The Internet is indeed uniting the world, but probably not in the way that the idealists were hoping. While we're still waiting for a new era of cross-cultural understanding and peace, what we get in the meantime are memes. Bad photoshops, endless running jokes, image macros... you find them at every corner of the globe. All of them are ridiculous in their own way.

6 PhotoExtreme (Russia)

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Spawned from an Internet community called Encounter Urban Games, the rules of the Russian online phenomenon known as PhotoExtreme are simple: Someone comes up with a random, oddly specific scenario. Then everyone else acts it out and takes photographs. Bonus points if your scenario is insanely dangerous.

For example:

"A Cheating Wife: You need to make a photo of a man, 'a lover,' hanging outside a real window. The window should be not lower than the third story of a multi-storied building. 'A husband' should lean out from another window with a gun, aiming at 'the lover.' From yet another window 'the cheating wife' should look out in despair."



Note that "red boxers" are not specified in the scenario. That just seems to be what every man in Russia wears.

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The scenes often take place in public and in broad daylight, and remember that this is an Internet thing: The unsuspecting denizens of meatspace have no idea what's going on, or that some people on some forum somewhere said, "OK, this time we're all going to get naked in a bathtub in the middle of the street."



All in all, it's a fine hobby.

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This is therefore one of the few Internet memes in the world that has the capacity to lead to federal charges, international incidents or flat-out War of the Worlds style riots for fear of a zombie outbreak.