EPIC WIN FOR ANONYMOUS (8 page)

These are just a handful of examples. Today the form stars a cast of characters numbering several dozen. The important thing about these comics is their status as
exploitables,
or images that serve as semiblank canvases for the imagination of the hivemind. An exploitable could be a man’s face with a blank thought bubble overhead; everyone can fill in the bubble with their own text. It’s kind of like the
New Yorker
caption contest. It becomes a game to creatively fill in the blanks.

And it doesn’t stop at text. Photoshop wizards augment the imagery itself, for hilarious results. Exploitables allow anyone to engage in the communal meme pool that is 4chan, with a very low barrier to entry. All you need is some basic image-editing prowess and a sense of humor, and you too can achieve maximum lulz. Some of the comics that come out of these threads surpass anything I’ve seen in the Sunday funnies.

A Meme Pool For Participatory Culture

There are many words used to describe this kind of interactive entertainment. Some call it riffing
;
others call it remixing. Media scholar Henry Jenkins calls it participatory
culture. Before the web, most content was produced by professional content producers and broadcast by professional broadcasters until it reached you and millions of other consumers. The web has obliterated that process.

Consider a recent meme called Nyan Cat, aka Pop Tart Cat. Nyan Cat is an animation depicting a cat with a Pop Tart body flying in space with a rainbow contrail. It was originally posted to a comics site, then made its way to Tumblr in GIF form. Someone else set it to a hyperactive electronic pop song created with a vocal synthesizer that sounds like a person saying “nyan nyan nyan” over and over, and uploaded it to YouTube. Then 4chan and Internet culture blogs like Buzzfeed picked it up. Since it was uploaded, someone mashed it up with heavy metal band Slipknot’s music video for “Psychosocial.” Dozens of alternate animations and parodies were created. A bunch of musicians independently covered the song with piano, guitar, and Japanese lute. There’s a dubstep remix. There’s a video of a guy on an exercise bike dressed up as Nyan Cat, pedaling to the music. There is a Nyan Cat flash video game. Between the image parodies, video mashups, audio remixes, games, and other references, the flying cat with the Pop Tart body is a memetic sensation with tens of thousands of iterations—and it’s only been viral for a month, as of this writing.

Another example of participatory culture is Advice Animals, which also began in 4chan but has seeped out into the broader web. The Advice Animals are some of the most visually arresting and immediately satisfying image macros on 4chan, and, like Ragetoons, have expanded to places like Reddit and Tumblr. It all started with Advice Dog, a cheerful puppy against a bursting rainbow backdrop. Nothing could be cuter. And then, you read the caption, which consists of two lines; a command above and below the dog’s adorable face:

STEAL THE CANDY

FROM THE MEDICINE CABINET

The cutesy image of a dog juxtaposed with horrific “advice,” made for a powerful meme. Then came Courage Wolf, a snarling beast that offers extreme platitudes:

THE DOCTOR SAID IT WAS CANCER

I CALL IT A CHALLENGE

And Insanity Wolf:

YOU SAY KIDNAPPING

I SAY “SURPRISE ADOPTION”

And Courage Pup, a miniature version of Courage Wolf:

DAD SAYS NO LUNCHABLES

PUT IN CART ANYWAY

The meme soon expanded to include dozens of other animals and people. There’s Bachelor Frog, a stereotype of the slacker lifestyle:

CAN’T HEAR TV

CHEW CHIPS SLOWER

Business Cat, who spouts business cliches:

I NEED YOU TO STAY LATE TONIGHT

WE REALLY HAVE TO CATCH THAT RED DOT

And Socially Awkward Penguin, who’s always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time:

WAITRESS TELLS YOU TO ENJOY YOUR FOOD

SAY “YOU TOO”

And so on. Now there are millions of variations of the Advice Animal meme encompassing Hipster Disney Princesses, OCD Otter, and more. They usually derive their humor in one of two ways: Either they speak universally recognized but seldom spoken little truths, or they rely on pure shock value. The closest pop-culture equivalent to these diptychs would probably be editorial cartoons.

I’ve described just a few of the simpler visual memes. They’re not examples I’d point to if I wanted to demonstrate the intellectual vibrancy of the medium; they’re just case studies in virality. Nyan Cat is not only a video, but an experience in which thousands of people are actively participating.

Today, most consumers have the ability to be producers, and communication channels no longer move information in just one direction, from few to many, but can move information back and forth and back again. Pieces of content rub up against one another in melting pots like YouTube, DeviantArt, Tumblr, and Reddit. Users recut their favorite films, make custom music videos for new pop songs, and develop sprawling fan fiction based on beloved literature. The experience of consuming entertainment is now only part of the fun. Today, we can make the entertainment our own, and it happens nowhere more dynamically than at 4chan.

Mini-Games

“You Barf You Lose” reads the description of a newly christened thread. Accompanying this caption is a photo of a corpse; the top half, anyway. Threads like this are called “gore threads.” The object of this game is to find revolting images featuring mutilated bodies, autopsy photos, animated GIFs of suicides caught by security cameras, and so on. Gore threads are a parade of death and dismemberment, drawing on the adolescent male impulse to gross out one’s friends. Perhaps it’s a way to laugh in the face of death. Maybe it’s just the visceral thrill of seeing something you’re not meant to see. Call it /b/-horror.

“You Barf You Lose” is only one of the many iterations of the “You Lose” games. The most popular is “You Laugh You Lose,” in which players compete to post the most hilarious, freshest images. In “You Bawww You Lose,” players post the saddest pictures they can find in order to make people bawww, or cry. One that immediately comes to mind is a devastating image of a loyal dog lying next to a body bag, presumably his recently deceased owner. “You Rage You Lose” has people posting links to pages containing troll-baiting content, like some 14-year-old kid’s ADD YouTube rant about libertarianism or a woman complaining about misogyny in the workplace.

One of the more fascinating games is “You Fall In Love You Lose,” which pits players against each other to find not so much the hottest girls, but photographs of women that they’d like to hold hands with while strolling along a promenade. It’s interesting how these /b/tards, who have long been desensitized to the most extreme forms of pornography, tend to gravitate toward photographs that depict women as innocent, carefree, and generally wholesome. The girls featured prominently in these threads are almost always fully clothed. There are several more “You Lose” games, all designed to elicit strong, specific emotions such as nostalgia, lust, or bewilderment. 4chan is defined by its users’ desire to outdo each other, and these threads capture that mentality.

Another example of a game 4chan likes to play is called “Delicious Cake.” Someone will post a crude MS Paint drawing of a man and a cake separated by whirling blades, deadly spikes, monsters, pits of lava, and the like. Then everyone else in the thread will augment the image, explaining how they will overcome the obstacles in order to acquire the delicious cake.

There’s also “3 Items That Make the Cashier Wat.”
Wat
is a catchall response to anything mind-blowingly bizarre. It’s like saying “What?” but comes across as more deadpan. The challenge here is to come up with three items that would freak out a cashier. Some examples:

• A pregnancy test, a metal clothes hanger, a goldfish.
  
• A wooden crate, a rope, and an ice-cream cake.
  
• A hunting knife, duct tape, six boxes of Lunchables.
  

The best ones don’t imply gross sex or murder, like “A box of Cheerios, milk, and a single spoon.”

Other games include “Make This Face,” “Read The 3rd Sentence on the Last Page of the Book Nearest to You,” and “Finish This Drawing.” New games are being created every day. The /b/ community is constantly coming up with new ways to defeat boredom.

You’re just as likely to come across a thread with guys comparing pictures of their dicks as you are an example of wildly creative storytelling or deep philosophical debate. It’s true that the lion’s share of content on /b/ tends to be sophomoric, but it is random after all, so there are pleasant surprises.

Delicious Copypasta

Here we go. I’ve just found some
copypasta
, which is content that’s been “copy-pasted” from other sources. I know it’s old content because I googled it and found a match.

Okay so I am starting to have a panic attack because I am afraid the fucking FBI is going to kick my door down any second so if this is my last post on /b/ I hope it’s epic. To start it all off I live in a pretty quiet, secure, suburban town. I have a cat that I love more than life itself and a neighbor that is dumb as fuck. next door to me lives a New Family that just moved in a year ago or so, they have a child thats probably 18 months or so old. This kid is the fucking devil. He has cause more problems than any other kid I have ever heard of. Anyway, I have observed on several occasions the child torturing my cat. The parents let the child play outside alone quite a bit, I imagine they supervise from the kitchen or patio, I can never really tell from my vantage point, I just assume so since the child is so young. I have seen my cat (who is so friendly he literally goes up to everyone he see’s and rubs against them) wander over to the child and get friendly only to witness Satan smaching the cat, punching him, ripping out clumps of fur, and grabbing his tail and not letting go. The cat is so nice that he doesn’t even try to attack the child, just squirm away in pain as best he can. I always have to run outside and save my cat, but there have been times this happened when I was not around. Now I know this makes my cat look stupid but the fucking kid actually goes out there trying to catch him, my cat learned from the first encounter but since then his parents have given the child some cat nip and other such treats to try and lure that cat over. So finally I snapped today after I saw the kid throw a rock at my cat. It hit him on his hind leg and I imagine it’s broken, I saw the cat limp away whining with his leg literally being dragged behind him. I went on my computer and pulled up Earth Caller.

I called up the neighbor (I knew the mother was the only one home). And as soon as it started to ring I played some music on my computer near the mic and bolted out the door. I ran to the back yard, looked in the window and saw the mother with her back turned walking to the phone. I snatched the kid and bolted out of there. I know she did not see me. I cupped his mouth so the bastard would not make any noise. I ran inside and grabbed a black trash bag from my house. I literally stuffed the fucker in there and went for my car in the front. I threw the bag in my car and drove off non-chalantly. I drove for a while and got out in a wooded area and literally just through the bag in the woods. The kid screamed so loud. I herd the thud and then took off. I went to a friends house from there so I had some kind of alibi and then I came home and started typing this. Am I fucked /b/? I am pretty sure the kid is dead . . .

People make up freak-out tales like this, and responses range from ironic support to outrage to bored yawns. Some of them turn out to be elaborate shaggy-dog stories.

Copypasta is also used as a template for riffing. Consider the Bel-Air meme, based on the lyrics of the opening theme of Will Smith’s sitcom
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
, which are recontextualized in different situations.

They’ve been remixed for Darth Vader:

Now this a story all about how

My life got flipped turned upside down

And you should take a minute just listen to this

About how I became apprentice to the Dark Lord of Sith.

In West Tatooine I was born and raised . . .

You get the idea. Here’s another version, spoken like a caricature of a real British gentleman.

To begin, this is a tale of how my very existence was twisted and transformed in a most peculiar way. Please have a seat, for I wish to take a moment to relate to you the fascinating odyssey which ultimately led to my reign as the Prince of Bel-Air. I was sired and reared in West Philadelphia. As a lad, most of my time was spent at the neighborhood recreation center where I would laze about and relax in a most charming manner—that is, when I was not engaging my chums in a friendly game of basketball at the schoolhouse. Around this time, two young hooligans had begun to stage a campaign of vandalism and intimidation in my neighborhood. When my mother discovered I had had a bit of an altercation with the ruffians, she insisted I leave town at once and take up lodgings with my aunt and uncle in Bel-Air.