Pre-Internet Memetics

1939 — 1989. Before the word existed for it, the thing existed. The phrase KILROY WAS HERE precedes American troops onto every landing beach of the Second World War, scratched in by soldiers who hadn't seen it yet. Catchphrases from radio serials and television commercials carpet-bomb the American mouth for a month and vanish: Where's the Beef?, I Want My MTV, Whassup in proto-form, Have a Nice Day in yellow on every bumper. Chain letters mutate by hand across decades, surviving via the threat of bad luck. In 1976 Richard Dawkins, in the final chapter of The Selfish Gene, coins the word meme to describe a unit of cultural transmission that propagates by imitation, the way genes propagate by replication. He is thinking about tunes, catchphrases, fashion. The term sits in academia for two decades waiting for the substrate that will validate it. The pre-internet meme is slow. Its replication cycle is a postcard, a bumper sticker, a graffiti tag, a television broadcast. But the underlying mechanic, an arbitrary cultural object reproducing itself for no reason except that it can, is already complete.

Part of The Meme Oracle

17 moments in this segment.

1. 1925 — Burma-Shave Roadside Signs. Date: 1925-1963 · Place: United States (originating Minneapolis, Minnesota) · Figures: Allan Odell, copywriter and inventor of the format · Clinton Odell, Burma-Vita Company founder · Leonette Odell, contest judge · Tags: Advertising, Roadside, SerialFormat 01. The Distributed Punchline In 1925 Allan Odell convinces his father Clinton, owner of the Minneapolis-based Burma-Vita Company, to spend two hundred dollars on small red and white wooden signs planted in sequence along Highway 65 toward Albert Lea. Five signs at a hundred-foot spacing, each carrying one fragment of a single message, plus a sixth reading Burma-Shave. The form is the meme. The driver decodes the joke across roughly eighteen seconds of road time, supplies the rhythm in their own head, and shares the punchline at the next stop. By 1935 there are seven thousand sign sets across forty-five states. 02. Public Authorship From 1928 onward Burma-Vita runs an annual jingle contest, paying one hundred dollars for accepted verses. Tens of thousands of submissions a year arrive at the Minneapolis office; Leonette Odell sorts them. The audience writes the meme it then reads from a car window. Within this vale / Of toil / And sin / Your head grows bald / But not your chin / Burma-Shave is a 1933 submission, not a copywriter's line. "Past schoolhouses / Take it slow / Let the little / Shavers grow / Burma-Shave" — Burma-Shave roadside sequence, 1960, the company's penultimate year of signage 03. End of the Form The Interstate Highway Act of 1956 raises typical cruising speeds and pushes traffic onto limited-access roads with no shoulder for a six-sign sequence. Philip Morris buys Burma-Vita in 1963 and pulls the signs that same year. The format outlives the product as a template: every subsequent roadside teaser campaign, every multi-panel internet image macro that withholds its punchline across a scroll, descends from a Highway 65 sequence eighteen seconds long. Sources • Frank Rowsome Jr., 'The Verse by the Side of the Road: The Story of the Burma-Shave Signs and Jingles' (Stephen Greene Press, 1965) • Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Archives Center, Burma-Shave Collection • Bill Vossler, 'Burma-Shave: The Rhymes, the Signs, the Times' (North Star Press, 1997)
2. 1939 — Kilroy Was Here. Date: 1939 onward · Place: Allied military installations, then ships, then everywhere · Figures: James J. Kilroy, shipyard inspector at Fore River Shipyard (Quincy, MA, leading attribution) · unknown wartime taggers worldwide · Tags: WWII, Proto-Meme 01. A Shipyard Inspector and a Phrase James J. Kilroy, riveter inspector at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, writes KILROY WAS HERE in yellow crayon on the hulls of completed ship sections, partly as a tracking signature so management knows the work is checked. The sections ship out across the Atlantic; the phrase travels with them. American soldiers find KILROY WAS HERE already scrawled inside tanks, on the walls of bombed-out bunkers, on the underside of bridges they thought they'd captured for the first time. Other origin candidates exist (a Sergeant Francis Kilroy of the Air Transport Command; British Mr Chad; Australian Foo Was Here). The James Kilroy attribution wins because the American Transit Association awarded him the credit in 1946. 02. The First Meme That Knew It Was a Meme By 1945 the phrase, often paired with the bald-head-with-fingers-over-wall doodle, appears at the Potsdam Conference (according to a Truman aide), on the underside of the torch of the Statue of Liberty, on Mount Everest in 1953 (Hillary's team finds it scratched into ice). Stalin reportedly asks who Kilroy is, twice. Dawkins won't coin the word for thirty years. But KILROY WAS HERE is, in retrospect, the first meme that EVERYBODY understood as a meme: a unit that propagates because propagating is the point, that exists to mark its own propagation. "KILROY WAS HERE." — everywhere, 1939 onward Sources • Charles Panati, Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (1989) • American Transit Association award announcement (1946) • Wikipedia, Kilroy was here
3. 1943 — We Can Do It! (Rosie the Riveter). Date: 1943 · Place: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Westinghouse Electric internal poster) · Figures: J. Howard Miller, illustrator · Geraldine Hoff Doyle and Naomi Parker Fraley, candidate models · Penny Colman, historian who surfaces the poster in 1994 · Tags: Poster, Wartime, Rediscovery, Feminism 01. Two-Week Factory Poster In February 1943 the Westinghouse War Production Coordinating Committee posts J. Howard Miller's We Can Do It! inside Midwest plants for roughly two weeks. The audience is female line workers. The purpose is to discourage absenteeism, not to celebrate them. Fewer than 1,800 copies ever print. The poster vanishes back into Westinghouse archives by March. Through the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s the image is functionally unknown. The wartime woman-in-the-workforce icon of record is instead Norman Rockwell's muscular Saturday Evening Post cover from May 29, 1943, which Westinghouse never used. 02. 1982 Rediscovery as Replicator The Washington Post Magazine reprints Miller's poster in 1982 inside a National Archives feature. Second-wave feminist publishers grab it. By the late 1980s it appears on mugs, t-shirts, refrigerator magnets, and the cover of Smithsonian Magazine in 1994. The bandana, the bicep, the speech bubble lock into a single readable unit. The image becomes the meme it was never designed to be. Geraldine Hoff Doyle claims herself as the model in 1984; Naomi Parker Fraley produces stronger photographic evidence in 2015. The replicator outlives both candidates. "We Can Do It!" — J. Howard Miller, Westinghouse internal poster, February 1943 03. Posthumous Memetic Life By 2008 the bandana-and-flex composition is on Hillary Clinton campaign merchandise, Beyoncé Instagram posts, and Halloween costume racks. The original Westinghouse purpose (work harder, complain less) is fully overwritten by the audience purpose (women working at all). Rosie is one of the earliest cases of a sleeping image waking up four decades after print as a self-replicating symbol. The lesson is template: a poster's meaning is set by the audience that finds it, not the client that paid for it. Sources • James J. Kimble and Lester C. Olson, 'Visual Rhetoric Representing Rosie the Riveter,' Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Vol. 9 No. 4, 2006 • Penny Colman, Rosie the Riveter: Women Working on the Home Front in World War II (Crown, 1995) • William L. Bird and Harry R. Rubenstein, Design for Victory: World War II Posters on the American Home Front (Princeton Architectural Press, 1998) • Margot McCain, 'The Woman Behind Rosie the Riveter Dies at 96,' The New York Times, January 22, 2018
4. 1947 — The Doomsday Clock. Date: June 1947 · Place: Chicago, Illinois · Figures: Martyl Langsdorf, designer · Eugene Rabinowitch, Bulletin co-editor · Hyman Goldsmith, Bulletin co-editor · Tags: Iconography, ColdWar, RecurringUpdate 01. Seven Minutes Martyl Langsdorf, a landscape painter married to Manhattan Project physicist Alexander Langsdorf, designs the cover of the June 1947 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She crops a clock face to the upper-left quadrant and sets the hands at seven minutes to midnight because, she later says, it looks right. Editors Eugene Rabinowitch and Hyman Goldsmith run it on the cover. The image is meant for one issue. It has now run on every cover for seventy-nine years. 02. The Update as the Meme The replication mechanism is the announcement. In 1949, after the Soviet atomic test, the hands move to three minutes to midnight; in 1953, after the United States and Soviets test thermonuclear devices, to two minutes. Each move generates global front pages, and the same icon recirculates intact. The clock works because it is one image with one variable. Every newsroom in the world already has the file; the wire only needs to carry the new minute count. "Setting the hands of the Bulletin clock is not a measurement; it is a statement." — Eugene Rabinowitch, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists editorial, 1958 Sources • Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 3, no. 6, June 1947 • Kennette Benedict, 'Doomsday Clockwork', Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 2015 • Robert K. Elder and J. C. Gabel, 'The Doomsday Clock at 75' (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists / Hat & Beard Press, 2022)
5. 1958 — The Peace Sign. Date: 21 February 1958 · Place: London, United Kingdom · Figures: Gerald Holtom, designer · Hugh Brock, Direct Action Committee organizer · Bertrand Russell, CND figurehead · Tags: ProtestIcon, Semaphore, Counterculture 01. N and D Gerald Holtom, a professional designer and conscientious objector, sketches the symbol at his Twickenham home in February 1958 for the Direct Action Committee's planned Aldermaston march. He overlays the semaphore positions for N and D, for Nuclear Disarmament, inside a circle. Holtom also describes the figure as a person with hands outstretched downward in despair, in the posture of Goya's peasant before the firing squad in The Third of May 1808. He offers it free of copyright. 02. Atlantic Crossing On 4 April 1958, between four and ten thousand marchers carry the symbol from Trafalgar Square to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston. Within a year the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament adopts it as logo. Bayard Rustin brings it to the United States in 1958, then Albert Bigelow flies it on the ketch Golden Rule into the Marshall Islands test zone. By 1965 it is on lapel pins at every Vietnam-era march; by 1970 the National Park Service permits it on Park Service maps as a protest landmark. No copyright means perfect replication. "I drew myself, the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya's peasant before the firing squad." — Gerald Holtom, letter to Hugh Brock, 1973 Sources • Ken Kolsbun and Mike Sweeney, 'Peace: The Biography of a Symbol' (National Geographic, 2008) • Andrew Rigby, 'A Peaceful Symbol Made in Britain', Peace News, March 2008 • Commonweal Collection, University of Bradford, Gerald Holtom papers
6. 1962 — Campbell's Soup Cans. Date: July 9, 1962 · Place: Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, California · Figures: Andy Warhol, painter · Irving Blum, Ferus Gallery dealer · Walter Hopps, co-founder of Ferus · Tags: Art, Replication, PopArt 01. Thirty-Two Cans on a Shelf Warhol's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles opens July 9, 1962, at Irving Blum's Ferus Gallery. Thirty-two canvases, one per Campbell's Soup variety then sold, each 20 by 16 inches, lined up on a narrow white shelf like supermarket inventory. Five paintings sell at one hundred dollars each. Blum buys them back and reassembles the set for himself. The form is the argument. A meme is a thing identical to its neighbors that nevertheless asks to be looked at. Warhol stages exactly that condition and dares the room to find difference. 02. From Painting to Silkscreen By August 1962 Warhol drops hand-painted execution for photo-silkscreen. Marilyn, Elvis, Liz, electric chairs, car crashes, dollar bills now come off the Factory wall in editions of dozens, sometimes hundreds. The medium is replication itself. The artist's labor is the choice of source image and the tolerance for misregistration. Warhol describes the goal as becoming a machine. He is also describing the function of a meme. "I want to be a machine." — Andy Warhol to G. R. Swenson, ARTnews, November 1963 03. Template for the Reproducible Image Every later image macro, reaction-image grid, and four-panel meme template inherits Warhol's premise: meaning lives in the variation across a repeated frame, not in any single instance. The Campbell's grid is a 1962 proof that the public will pay attention to a thing precisely because there are thirty-two of it. Blum's reassembled set sells to MoMA in 1996 for fifteen million dollars. The grid is now hung exactly as Ferus showed it. Sources • Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol Sixties (Harcourt, 1980) • Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik, High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture (MoMA, 1990) • G. R. Swenson, 'What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part I,' ARTnews, November 1963 • Roberta Smith, 'Warhol's Soup Cans, As You've Never Seen Them,' The New York Times, April 25, 2015
7. 1963 — The Smiley Face. Date: December 1963 · Place: Worcester, Massachusetts · Figures: Harvey Ball, freelance commercial artist · State Mutual Life Assurance Company of America, client · Bernard and Murray Spain, button retailers · Franklin Loufrani, French registrant · Tags: Icon, Button, CorporateMorale 01. Forty-Five Dollars In December 1963 the State Mutual Life Assurance Company of America hires Harvey Ball, a freelance commercial artist in Worcester, Massachusetts, to design a morale image for employees rattled by a corporate merger. Ball spends about ten minutes drawing a yellow circle, two oval eyes, and a curved mouth. State Mutual pays him forty-five dollars. The first hundred buttons are printed for an internal Friendship Campaign. Ball never registers the design. He earns nothing further from it for the rest of his life. 02. Fifty Million Buttons In 1970 Philadelphia novelty retailers Bernard and Murray Spain pair Ball's face with the phrase Have a Nice Day and sell it on buttons, mugs, and bumper stickers. By 1972 they have moved over fifty million units. In France in 1971 Franklin Loufrani registers the smiley commercially, founding what becomes The Smiley Company. Two parallel meme economies run for decades on an unregistered ten-minute drawing. "I made a smile. Just a yellow smile. Never thought it would go anywhere." — Harvey Ball, interview with the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, 1998 03. Ancestor of the Emoji On 19 September 1982 at Carnegie Mellon, Scott Fahlman proposes the colon-hyphen-parenthesis sequence as a joke marker on a bulletin board. Shigetaka Kurita's 1999 NTT DoCoMo emoji set includes a yellow circular smile directly descended from Ball's design. The yellow disc is one of the few twentieth-century icons that travels intact across paper, plastic, ASCII, Unicode, and PNG. Sources • Jimmy Stamp, 'Who Really Invented the Smiley Face?', Smithsonian Magazine, 13 March 2013 • Luke Stark and Kate Crawford, 'The Conservatism of Emoji', Social Media + Society, 2015 • Worcester Historical Museum, Harvey Ball Collection
8. 1965 — Frodo Lives. Date: 1965-1969 · Place: United States (originating university campuses and New York City subway) · Figures: J. R. R. Tolkien, author · Donald A. Wollheim, Ace Books editor · Tolkien Society of America, founders Dick Plotz and Ed Meskys · Tags: Fandom, Graffiti, ButtonCulture 01. The Ace Paperback In 1965 Donald A. Wollheim's Ace Books exploits a perceived copyright gap and publishes an unauthorized paperback of The Lord of the Rings, seventy-five cents a volume. Houghton Mifflin and Ballantine respond with an authorized paperback edition that fall. By 1968 over three million copies circulate in the United States. The Tolkien Society of America forms in 1966 around Dick Plotz, a Bronx high school student, and Ed Meskys. Buttons, posters, and graffiti follow within months. 02. The Slogan as Counterculture The phrase Frodo Lives appears in Sharpie on New York subway platforms, on Berkeley telephone poles, on Pentagon protest signs in October 1967. Variants spread: Gandalf for President, Go Go Gandalf, Come to Middle-earth. Tolkien receives so much fan mail at his Sandfield Road address in Oxford that he and his wife are forced to change their telephone number in 1968. He calls the American admirers his deplorable cultus. "Many young Americans are involved in the stories in a way that I am not." — J. R. R. Tolkien, letter to Rayner Unwin, 12 September 1965 Sources • Humphrey Carpenter, 'J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography' (Allen & Unwin, 1977) • Nancy Martsch, 'Tolkien Fandom Review' (Beyond Bree Press, 2014) • Marquette University, J. R. R. Tolkien Collection, fan letters 1965-1973
9. 1968 — Keep on Truckin'. Date: February 1968 · Place: San Francisco, California · Figures: Robert Crumb, cartoonist · Don Donahue, Apex Novelties publisher · Blind Boy Fuller, original song source 1936 · Tags: Underground, Comix, BootlegEconomy 01. A One-Page Filler Robert Crumb draws the strip as a one-page filler for the first issue of Zap Comix, published by Don Donahue's Apex Novelties in San Francisco in February 1968. Five panels of long-legged men strutting forward in big shoes, the only text the title borrowed from a 1936 Blind Boy Fuller blues. Crumb sells issue one out of a baby carriage on Haight Street with his wife Dana. Print run: about five thousand. 02. The Bootleg Decade By 1970 the strutting figure is on T-shirts, mudflaps, decals, rolling papers, and back windows of vans from Vermont to Oregon. Crumb sees almost none of the money; he has not bothered to copyright the image and the underground press regards copyright as a square hang-up. In 1977 he registers the design and sues a Long Island bootlegger. A federal court rules the image is in the public domain because of years of uncontested reproduction. The lawsuit costs him more than he wins. "It became a curse. I'd see it on people's vans, on bumper stickers, and I'd just cringe." — Robert Crumb, interview with Terry Gilliam, 1988 Sources • Patrick Rosenkranz, 'Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975' (Fantagraphics, 2002) • Terry Zwigoff (dir.), 'Crumb' (Sony Pictures Classics, 1994) • Robert Crumb v. Aurelio Productions, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York, 1977
10. 1968 — Black Power Salute, Mexico City Olympics. Date: October 16, 1968 · Place: Estadio Olímpico Universitario, Mexico City · Figures: Tommie Smith, gold medalist 200m · John Carlos, bronze medalist 200m · Peter Norman, silver medalist (Australia) · John Dominis, Life photographer · Tags: Photograph, Protest, Gesture 01. Eight Seconds on the Podium Tommie Smith wins the 200m in 19.83 seconds, a world record. John Carlos finishes third behind Australian Peter Norman. On the podium the two Americans bow their heads during the Star-Spangled Banner, shoes off, black socks visible, and each raises a single black-gloved fist. Smith's right hand, Carlos's left, because they had to share one pair of gloves Carlos forgot in the Olympic Village. John Dominis shoots the frame for Life. Wire services move it overnight. By Thursday October 17 the image is on front pages in every Olympic-broadcasting country. 02. A Gesture That Compresses an Argument The composition is self-contained: two bowed heads, two raised fists, one white ally wearing the Olympic Project for Human Rights badge in solidarity. No caption is required for the photograph to mean what it means. That self-sufficiency is what makes a gesture memetic. Smith and Carlos are suspended from the US team within forty-eight hours by IOC President Avery Brundage and ordered out of the Olympic Village. They return to threats, lost endorsements, decades of professional cost. Peter Norman is left off Australia's 1972 team despite running qualifying times. "If I win I am American, not a black American. But if I did something bad then they would say a Negro. We are black and we are proud of being black." — Tommie Smith, post-race press conference, Mexico City, October 16, 1968 03. The Fist as Reusable Mark The raised fist predates Mexico City as a labor and Black Power symbol, but the Dominis frame makes it the canonical visual citation. Athletes from Colin Kaepernick to the 2020 US Open winners reach back to this podium frame deliberately. Statues of Smith and Carlos stand at San José State University, unveiled October 2005, with Norman's spot left empty so visitors can stand in it. A meme in the original Dawkins sense: a unit of cultural transmission that survives across decades, hosts, and media because the gesture itself is the argument. Sources • Tommie Smith with David Steele, Silent Gesture: The Autobiography of Tommie Smith (Temple University Press, 2007) • John Carlos and Dave Zirin, The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World (Haymarket Books, 2011) • Douglas Hartmann, Race, Culture, and the Revolt of the Black Athlete (University of Chicago Press, 2003) • Salt: The Documentary on Peter Norman, dir. Matt Norman (2008)
11. 1970 — Have a Nice Day. Date: 1970-1972 · Place: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania · Figures: Bernard Spain, novelty wholesaler · Murray Spain, novelty wholesaler · Harvey Ball, smiley creator · Tags: Catchphrase, Bumper, Seventies 01. The Spain Brothers Brothers Bernard and Murray Spain run a small novelty wholesale operation out of Philadelphia. In September 1970 they pair Harvey Ball's unregistered yellow smile with the phrase Have a Nice Day on a button. They register the combined design and order an initial run from a New Jersey button manufacturer. By the end of 1971 they have sold an estimated twenty million units. By 1972, fifty million. Wholesale price: about three cents per button. 02. Saturation and Backlash The phrase appears on mugs, ashtrays, T-shirts, postcards, McDonald's bags, gas station receipts, and bumper stickers. By 1973 it is the standard sign-off of supermarket cashiers from Florida to Oregon. The phrase precedes the corporate scripting; the corporate scripting reinforces the phrase. Cynical reuse begins almost immediately. In 1972 Underground Press Syndicate papers run the smiley with a bullet hole between the eyes. Watchmen's 1986 cover image, a smiley with a blood smear, is a direct response to the 1970 saturation. "We must have sold fifty million buttons by 1972. We weren't artists. We were button guys." — Murray Spain, interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, 1996 Sources • Susan Strasser, 'Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market' (Pantheon, 1989) • Daniel J. Boorstin, 'The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America' (Atheneum, 1962, reissued 1992) • Philadelphia Inquirer, 'The Spain Brothers and the Yellow Smile', 14 April 1996
12. 1971 — Hang In There, Baby. Date: 1971 · Place: Los Angeles, California · Figures: Victor Baldwin, photographer · Jeanne Baldwin, co-author of 'Kliban's Cat'-era poster context · Argus Communications, distributor · Tags: Poster, Workplace, OfficeKitsch 01. Sassy on the Bamboo Victor Baldwin, a Los Angeles photographer best known for the 1961 book The Funny Side of Cats, shoots a kitten named Sassy clinging to a bamboo pole sometime in 1970. The image is published as a poster by Argus Communications of Niles, Illinois, in 1971 with the caption Hang In There, Baby. Argus prints it on heavy stock, retails it at one dollar fifty, and ships it to college bookstores and head shops nationally. 02. The Office Wall Within eighteen months the poster is on cubicle walls, dorm rooms, dentist offices, and high school guidance counselor doors across the United States. President Carter is reported to have a copy in a White House staff office in 1977. By 1979 over three hundred and fifty thousand copies are sold. The template, animal in difficulty plus motivational caption, becomes the dominant inspirational format for the next thirty years and the structural ancestor of every captioned cat picture on the early web. The image macro is born in a 1971 office supply catalog. Sources • Hannah Rosefield, 'A Brief History of Hang In There, Baby', The Paris Review Daily, 29 July 2014 • Victor Baldwin, 'The Funny Side of Cats' (Putnam, 1961) • Argus Communications product catalogs 1971-1979, Newberry Library trade collection
13. 1975 — Pet Rock. Date: August 1975 to February 1976 · Place: Los Gatos, California (originator) · United States (market) · Figures: Gary Dahl, advertising copywriter and inventor · Rod Lawrence, illustrator of the manual · Tags: Object, Fad, Joke 01. A Joke Sold at Cost-Plus Gary Dahl, a Los Gatos copywriter, is drinking with friends in April 1975 when they complain about pets. He says his pet is a rock. He goes home and writes a 32-page training manual: how to housebreak it (place on newspaper), how to teach it to sit, stay, attack. The rock costs him about a penny from a builder's supply in Rosarito Beach. The straw-filled box and manual cost a dollar. He retails it for $3.95. He sells about 1.5 million units between August and Christmas 1975, mostly through Neiman Marcus and department-store novelty counters. 02. The Object That Replicates by Embarrassment The Pet Rock works as a meme because the gift carries the joke for the giver. The recipient laughs, shows colleagues, who buy one for their cousin. The product is the punchline; the box is the delivery system. By December 1975 Newsweek, Time, and the Tonight Show have all done segments. Dahl is on Carson twice. Five months in, every five-and-dime is stocked with knockoffs: pet rocks with googly eyes, Pet Rock cemeteries, divorce papers for your rock. The category collapses inside its own saturation by Valentine's Day 1976. Dahl walks away with a reported $15 million in revenue and roughly $2 million in profit. "Sometimes I look at people and wonder how I ever sold them a rock." — Gary Dahl, quoted in People magazine, November 1975 03. Template for the Ironic Object Every later joke product (Yule Log VHS, Snuggie, Big Mouth Billy Bass, The Onion's I Am the Walrus T-shirts) descends from a Los Gatos garage in 1975. The Pet Rock proves a market exists for objects whose only function is to be a meme other people can witness you owning. Dahl dies in 2015 in Jacksonville, Oregon. The original packaging design with Rod Lawrence's deadpan dog-manual illustrations is in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Sources • Gary Dahl, The Care and Training of Your Pet Rock (Rock Bottom Productions, 1975) • Margalit Fox, 'Gary Dahl, Inventor of the Pet Rock, Dies at 78,' The New York Times, April 1, 2015 • Bruce Watson, 'The Pet Rock Story,' Smithsonian Magazine, March 2015 • 'And You Thought It Was Just a Rock,' People, November 24, 1975
14. 1976 — Dawkins Coins 'Meme'. Date: 1976 · Place: The Selfish Gene, chapter 11, Oxford University Press · Figures: Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, 35 · Tags: Theory, The Word 01. A Replicator That Isn't Genetic Richard Dawkins ends The Selfish Gene with a chapter ('Memes: the new replicators') proposing that ideas, tunes, and cultural patterns replicate from brain to brain by imitation, mutate, and compete for attention the way genes compete for survival. He needs a one-syllable noun. He shortens the Greek mimeme to meme by analogy with gene. His examples are quiet: God as a successful meme, the tune of a hymn, the practice of celibacy among priests as a meme that survives despite carrying its own non-reproductive payload. He is not thinking about cartoon frogs. 02. Patient Word The term sits dormant in academic memetics for two decades. Daniel Dennett picks it up in Consciousness Explained (1991). Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (1999) tries to build a discipline around it. None of this is what survives. What survives is the word as the internet uses it: an image (with or without caption) that spreads, mutates, and gets used as social vocabulary. Dawkins's framing is correct in shape and wrong in tone. He coins a word for tunes; we use it for cats with grammar errors. The replicator does not know its own future use. "We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." — Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976), chapter 11 Sources • Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976) • Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (1999) • Dawkins's 2013 interview reflecting on 'internet meme'
15. 1981 — I Want My MTV. Date: 1 August 1981 (channel launch); March 1982 (campaign launch) · Place: New York City · Figures: George Lois, art director · Bob Pittman, MTV co-founder · Les Garland, MTV programming chief · Mick Jagger, first celebrity spot · Tags: AdCampaign, Catchphrase, Shibboleth 01. The Cable Holdouts MTV launches on 1 August 1981 carried by very few cable operators in the major markets. Manhattan does not have it. By early 1982, with affiliate uptake stalled, Bob Pittman and Les Garland hire art director George Lois to flip the carriage strategy from supply to demand. Lois pitches a single line: I Want My MTV. The viewer is the lever; the cable operator is the target. 02. The Shibboleth Spot Lois films Mick Jagger first, in a single take, instructing the camera: I want my MTV. Pat Benatar, Pete Townshend, David Bowie, and Stevie Nicks follow within weeks, each delivering the same six syllables in their own voice. The spot ends with a phone number for the local cable office. Affiliates report thousands of calls a day. Within eighteen months MTV is in the top ten US markets. The line becomes a catchphrase the way the Beatles' name is a catchphrase: by force of repetition by celebrities who matter more than the product they are selling. "If you don't get MTV where you live, call your cable operator and say: I want my MTV." — campaign tag, voiced by Mick Jagger, March 1982 03. Citation Loop Dire Straits releases Money for Nothing in 1985 with Sting singing the phrase as a hook. The song wins the 1986 MTV Video of the Year. The ad campaign for the channel has become the lyrical content of a song aired on the channel. The structure, celebrity-as-shibboleth demanding access to the product on the audience's behalf, is repeated in every Got Milk and Just Do It campaign for the next two decades, and is the template the influencer economy of the 2010s automates. Sources • Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks, 'I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution' (Dutton, 2011) • George Lois, 'Damn Good Advice (For People With Talent)' (Phaidon, 2012) • Museum of the Moving Image, MTV campaign archive, accession 1982-1989
16. 1984 — Where's the Beef?. Date: 9 January 1984 · Place: Chicago, Illinois (filmed) · Figures: Cliff Freeman, Dancer Fitzgerald Sample copywriter · Joe Sedelmaier, director · Clara Peller, performer · Walter Mondale, Democratic presidential candidate · Tags: Catchphrase, Television, Politics 01. Eighty-One Years Old Cliff Freeman writes the spot at Dancer Fitzgerald Sample in New York. Director Joe Sedelmaier casts Clara Peller, an eighty-one-year-old former manicurist he has used in earlier commercials, and shoots in Chicago in late 1983. The thirty-second spot for Wendy's airs nationally on 9 January 1984. Peller has emphysema and can barely get the line out on take. Sedelmaier dubs it cleaner in post. The line is three words and a fluffy bun. 02. The Mondale Use Within a month Where's the Beef? is on T-shirts, novelty records, and the lips of late-night hosts. Wendy's same-store sales jump thirty-one percent for the quarter. On 11 March 1984, during a Democratic primary debate in Atlanta, Walter Mondale turns to Gary Hart and asks where the beef is in his New Ideas platform. The clip dominates the next news cycle. Mondale wins the nomination. He loses forty-nine states to Reagan. "When I hear your new ideas, I'm reminded of that ad: Where's the beef?" — Walter Mondale to Gary Hart, Democratic primary debate, Atlanta, 11 March 1984 03. End of the Endorsement In 1985 Peller appears in a Prego spaghetti sauce ad declaring she has finally found the beef. Wendy's drops her for crossing brand lines. She dies in August 1987 at age eighty-five. The structure of the joke, an old woman demanding the missing thing, persists as the basic template of every short-form video question meme that follows. Sources • Bob Garfield, 'And Now a Few Words From Me: Advertising's Leading Critic Lays Down the Law' (McGraw-Hill, 2003) • New York Times, 'Clara Peller, 85, Star of Wendy's TV Spots, Dies', 13 August 1987 • Jonathan Mahler, 'The Long History of Where's the Beef', Slate, 30 January 2014
17. 1989 — Tank Man. Date: June 5, 1989 · Place: Chang'an Avenue, near the Beijing Hotel, Beijing · Figures: Unidentified protester, subject · Jeff Widener, AP photographer · Stuart Franklin, Magnum · Charlie Cole, Newsweek · Arthur Tsang Hin Wah, Reuters · Terril Jones, AP (alternate ground-level frame) · Tags: Photograph, Anonymity, Protest 01. The Morning After On the morning of June 5, 1989, one day after the PLA clears Tiananmen Square, a column of Type 59 tanks rolls east on Chang'an Avenue. A man in a white shirt and dark trousers, carrying two shopping bags, walks into the lead tank's path and refuses to move. The lead tank tries to go around him; he steps with it. He climbs onto the hull, speaks to the crew, climbs back down. Bystanders pull him into the crowd. The tanks continue east. Five photographers shoot the encounter from balconies of the Beijing Hotel, roughly half a mile away with long lenses. Widener (AP), Franklin (Magnum), Cole (Newsweek), Tsang (Reuters), plus Jones at street level. Cole's frame wins the 1990 World Press Photo of the Year. 02. A Frame Without a Name The image moves on wire services within 24 hours. By Wednesday June 7 it is on every front page outside mainland China. Inside China it is censored from the moment of capture and remains so on Weibo, WeChat, and Baidu image search to the present day. The number 64, references to candles, even certain emoji are filtered annually around June 4. The man's identity is never confirmed. The Chinese government has at various points named different candidates, all denied. The anonymity is structural to the meme: the figure is any single person against any column of tanks. "Why are you here? You have done nothing but create misery. My city is in chaos because of you." — as reconstructed in Frontline, 'The Tank Man,' PBS, April 11, 2006 03. The Replicating Silhouette The composition (lone vertical figure, perpendicular horizontal column) becomes the most-cited protest photograph of the late twentieth century. Time names it among the 100 Most Influential Images. The silhouette is reused on Hong Kong 2019 banners, Belarus 2020 posters, AI image-prompt jailbreak tests in 2024. An image becomes a meme when stripping it to the line drawing still carries the argument. Tank Man passes that test inside its own first news cycle. Sources • Patrick Witty, 'Behind the Scenes: Tank Man of Tiananmen,' The New York Times Lens Blog, June 3, 2009 • Frontline, 'The Tank Man,' dir. Antony Thomas, PBS, April 11, 2006 • Stuart Franklin, 'I took the Tiananmen Square tank picture. Here's what it means today,' The Guardian, June 4, 2019 • Louisa Lim, The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2014)