Internet Memes

Abstract

The word “meme” was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 for an idea that spreads and mutates like a gene. Mike Godwin borrowed it for the network in a 1994 Wired essay, and the internet turned the metaphor literal: a joke, image, or phrase copied and altered by millions of strangers, each adding a twist, none in charge. This article traces the form from the Dancing Baby of 1996 through “All your base are belong to us”, Rickrolling, lolcats, and Doge, and the pattern underneath them: the cost of copying and remixing media fell to zero, and culture started behaving like a virus with no author.

The Word Before the Thing

Richard Dawkins ended his 1976 book The Selfish Gene by proposing that genes were not the only things that replicate. Ideas do too, tunes, catchphrases, fashions, beliefs, copying themselves from mind to mind. He named the unit a meme, from the Greek mimeme (imitation), clipped to rhyme with “gene”. For eighteen years it stayed an academic term in evolutionary biology and philosophy.

In October 1994 the lawyer Mike Godwin applied it to the network. His Wired essay Meme, Counter-meme described how he had deliberately seeded Usenet with Godwin’s Law (“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis approaches one”) as an act of what he called memetic engineering, to counter a meme he disliked with one of his own. It is among the first uses of “meme” to mean a self-spreading unit of online culture rather than Dawkins’s broad biological idea. The term was in place before the internet gave it its defining examples.

The Dancing Baby

The first example to escape into mass culture was an accident of a software demo. In autumn 1996, Autodesk’s Kinetix division shipped Character Studio, an animation plug-in for 3D Studio Max, with sample files to show off its motion tools. One was sk_baby.max: a diapered toddler model performing a cha-cha, animated by Michael Girard and Robert Lurye to demonstrate the software’s inverse-kinematics engine. It was a technical sample, not a joke.

Ron Lussier, a developer at LucasArts, cleaned up the file and emailed it around; his coworkers forwarded it onward, and the rendered clip (soon set to Blue Swede’s “Hooked on a Feeling” and nicknamed “Baby Cha-Cha”) spread through email chains worldwide. In 1998 it became a recurring hallucination on the TV series Ally McBeal, probably the first time native web culture crossed into prime-time television. The Dancing Baby established the template: an artifact escapes its intended use, strangers pass and modify it, and it lands in the mainstream carrying no trace of who made it or why.

All Your Base

The most linguistically distinctive early meme came from a bad translation. Zero Wing, a Toaplan arcade shooter from 1989, gained an introductory cutscene when it was ported to the Sega Mega Drive in 1991. Sega of Europe’s in-house translation of that scene from Japanese produced broken English: “Somebody set up us the bomb”, “You have no chance to survive make your time”, and the villain CATS announcing “All your base are belong to us”.

The line sat forgotten until around 1999, when forum users (notably at Something Awful) rediscovered the screenshots. In 2000 and 2001 the phrase became a Flash animation set to a remix, splicing the game text with Photoshopped images of the slogan on billboards, cereal boxes, and street signs, and it spread by email and forum posting into a genuine phenomenon. Wired reported on it on February 23, 2001, describing a form of humor that marketers could not have engineered. The meme even left the screen: in 2004 several people planted “All your base are belong to us” signs around Sturgis, Michigan, and were briefly detained. “All your base” showed that a meme needs no meaning to spread; a shared reference is enough.

The Mature Form: Rickroll, Lolcats, Doge

By the mid-2000s the imageboard 4chan (founded 2003) had become a meme factory, and the form matured into recognizable genres.

Rickrolling refined the bait-and-switch. It descended from a 2006 4chan gag called “duckrolling”, in which a site word filter turned “egg-roll” into “duck-roll” and users began hiding a picture of a wheeled duck behind tempting links. On May 15, 2007, a user swapped the payload: a link promising the trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV instead opened Rick Astley’s 1987 video “Never Gonna Give You Up”. The prank outlived its origin and became a permanent internet ritual, deployed everywhere from Congressional hearings to the Macy’s parade.

Lolcats codified the image macro: a photo with bold top-and-bottom caption text in deliberately broken grammar (“I Can Has Cheezburger?”). The genre grew from 4chan’s “Caturday” and was industrialized in 2007 by the site I Can Has Cheezburger, which turned meme aggregation into a business. Doge, from 2013, paired a photo of a Shiba Inu named Kabosu with scattered pastel Comic Sans phrases (“much wow”, “so meme”); within months it spawned the joke cryptocurrency Dogecoin (December 2013), showing that a meme could mint a financial asset.

Why the Form Works

The meme is what culture looks like when copying and editing cost nothing. Each of the technologies underneath a meme wave removed a friction: email carried the Dancing Baby, Flash and cheap image editing carried “All your base”, YouTube and imageboards carried Rickrolling and lolcats, and smartphone apps made remixing a photo a ten-second act. The result inverted the twentieth-century model of mass media, in which a few producers broadcast finished works to a passive audience. A meme has no finished form and no author; it exists only in its variations, and its “quality” is measured entirely by how readily people copy and change it. The academic irony is intact: Dawkins invented “meme” to argue that ideas evolve by blind replication, and the internet built a culture that proves it hourly, mostly with pictures of cats.