Phillips, an assistant communications professor at Syracuse University, now thinks she got it wrong. A man in the audience shouted: “Kill her!” One section, Phillips recalled, showed “several internet-infamous young white women who had inspired widespread mockery online.” Such women, the three men explained, were referred to as “camwhores.” When the photograph of one flashed on-screen, the crowd booed. There was an assumption that everyone in the room “got it,” that they understood who was being satirized-the racists and the homophobes-and that everything was just for lulz.īut the blizzard of memes didn’t allow any time to distinguish between the cute and the offensive, the innocuous and the hateful. Phillips remembers laughing until she cried at a repeat performance the next year. The first Meme Factory show began with a disclaimer about its offensive content, delivered in front of a picture of a white cat captioned with what was a popular phrase at the time: Internet. There were “fails” there were “owns” the viewers didn’t have to think much about the people who were the butt of the joke. Three young men sat in front of microphones, talking deliberately fast, occasionally projecting pictures onto the screen behind them. In 2009, she attended a live show called Meme Factory, which aimed to explain this new language of the internet. Sexism, racism, and other hatreds were being invoked for nothing more than shock value. The casual sadism of trolling was just “lulz,” which shouldn’t be taken seriously.
(The founders of social networks-primarily young, carefree, middle-class white Americans-agreed.) Okay, the argument went, this outpouring of creativity had its darker elements, but that was part of its countercultural charm. In the 2000s and early 2010s, Phillips was one of a group of academics, activists, and intellectuals who studied memes, and promoted the idea of the web as a space of unfettered, anarchic creation. “HALP,” “OHRLY,” “KTHXBYE.” Adorable cat GIFs. Blocky white letter captions on pictures of exaggerated facial expressions. The look was lo-fi and absurdist, and the tone was eye-rolling, cynical, self-aware. If you’ve spent any time online, you will have imbibed both the aesthetic and, perhaps, the ethics of “meme culture” or “internet culture.” This is the mashed-up jumble of images, jargon, and folk art that gushed out of sites such as 4chan, Reddit, and Tumblr from the late 2000s. And more sneering mockery of an old man hooked up to an oxygen tank. The thread began, she wrote recently, “with a lighthearted meme about Hitler.” After that was “dehumanizing mockery of a child with disabilities. A guy Photoshopped to have mouths for eyes.
The first comment described the era as “a more simple time,” and sure enough, the pictures were weird, silly, and creative.
The digital anthropologist was recently looking through a huge set of images from the late 2000s that had been posted to Reddit. R emember when the internet used to be fun? Whitney Phillips does.
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