A Dank History of Memes

I love memes. As a millennial, I remember the dawn of Facebook, the early days of MySpace, and some of the earliest memes to circulate the Internet. One day, I found myself wondering, what was the first meme? Well, I looked into it, so that you don’t have to. I dove deep into the dank history of Internet memes, and to do that, I had to go all the way back to the beginning of the Internet.

In the Mid 1990s, before there was Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, forums, or anything that we recognize under the realm of social networking today, there was something called Usenet. Because I was born in 1994, right at the cusp of the millennium, I had not previously heard of Usenet, and it is difficult to conceptualize what Usenet actually was/is, using our modern understanding of social media as a frame of reference, but I am going to try.

Essentially, Usenet was an online bulletin board that allowed people to chat, post on discussion forums, and share content, like video clips and images. Usenet was initially developed in 1979 as an alternative to the US military-controlled Arpanet system, which eventually evolved into the Internet we are familiar with today. Usenet was basically social media before social media, or even the world wide web, was a thing. Usenet is still around today, although it has undoubtedly been overshadowed by contemporary social media sites, and most Internet users are probably unfamiliar with it today.

Usenet has been described as “one of the oldest working network communication platforms” and “like a symbiotic cross between Reddit and BitTorrent”. According to Cybersecurity researcher Jasmin Leete, “Usenet could have been the foundation of our modern internet, but was slightly too difficult to use.” Usenet is organized into different topics, called ‘newsgroups’ which are posted on a worldwide network of servers, called ‘news servers’. Usenet was the most primitive form of social media, allowing people to post on forums, and share information like images and video clips.

In the 1994 edition of Wired, Mike Godwin introduced his idea of the Internet meme in an article entitled “Meme, Counter-meme”. In this article, he discussed what he noticed as the “Nazi Comparison meme” which was a reoccuring trope in Usenet newsgroups. His observations about this trope are ones that could easily be applied to a Facebook comment thread argument today.

Godwin developed his Law of Nazi Analogies around the frequency of the Nazi comparison online: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”

While he refers to this as a “meme”, it might be described in terms of today’s understanding of memes as a recurring trope, which you can still find on modern social media sites. In recent years, discussion around the early warning signs of facism have been prompted by Donald Trump’s presidency, and the Nazi comaparison contiues to show up on Facebook comment threads.

When writing about the potential of the Internet Meme in 1994, Godwin was using Richard Dawkin’s original idea of a meme as “an idea that functions in a mind the same way a gene or virus functions in the body”, and applying it to the earliest form of social media, trying to predict how an idea might spread from mind to mind, facilitated by the Internet. Godwin realized, even as early as the mid 1990s, how the Internet would facilitate the spread of these “viral memes”, but he could not have predicted exactly how much these viral memes would evolve, taking on new meanings, and crossing with other memes.

He couldn’t have known just how much these viral memes would take on a life of their own, spreading and evolving to become internationally recognized. He couldn’t have known that memes would become a form of communication, a coping mechanism, and a time capsule of an exact moment in history.

He did know that with the introduction of the Internet, viral ideas, memes, were going to spread more quickly and easily than ever before. He knew that certain ideas spread from mind to mind like a virus, (as introduced by Richard Dawnson in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene), but he couldn’t have known exactly how much the Internet would facilitate this viral spread. Thus, the earliest conception of the Internet Meme was born. So, what was the first Internet meme? This question, of course, is up for debate. I’ve traced back through Internet history to try to identify what the very first meme was, and I’ve compiled my research into a timeline of Dank Internet Meme History.

1996: The Dancing Baby

Many think that the first Internet meme was the Dancing Baby. The Dancing Baby, otherwise known as Baby Cha-Cha or Oogachacka Baby, was created in 1996 by Michael Girard and Robert Lurye. Essentially one of the earliest gifs, it’s a 3D image of a baby dancing to the intro of “Hooked on a Feeling” by the Swedish rock band Blue Suede. It was originally released in the fall of 1996 as a product sample source file in the 3D character animation software Character Studio, by Kinetix/Autodesk.

Ron Lussier, an employee of LucasArt at the time, tweaked the original file and began sending it to his coworkers via email, thus initiating the Dancing Baby’s viral spread. Then, in late 1996, John Woodell created an animated gif from the original video, as part of a demo to show the process of converting a movie to a gif, which continued the spread of the Dancing Baby.

In 1997, artist Rob Sheridan found the .avi file in a newsgroup, and shared it to his homepage under a section entitled “Funny Stuff”. Sheridan says he was then bombarded by emails asking him to share the file, which prompted him to make "The Unofficial Dancing Baby Home Page", which included the Dancing Baby, as well as several remixes of the original.

In 1998 Sheridan was interviewed by K5 News in Seattle, where he discussed making the homepage. In the two years since its original creation in 1996, the Dancing Baby had taken on several defining qualities of an Internet meme: it spread rapidly, and began to evolve, mutate, and take on new forms as remixes were made.

The modified editions of the Dancing Baby began to stream in steadily from fans, including "Kung Fu baby", "Rasta baby" and "Samurai baby." In 1998, the baby even made the leap from Internet screen to TV screen, appearing on the popular TV series Ally McBeal as a recurring hallucination. One of the earliest Internet memes had officially gone viral.

The Dancing Baby had some staying power, which is another characteristic that defines viral Internet memes. 10 years after its conception, on January 15th, 2006, the original Dancing Baby video was uploaded to Youtube, which was a platform still in its infancy, having been created the year prior in 2005. The Dancing Baby would go on to amass more than 3 million views, and 1300 comments in the following 11 years.

On February 7th, 2020, the baby, now 14 years old, resurfaced on Twitter when user @JArmstrongArty shared an HD remaster of the dancing baby recreated from the original video, and received over 5,400 likes and 2,200 retweets in less than a week. Tribute sites to the baby still exist, such as megababy.com.

1998: The Hamster Dance

2 years after the creation of the Dancing Baby meme, another early meme emerged. Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte created the Hamster Dance in 1998 as a GeoCities page. Deidre, her best friend, and her sister were having a competition to see who could create a webpage that received the most traffic, so Deidre used the web hosting service GeoCities to create a homepage for her pet hamster, Hampton. The site featured 392 animated dancing hamsters.

In August 1998, Deidre added music to the page, using a 9-second WAV file to pair with the gifs, which contained a sped-up sample from the song "Whistle Stop" by Roger Miller, written for the 1973 Disney cartoon Robin Hood. The site began to spread through email chains and newsgroups.

In January 1999, a company called NuttySites, which had no relation to Deidre, bought hamsterdance.com and hampsterdance.com. She then registered the domain name hamsterdance2.com, and told viewers that she and her original site did not have anything to do with the other pages.

In August 1999, the webzine GettingIt published one of the earliest articles about the original site. This article revealed that the original website received only 800 views during its first 7 months online. Then, in March of 1999, it received 60,000 hits in just 4 days. The site reached 17 million views 3 months later.

In April 1999, the dance group The Cuban Boys used a Sample of the Hamster Dance song in their song "Cognoscenti vs. Intelligentsia." The song reached #4 on the UK Radio Charts, bringing more attention to the website. The website also inspired the creation of a full “Hamsterdance Song”, produced in 1999 by the Boomtang Boys, and released on July 3, 2000.

The Hamsterdance Song reached #1 on The Canadian Singles chart, and when it was released in Australia in 2001, it reached #5 on the ARIA Singles Chart. It became Radio Disney’s all-time most played song, and was included on the compilation album Radio Disney Ultimate Jams.

The original website no longer exists, but other sites inspired by it are still around. Like the Dancing Baby, Hamster Dance would continue to evolve and mutate from its original form. In 2000, the Internet Service Provider Earthlink used the website in a commercial. In April of 2000, the website was still receiving hundreds of thousands of hits each day.

In the twenty years since Hamster Dance was originally created, it has been featured on several Internet culture blogs, and has inspired merchandise, such as clothes and toys, which were sold on the official website. In 2002, Diedre LaCarte sold all of the Hamster Dance rights to Abatis, Inc.

1998: The Demotivator Meme

In 1985, Mac Anderson founded a company called Successories in Delray Beach, Florida. Anderson collected motivational writings, so he was inspired to start a company that would help motivate his customers in the form of inspirational posters, plaques, and customized gifts. These motivational posters cropped up in offices and classrooms all over the US. Most of us have seen them either in school or at work - they are typically a photograph centered on a black background, with a motivational quote or phrase underneath it in big white lettering. See the example below:

In 1998, in Austin, Texas, E.L. Kersten founded a company called Despair, Inc., which was a satirization of the Motivational Poster. As the name suggests, Despair Inc. created the opposite of a Motivational Poster, the “anti-Motivational Poster”, so to speak: The Demotivator. See example below:

The Demotivator meme grew in popularity on 4Chan in the early 2000s, where it continued to evolve and see new iterations. Probably in part because of the viral spread of the Internet memes inspired by posters like these, motivational posters are now largely viewed as tacky, cheesy, and almost satirical today, but there was a time when those posters unironically plastered the walls of offices and classrooms.

2005: LOLCats

Of course, I cannot discuss the history of Internet memes without talking about LOLCats. The Internet has always loved cats. Funny videos and cute pictures of cats have historically done exceedingly well across Social Media platforms. The term “lolcat” first appeared on 4Chan in 2006. The year prior, on April 30, 2005, the domain name Caturday.com was registered.

The domain name lolcats.com was registered on June 14, 2006. Before that, pictures of cats being silly have appeared on forums like Something Awful. Posting pictures of cats on Saturdays, (or “Caturdays”) became a trend on 4chan, which evolved into the website Caturday.com, but some argue that what really made LOLcats a sensation was the early 2007 inception of "I Can Has Cheezburger?", a blog style website featuring videos and image macros. I Can Has Cheezburger? (abbreviated as ICHC) was created in 2007 by Eric Nakagawa (Cheezburger), from Hawaii, and his friend Kari Unebasami.

The first image was posted on "I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER?" on January 11, 2007, and was alleged to be from the website Something Awful. The term "lolcat" gained national media attention when it was covered by Time, in a piece that described lolcats as having "a distinctly old-school, early 1990s, Usenet feel to [them]".

The first image that Eric Nakagawa posted on ICHC was of Happycat, a smiling British Shorthair cat, with the caption “I can has cheezburger?”, in the image/text style popularized by 4Chan. Nakagawa posted similar images, and then converted the site to a monetized blog. The website was acquired by a group of investors in 2007 for $2 million USD. The blog became the first site of the Cheezburger Network, which also includes FAIL Blog and Know Your Meme.

The network was acquired by Literally Media in 2016. ICHC was instrumental in bringing animal based image macros and lolspeak into the public consciousness, and was one of the first examples of making Internet memes profitable. Now, the site ICHC is community based, with users submitting posts and rating each others’ submissions from 1 to 5 “cheezburgers”. In 2008, ICHC was averaging about 2 million page views per day.

From there, Internet memes continued to evolve throughout the early 2000s and 2010s, as Social Media began to expand, and more platforms began to emerge. In 2006, Facebook became available to anyone 13 or older with a valid email address.

Many early memes became popularized via Facebook. In 2005, YouTube was released, which allowed for the spread of popular videos, and “Rick Roll-ing” emerged as a trend. In 2006, Twitter was released, and in 2007, Tumblr. Vine briefly but powerfully left an impact on the meme scene from 2012 - 2016 (RIP Vine), and of course, in 2018, Tik Tok became available worldwide, quickly becoming the latest popular social network.

Modern memes have come a long way since the Dancing Baby or Dancing Hamsters of the late 90s and early 00s. Memes will continue to evolve, but cats, dancing animals, and dancing babies will never cease to entertain us.