I've been online longer than Google.
I first connected to the internet in 1996 with a 28.8kbps modem inside a Dell computer with a 75 MHz Pentium and 8 MB of RAM. I had to jailbreak out of a CompuServe product called WOW! by replacing a specific DLL to escape their walled garden. That was my first taste of the open internet, and I've bore witness to meme culture evolving ever since.
What started as art became a weapon. What began as connection became division. What we built "for the lolz" got corrupted by algorithms optimizing for rage.
Memes started as ASCII art in chat rooms and Usenet groups. They evolved through GeoCities pages, AIM profiles, 4chan threads, Reddit feeds, algorithmic platforms, and now AI video generators. Each era had its own creative class, its own distribution network, its own rules. And somewhere along the way, the thing we created to make each other laugh learned to make us hate each other instead.
This is how it happened. And how we fight back.
The Ancestors: ASCII Art (1986–1996)
ASCII art was cave painting on scrolling walls. Black and white. Funny and beautiful in a primitive way, constrained by the medium. I remember being even more enthralled by the ANSI art from old BBS systems, those deliciously dithered color patterns in the message of the day (MOTD). A level of sophistication beyond raw text, a form of electronic graffiti.
L33t speak emerged in this era. H4X0R language signaled identity. A coded way to show you belonged to the culture. Every 3 substituted for an E marked you as part of the underground.
Behind the ASCII art lived an entire subculture organizing through IRC channels. We congregated on channels like #hack and #phreak, sharing tools and philosophy across continents at 28.8kbps. The culture fused digital art with music and the exploration of computer systems. Zines like Phrack published technical exploits alongside manifestos about information freedom. The demoscene hosted coding competitions where programmers pushed hardware to its limits, creating audiovisual demos as proof of technical mastery.
I joined a group called TekNopia. The name captured the technological utopian ideas of the time, that cyberdelic experience we were trying to manufacture. This was the run-up to the dot-com boom, but we weren't building startups. We were building a new world, driven by curiosity rather than capital. We shared everything freely.
"This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud."
— Loyd Blankenship, The Conscience of a Hacker
My first contributions were hand-transcribed song lyrics in .txt files (lyric sites didn't exist yet) and documentation about a lineman's handset, the tool used to identify tip and ring on phone pairs at junction boxes. I had hacker friends on multiple continents before most of my IRL peers had email addresses. We would telnet into each other's computers to play Capture The Flag (a hacker game where you attempt to escalate privilege and reboot your opponents machine). The trust and openness feels naive now. But the internet felt infinite. Every login was an adventure.
I fell in love with authors like Kevin Kelly, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine at the time. His writing about emergent systems and technology evolution felt like scripture for our digital religion. He argues that we aren't just using technology. We are the substrate that it grows from.
The internet has transformed us into super organisms; collectives of individuals working together as one. Memes function like electrical signals firing between our synapses, transmitting ideas and culture that drive collective action.
These were the ancestors. Pure text. Dial-up speeds. Humor that traveled slowly and only existed in small pockets of the broader electronic world. But those pockets were building something. Anonymous and unbound by the biases of physical appearance, the disembodied consciousness of early hackers explored the global network. Together we developed unique ways to express ourselves and relate through the ephemeral digital medium.
The Builders: GeoCities (1996–1999)
The text-only era couldn't last. Images arrived.
GeoCities gave us free hosting, a built-in HTML editor, and image uploads. That's where I learned HTML. My first GeoCities page was inspired by the movie Hackers and fueled by Jolt Cola. I used a totally 1337 hacker alias and carefully picked Hollywood as my "neighborhood". I added a pi symbol in the page footer that linked to a hidden page, as a nod to "The Net" featuring Sandra Bullock.
Internet culture was already remixing pop culture. Taking corporate IPs and bending them to our desires.
The memorable GeoCities memes were marqueeing text, blinking text, and those under-construction GIFs. Everyone put under-construction GIFs on their pages. A subconscious manifestation of our growth mindset, constantly building and learning, never complete. Hit counters became status symbols. You'd proudly display your webmaster badges. You'd find similar sites through webrings.
As the era closed, "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" spread as the first multimedia Flash meme that I remember vividly. A mistranslation from the 1989 game Zero Wing became the bridge between the old web and what came next. We were all building our bases, and someone set up us the bomb.
The aesthetic was chaos. The creativity was earnest. The web felt personal.
This was the builder era. You made your space. You curated references. You embedded personality in HTML. But soon, we adopted faster ways to signal who we were.
The Messengers: AIM (1999–2002)
Personal web pages were cool. But instant messaging was intimate and more accessible.
AOL Instant Messenger turned your profile into a canvas and your away message into a broadcast channel. People put quotes and song lyrics in their profiles. My away message was a Nas lyric for years: "I never sleep because sleep is the cousin of death." Peak edge-lord teeny bopper.
ASCII art reemerged. Character constraints brought back the text art from the dial-up days. Song lyrics and pop culture references spread peer-to-peer across buddy lists. You could watch memes propagate in real-time as friends copied and modified each other's away messages.
This was the messenger era. Small enclaves of people you usually knew IRL, signalling to each other. Away messages as status updates before social media existed. But the chaos was about to begin as intimacy was swapped for anonymity.
The Tricksters: 4chan and Forums (2003–2009)
The image boards changed everything.
Before Facebook and Twitter became meme hubs, I spent time in the random forums of php bulletin boards and 4chan. On the University at Buffalo Racing Forum (UBRF), we created original funny content constantly. We didn't even call them memes yet. We were just learning Photoshop and trying to make our friends laugh. These were the proving grounds, a place to practice your writing and debating skills. A place that foundationally improved my understanding of on-line politics and propaganda. It's also where I was introduced to 4chan.
Outsiders and historians don't usually understand 4chan's culture from that time. If you could read all the raw threads from that era, you could rightfully believe it was hateful. But my interpretation in the moment was that the vast majority of the content was largely ironic and absurdist comedy. It was a place where users created an us ("Anons") and a them ("Normies") by using coded and taboo language as a filter. If you got the joke, you were in. If you didn't, you self-selected out. The most wild and deranged posts that I would loathe to read out loud today were often lovingly crafted purely "for the lolz".
Image boards operate like venture capital markets for original content. Thousands of Original Posters (OPs) create content hoping for mass adoption. Most fail. If your post doesn't get replies, the thread dies and disappears. This creates a meritocracy where the best content survives and spreads. But it also rewards the extreme and outlandish. The chans were Mount Doom. The only forge hot enough to create memes powerful enough to rule the entire internet.
Rickrolling emerged from 4chan in 2007. A bait-and-switch with Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" that spread like wildfire. You fell for clickbait, you got Rick Astley. The prank transcended the platform and infected every corner of the internet for decades.
The Advice Animals format evolved here too. Starting with Advice Dog in 2006, then Courage Wolf, then an explosion of animal-based image macros. Each one had its personality. Its rules. The format became a template for expressing specific emotional states through animal avatars and Impact font.
4chan was chaotic and creative, eating its own content and generating new forms constantly. Though chaotic neutral at its core, if you awoke the internet hate machine, you'd see it was powerful beyond comprehension. I stayed a lurker for self-preservation. Anonymous giveth and anonymous taketh away.
Since every thread self destructed as Anons lost interest, most of the historical records from the time only exist as "Green text" images. Snapshots that could be used to resurrect a cultural touchstone as an image post, that also served as a template for remixing. Since there were no user names, any Anon could continue the story arc of another, claiming to be them.
In a board full of tricksters, you can see how this taught a generation of meme creators how to exist in a post-truth environment. Building psychic resilience to algorithmic psyops before they even existed. This was training. We just didn't know it yet.
This was the trickster era. Anonymous chaos. The primordial ooze where proto-social-media-managers learned the dark arts.
The Settlers: Twitter and Reddit (2009–2016)
The underground went mainstream. And the barriers between celebrities and normies collapsed.
Andy Warhol said everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. He was right. He just didn't know it would happen on Twitter.
Twitter and Reddit broke down the celebrity firewall. Twitter's hashtag culture turned everyone into potential broadcasters. Reddit's AMAs forced celebrities into direct contact with internet trolls and normies. President Obama crashed Reddit's servers in August 2012. Arnold Schwarzenegger built genuine rapport answering questions. But celebrities who didn't understand the culture got destroyed. This required new media training. A new skill set. Relatability became currency. B and C-list stars who mastered it accelerated their careers through this new asymmetrical digital intimacy.
My "Twelve Hours In A City" project happened during this transition. JetBlue's All You Can Jet promotion, 2009. $599, unlimited flights for a month. I quit my job, started a blog, started tweeting. Our tweets got picked up by Howard Stern, CNN, and the Times on day one. Traditional media had just figured out Twitter and used it to find the pulse of the day.
We went from anonymity to people waiting for us at terminal gates. Limo service in every city. Flight attendants flying across the country to party with us on a 30-day bender. We wrestled alligators in Kissimmee. Had access to Dunkin Donuts box seats at Fenway. Were comped suites, bottle service, and supercars in Vegas. Jumped out of airplanes. The Associated Press published our story in every English-speaking newspaper in the world. I did final interviews in China and Australia.
During the trip, I had a mantra: "You're just a dude." I knew the attention was temporary. I repeated it constantly to stay grounded.
Almost exactly 48 hours after our return, it was as if nothing had ever happened. I was back to being a struggling commercial photographer in Buffalo, New York. The internet has a short attention span.
Twelve Hours In A City made me a proto-influencer. It showed me the possibilities that come with virality as currency. Traditional media mining Twitter for stories. Brands offering free products for exposure. Strangers treating you differently because they recognized you from the internet. I saw how attention could be converted into access, experiences, and opportunities.
But I had been using memes as political strategy for years before I understood what I was doing.
In my senior year of college around 2006, I took my cultural learnings from 4chan and the forums and acted as political advisor for my fraternity brothers running for Student Association. We developed memes and iconography. Posted them on physical and virtual bulletin boards around campus. They won in a landslide.
Then my brother Grant called. He was a sophomore planning to run for Secretary of his high school student council. I told him no. He was going to run for President. We ran the same meme-based campaign playbook in his high school against an incumbent Junior who was a well-respected socialite. He won by a landslide. He stayed in elected positions through the remainder of his academic career, peaking as Student Association President at the University of Rochester.
One example of Grant building brand through memeing was a shot-for-shot remake of Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" where he cross-dressed as the pop star and the male protagonist was the school's mascot. The video went viral on campus. Comedy as campaign strategy.
These experiences taught me that memes could act as powerful propaganda. A trojan horse that influences decision making through comedic inception. Make people laugh and they'll vote for you. The format matters more than the message. If normies were talking about your content, you were winning.
I didn't think of it as weaponization at the time. It was just helping my friends and family win elections. But looking back, I was learning how to manufacture consent through humor. How to bypass critical thinking by triggering dopamine. The same tactics 4chan used for the lolz were surprisingly effective on regular people when used by those pursuing real power.
Planking happened. The Harlem Shake happened. Harambe (2016) became a referendum on internet grief and irony. Memes moved faster. Spread wider. Died quicker.
This was the settler era. Memes moved from subculture to mainstream. The content became the product. Proto-influencers were born. Notoriety without compensation became the norm. And the platforms started watching everything we did.
The Machine Priests: Algorithmic Feeds (2017–2020)
Remember TekNopia? Remember when we shared everything freely, driven by curiosity rather than capital? That culture shifted when the attention economy was born.
“The filter bubble tends to dramatically amplify confirmation bias — in a way, it’s designed to. … An information environment built on click signals will favor content that supports our existing notions about the world over content that challenges them.”
- Eli Pariser, "The Filter Bubble", 2011
What Pariser described as “invisible algorithmic editing” became the backbone of every major platform. His early alarm about information silos anticipated the polarization, outrage cycles, and virality-as-currency that defined the digital landscape a decade later.
Did you like, comment, share? Did you hesitate during your infinite scroll? Did your friends do any of those things? That's signal in the noise. The algorithms fed you more of what kept you engaged or enraged.
Everything you see gets decided by machines optimizing for attention and retention. Filter bubbles began to inflate. National identity started fracturing along digital lines. Political alignment drifted between genders. What was once crafted for the lolz became corrupted by the financialization of the art form.
I watched this from an unusual vantage point. I ran an R&D unit at a defense contractor. The broader company worked in irregular warfare. To make watercooler conversation with my colleagues, I studied influence operations. I improved my pattern recognition.
As a systems thinker who came of age in the hacker subculture, I'd learned social engineering as survival. With autistic traits and limited ability to intuit social dynamics, I treat human intelligence gathering like signals intelligence. The difference between online memes and me parroting lines that build rapport is negligible in my neuro-atypical mind.
So I could see what was happening. The same memetic warfare tactics I'd learned for campus elections were now being deployed at national scale. The same dopamine loops. The same bypass of critical thinking. But now with algorithms amplifying the most divisive content because outrage drove engagement.
We stopped saying how we feel. We started posting reaction GIFs. We stopped writing arguments. We started sharing memes that scored points for our team. The iteration happens in hours, not days. Algorithms decide what spreads. What gets boosted. What dies in obscurity. Formats spread and mutate at speeds that would have been impossible in the forum era.
The machine priests curate the feed. They decide what reaches millions and what reaches no one. Virality becomes engineered and emergent at the same time. You can't game the system. But the system definitely games you.
This was the algorithmic era. Content at scale required computer mediated curation. Memes became currency. But the machines weren't done yet.
The 80%: How We Polarized
How I describe radicalization by algorithm. Picture 100 people in an airplane hangar. Twenty are people you would never voluntarily spend time with. Ten on the left, ten on the right. Only one extremist on each side is actively screaming. Throwing excrement at their evil twin across the room.
The algorithms are spotlights that only shine on those two maniacs. The other 80 people stand in darkness. Moderate. Reasonable. Just trying to provide for their families and pursue their interests. But you can't see them outside the light. You only see the screamers.
So you move. You run away from the side screaming the things that sound scariest to you. Everyone in the middle does the same. Stampeding towards the perimeter to escape the heathen in the spotlight. Trying not to get poop on themselves.
But here's the trap. When you reach the edge, you're standing next to the most annoying 10% of your own side. The spotlight's feathered edge catches both you and them together.
So when both sides look toward each other, everyone appears to be the worst and most extreme version of their team. The middle didn't disappear because beliefs changed. It disappeared because the algorithms don't show the normal 80% regularly. And when they do appear, they're accidentally clustered with the worst people on their own team—having fled from the worst people on the other side.
Everyone gets covered in muck from both maniacs.
The Mimics: Remix Culture (2020–Present)
Then the machines started making the memes.
GPT-3 sped up meme creation from minutes to seconds. In June 2020, OpenAI released 175 billion parameters that could generate human-level text. Talented prompters could create hundreds of variations on proven formats, then curate down to the most effective. The iteration loop compressed.
COVID stimulus checks created a new battlefield, the crypto and NFT markets became "the trenches". Scammers pumped out AI-generated memes at scale. Doge references. Moon rockets. Diamond hands. They targeted normies who suddenly had disposable cash and too much time time to scroll. The formula was simple: build hype with coordinated meme campaigns, pump the shitcoin, wait for the normies to FOMO in, then rug-pull. Millions of dollars vanished into anonymous wallets. The memes weren't jokes anymore. They were bait. And people kept biting because the humor made it feel safe. Made it feel like a community. Made it feel like they were in on something instead of being the mark.
In January 2021, WallStreetBets turned GameStop into a meme stock. "Diamond Hands" became the rallying cry for retail investors holding against hedge funds. The memes drove real collective action. Real money. Real consequences. This wasn't funny internet pictures anymore. This was financial warfare dressed up as jokes.
Remember how 4chan trained a generation of Anons to navigate post-truth environments? That psychic resilience became necessary.
Bot farms owned by bad actors, both foreign and domestic, influence the population through algorithmically amplified content. Dead Internet Theory manifests as agentic LLMs generate millions of pages of content and artificially amplify their own posts.
This tremendous deployment of resources has started building siloed realities where different groups see completely different versions of events. Memes are now the primary weapons in information warfare.
We developed gallows humor as cope. "We're so back" when a meme brings a glimmer of hope. "It's so over" when the "other side"™ appears to be winning. "They're cooked" for anyone facing an inevitable failure. "NGMI" (not gonna make it) as shorthand for existential dread. These phrases function as pressure release valves. Quick signals that ironically acknowledge the manufactured chaos without drowning in it.
But something started shifting around COVID. The manipulation got sloppier. More obvious.
It started with Comedy News sources. The Daily Show. The Colbert Report. Political commentary disguised as entertainment. They had led the way since the early 2000s, a Mainstream Media adoption of image memes flanking the talking heads as they pedaled influence through comedy. Then the parties and politicians themselves fully embraced meme warfare. Democrats and Republicans both lost decorum. By 2025 it's gotten extreme. Politicians themselves directly engaging in trollish memes. The escalation has made the manipulation and rage baiting more visible.
The manipulation used to be subtle. Local Television News anchors all using the same talking points across different stations, in different states. Now it's politicians quote-tweeting each other with clown emojis. The loss of decorum is creating antibodies in society. The super organism is developing an immune response as more of us discuss the way these tools suppress real dialog and short-circuit critical thinking.
When Sora 2 launched in October 2024, AI video generation reached new heights. Templates let users build off existing prompts. Pop culture characters running from police on body cams. IP violations so blatant you knew OpenAI was about to get sued and lock it down. They did. Within days, the safety guardrails went up.
AI-generated songs spread everywhere. 50 Cent singing like a soul crooner. Gospel covers of Killswitch Engage. Deepfake audio that sounds incredible because AI doesn't have to breathe while singing. Memes became multimedia remixes of reality itself.
This is the AI era. Humans ideate, machines generate, humans curate and schedule, machines curate for the individual consumer, humans consume. The creation cycle compresses from days to minutes. The barrier to entry is a text prompt.
My belief is that portions of society are becoming more aware of the manipulation. Millennials and Gen Z started organizing a return to analog. Spending actual time with each other. Board game cafes, playing sports, doing work outside. Touching Grass.
I see this in my own life. I focus on in-person social networks with diversity of opinions. My Brazilian Jiu Jitsu gym is that for me.
The BJJ community has a saying: the mats never lie. It doesn't matter what color your belt is. If I can submit you, I can submit you. Your politics, your job, your social media following means nothing when you're trying to escape a rear naked choke.
My BJJ school in Buffalo had multiple FBI agents training in the same classes as Anarchists, Libertarians, Socialists, and Psychonauts. We came from radically different backgrounds and worldviews. But within the framing and context of the gym, we were all friends with an extremely high degree of trust.
You have to trust your training partner. Trust they won't injure you. Trust they won't choke you unconscious when you're drilling technique. We're literally simulating murdering our friends on a daily basis. That level of vulnerability creates strong bonds.
That environment proves the 80% shared values thesis. We can hold different ideological viewpoints and still live in high-trust communities. We just need physical spaces and shared practices that transcend political identity. The continuity of contact matters. Seeing the same people four days a week. Building together. Helping each other improve.
The resistance takes other forms too. People are setting limits on their own app usage or opting out of social media entirely. I have friends who use dumb phones. Friends who use software to limit their social media use. My family uses hardware (a Pi-hole DNS sinkhole) to filter out ad networks at the router level.
Parents are self-organizing ways to protect Gen Alpha from brain rot. Giving kids flip phones. Teaching kids to recognize manufactured outrage. Building communities around authentic connection instead of algorithmic feeds.
The pendulum is swinging back. Not necessarily away from technology. But toward intentional use and human-centric design.
The Natives: Gen Alpha Speaks Fluent Meme
And now we have the first generation born into meme fluency.
My kids are native meme speakers. I rate their meme knowledge 6, 7. They say "Sigma Chad" and do a hand motion that traces an imaginary square jawline. I asked if they knew what Sigma means, or Chad, or why they do that gesture. They didn't know any of it. But they use it perfectly in context.
They're like immigrants who don't have the etymology, but learned the idioms contextually. Their speech is inundated with references to memes that originated 20 years before they were born. They don't understand the history. They just speak it fluently.
But they're also more susceptible to algorithmic manipulation than any previous generation, being exposed to screens long before they've developed critical thinking skills. An early indicator of the influence, surveys report Gen Alpha wanting to be YouTubers more than any other profession. Children don't realize they exist in filter bubbles. They don't understand how algorithms work.
So my wife and I made decisions early. Our kids' images and stories stay off the internet for operational security. No digital footprint until they can consent to one.
We talk to them about how the internet is full of Tricksters. We routinely discuss OpSec principles. Don't give your name, where you live, or other PII to strangers. People in chat rooms can roleplay and be characters they aren't in real life. It's their job to be junior detectives and look for anomalies. Let us know when they spot them, so we can help, since we've solved more capers. We keep it fun. Focus on being interesting, not scary.
Children are more capable of understanding complex systems than most people give them credit. In order to build defense against tactics, they first need to understand the rules of the game. We discuss AI-generated content. AI voice cloning. The dangers of brain rot and slop. Our children aren't allowed to watch short-form content.
This is the future. Memes as a universal native language. But it also requires all of us to build the resistance to influence operations, one household at a time.
Memes Are Older Than the Internet
But before we can win this fight, we need to understand what we're actually fighting for.
Dawkins gave memes their name in 1976. But they're older than civilization. They're how humans have always transmitted culture. And they've always been slippery. They resist control. They get reclaimed.
"We Can Do It!" became Rosie the Riveter in 1943 as WWII labor propaganda. Largely forgotten for decades. Then feminists reclaimed it in the 1980s as an empowerment symbol, completely divorced from its original capitalist and militarist intent. Now it's been commercialized again through identity politics. You can buy Rosie on coffee mugs, t-shirts, tote bags. The resistance symbol became a consumer product. Full circle.
Pepe the Frog demonstrates this even more clearly. Created by Matt Furie in 2005 as an innocent comic character. Adopted by 4chan as a reaction image. Weaponized by the alt-right during the 2016 election. The ADL declared it a hate symbol. Furie killed the character in protest. But Pepe refused to die. Hong Kong protesters reclaimed him as a resistance symbol in 2019. He's been reborn multiple times since, appropriated and redefined by whoever needs him to make their point.
Pepe illustrates the triangle of art interpretation. The Artist creates a personal expression imbued with subjective meaning. The Art is appreciated for its aesthetics, a blank vessel. The Observer projects their own meaning onto it. All three components provide their own value to an arbitrary device. The creator loses control the moment the meme enters circulation. It belongs to the culture now. It will be remixed, reclaimed, corrupted, and reborn according to the needs of each era.
The Resistance Remembers How to Laugh
I've watched an art form get corrupted. Then watched that corruption spread to society.
Memes started as pure creativity. Hackers making ASCII art for friends. GeoCities builders expressing themselves. 4chan OPs creating content for the lolz. The early internet ran on curiosity, not capital. We shared everything freely.
Then it changed. The attention economy financialized humor. Algorithms optimized for outrage instead of connection. Bot farms deployed memetic warfare at scale. The 1% extremes manufactured division among the 80% of us who share values. What was once art became a weapon. Humor stopped being connection and started being currency.
Here's what gives me hope: the impulse to make each other laugh is unkillable.
The manipulation got too obvious. The propaganda started eating itself. And the super organism is developing antibodies. People are opting out. Teaching their kids to recognize manufactured outrage. Building physical communities where FBI agents train jiu jitsu with Anarchists and everyone trusts each other not to break their arm.
The resistance isn't happening in grand political movements. It's happening in living rooms and gyms and board game cafes. One conversation at a time.
Think about someone you've lost to the memetic violence. A friend. A neighbor. A relative you started avoiding because every interaction became a political minefield. They're probably in the 80%. You're probably in the 80%. The algorithms just convinced you otherwise.
What if you reached out? Not to debate. Not to convince. Just to connect. Share a meal. Workout together. Play a game. Remind each other that the person behind the feed is still human.
The types of walls we scratch our jokes on keep changing. But the impulse stays the same. Humans wanting to make each other laugh. That impulse is more powerful than any algorithm. More ancient than any platform.
Reclaim it. Make content that makes your friends laugh instead of optimizing for virality. Build communities that transcend filter bubbles. Protect the kids. Touch grass.
Do it for the lolz.