Introduction to Cyber-Warfare - Proiect SEMPER FIDELIS

HOW WE ARE INFLUENCED BY 4CHAN: MEMES73FIGURE 6.1 A “Caturday” image. Anonymous memberswould post Saturday images of cats with quotationssuch as this. Source: M-J, WikiCommons. 43experience variations and changes after their inception and have to withstand the competitionwith other memes in order to survive. 40 Hence, the term also refers to the jokes,videos, and catchphrases that spread online. More exactly, meme is a popular post andCole Stryker proclaims in his book that 4chan is “the meme factory of the Internet.” 41 4chanwas not the first and is not the only Internet forum producing, sharing, and replicatingmemes, k but so far it appears to be the most viral. A self-professed Anon describes memesas the 4chan/b/’s raison d’etre. 42 Some memes that originated from or entered the vocabularyof “b-tards” eventually became popular among Internet users in general. LOLcats isa meme derived from the 4chan’s introduction of Caturdays—on Saturdays, the userswould post images of cats complemented with phrases representing the cats’ comments(Figure 6.1). lOther memes refer to singers like Tay Zonday, whose original of the song “Chocolate Rain”at the time of writing had over 79 million views on YouTube. Since its first upload by the artistin April 2007 on YouTube and its subsequent posting on 4chan.org (in July 2007), it experiencednumerous covers and remixes. 44 Rick Astley experienced a comeback when his 1987song “Never Gonna Give You Up” featured in a bait-and-switch practice, in which a seeminglyrelevant link leads to the music video. The Internet user who falls prey to this particularbait-and-switch trap is said to have been “rickrolled.” 45 As the domain name suggest, the Website Know Your Meme.com is generally a go-to source for popular and “dead” memes andassociated culture.Even the term “Anonymous” really is a meme referring to bloggers in 4chan, 7chan, andother image boards and associated with its own mythology and aesthetic. “Every time you’veever posted anything on the Internet without stating your name, you’ve been Anonymous,and that’s all that defines Anonymous,” an Anon is quoted in an interview. 46k At the time of writing, there are many Web sites and fora dedicated to memes including knowyourmemes.com, memegenerator.net, quickmeme.com, memebase.com, memecenter.com, and thedailymeme.com.l From here, a now popular Web site dedicated to such postings spiraled out (icanhascheezburger.com).