncing to O-Zone's Dragostea Din Tei (Moldovan eurodance, 2003), wearing headphones, mouthing the Romanian lyrics with full earnest commitment, throwing his arms up at the chorus. He uploads the clip to Newgrounds. The clip is 1 minute 39 seconds. He calls it Numa Numa Dance after the chorus. By March 2005 it has been seen by tens of millions. 02. The First Viral Lip-Sync Video The Today Show, Good Morning America, Late Night with Conan O'Brien all book the clip. Brolsma initially refuses interviews; he later embraces the role and releases a New Numa Numa in 2006. New York Times profiles him as a reluctant celebrity. Numa Numa is the template for every TikTok lip-sync that follows. The webcam, the bedroom, the unironic commitment, the eurodance bridge: every element gets reproduced for two decades. "Maaa-iaaa-hiii, maaa-iaaa-huuu, maaa-iaaa-haaa, maaa-iaaa-haa-haa." — Gary Brolsma, Numa Numa Dance, 6 December 2004 Sources • New York Times, 'Internet Fame Is a Cruel Mistress for a Numa Numa Dancer' (26 February 2005) • Newgrounds, Numa Numa upload archive • KnowYourMeme, Numa Numa
  31. — Caturday and Lolcats. Date: 2005 (Caturday on /b/) · 11 January 2007 (icanhascheezburger.com) · Place: 4chan /b/, then icanhascheezburger.com · Figures: anonymous /b/ posters · Eric Nakagawa, co-founder of I Can Has Cheezburger · Kari Unebasami, co-founder · Tags: Cats, LOLspeak 01. Saturday is for Cats Beginning around 2005, /b/ anons start posting cat pictures every Saturday and calling it Caturday. Pictures arrive captioned in the broken-English pidgin already developing across the chans: I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?, OH HAI, IM IN UR BASE KILLIN UR D00DS, MONORAIL CAT. The Impact-font caption hardens into the canonical image-macro form. The grammar is intentional: bad spelling, baby talk, third-person animal voice. Linguists later call it LOLspeak. 02. Eric and Kari Build a Business Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami in Hawaii repost a Caturday image (a British Shorthair captioned I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?) on a personal blog 11 January 2007 to cheer up a friend. The blog becomes icanhascheezburger.com, an entire site of crowdsourced lolcats. Cheezburger Inc. raises $30 million by 2011. Caturday is the moment the image macro becomes a literal industry. The grammar that /b/ built without commercial intent becomes the format of a venture-backed company. The chans, predictably, hate this. Sources • Eric Nakagawa interview, Time (2007) • KnowYourMeme, Lolcats / Caturday • Wired, 'I Has a Sweet Cheezburger Business' (2008)
  32. — Cyanide and Happiness. Date: 25 January 2005 · Place: explosm.net, Dallas, Texas · Figures: Kris Wilson, co-founder · Rob DenBleyker, co-founder · Matt Melvin, co-founder · Dave McElfatrick, later co-founder · Tags: Webcomic, Stick 01. Three Teenagers Build a Stick Empire Kris Wilson, Rob DenBleyker, and Matt Melvin meet on a small webcomic forum and merge their efforts at explosm.net. The first Cyanide and Happiness strip posts on 25 January 2005. The art is deliberately crude: four panels, stick limbs, dot eyes. The jokes are deliberately bleak: cancer, suicide, paedophilia treated as four-panel punchlines. By 2007 they are posting daily. By 2010 they have a Comedy Central pilot. By 2015 their YouTube animations are clearing nine figures of views per video. 02. The Stick Comic Becomes a Business Cyanide and Happiness is the first webcomic to industrialise the SomethingAwful-tone shock-joke into a brand a chain bookstore can sell. They publish books, run a Kickstarter, ship a card game, build a YouTube channel. The strip's success proves that the stick-figure aesthetic is not a budget constraint but a style. The flatness lets the joke land first. The drawing never gets in the way. Sources • explosm.net archive, first strip (25 January 2005) • Wired, 'How three teenagers built Cyanide and Happiness' (2010) • KnowYourMeme, Cyanide and Happiness
  33. — Citation Needed. Date: 16 February 2005 · Place: Wikipedia, Template namespace · Figures: Ta bu shi da yu, Wikipedia editor (template creator) · Wikipedia editor community · Tags: Template, Wiki 01. A Template That Reaches the Street On 16 February 2005, English Wikipedia editor Ta bu shi da yu creates the Template:Citation needed markup. The template inserts a small bracketed superscript at the end of an unsourced sentence: [citation needed]. It is a workflow tool, meant only for editors patrolling articles. It immediately becomes the most-deployed inline template on the English Wikipedia. By 2010 hundreds of thousands of pages carry the tag at least once. 02. The Markup Becomes a Punchline By 2007 readers are wearing T-shirts printed CITIZENS HAVE THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS [CITATION NEEDED]. Picket signs carry it at protests. Forum posts append it sarcastically to obvious lies. The template detaches from Wikipedia and becomes a generic skepticism gesture, the textual equivalent of an arched eyebrow. Citation Needed is the first piece of platform-specific markup to escape its platform and become free-floating cultural vocabulary. It is the model for the [intensifies] greentext, the /s sarcasm tag, the air-quote, every snowclone-shaped sigil that lets you punctuate a sentence with disbelief. "[citation needed]" — Wikipedia Template:Citation needed, 16 February 2005 Sources • Wikipedia, Template:Citation needed history (16 February 2005) • The Atlantic, 'How citation needed became the internet's favorite phrase' (2014) • Wikipedia, History of citation-needed template
  34. — Megaupload Era. Date: 21 March 2005 · Place: megaupload.com, Hong Kong incorporation · Figures: Kim Dotcom (Kim Schmitz), founder · Mathias Ortmann, CTO · Bram van der Kolk, programmer · Tags: Platform, File Locker 01. The One-Click Locker Kim Schmitz, soon Kim Dotcom, launches Megaupload from Hong Kong on 21 March 2005. The proposition is simple: drop any file, get a link, share the link, free users wait through ads, premium users pay $10 a month for speed. No tracker, no torrent, no peering knowledge required. Within five years Megaupload claims 180 million registered users and 4% of total internet traffic. It is the connective tissue of an entire era of forum-shared TV episodes, cracked software, and PDF textbooks. 02. The Forum's Default Verb By 2008 to mega something is a verb on every fan forum, every scanlation board, every pirate music blog. Rapidshare, MediaFire, Sendspace, and zShare compete for the same niche. The locker constellation replaces the IRC bot and the FTP topsite for the casual user. The US Department of Justice seizes Megaupload on 19 January 2012 in a coordinated international raid. The seizure breaks billions of dead links across the web. The dead-link era inaugurates the modern argument for personal archives, which is one of the reasons this archive exists. Sources • US v. Dotcom et al., E.D. Va indictment (5 January 2012) • Wired, 'The rise and fall of Megaupload' (January 2012) • KnowYourMeme, Megaupload
  35. — Flying Spaghetti Monster. Date: June 2005 · Place: Bobby Henderson's open letter to the Kansas State Board of Education · Figures: Bobby Henderson, 24, physics graduate, Oregon State · Tags: Satire, Pastafarianism 01. Open Letter to Kansas In June 2005 Bobby Henderson, a 24-year-old Oregon State physics graduate, posts an open letter to the Kansas State Board of Education, which is debating whether to teach intelligent design in public-school science classes. Henderson argues that if intelligent design qualifies as science, his belief that the universe was created by an invisible Flying Spaghetti Monster also qualifies and must receive equal classroom time. The letter goes viral on early-blog channels and forums within weeks. Pastafarianism is born as a deliberate, well-written satire. 02. Colanders on Driver's Licences By 2007 Pastafarians in several countries have won the right to wear colanders on their heads in government ID photographs on freedom-of-religion grounds. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster registers as a religion in the Netherlands (2016), Australia (rejected 2015), and elsewhere. FSM is the era's most successful piece of policy-targeted satire. The meme works as a wedge against intelligent-design pedagogy in school boards from Kansas to Florida. The satire is the argument. "I would like to know what evidence there is to support intelligent design over my Pastafarianism." — Bobby Henderson, open letter to Kansas Board of Education, June 2005 Sources • Bobby Henderson, The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Villard, 2006) • Original open letter, venganza.org (Wayback, June 2005) • Washington Post, 'Pastafarian wins right to wear colander' (2014)
  36. — Where the Hell is Matt. Date: 2005 (first version) · June 2006 (Stride sponsorship) · Place: Matt Harding's laptop, then 70+ countries · Figures: Matt Harding, video-game designer turned traveller, 28 · Stride Gum, eventual sponsor · Tags: Travel, Earnest 01. A Man Dancing Badly Everywhere Matt Harding, 28, quits his job designing the video game Where's Waldo: The Great Waldo Search in 2003 and travels the world. He films himself doing a single goofy dance (knees and elbows bent, arms swinging) in front of landmarks, edits the clips together, posts to his website in 2005. The video, four minutes scored to Sweet Lullaby by Deep Forest, goes viral on forwards. Strangers email Harding asking him to come dance in their country. Stride Gum sees the original and sponsors the 2006 sequel; the 2008 version (Where the Hell is Matt 2008) is shot in 42 countries with crowds joining in. 02. The First Unironic Viral Travel Video Where the Hell is Matt is the era's countercurrent: not ironic, not cruel, not hostile. It is genuinely earnest in a way the rest of /b/-era culture finds embarrassing. The earnestness is the point. Harding releases new versions in 2008, 2012, and 2024. Every well-meaning travel-and-dance video on Instagram descends from him. The 2008 version has been viewed over 100 million times. Sources • Matt Harding, wherethehellismatt.com archive • Stride Gum case study, AdAge (2006) • Outside, 'How a Goofy Dance Made Matt Harding a Star' (2008)
  37. — Snakes on a Plane Meme Campaign. Date: August 2005 onward · film released 18 August 2006 · Place: blogs · livejournal · the film's pre-release publicity vacuum · Figures: Samuel L. Jackson, lead · New Line Cinema, producers · Brian Finkelstein, blogger (Snakes on a Blog) · Tags: Marketing, Pre-Release 01. A Title No Marketing Department Can Improve In August 2005 screenwriter Josh Friedman blogs that he has been hired to do uncredited work on a film called Snakes on a Plane and that Samuel L. Jackson reportedly threatened to quit when the studio tried to retitle it. The title goes viral within the blogosphere within days. Bloggers, especially law student Brian Finkelstein at Snakes on a Blog, treat the unfinished film as a meme object for a full year. Fans submit fake posters, songs, T-shirts, trailer parodies, alternate openings. New Line Cinema reshoots in March 2006 to add fan-requested R-rated material including the canonical Samuel L. Jackson line. 02. The First Crowdsourced Studio Movie The film opens 18 August 2006 to underwhelming box office ($62 million worldwide on a $33 million budget). The cultural footprint is significantly larger than the financial one. The line GET THESE MOTHERFUCKING SNAKES OFF THIS MOTHERFUCKING PLANE was workshopped into the film by the audience before the audience ever bought tickets. Snakes on a Plane is the first studio film whose marketing collapses into its meme. Every subsequent fan-led pre-release campaign (Sharknado, Cocaine Bear) descends from it. The marketing lesson studios actually learn (a meme is not a ticket sale) survives the box office. Sources • Josh Friedman, 'Snakes on a Motherfucking Plane' blog post (August 2005) • New York Times, 'Snakes on a Plane: a one-of-a-kind marketing test' (2006) • KnowYourMeme, Snakes on a Plane
  38. — XKCD Launches. Date: September 2005 · Place: xkcd.com, Cambridge, Massachusetts · Figures: Randall Munroe, NASA contractor turned cartoonist · Tags: Webcomic, Geek, Stick 01. A NASA Contractor's Sketchbook Randall Munroe is working as a robotics contractor at NASA Langley when he starts posting sketchbook pages on a personal site in September 2005. The format settles fast: black-ink stick figures, no recurring characters, captions about programming, mathematics, romance, and dread. He calls the site xkcd because the four-letter combination was unclaimed. Munroe quits NASA in 2006 to draw full time. The strip is updated Monday, Wednesday, Friday. He never misses. 02. The Geek Lingua Franca XKCD becomes the comic that engineers, scientists, and grad students forward to each other to mean I see you. Strips like Sandwich, Map of the Internet, Compiling, and Standards enter Slack channels and lecture-hall slides as shorthand. The hover-text adds a second joke for the obsessive reader. Munroe builds a book empire on the back of the strip, then a column for IFLScience, then What If, then a New York Times bestseller list. XKCD is the proof that a free webcomic with no merch can sustain a single cartoonist for two decades without selling out. Sources • xkcd.com archive, comics 1-50 • The New Yorker, 'XKCD's Randall Munroe' (April 2014) • KnowYourMeme, XKCD
  39. — Truthiness. Date: 17 October 2005 · Place: The Colbert Report, premiere episode, Comedy Central · Figures: Stephen Colbert, host · Allison Silverman, head writer · Ben Karlin, executive producer · Tags: Coinage, Politics 01. The Premiere Word of the Word Stephen Colbert launches The Colbert Report on 17 October 2005 and opens with a segment called The Word. The first word is truthiness. Colbert defines it as the quality of seeming true to the gut without regard for evidence, books, or facts. The bit lands as a joke about George W. Bush and the Iraq war. The American Dialect Society names truthiness its 2005 Word of the Year in January 2006. Merriam-Webster picks it as 2006 Word of the Year. Colbert pretends to be furious that he was not credited and works it into the show. 02. A Diagnosis That Outlasts Its Punchline Truthiness names a posture the next twenty years of political discourse will be organised around. Cable news, social media, post-truth journalism, the entire 2016-2020 cycle, the 2026 deepfake election all live inside the word Colbert coined as a joke on a premiere. It is the rare meme that crosses out of comedy and into the dictionary while remaining funny. The diagnosis and the symptom keep pace with each other. Sources • Comedy Central, The Colbert Report S01E01 (17 October 2005) • American Dialect Society, 2005 Word of the Year announcement (6 January 2006) • Merriam-Webster, 2006 Word of the Year
  40. — Charlie the Unicorn. Date: 10 December 2005 · Place: Newgrounds, then YouTube. FilmCow, Orlando, Florida · Figures: Jason Steele, FilmCow animator and writer · Brian Goodwin and Adam Sliger, voice actors · Tags: Flash, Absurdist, Newgrounds 01. A Trip to Candy Mountain Jason Steele, 19, uploads Charlie the Unicorn to Newgrounds on 10 December 2005 under his FilmCow handle. Two pink unicorns wake the grumpy Charlie and drag him on a singing journey to Candy Mountain. They abandon him. They steal his kidney. The Banana King liopleurodon makes a guest appearance. The dialogue is a wall of squeaky non-sequiturs. The animation is deliberately stiff. The runtime is under four minutes and contains no slack. 02. The Quote Storm Within months the script is committed to memory by every middle-schooler with broadband. Shun the non-believer. SHUUUUUN. Candy mountain Charlie. It's a magical leopleurodon. The video crosses to YouTube and clears 50 million views by 2008. Charlie the Unicorn is the first Flash short whose quotes outlive the video on multiple platforms simultaneously. Steele turns FilmCow into a sustainable studio on the strength of one cynical unicorn and a kidney joke. Sources • Newgrounds, Charlie the Unicorn (10 December 2005) • FilmCow official site, history • KnowYourMeme, Charlie the Unicorn
  41. — Lazy Sunday. Date: 17 December 2005 · Place: Saturday Night Live, Studio 8H, then YouTube · Figures: Andy Samberg, performer and co-writer · Chris Parnell, performer · The Lonely Island, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, co-writers · Tags: Sketch, YouTube 01. A Hard Rap About Cupcakes Andy Samberg, freshly hired at SNL with the Lonely Island team, premieres Lazy Sunday with Chris Parnell on 17 December 2005. Two grown men rap, with full hip-hop posture, about going to see The Chronicles of Narnia and buying cupcakes from the Magnolia Bakery. The piece is shot like a real music video. The studio audience laughs. The real reaction lives elsewhere. 02. The Network Discovers YouTube Within 24 hours the clip is on the ten-month-old YouTube. By February 2006 it has been viewed five million times. NBC issues a takedown. The takedown is the news story. The takedown is also when NBC Universal realises every clip in its vault is suddenly worth more, and starts negotiating what will eventually become Hulu. Lazy Sunday is the first SNL sketch to break on YouTube before broadcast reruns. It is the moment legacy network television acknowledges that the after-life of a sketch on the internet matters more than the airing. Sources • Saturday Night Live, S31E9 (17 December 2005) • The New York Times, 'NBC, Viacom and YouTube' (February 2006) • KnowYourMeme, Lazy Sunday
  42. — Evolution of Dance. Date: 6 April 2006 · Place: YouTube · originally a motivational-speaker routine · Figures: Judson Laipply, motivational speaker, 30 · Tags: YouTube, Dance 01. Six Minutes of Decade-Hopping Dance Judson Laipply, an Ohio motivational speaker, uploads a six-minute clip of his stage routine to YouTube on 6 April 2006: he dances through fifty years of pop hits, Elvis to Eminem, in costume changes and stage choreography. The routine is well-rehearsed and the editing is clean. By the end of 2006 the video is YouTube's most-watched clip with 70 million views. It holds the position for over a year. Laipply books larger speaking gigs and tours internationally. 02. The First YouTube Megahit Evolution of Dance is the first video to make clear that YouTube has displaced every prior viral-video host. Newgrounds, ebaumsworld, Albino Blacksheep, iFilm, Revver all become legacy infrastructure within eighteen months. The single-stream player and the embed code win. The video also proves that long-form (six minutes) can outperform short-form on the new platform. The forum-era assumption that virality requires a thirty-second loop dies here. Sources • YouTube, Evolution of Dance • New York Times, 'Web Sites by and About Kids Confront Issues of Online Safety' (May 2006) • KnowYourMeme, Evolution of Dance
  43. — I'm a Mac, I'm a PC. Date: 2 May 2006 · Place: Apple Get a Mac campaign, agency TBWA Media Arts Lab, Los Angeles · Figures: Justin Long, Mac · John Hodgman, PC · TBWA Media Arts Lab, agency · Lee Clow, creative director · Tags: Advertising, Template 01. Two Men in Front of a White Wall Apple's Get a Mac campaign launches 2 May 2006. The format never changes for the four years it runs: a white void, Justin Long as a hoodied young Mac, John Hodgman as a suited middle-aged PC. They introduce themselves. PC complains. Mac is patient. End. TBWA Media Arts Lab and Lee Clow ship 66 spots between 2006 and 2009. The constraint, two men, one white wall, one premise, is the template. 02. The Snowclone Is the Ad I'm a Mac, I'm a PC becomes a snowclone template within weeks. I'm a Coke, I'm a Pepsi. I'm a Liberal, I'm a Conservative. I'm a Pirates fan, I'm an Orioles fan. Late-night television runs the parody. The campaign is so over-imitated that it functions as the joke about advertising itself. The Get a Mac ads are the rare brand campaign whose template outlives the product cycle it sold. The PC market shares the ad teaches snowclone is now a brand asset whether or not anyone bought a MacBook because of it. Sources • Adweek, 'The Get a Mac campaign at 10' (May 2016) • TBWA Media Arts Lab, Get a Mac case study • KnowYourMeme, I'm a Mac, I'm a PC
  44. — Diet Coke and Mentos Geyser. Date: 3 June 2006 (Eepybird's The Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiments) · Place: Buckfield, Maine · Revver and YouTube · Figures: Stephen Voltz, lawyer-turned-performer · Fritz Grobe, juggler · Eepybird, performance collective · Tags: Stunt, Practical 01. 101 Bottles, 523 Geysers Stephen Voltz and Fritz Grobe, performing as Eepybird, post The Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiments on Revver on 3 June 2006. They use 101 bottles of Diet Coke and 523 Mentos mints to choreograph a synchronised fountain show in a Maine field. The video is shot like a music video, scored to lounge music, edited to the geyser rhythm. The dropping-Mentos-in-Coke trick is old (the chemistry was published in 1999); the choreography is new. Eepybird's production values are higher than any prior viral-stunt video. 02. The First Sponsored Viral Stunt Within a week the video has 5 million views, then 15 million. Mentos pays Eepybird directly. Coca-Cola refuses to engage at first, then pivots and sponsors a sequel. Revver's revenue-share model pays Eepybird roughly $30,000 from the first video alone; the pair quit their day jobs. Diet Coke and Mentos is the first viral video to operationally prove that performers can make a living from the form, that brands will pay for placement, and that practical-effect stunts beat Flash animation as the era's dominant video format. The format eats its parent: YouTube swallows Revver, Newgrounds, and ebaums within five years. Sources • Wired, 'Diet Coke and Mentos: What Happens Next' (2006) • Eepybird.com, The Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiments • Stephen Voltz and Fritz Grobe, How to Build a Viral Hit (Workman, 2013)
  45. — Pool's Closed. Date: 12 July 2006 onward · Place: Habbo Hotel virtual pool · coordinated from 4chan /b/ · Figures: anonymous /b/ raiders · Sulake, Habbo Hotel operator · Tags: Raid, Habbo 01. Suit, Afro, Block the Ladder On 12 July 2006 hundreds of /b/ users create identical Habbo Hotel avatars: dark suit, large afro, dark skin. They flood the hotel's swimming pool, line up in a wall blocking the entry ladders, and announce POOL'S CLOSED DUE TO AIDS. The raid is coordinated entirely on /b/ threads. Habbo Hotel is a children's virtual world; the raid exploits the platform's lack of moderation tools. The aesthetic (the identical avatars, the wall formation, the catchphrase) is meticulously planned. 02. The First Coordinated Image-Board Raid Form POOL'S CLOSED is the first time /b/ executes a coordinated multi-user identity-spoofing raid on a third-party platform with a memorable visual. The format gets repeated against Habbo for years and becomes the prototype for every subsequent Anonymous operation, from Project Chanology (January 2008) to the larger Operation Payback (2010). The raid is also straightforwardly racist. /b/ argues for years about whether this is the joke or merely incidental. The historical record treats both readings as evidence. "Pool's closed due to AIDS." — anonymous Habbo avatars, 12 July 2006 Sources • KnowYourMeme, Pool's Closed • Vice, 'A History of the Habbo Hotel Raids' (2014) • Encyclopedia Dramatica, Pool's Closed entry (archived)
  46. — Caramelldansen. Date: October 2006 · Place: Futaba Channel and YTMND, song from Caramell's 2001 Supergott album · Figures: Caramell, Swedish Eurodance duo · anonymous editor, Popotan loop · Tags: Loop, Anime, Eurodance 01. A 2001 Eurodance Song Meets a 2002 Visual Novel In October 2006 an anonymous editor loops a four-second sequence from the 2002 visual-novel anime Popotan in which characters Mai and Mii bounce side to side, hands flapping above their heads. The audio underneath is a sped-up version of Caramelldansen by the Swedish duo Caramell, recorded in 2001. The chorus is in Swedish and is also nonsense. The loop posts to Futaba Channel and crosses to YTMND within weeks. 02. The Caramelldansen Dance Floor By 2007 every anime fandom has produced a Caramelldansen loop with its own characters performing the hand-bounce. Naruto, Bleach, Death Note, Touhou, Final Fantasy, Lord of the Rings cosplayers, real people at conventions. Caramell, retired since 2002, re-form briefly to perform the song at a Stockholm festival in 2008. Caramelldansen is the moment Western internet culture acknowledges that a single rigid bodily template can be reapplied indefinitely. Every later TikTok dance challenge, every Gangnam Style line, every Renegade routes through the Caramell hand-bounce. Sources • Caramell, Supergott (Remixed Records, 2001) • KnowYourMeme, Caramelldansen • Aftonbladet, 'Caramell ater pa scenen' (June 2008)
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