By Scott Blacklock

First, there is conception. We all know what that entails, so don’t you dare giggle. It’s not funny.

Right after that is a period of restless excitement. This “thing,” whatever it is, has been created out of thin air – isn’t that incredible? From the ether of imagination comes a real, live, albeit tiny and relatively insignificant entity.

What follows is a long, arduous journey, both for the creator and the creation. Caution is a must, as is preparation. It’s a time of constant work, though, so one must be prepared for the “long haul.”

Sadly, some don’t get past this phase. But it’s a fact of life – not all things are meant to live, and some must fall by the wayside. Tears and heartbreak are to be expected.

But many do get to the final stage of this long process. After a varying period of grueling labour, that creation, which has been alive all this time in one form or another, finally sees the light of day. The world opens up in reception of this miraculous creature, embracing the newborn while simultaneously forgetting everything it took to help it get this far in the first place.

All we know or care about is that it’s here, to be adored.

So, that’s how a meme is made. What else do you want to know?

LABOUR PAINS

Uncomfortably ambiguous and weird analogies aside, isn’t it strange that we “birth” our ideas in much the same way we birth our children? Maybe not so much. Richard Dawkins, author of the groundbreaking The Selfish Gene, the first work to conceptualize the meme, writes that just as the gene is the basic building block of biology, so is the meme the basic building block of our minds and culture.

Oh, the meme. Such a crucial concept to the existence and evolution of our values and ideas, yet it’s been most recently tied to our culture’s finest specimens, such as Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” and Samwell’s “What What (In The Butt).”

Many of these new Internet memes start out in the same way as, let’s say, a child – just the whisper of a possibility. A video, filmed in earnest by a young, chubby, broom-wielding would-be Jedi, finds its way onto the web and into the hands of our weirdest, newest wave of online cultural comics. The video itself is only funny if you’re a cruel bastard. But with enough time and nurturing and editing, it becomes a brilliant life-form – an Internet meme called “Star Wars Kid.”

Some of them, just like people, rise to great fame and success. Some fail completely and live and die in the same thread or post. Others, however, are born and enjoy mediocre success and lead a reasonably quiet and stable life. These are the distant uncles of Internet memes (and not the distant uncle that got busted on drug trafficking charges either; more like the ones who have had the same mid-level corporate job for fifteen years and eats Fiber Plus to “stay regular”).

DILATION

Josh (he chose to withhold his last name), a 25-year old computer programmer with the United States Air Force, hems and haws over airwaves on Ventrilo, the online chat software we’re both using to conduct this interview.

“I can’t do it right now,” he admits. “How about in five minutes? I’ll send it to you over MSN.”

This was at the end of our interview. I had just asked Josh to summarize his “career” as a meme-maker in haiku form, a familiar style of writing for him. He had trouble doing it on the spot.

Josh also goes by “tldrHaiku,” or “too long, didn’t read, haiku.” He frequents the social news website Reddit, and his alter ego is part of that community as what’s called a “novelty account” – a user account designed specifically to be a joke. In Josh’s case, the joke is his haikus, which he posts on comments sections for certain submitted links. Always in strictly traditional syllabic haiku form, he usually summarizes a story or responds to another user’s post.

A story was submitted to Reddit about an adopted man who, later in life, sought out his real parents, only to find his father was a famous serial killer. tldrHaiku/Josh’s response:

Finding parentage

When your dad is Charles Manson

Not what you expect

It’s not brilliant or even particularly witty, but Josh gets a lot positive feedback. So much so, in fact, that the barely 6-month old meme was nominated for a coveted award on Reddit last year – “Novelty Account of the Year.”

“The sheer number of users on Reddit and the fact that I have thousands of people who think that I’m funny or interesting really was actually, an extremely humbling experience for me,” Josh says. “To think that I had beat out all these other people that I had looked to as inspiration.”

As a meme, tldrHaiku’s existence and popularity is entirely contained within the Reddit community. He hasn’t branched out to other forums or websites. He’s gotten enough love from Reddit.

“In my particular case, I was very lucky,” he begins. “My first post was probably, to date, my most popular. I actually saw sort of an inverse shift in that way, simply because when I started out, everyone said, ‘wow, that’s hilarious! It’s this brand new idea!’ and ever since then, it’s actually tapered off. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to achieve that success again.”

Josh’s pitch wavered just slightly. I asked why he thought his popularity had waned in recent times.

“I think it’s because it’s based so much around my particular interpretation of certain things,” he said with a little sigh. “Not everyone, however, aligns with what I think is funny. As I grow, I try different things. It’s always the same principle, but I shift around the way I do different things. There’s a lot of trial and error in seeing what works and what people thinks is hilarious.”

Lately, tldrHaiku has been inactive. At the time of our interview, he hadn’t posted a new haiku in over a week, a big shift from the daily contributions users had come to expect from tldrHaiku. In the interview, Josh fumbled for an answer when I asked how much longer he anticipated using his tldrHaiku account. But after the interview, a more coherent Josh messaged me on MSN.

“This was a great experience,” he wrote. “It makes me want to start up again! Maybe I’ll get back on tldr soon.”

I wondered to myself if Josh had the motivation to work against the grain in gaining back the support from the Reddit community. And despite not posting in over three weeks at the time of this writing (click here to check out tldrHaiku’s activity status), the haiku that he had managed to write as per my request gave me some hope:

The birth of a meme

A good one comes from the heart

The rest just follows





EXPULSION

In tldrHaiku’s case, the online sub-culture was just preparing to receive him, opening up to embrace the slowly maturing meme. Tay Zonday knows that feeling well, but to a greater degree than Josh.

“It turned into the Energizer Bunny,” Zonday uttered in his deep, rich voice, almost incredulous at what he was suggesting. “It just kept going and going and going. I was on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. The next month, it was on the front page of the Sunday LA Times. I did a commercial for Dr. Pepper. In the following year, I won a YouTube award. I was nominated for a People’s Choice award. In April of 2008, I was parodied on South Park. May of 2008, I did a music video with Weezer.”

The list goes on and on for Zonday, the former Ph.D. student behind the meme called Chocolate Rain. Since July 2007, when he first uploaded the video entitled “Chocolate Rain,” he hasn’t had a moment’s peace.

“Chocolate Rain” is, more accurately, a song with deep political and racial meanings and subtexts, accompanied by a video of Zonday himself singing. And like every meme, “Chocolate Rain” has its quirks: Zonday’s unusually deep voice (he calls it a “voice-body mismatch”); his unique, head-cocking mannerisms; and the much-parodied disclaimer featured in the video, “I move away from the mic to breathe in.”

The moment of critical mass came after weeks of exposure on YouTube, when some anonymous viewer posted the clip on the news aggregator and social news site Digg. From there, the unusual video and song were brought to 4chan – infamously known as “the birthplace of online memes” as well as “the asshole of the Internet.” It became a sort of pet project for users on 4chan, who ensured that its Internet fame went through the roof.

It was in mid-July of 2007 that the ceiling broke and the formerly unknown Adam Nyerere Bahner, aka. Tay Zonday, transcended the barrier between online and offline, as his celebrity began to grow.

“It seemed to take off in so many directions,” says Zonday in an interview conducted, appropriately enough, over Skype. “It became a story that received national attention.”

As Chocolate Rain spread across the world like wildfire, Zonday remained humble and down to earth. I asked if it bothered him that Chocolate Rain, which clearly preached a serious message, became popular largely as a joke.

“Am I wallowing over with regret that not every listener took detailed notes and felt inspired to have a political conversion? No,” he answered firmly. “I do think that definitely there was something innate about me and the way I did it. I was very much the basis of the song’s attention.”

As for Chocolate Rain’s status as a meme, it might be considered one of the prototypical examples of a meme that’s “made it.” If meme success is measured in how well it traverses the boundaries between online and offline cultures, then Chocolate Rain should be considered to be in the top two or three Internet memes, alongside perhaps “Don’t tase me, bro” and the ever-popular Rickroll (click here for a detailed timeline of the Rickroll*).

In the middle of the interview, it occurred to me that, had it not been adopted as an inside joke by certain Internet community members, Chocolate Rain might have never seen this sort of popularity. I asked what Zonday thought about the idea that his success was determined almost exclusively by users of social media with their own agenda, as if he were riding the wave that they produced.

“Look, anytime you’re an artist and you put something out there for public consumption, it’s like having a kid,” he said, with just a touch of contempt seasoning his first few words. “The child does grow up and do their own things, and you can try to coax the child one way or another. You hope they don’t become a drug dealer or a drug addict or whatever, but ultimately that is a child that is separate from your body and you don’t control them. Releasing a song of any other work of art, you do give up that control.”

“But at the same time,” he continued, with an air of calm confidence in what he was saying, “the world also expects you to claim your successes and your victories. As random and blessed as success is, the world expects you to claim it in a context of meritocracy.”

It began as just an idea, translated into an earnest product, embraced with warm and loving arms by the Internet (albeit with different motivations than the creator had intended), and eventually exploded with enormous momentum, bursting from the Internet as a mature and healthy child of the web. Chocolate Rain is the perfect successful meme: a grassroots concept turned into a pervasive, widely-popular money-maker.

And if an obscure online subculture can do that for an idea, what can’t it do?

*If you fell for that, you deserve it. If you’re confused, click here for a full explanation. Really.





PLACENTA

I’m entering 4chan now, nervous and suspicious. Amazingly, despite everything I know about this website, its history and its denizens, I have never visited 4chan. Not once. The hive mind does not call out to me. I have not been assimilated.

And it comes in handy, too. I like seeing this place for the first time, with a clean slate. It’s not even terribly intimidating: I had assumed the front page would be overloaded with rapidly flashing GIFs of brutal decapitations and naked grandmas getting stuffed with vegetables, all while a Norwegian death metal band screeched on loop.

Instead, I get this: a plain, peach-coloured background with a chunk of harmless text. But ah, that’s the genius of these villains – betray the senses so as to hide their beastly selves. The peach is a lie! The peach is a lie!

I am immediately reminded where I am when I click to visit the Random board and a disclaimer pops up. “The content of this website may be for mature viewers only…”

“You can literally post anything you want on there,” says Bridget Parker, an 18-year old student and frequent 4chan user. “And sometimes, you run into some tasteless and gross stuff.”

So, why are we on 4chan then? Because this is the birthplace of many of the memes that you and I love: Chocolate Rain, LOLcats and the Rickroll. This is not to mention an innumerable army of others that you probably haven’t heard of: Tron Guy, Obama Snowball, Raptor Jesus, Domo, Milhouse is not a meme, Courage Wolf, and so on and so on. And that list is potentially never-ending, as 4chan – or more specifically, the Random or “/b/” (warning: extremely unsafe for work) board, churns out hundreds more daily.

This is where Internet culture is fabricated. This collaborative community is comprised of people from all walks of life, united by ownership and operation of a computer and their collective penchant for sarcastic, brutal wit. If something’s funny, expect it to be exploited, edited, corrupted, accepted, rejected, and/or spammed somewhere on the /b/ board. And if it’s not funny, just wait – it will be eventually, once /b/ gets their hands on it.

To get a feeling for the social atmosphere on the /b/ board, I interviewed Bridget and 20-year old Ahmed Minhas. Both have been visiting 4chan for a few years now, which offers, in addition to the /b/ board, a huge array of other topic-specific forums. Bridget says she mainly frequents Comics & Cartoons and Toys, while Ahmed is an active participant on the Health & Fitness boards. But they do share one interest: the /b/ board.

“I’ll occasionally go on /b/,” says Bridget. Ahmed agrees, saying that he doesn’t visit /b/ often though. Both seemed to want to emphasize that point – that visiting /b/ was not a frequent occurrence. It was almost as if the board was a guilty pleasure.

“There are some really nice boards, and there are some really bad ones,” explains Ahmed. “/b/ is a bad one. On the bad ones, you’ll get attacked for whoever you are. And in /b/, everyone is anonymous.”

On other boards, users need to register an account name to post comments and make new topics. On /b/, no such infrastructure exists. Every user is named “Anonymous,” with no distinguishing numbers to tell one faceless, nameless commenter apart from another. Maybe that explains Ahmed’s observation; it’s tough to attack your neighbour or your friend or your sibling, but social boundaries can dissolve into a free-for-all cage match when no one knows anyone else.

“[On other boards,] everyone sticks up for one another,” says Bridget. “But you can’t go on /b/ and do that. You can’t agree with anyone without getting attacked.”

So what place does an innocent meme have in the middle of this savage fray? How can anything beautiful and inspired come out of such frothing, mindless barbarism?

To find an answer, I pulled up the /b/ window once again and spent a few minutes looking around.

Let’s see… What do we have here? Picture of fisting lesbians. Someone from Dearborn requesting that “all Michiganfags report in” (translation: “hey, who else here is from MI?” A grainy photo of a young white man in a t-shirt with a red bandana covering his face, pointing a handgun at the camera, accompanied by a threatening and seemingly furious comment which is quickly dismissed by other Anonymouses as “obvious trolling.”

Oh, here we go – someone has posted a graphic representation of the island of Greece with big, bold, white text reading, “THAT’S NOT GREECE! THAT’S A SPACESTATION!” Now that’s got meme potential: it’s weird, it’s unsolicited, it’s loud and obnoxious. Maybe we’ll be seeing that on t-shirts soon.

And such is the memetic power of /b/: all it takes is someone with some basic editing software and an oddball sense of humour to create the next big meme.

But, of course, it’s not that simple. This is where we combine the idea generating potential of “/b/-tards” (their name, not mine) with the remorseless capacity for judgment by the community at large. THAT’S NOT GREECE! might be the next big meme, but only if the rank and file of /b/ rally behind it.

“Memes are at the mercy of the users. If enough people like it, then boom,” says Bridget with a snap of her fingers.

And if a new idea goes without the support of the creator’s peers for long, it flatlines and fades into oblivion. Truth is, the Greece meme won’t likely last; it’ll be shoveled into the daily pile of corpses of ideas that come out of /b/ every day.

Not exactly how you pictured the infancy of Chocolate Rain, huh? Like it or not, this is where Internet culture is being created. It’s the ugly secret that insiders just can’t keep any longer, as 4chan has turned into a meme-producing juggernaut.

To summarize, here is what we have encountered in /b/ and 4chan: the Borg from Star Trek.

There, I said it. I’m not the first to say it and I won’t be the last: 4chan’s Random board is the emotionless collective of assimilation-driven cyborgs, bent on principles of efficiency, perverse meticulousness and global cultural domination.

DAMN 4CHAN, YOU SCARY!

VISITING HOURS

It’s finally calm now. All the pain and anguish, all the waiting and praying is over. In your arms quietly rests the fruits of your labour – a new and beautiful life.

Enjoy your creation and let it enjoy its time in the sun. Though the world has embraced you for now, it still turns its back on countless numbers of your creation’s brothers and sisters every minute of every day.

Nothing has legs forever. Everything dies eventually. So let those ideas live for as long as they can; they deserve it. They worked so damn hard to get here.