lolcat Concepts

Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters

by Joanna Walsh · 22 Sep 2025 · 255pp · 80,203 words

viiIt’s all aesthetics . . . do you even know what aesthetics is?viii is blank Elliot Stevens, lockdown 2020 ix Contents 2004: Amateurs 2007: Our Aesthetic LOLcats 2011: The Old Aesthetic 2001: Decuperation Loops 2023: The SunDALL·E Painters of the Internet 2014: Selfies 2020: Wikidentities 2015: In Praise of the Trash

…

fact are liable to make them despise material concerns’?25 Let’s find out. 27 2007: Our Aesthetic LOLcats I thought, this game Takes precedence over work Virgil, Eclogues Around the time the LOLcat site icanhascheezburger.com debuted in 2007, the American critic Sianne Ngai began to define Our Aesthetic Categories in

…

the commercial commodity with the commodified self in an aesthetic of consumption. Despite its publication year, Ngai’s book was not about the internet. A LOLcat, for anyone who’s been on a media-free retreat for the last twenty years, is a photo of a cute cat (or cats) accompanied

…

in wonky, zany English. It’s an image macro, a mutable combination of picture and text passed round the internet on forums and social media. LOLcats are the paradigm of early-internet creative practice, exemplifying the net’s links between aesthetics and economics, and Ngai’s aesthetic categories are key to

…

the term meme in The Selfish Gene (1976): ‘a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation’. LOLcats’ evolutionary unit of imitation is linguistic. The images don’t change much, but the initial ‘I can has cheezburger?’ rhizomed into ‘I can has X

…

?’, then, ‘I can no have Y?’, then departed from the original phrase altogether, though its recognisability as a LOLcat has come to rely less on the initial phrase than on an identifiable style of writing – LOLspeak – that also relates to the languages of other

…

29is meming. The game is that the user changes an aspect of the work but the overall meme remains governed by a defined, evolving, aesthetic: LOLcats’ font is usually recognisably blocky and frames the photo, top and base. The style of photography is visibly amateur and (rarely used) Photoshopped elements are

…

users but profited via ads that relied on site traffic, which had already doubled after Nakagawa added a rating function: visitors could not only post LOLcats but score them out of five, voting the top macros by awarding them ‘cheezburgers’.3 Judgement is what makes aesthetic categories ours. In our online

…

meming uses aesthetics to grow a community, the community, as much as the image produced, is the work. 30But the LOLcats community did not start with Cheezburger. The origin of LOLcats as an amateur and spontaneous practice is claimed by 4chan’s Caturday, which began in in 2005. Christopher Poole, a.k

…

ways. Of the Cheezburger creators, Unebasami remained anonymous for longest, posting under the name Tofuburger until April 2008, after threats from 4chan members who considered LOLcats their exclusive creation. Unebasami is a woman, and 4chan was already well known for misogynist hate campaigns, the most notorious being the subsequent 2014–15

…

women in the games industry with rape and murder threats, during which haters were protected by their anonymity. In 2009, Huh admitted: ‘The origin of LOLcats came from an Internet forum called 4chan, which is a NSFW [not safe for work] place. And these images over the year had made it

…

, but they also draw attention to the gap between understanding and language with their noticeable faults. Like the creative response provoked by the sublime, a LOLcat figures what cannot be figured. Or, rather, it performs this non-configuration, displacing meaning into an opaque image-text interplay that incites repetition, in order

…

creative translation. Ngai’s stuplimity, ‘undermining conventional patterns of grammar, syntax, and sense, threatens the limits of self by challenging its capacity for response’.20 LOLcats may be ‘dumb’, but their stuplime language both demands and defies response. If they ask a question, it is rhetorical, or just plain orthogonal. 40Their

…

language basically through Internet, which hasn’t really happened before’. As Lolspeak is a purely written language, ‘when people ask me to read aloud a lolcat caption, I actually decline to do so, because I don’t want to ruin what they have in their heads’.23 There are no personal

…

no doubt they are host to some of what Ngai called ‘ugly feelings’. If LOLspeak is a pidgin, who are the LOLcats workers, and who is the boss? If LOLcats invite the mild aesthetic engagement of liking, they also rely on the idea of a cat behaving and speaking like a human

…

. LOLcats speak a language that is like standard English, but rather more like that of non-standard English, L2 (second-language), or cultural minority speakers. Ngai’

…

aesthetic, legitimising the repetition of similarly retro attitudes and giving racism a free pass. There’s no getting round the fact that several strands of LOLcats are part of this discourse. This decontextualised online repetition of phrases associated with racialised or second-language English-speakers is typically used in reaction memes

…

indicates not so much a surplus feeling as the performance of a surplus desire to feel, creating an aesthetic that could be called affectiness. A LOLcat from cheezburger.com (the phrase doesn’t change for this sub-meme, but the photo does). The ‘Oh Lawd He comin’ ’ meme typically celebrates ‘chonk

…

are not always fun – or rather, they are fun as an expression of power. If Ngai’s zany responded to work by becoming its expression, LOLcats’ response is very different. Its brand of fun is lethargic, disinterested, uninterested: like Melville’s slacker antihero Bartleby, it would prefer not to. Shortly after

…

talking not only about play as opposed to work but about Kantian free play – purposive purposelessness – that is at the root of all aesthetic acts. LOLcats answer both these meanings, and their play between text and image (and within the text) evokes another meaning of play – play as the elasticity of

…

a situation. LOLcats’ humour hinges on their difference and repetition, both the internal friction between text and image, and their presence within online structures. They depend for their

…

meaning on interplay with other LOLcats, but also on their position in a larger internet landscape, in which cute LOLcats are the opposite of what’s termed Not Safe For Work. NSFW itself depended on the meatspace situation in

…

place in a non-sexual space. The existence of NSFW implies that work is a safe space. The kind of pleasure LOLcats give is very ‘safe for work’, because posting LOLcats is something people do at work. NSFW sets up work as the paradigm of existence and tells us that it is

…

outside. What is outside work? Everything that is not LOLcats, which are made on breaks from work. What is work then? Everything that is not not safe for work. Work is a space that needs

…

. Where once leisure was a sacred space, now work is. Where once we worked to be at leisure, now we make fun memes at work. LOLcats were made to be consumed at work, in timed comfort breaks, in secretly open windows, which were just as secretly allowed – though it was a

…

secret everyone knew, generating a guilty pleasure that kept us on the job. Flarf was founded as a kind of poetry LOLcats but its vibe is very different. Founder Gary Sullivan proposed Flarf as NSFW: ‘Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. Not okay.’ Operating via image

…

essentially a form of play, a way of “fucking around on the man’s dime”.’32 This might be the literal dime, like workers making LOLcats when they could be on a smoke break. It might be the poetry dime (as even poetry has economic structures), or just the evoked general

…

dimeyness of life. Flarf may be opposed to work, but it is not integrated into work as LOLcats are. Just as work and NSFW recursively embed each other, Ngai links the graspable cute to the abject shit, via externalised objects which must be

…

poomoji, as it appears on Twemoji, for use on Twitter, Discord, Roblox, Nintendo Switch and others. Source: Wikicommons 47Let’s face it: work in the LOLcats era might have been shit, but by today’s standards, it was cute. And work has got both cuter and less safe. If

…

LOLcats-era work was the discourse, LOLcats were its legitimising internal commentary. If ‘the aesthetics of the sublime is’, as the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard wrote, ‘indeterminate: a pleasure

…

mixed with pain, a pleasure that comes from pain’, then LOLcats are a minor expression of a minor pain.33 Why is their expression of pain so cute? Because it is a reaction to an ‘absolutely

…

large object’ – what Timothy Morton has called a ‘hyperobject’ – that was at the same time completely underwhelming: the old-timey office. Old-timey because LOLcats were founded in a world of work that was already becoming obsolete: The Simpsons’ world, where one low-grade, yellow-collar wage could support a

…

the legacy-media world that show inhabits, as it was made in an era when that sort of job was rapidly being replaced. Our aesthetic LOLcats point at the idea of community outside their online networks, or at the idea of work displaced in time as well as space (nostalgia for

…

centres worldwide are a front for the traditional sweatshops where the components they rely on are mostly manufactured. There is nothing virtual about the virtual. LOLcats are not so much an expression of the refusal of work as a desire to be at work, but at a leisurely pace, uncommitted, painfully

…

pleasurable. LOLcats are not a violent revolution but a go-slow or, in its more contemporary iterations: quiet quitting, bullshit jobs, lazy-girl careers, #fails. Cheezburger’s

…

jump cuts of YouTube ad breaks, or new ways of telling on amateur TikTok? Because of their avowed triviality, it would be easy to see LOLcats as works that, as Rancière writes, ‘play on the indiscernibility between works of art and objects or icons of commerce,’ and so ‘represent the nihilist

…

the opposite of commercial: made for free, by amateurs, initially on non-commercial platforms, the sort of play involved in making LOLcats utilises distraction as a reclamation of free time. LOLcats may not look like what Rancière calls ‘social art’ that, eliminating the boundaries between art and life, eliminates itself in the

…

‘by effacing its difference as art, becomes a form of life’ – but, in their creation of communities, they are.38 The freely given content of LOLcats aims at content: Huh said that his sites are ‘creating content that makes people happy for just a few minutes a day’.39 Emotionally, ‘content

…

distraction, but is an ‘aesthetic category’ nonetheless, an aesthetic characterised not by what it ‘means’ or ‘looks like’ but what it does – or rather, in LOLcats’ case, doesn’t do. ~ 50I’ve often seen ‘I CAN HAZ . . . ?’ misquoted as ‘CAN I HAZ . . . ?’ Reading the sentence as a pure question makes sense

…

like to serve us, the kind that poses as ever-new, that seems to offer a solution to the problems it has, itself, dealt us. LOLcats may not be art, but they are interesting, Ngai’s persistently minor aesthetic whose hermetic ‘free play’ allows them to, as Rancière wrote, take ‘up

…

a combat against culture’.40 The worker who produces LOLcats creates a holding space of refusal, a collaborative minor claim on their – on our – own time. Of all Ngai’s claims about cute, zany and

…

formed via shared creative practice and aesthetic judgement. Playing out far beyond funny cat memes, this internet-native practice was born and raised with LOLcats. Though still popular, LOLcats, like the work situation that gave birth to them, are old enough to be internet history. Meanwhile, new image macros provide updated cute

…

it might be an insurance-comparison site. Nakagawa now works developing sustainable blockchain. Unebasami is a baker and pastry cook. Ben Huh, who claims that LOLcats facilitated ‘a shift in the way people perceived entertainment’, is allergic to cats.42 52 2011: The Old Aesthetic Whatever you now find weird, ugly

…

, eds, Voices of the People: The Social Life of ‘La Sociale’ at the End of the Second Empire (Routledge, 1988), p. 50. 2007: Our Aesthetic LOLcats 1.A common Lolspeak emphatic, implying that the writer was feeling so zany that they were unable to stop typing exclamation marks after taking their

…

, ‘Big Omaha – Ben Huh: “Things That Excite Us Are Things That Would Make Other People Cringe” ’, Silicon Prairie News, 12 May 2011. 21.Jenna Wortham, ‘Lolcat Guys Squeeze Laughs Out of Graphs’, Wired, 27 March 2008. 22.Ward, ‘Icanhascheezburger.com CEO Ben Huh Talks!’. 23.J. L. Green, Digital Blackface: The

…

. 545. 35.Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention (Verso, 2024), p. 18. 36.Rancière, Aesthetics and its Discontents, p. 20. 37.Ibid., p. 36. 38.Andrew LaVallee, ‘LOLcats CEO on Failure: “Part of Our Culture” ’, Wall Street Journal, 12 October 2009. 39.Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, p. 43. 40.‘Hungry but Too

…

Nast, 204 Consensys, 213 consumer aesthetics, 154–5 consumer choice, and identity, 162 consumers, 15 content conceptualisation, 53, 177–8 and form, 35 content creation, LOLcats, 49 content-as-style, 185–6, 186–7 contingent identities, 167 copies, 31 copyleft, 115 copyright, 33–4, 35, 79, 115–16 evading, 81 online

…

, 147, 148 lack, feminine performance of, 136–46, 137 LAION, 118–19 Land, Nick, 91–2, 94 language, and AI art, 123–4 language use LOLcats, 39–41 racialised, 41–2 large companies, domination of the internet, 219–20 L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (film), restoration

…

Les Immatériaux (exhibition), 209 Lettrism, 161 libertarianism, 7 lifestyle journalism, 188 likes, 2, 28 Linux, 215–16257 Liszewski, Andrew, 108 LiveJournal, 215–16 liveness, 97 LOLcats, 27, 27–9, 50 aesthetic appreciation of, 38–41, 39 aesthetic reactions, 28 avowed triviality, 49 and content creation, 49 language use, 39–41, 42

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

by Gretchen McCulloch · 22 Jul 2019 · 413pp · 106,479 words

feature to prove a point about how annoying repetitive images were. Instead, people loved them. A further macro came with an even more popular meme: lolcats. People started sharing pictures of blissed-out cats with overlaid text on the anonymous forum 4chan starting in 2005, in a Saturday celebration of cats

…

known as “Caturday,” and the lolcat phenomenon eventually occasioned articles everywhere from academic journals to Time magazine. Like the earlier memes, the first lolcats had their text added manually, using graphics programs like Photoshop and Microsoft Paint. As

…

lolcats became popular, so did a second kind of timesaving macro, which would place the text automatically on the base image

…

white Impact font (a brilliant innovation in automatic caption generation because it stands out easily no matter what colors or patterns are behind it). Making lolcat generation easier became controversial. Putting text on top of an image had formerly required a certain amount of technical knowledge of photo-editing software. Now

…

some “insiders.” Technologist Kate Miltner documented this split among two kinds of lolcat fans in the late 2000s. Self-described MemeGeeks had liked the early kind of lolcats on 4chan but had moved on to other memes, like Advice Animals, as lolcats became more popular and easier to create. Self-described Cheezfriends, on

…

Has Cheezburger and demonstrated their community membership through fluency in the stylized lolspeak itself, rather than technical prowess creating the memes. At peak lolcat, posters on the lolcat forums at I Can Has Cheezburger would type entire messages to each other in lolspeak, and it was easy for them to linguistically tell

…

the true Cheezfriends, even without any cat images to help. Rather than dive into old Cheezburger forum posts, let’s look at the closest thing lolcat has to a peer-reviewed text: a translation of the Bible into lolspeak. It was written collaboratively on a wiki, with multiple authors contributing and

…

An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1 Practically every single word in this excerpt is a reference to something. “Oh hai” is from one lolcat meme. “Teh” is early internet slang. Ceiling Cat is a specific cat in another meme. “Maded” and “eated” are from the “I made you a

…

of fellow insiders. This community was about to get a lot bigger. The meme generation websites that had popped up towards the end of the lolcat meme brought in a whole wave of new animal memes from 2008 to 2014. These Advice Animal memes contained a stock character archetype in the

…

Cat is a cat with a characteristically unamused facial expression. What was interesting about Advice Animals was how they democratized and fragmented the meme space. Lolcat was based around a more or less unified set of linguistic references, a single kitteh grammar of “oh hai” and “I can has” and “k

…

linguists to spread the meme very far. Despite how much our fish meme, uh, flopped, it was an important milestone for me. I’d encountered lolcats and participated in text-based memes before, such as “answer a list of questions and tag some friends to do the same,” but if I

…

’d known anyone who was originating image memes, they weren’t going to tell me about it. Lolcats were made by people “out there” on the internet, and the most I could do to participate was imitate the language; Advice Animals were the

…

later, a different college freshman claiming that the students only a year older don’t truly understand memes? (Both students were mere children during Peak Lolcat in 2007, and neither of them was even born when Mike Godwin started seeding counter-Nazi memes on Usenet in 1990, if we want to

…

really put our harrumphing hats on.) It doesn’t make sense if we think of memes as a single, unified phenomenon. True, lolcats and Godwin’s Law are now historical memes, but there were certainly remixed images and texts and videos of various kinds that were being shared

…

throughout these years. In fact, a new category of image meme was born during this very time period: where the animal-based memes from lolcat to snek used superimposed text to narrate the interior monologue of the animal, the newer memes used superimposed text to label objects in some sort

…

personal claim on internet culture. But what exactly am I claiming? I reproduced this particular meme in this particular format, rather than, say, painting a lolcat, because it fascinates me in its juxtaposition of old and new, of oral culture and digital culture, of domestic and profane, of the aspiration to

…

every meme that crossed my Twitter feed while I was supposed to be writing.) The Library of Congress archives memes now, preserving things like the Lolcat Bible, Urban Dictionary, and Know Your Meme. It calls them, charmingly and also not entirely inaccurately, “folklore.” There are people with full-time jobs in

…

Shifman. 2014. Memes in Digital Culture. MIT Press. Rather than re-uploading: Bill Lefurgy. May 28, 2012. “What Is the Best Term to Categorize a Lolcat Image and Text?” English Language & Usage Stack Exchange. english.stackexchange.com/questions/69210/what-is-the-best-term-to-categorize-a

…

-lolcat-image-and-text. Hugo. September 11, 2008. “Antedatings of ‘image macro.’” LINGUIST List. listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2013-September/128420.html, via Ben

…

86(4). pp. 454–479. People started sharing pictures: Lev Grossman. July 16, 2007. “Lolcats Addendum: Where I Got the Story Wrong.” Techland, Time. techland.time.com/2007/07/16/lolcats_addendum_where_i_got_t/. the lolcat phenomenon: Lev Grossman. July 12, 2007. “Creating a Cute Cat Frenzy.” Time. content.time.com

…

: ‘The Meme Font.’” Journal of Visual Culture 13(3). pp. 307–313. Technologist Kate Miltner: Kate Miltner. 2014. “There’s No Place For Lulz on LOLCats: The Role of Genre, Gender, and Group Identity in the Interpretation and Enjoyment of an Internet Meme.” First Monday 19(8). www.ojphi.org/ojs

…

and Mechanical College. assets.documentcloud.org/documents/282753/lefler-thesis.pdf. Aliza Rosen. 2010. “Iz in Ur Meme / Aminalizin Teh Langwich: A Linguistic Study of LOLcats.” Verge 7. mdsoar.org/bitstream/handle/11603/2606/Verge_7_Rosen.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. pondered the quotes: triscodeca. June 26, 2000. Quoteland forums

…

cohort, 95 and Semi Internet People cohort, 90–91 social lubricant function of, 125 Urban Dictionary on, 136, 137 Wired Style’s discussion of, 87 lolcats, 241–44, 246 Lost Memories Dot Net, 79 lowercase. See case Lowth, Robert, 44 Luther, Martin, 257–58 macros for posting images, 241 manicules, 174

…

and in-group status, 230, 249–50, 258 and internet culture, 239–41, 250, 252, 258–59, 263–64 and Know Your Meme website, 250 lolcats, 241–44, 246 and macros for posting images, 241 and presidential election of 2016, 250–51 scholarly studies of, 250, 259–60 shifting to next

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age

by Clay Shirky · 9 Jun 2010 · 236pp · 66,081 words

countless pieces of throwaway work, created with little effort, and targeting no positive effect greater than crude humor. The canonical example at present is the lolcat, a cute picture of a cat that is made even cuter by the addition of a cute caption, the ideal effect of “cat plus caption

…

” being to make the viewer laugh out loud (thus putting the lol in lolcat). The largest collection of such images is a website called ICanHasCheezburger.com, named after its inaugural image: a gray cat, mouth open, staring maniacally, bearing

…

the caption “I Can Has Cheezburger?” (Lolcats are notoriously poor spellers.) ICanHasCheezburger.com has more than three thousand lolcat images—“i have bad day,” “im steelin som ur foodz k thx bai,” “BANDIT CAT JUST ATED UR BURRITOZ”—each

…

hundreds of comments, also written in lolspeak. We are far from Ushahidi now. Let’s nominate the process of making a lolcat as the stupidest possible creative act. (There are other candidates, of course, but lolcats will do as a general case.) Formed quickly and with a minimum of craft, the average

…

lolcat image has the social value of a whoopee cushion and the cultural life span of a mayfly. Yet anyone seeing a lolcat gets a second, related message: You can

…

play this game too. Precisely because lolcats are so transparently created, anyone can add a dopey caption to an image of a cute cat (or

…

dog, or hamster, or walrus—Cheezburger is an equal-opportunity time waster) and then share that creation with the world. Lolcat images, dumb as they are, have internally consistent rules, everything from “Captions should be spelled phonetically” to “The lettering should use a sans-serif font

…

.” Even at the stipulated depths of stupidity, in other words, there are ways to do a lolcat wrong, which means there are ways to do it right, which means there is some metric of quality, even if limited. However little the world

…

needs the next lolcat, the message You can play this game too is a change from what we’re used to in the media landscape. The stupidest possible creative

…

act is still a creative act. Much of the objection to lolcats focuses on how stupid they are; even a funny lolcat doesn’t amount to much. On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and the good is

…

on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something, and someone making lolcats has bridged that gap. As long as the assumed purpose of media is to allow ordinary people to consume professionally created material, the proliferation of

…

amateur-created stuff will seem incomprehensible. What amateurs do is so, well, unprofessional—lolcats as a kind of low-grade substitute for the Cartoon Network. But what if, all this time, providing professional content isn’t the only job

…

in the sharing. The phrase “user-generated content,” the current label for creative acts by amateurs, really describes not just personal but also social acts. Lolcats aren’t just user-generated, they are user-shared. The sharing, in fact, is what makes the making fun—no one would create a

…

lolcat to keep for themselves. The atomization of social life in the twentieth century left us so far removed from participatory culture that when it came

…

to make us laugh, then in some ways the Cartoon Network is a low-grade substitute for lolcats. MORE IS DIFFERENT When one is surveying a new cultural effusion like Wikipedia or Ushahidi or lolcats, answering the question Where do people find the time? is surprisingly easy. We have always found the

…

like or care about. Those two facts are common to every story in this book, from inspirational work like Ushahidi to mere self-amusement like lolcats. Understanding those two changes, as different as they are from the media landscape of the twentieth century, is just the beginning of understanding what is

…

not of much use for society at large) and how much of it will be civic. (You can think of communal versus civic as paralleling lolcats versus Ushahidi.) After I address means, motive, and opportunity in chapters 2-4, the subsequent two chapters take up these questions of user culture and

…

’re using a concept from professional media to refer to amateur behaviors, but amateurs’ motivations differ from those of professionals. If ICanHasCheezburger.com, purveyor of lolcats, is a late-model version of the fifteenth-century publishing model, then the fact that its workers are contributing their labor unpaid is not just

…

place, and why would the Grobanites for Charity create a separate entity for themselves even though the Josh Groban Foundation already existed? This isn’t lolcats; running Grobanites for Charity is hard work, and not only are the participants unpaid, they’re putting their own money into the effort. Of all

…

sense of membership, but something designed by an amateur can actually create better conditions of membership than a professional design can, in the same way lolcats sends the message You can play this game too. As an analogy, consider the kinds of kitchens you see in photographs in House Beautiful and

…

rather than inclusion in any formal publication. Digital folk art often takes the form of a mashup, the combination of existing materials into something new. (Lolcats is an example of a mashup: a person adds a caption to an existing picture.) Digital folk art has existed almost as long as computers

…

like Pramod Muthali, who object in principle to that kind of freedom). These different kinds of participation don’t mean that we should never have lolcats and fan fiction communities—it’s just that anything at the personal and communal end of the spectrum isn’t in much danger of going

…

Colleges doing the hard work of creating many kinds of public and civic value—or we can settle for Invisible High School, where we get lolcats but no open source software, fan fiction but no improvement in medical research. The Invisible High School is already widespread, and our ability to participate

…

uses. The world is becoming well provisioned with sources of personal and communal value, value mainly created and captured by the participants. Down at the lolcats end of the spectrum, the current experimentation is unlikely to stop anytime soon. At the civic end of the spectrum, though, we can’t count

…

Kenya Kenyan Pundit blog Kingston, Maxine Hong Kiva.org KOAM.com Kobia, David Lahore, Pakistan Leadbeater, Charlie Lee Myung-bak Lenin, Vladimir Linux operating system lolcats London, England looky-loos Lou Gehrig’s disease Luther, Martin mailing lists making and sharing broadcast media versus social media consumption versus free time and

…

lolcat images and motivation for wider distribution of See also social production Mangalore, India markets communal sharing versus crash of 1987, emotional components of transactions motivation

…

contagion social media adapting broadcast media versus connectedness and coordination and dynamics of growth and effective group performance and intrinsic motivation and launching limits on lolcats membership and sharing and PickupPal pooled free time and public address and quality of publication and rules versus design and scale and social contagion and

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web

by Cole Stryker · 14 Jun 2011 · 226pp · 71,540 words

. Ask a fifteen-year-old what a meme is and he or she will probably say something along the lines of, “Have you ever seen lolcats? What about Antoine Dodson? Double Rainbow?” They’ll rattle off Internet ephemera until you recognize something. That’s because today the word meme is shorthand

…

increasingly intertwined. It’s difficult to pinpoint a precise time when the word meme started to refer to bits of Internet-borne cultural iconography, like lolcats. I’d guess that Richard Dawkins would scoff at the bastardization of his term, especially since he distanced himself from it before the Internet ever

…

, the moment when Internet ephemera became solidified in the mainstream. When people ask me what memes are I usually respond, “Have you ever heard of lolcats? You know, those funny cat photos with the misspelled captions?” If that doesn’t work, I’ll say, “How about Antoine Dodson? That guy from

…

’s a new stage in human social evolution! Look at all the cool stuff the Internet lets us do! In Cognitive Dissonance, Shirky uses the lolcats found at http://www.icanhascheezburger.com as a convenient representative for what he calls “the stupidest possible creative act,” as opposed to, say, improving a

…

so radically different from what we were capable of doing in the twentieth century, that even a lolcat, one of the stupidest creative acts, is still a creative act. Clay explains that we regard lolcats as an inexplicable novelty because the network on which they happen is so new. But the drive

…

are into video games, /v/ is often plagued by the most banal discourse. This board is also incidentally famous for launching the Rickrolling meme. After lolcats, the most recognizable 4chan meme is undoubtedly Rickrolling. It was a happy accident. moot instituted a wordfilter which changed the word egg to duck, so

…

defining obsessions. If I come across someone who’s never heard of Internet memes, the first thing I usually say is, “Have you ever seen lolcats?” That’s because it’s not only the biggest thing to come out of 4chan, it’s the undisputed biggest Internet meme. Here’s the

…

broken English coupled with the inherent cuteness of the cat images made for a viral phenomenon. lolcats were dumb, catchy, and approachable enough that anyone could pick up on the humor after seeing a few. lolcats first showed up on 4chan in 2005 as a cute joke contrasting with the site’s

…

usual stream of gross-out content, but they did not achieve cultural ubiquity until 2007, when Ben Huh bought http://www.icanhazcheezburger.com and formed the site around lolcats. Now there are

…

millions of lolcat images all over the web, generating millions of dollars. And it all came from /b/’s “Caturday” tradition of posting cute captioned

…

kind of depressing, partially because the stuff that’s making money is a lot of the dumbest stuff, the worst of “Internet humor,” like the lolcat shit. Another reason it’s depressing is because I’m not one of the people making money off it. Thorpe points to the creation of

…

to be popular on Something Awful but have since died out due to their mainstream popularity. These are basically images with text plastered on top; lolcats are the most popular example. They were called macros because it used to be possible to post popular ones by typing a code in the

…

output sequences. In this case, code in, funny photo out. Eventually, they developed into what a lot of people would call memes, like all the lolcat stuff. A good example of SA’s influence on that development was that my friend Jon, another writer for Something Awful, made this picture of

…

caption “How do I shot web?” That was one of the first examples of the kind of broken language thing that slowly evolved into the lolcat phenomenon. Jon is pretty ashamed to have indirectly influenced the development of something so idiotic. How Do I Shot Web is a massively popular meme

…

. 4chan’s Eternal September Moment If one had to pick an eternal September period for 4chan, it began in 2007. That was the year of lolcats and Tay “Chocolate Rain” Zonday. Most importantly, it was the year of the Internet Hate Machine. A Los Angeles Fox affiliate put together a breathless

…

Bevy of Memes.” The article followed the template for 4chan exposés, starting off with a brief introduction to memes (e.g., Have you seen these lolcats things the kids are into?), easing into 4chan culture, highlighting Anonymous, and dropping a few quotes from eggheads and anons that demonstrate the surprising influence

…

Has Cheezburger?” and eventually launched a media empire. The image was originally posted to Something Awful in the tradition of 4chan’s lolcats. A blogger named Eric Nakagawa thought the lolcat was hilarious, so he created a blog to document funny cat photos. Meanwhile, in Seattle, a start-up kid named Ben

…

Hands. About 9,000 years ago, humans started painting images of their favorite food there, the guanaco. It’s like a llama. It’s no lolcat, but they’re cute. Then, about 7,000 years ago, something happened. People started putting up hand stencils. You’d put one hand up on

Natural language processing with Python

by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein and Edward Loper · 15 Dec 2009 · 504pp · 89,238 words

3.5. The post is at http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002733.html. ◑ Study the lolcat version of the book of Genesis, accessible as nltk.corpus.gene sis.words('lolcat.txt'), and the rules for converting text into lolspeak at http:// www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=How_to

…

_speak_lolcat. Define regular expressions to convert English words into corresponding lolspeak words. ◑ Read about the re.sub() function for string substitution using regular expressions, using help(

…

to w and an empty dictionary to p. After calling the function, w is unchanged, while p is changed: >>> def set_up(word, properties): ... word = 'lolcat' ... properties.append('noun') ... properties = 5 ... >>> w = '' >>> p = [] >>> set_up(w, p) >>> w '' >>> p ['noun'] Notice that w was not changed by the function. When we

…

was modified. However, that change did not propagate to w. This parameter passing is identical to the following sequence of assignments: >>> >>> >>> >>> '' w = '' word = w word = 'lolcat' w Let’s look at what happened with the list p. When we called set_up(w, p), the value of p (a reference to

…

=[]): ... for word in text: ... if len(word) == wordlength: ... result.append(word) ... return result >>> find_words(['omg', 'teh', 'lolcat', 'sitted', ['omg', 'teh', 'teh', 'mat'] >>> find_words(['omg', 'teh', 'lolcat', 'sitted', ['ur', 'on'] >>> find_words(['omg', 'teh', 'lolcat', 'sitted', ['omg', 'teh', 'teh', 'mat', 'omg', 'teh', 'teh', 'on', 'teh', 'mat'], 3) 'on', 'teh', 'mat'], 2, ['ur

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

by Evgeny Morozov · 16 Nov 2010 · 538pp · 141,822 words

Killed the Soviet Union? Hold On to Your Data Grenade, Comrade! When the Radio Waves Seemed Mightier Than the Tanks chapter three - Orwell’s Favorite Lolcat How Cable Undermines Democracy The Denver Clan Conquers East Berlin The Opium of the Masses: Made in GDR Watching Avatar in Havana Online Discontents and

…

’t hurt that, contrary to the expectations of many in the West, certain kinds of information could actually strengthen them. chapter three Orwell’s Favorite Lolcat “The Tits Show” sounds like a promising name for a weekly Internet show. Hosted by Russia.ru, Russia’s pioneering experiment in Internet television supported

…

have been shuttling between Palo Alto and Long Beach by way of TED talks. Whom exactly do we expect to lead this digital revolution? The lolcats? If anything, the Internet makes it harder, not easier, to get people to care, if only because the alternatives to political action are so much

…

. By their sheer haplessness or misjudgment, they did let the Internet in, but instead of blogs ridiculing government propaganda, it’s the goofy websites like lolcats that their youth are most interested in. (Rest assured: Soon enough, some think-tank report will announce that the age of “feline authoritarianism” is upon

…

turned “amateur” activists into easier targets for surveillance. While there is nothing we in the West can do about the growing appeal of YouTube and lolcats—online entertainment is poised to remain an important, if indirect, weapon in the authoritarian arsenal—it’s possible to do something about each of those

…

theory Liberation by gadgets theory LinkedIn Lippmann, Walter Literature Liu Xiaobo Liu Zhengrong LiveJournal The Lives of Others (film) Logic The Logic of Failure (Dörner) Lolcats Luna, Riccardo Lynch, Marc MacKinnon, Rebecca Madison, Elliot Malkin, Michelle Mandelson, Peter Manhattan Project Mao Zedong Marconi, Guglielmo Marcuse, Herbert Marketing Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

by Clive Thompson · 11 Sep 2013 · 397pp · 110,130 words

, but within a human range) to the extraterrestrial manipulations of Ralph Lauren. The precise moment that text-picture memes went mainstream was probably with the LOLcat—a picture of a cute animal layered with intentionally illiterate text. As the joke spread across the globe, pundits soon began castigating the

…

LOLcat as another example of the dumbing down of digital culture. But LOLcat-crafting skills can become quite powerful when applied to other areas—even as political speech. In China, visual creations

…

inventing rebuslike short forms of expression, for staying in ambient contact with the world. Technological habits that seem laughable (sending smiley-bedecked text messages; making LOLcats) turn out to also be world-changing (sending text messages to Ushahidi to manage a crisis; using captioned pictures to outwit Chinese censors). We’ll

…

–6 3-D design literacy, 111–13 video literacy, 94–105 location. See geolocation; mapping Loftus, Elizabeth, 24–25 Logo, 190–93 Logo Microworlds, 192 LOLcat-crafting, 108–9 Looxcie, 41 Los Angeles Times wikitorial, 159 Lost (TV show), 96 Lostpedia, 187 Luff, Paul, 213 Lunsford, Andrea, 66–68 Luria, Alexandr

…

of, 60–61, 63–64 Penny, Laurie, 77 Perry, Rick, 24 Phaedrus (Plato), 68–69, 118 photographic literacy, 105–10 filters, use of, 109–10 LOLcat-crafting, 108–9 photomanipulation, 105–8 political uses, 105–7, 109, 247–48 Photoshop, 107 Pinboard, 154–55 Pinterest, 221 Plato, 68, 117 pluralistic ignorance

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

by Steven Pinker · 1 Jan 2014 · 477pp · 106,069 words

the age of three, and errors such as I can has cheezburger and I are serious cat are so obvious that a popular Internet meme (LOLcats) facetiously attributes them to cats. But the “subject” and “verb” that have to agree are defined by branches in the tree, not words in the

…

a vast community of English speakers, who respect the rules without ever having to think about them. That’s why we laugh at Cookie Monster, LOLcats, and George W. Bush. A subset of these conventions are less widespread and natural, but they have become accepted by a smaller virtual community of

…

president write because of what he looks like, or because of what he or she looks like? Many purists claim that singular they is a LOLcat-worthy grammatical howler which is tolerated only as a sop to the women’s movement. According to this theory, the pronoun he is a perfectly

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous

by Gabriella Coleman · 4 Nov 2014 · 457pp · 126,996 words

forums ranging from anime to health and fitness, it is both the source of many of the Internet’s most beloved cultural artifacts (such as lolcats memes), and one of its most wretched hives of scum and villainy. The “Random” forum, also called “/b/,” teems with pornography, racial slurs, and a

…

content can even circulation beyond the board—to distant lands like the message board t community, reddit, bodybuilding.com, and, eventually, mass cultural awareness. Remember, Lolcats got their start on 4chan. Trolls, in particular, focus on the collective pursuit of epic wins—just one form of content among many. (To be

…

.gov.tn/ also. K-rad: http://www.pm.gov.tn and http://www.marchespublics.gov.tn/ DE-FUCKING-FACED! lafdie: btw mad props on the lolcats: http://www.pm.gov.tn/pm/index.php vvom: http://www.pm.gov.tn/pm/index.php BOOYA MOTHERFUCKERS A group of hackers had been

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx · 18 Nov 2025 · 642pp · 142,332 words

with its mouth agape, captured in the Impact font with the grammatically incorrect plea, “I Can Has Cheezburger?” The image became a template for countless “LOLcat” memes, inspiring an eponymous website dedicated to collecting and monetizing these jokes. Its companion site, Know Your Meme, became the definitive encyclopedia for tracking the

…

Uzi Vert, 182 Limbaugh, Rush, 67 Limp Bizkit, 16 Linklater, Richard, 92 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 174 lip-synching, 36 Liu Cixin, 245 Lohan, Lindsay, 48, 49 “LOLcat” memes, 59 Lollapalooza, 1, 2–3, 201 long tail theory, 52–53, 214 Loose Change (documentary), 56–57 Lopez, Jennifer, 115 Lorenz, Taylor, 180, 185

Collaborative Society

by Dariusz Jemielniak and Aleksandra Przegalinska · 18 Feb 2020 · 187pp · 50,083 words

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath

by Nicco Mele · 14 Apr 2013 · 270pp · 79,992 words

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency

by Parmy Olson · 5 Jun 2012 · 478pp · 149,810 words

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence

by John Brockman · 5 Oct 2015 · 481pp · 125,946 words

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations

by Nicholas Carr · 5 Sep 2016 · 391pp · 105,382 words

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

by Anthony M. Townsend · 29 Sep 2013 · 464pp · 127,283 words

Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language

by Adam Aleksic · 15 Jul 2025 · 278pp · 71,701 words

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech

by Sara Wachter-Boettcher · 9 Oct 2017 · 223pp · 60,909 words

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age

by Astra Taylor · 4 Mar 2014 · 283pp · 85,824 words

She Has Her Mother's Laugh

by Carl Zimmer · 29 May 2018

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral

by Ben Smith · 2 May 2023

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World

by James Ball · 19 Jul 2023 · 317pp · 87,048 words

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory

by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin · 1 Oct 2018

Cooking for Geeks

by Jeff Potter · 2 Aug 2010 · 728pp · 182,850 words

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac · 2 Sep 2019 · 444pp · 127,259 words

Technical Blogging: Turn Your Expertise Into a Remarkable Online Presence

by Antonio Cangiano · 15 Mar 2012 · 315pp · 85,791 words

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing

by Ed Finn · 10 Mar 2017 · 285pp · 86,853 words

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement

by Amy Lang and Daniel Lang/levitsky · 11 Jun 2012 · 537pp · 99,778 words

The Year Without Pants: Wordpress.com and the Future of Work

by Scott Berkun · 9 Sep 2013 · 361pp · 76,849 words

Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us Into Temptation

by Chris Nodder · 4 Jun 2013 · 254pp · 79,052 words

The Good, the Bad, and the Furry: Life With the World's Most Melancholy Cat

by Tom Cox · 9 Oct 2013 · 185pp · 62,502 words

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

by Benjamin H. Bratton · 19 Feb 2016 · 903pp · 235,753 words

Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup

by Brad Feld and David Cohen · 18 Oct 2010 · 326pp · 74,433 words

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet

by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers and Josh Levy · 30 Apr 2013 · 452pp · 134,502 words