The Sordid History of "I Can Has Cheezburger"

Imagine there's a village somewhere, where the children have come up with a new game. They create ornate little paper butterflies, often with lovely and amusing designs, and attach a clever winding mechanism to them that allows them to fly. The joy in the game is seeing these lovely butterflies randomly fly past you while you are going about your business, and finding them lying on the ground after their winding mechanisms have exhausted their energy, only to be sent airborne again by whoever finds them (and thus covering great distances.)

The game begins with only a few children, but soon many people around the village are inspired by it and join in with their own unique designs. Soon these butterflies can be seen far beyond the village where the game began.

One young man, who particularly enjoys the game, is unsatisfied by the spontaneous nature of it. Wouldn't it be great, he thinks, if there was a centralized location where ALL of these butterflies could be seen at any time? So he sets about creating a museum for the butterflies, which he populates both with butterflies he's found outside, and copies of butterflies that he's seen. This museum quickly becomes popular amongst people who want to see the butterflies but can't ever seem to find enough of them when they want to. As the museum gains in popularity, he sets up little workshops for people to create their own butterflies, of which a copy is always kept in the museum. The museum gains popularity exponentially as more people come and create more butterflies there, chiefly among people who had never heard of the butterflies before and got their own initial exposure to them through the museum.

One day, a traveling merchant passes through the village. Stumbling across the museum, and seeing the large crowds of people therein, he thinks what all people who have chosen the life of the merchant think in such situations - "Wow, I bet someone is making Serious Coin off of this!" After making inquiries the merchant is shocked - and delighted! - to find that the museum is being run for no profit at all. Sensing he is on the Ground Floor Of Something, the merchant takes aside the creator of the museum.

"Hey kid", says the merchant. "I'll pay you two million golds for the rights to this museum. Not only that, I'll cut you in on the profits we make from slapping advertising up all over the place. We'll even put little watermarks on all the butterflies we find, and the ones that people make here and take home with them, so everyone knows where they came from."

More or less, this is the story of I Can Has Cheezburger and the LOLcats phenomenon. Begun as a creative expression by people just seeking laughs and joy, it was inevitably cataloged by a devoted but misguided appreciator, and subsequently Capitalized by a sharp-eyed merchant sniffing profits in massive web traffic.

The butterfly parable is a bit problematic here, because the origins of LOLcats lie in 4chan, YTMND and the Something Awful forums, and none of these are generally regarded as places of joy or beauty. The phenomenon particularly picked up steam with 4Chan's "Caturday" tradition(1). 4Chan is a hotbed of internet memes, some of them harmless (Rickrolling), but many of them disturbing and creepy (Pedobear.) The site is also known less for joyful expressions of exuberance than it is for pulling together to ruin the lives of people they feel are "asking for it" through various means of public humiliation, and for sharing porn pics. Nevertheless, the core of the two stories is the same, and the whole incident serves as an interesting commentary on how we view the collective consensus of our social existence.

But first, the sources and the citations. Mainstream journalism seems to be allergic to any kind of investigation or legwork these days, and coverage of LOLcats to this point has mostly consisted of fluff pieces in "human interest" or "news of the weird" segments(2). Several pieces in prominent business magazines have been run, citing the savvy of making money off of these internet phenomenons while casting no critical eye whatsoever toward their origins(3).

The I Can Has Cheezburger "About" page does cite "4chan, fark, fazed, vwforums, gpforums" as the origins of the phenomenon, albeit in a backhanded and dismissive way. Interestingly, the About page doesn't seem to be linked at all from the main page (unless it's hidden between one of the 18,000 advertisements on the sidebar and I missed it.) I only learned of it from a posting on a related article, and had to find the actual URL through Googling. Why make it so inaccessible?

Interestingly, the original I Can Has Cheezburger image - cited on the hidden About page as being found in January of 2007 - is cited as featuring a cat from advertisements for Happycat, a Russian brand of cat food. The interesting story here is how Happycat, an obscure Russian cat food whose use of the Happycat image was discontinued years before the Cheezburger image was created, became popular enough in the Western world to become a meme in and of itself. The answer is found in a much darker meme called NEDM, short for "Not Even Doom Music". The NEDM meme began in mid-2005, when a video of a live cat being doused in gasoline and burned was uploaded to an internet "shock site" called Ogrish.com. The men who filmed the video were quickly traced and arrested, but the video spread from there to the YTMND website, where a minor civil war on the site quickly erupted over the posting of such extreme animal cruelty. The most viewed of the YTMND posts had added the sick touch of overlaying the "Bunny" song from the ending of the computer game Doom over the video. In response to a user who had voted up the video, and then commented that he only did so "because of the irony of using Doom music", an admin at YTMND responded by posting that " ... nothing justifies 5(star)'ing burning kittens. Not even Doom music." From the twisted bowels of the internet, a meme was born. The first NEDM site used a picture of Happycat as it's logo, thus bringing Happycat to public attention for the first time.

The point of all this? The initial I Can Has Cheezburger image stems from a kitten getting brutally murdered and then filmed for the sick enjoyment of the internet. If that never happens, the blog that your sweet gramma likes to guffaw over never comes into existence.

The I Can Has Cheezburger blog's "About" page claims that the original Happycat image was "eventually traced" to a posting on the Something Awful forums. They further claim they tried to contact the original poster, but did not receive a response. They don't make any claim about what the nature of that contact was. If they were asking for permission to use the image as the basis of a for-profit enterprise, we can assume that in absence of a response, they just decided it was OK rather than assuming the original creator would not want their idea essentially stolen from them for profit.

One would suppose that the creator of the original image might be able to bring a legal claim, if they were to surface and care to - but then, perhaps, if it wasn't a picture that person took themselves, the photographer of the original image might too. No one has surfaced to do so, and as such, everything the I Can Has Cheezburger blog has been doing appears to be perfectly legal. The interesting question raised by all this is not the legality, or whether someone is getting "ripped off", but what is viewed as socially acceptable - indeed, where the line is drawn between simple unprincipled opportunism and "business smarts."

Western capitalism is a system that demands infinite growth to survive, but frequently butts up against the realities of a finite universe. After all, there's only so many trees that can be cut down, fish that can be pulled out of the ocean, and space to safely store the toxic by-products of industrial processes. Once natural resources have been exploited to the fullest, or are wholly controlled by the biggest of the corporations, things that were normally regarded as free and in the public domain increasingly have to be pulled into the economy to be converted to money in lieu of unavailable tangible resources. Things like babysitting, midwifery, and basic health care, which in simpler times were seen as a reciprocal community function not to be charged profit on, are now a matter of industry, simply because the economic system demands an endless and ever increasing production of money, and everything that can possibly be converted to money eventually has to be dragged into it as people scramble to survive and prosper within it. So too with simple human interaction on the internet, just joking around and creating funny images for personal amusement. I Can Has Cheezburger's CEO Ben Huh has piggybacked on this dynamic with advertising to make a profit, but the telling sign of the times is that a joke blog like this even has a "CEO" to begin with.

Huh was the investor that bought the rights to I Can Has Cheezburger back in 2007, and has since run with the model of coralling internet memes that he didn't create (most of them stemming from 4chan) and branding them with the watermarks of his sites. Expansions of the blog that continue with this concept are Nostalgic Win and Once Upon A Win (an offshoot of the "For The Win" meme), Fail Blog and Fail Dogs (from the "You Fail It" meme), Engrish (from sites making fun of poorly translated English since the internet began, but most commonly the clearinghouse Engrish.com established in the 1990s), Tofulator (uses the ability to overlay comments on Youtube videos which are entirely off-site content), and This Is Photobomb (abstract reworking of the "This Is Sparta" meme.) Language used in all these blogs was also commonly popularized by 4chan, with the frequent use of terms like "shooped", "sauce" (in place of "source"), and "moar".

Notice a couple of similar themes here? The content in all of these sites is either unoriginal, or original content created by building on someone else's idea without first notifying them or getting their consent. The other theme is that the people making the epic amounts of money off of these sites are doing little to no work themselves - they're letting an unpaid user base do it for them, which is pretty much what the Web 2.0 business model is really all about.

The sharp division in perspective on this business model reflects a sharp division is social perspective. Adherists see it as "smart capitalism" and applaud Hu and the Cheezburger folks for co-opting and capitalizing on these concepts. "Either you do it first or you get it done to you" seems to be the rallying cry from this camp. Critics decry it as theft and cynical monetization. Among the most consistently aggrieved critics are those identifying themselves with the internet-based subculture Anonymous, which is strongly tied to 4chan. Made up largely of hackers, wannabe hackers and trolls, this is a group known for destroying people's lives simply "for the lulz", and not one whose territory you would usually want to tread on and pilfer from. Thus far there seems to have been little repercussion to the Cheezburger folks, however, who seem immune to social criticism and legal challenges. Almost as if to deliberately taunt Anon, the Cheezburger team has registered the URL "lulzftw.com" to promote their upcoming Cheezburger book, and have organized a yearly convention called ROFLcon in counter to the Anon/4chan community's annual Lulzcon.

What is socially acceptable ultimately comes down to social consensus, and the issue of LOLcats surprisingly puts this question to us. Do we venerate people who pilfer the spontaneous, freely given and freely expected creations of other people, and make a cynical ad-laden business out of it? Do we applaud them, confer upon them social status and financial privilege? Or do we laugh at them for their naked opportunism, the seemingly ridiculous lengths of their desire to do anything to become rich while avoiding having to do real work and create real value, and thus shame them into more honorable behavior? The response thus far has largely been the former.

Sources Cited:

(1) http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1821435-2,00.html
(2) http://www.gazette.com/articles/cat_25284___article.html/sites_web.html, http://www.slate.com/id/2166338/, http://www.wired.com/underwire/2008/04/behind-the-me-3/
(3) http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jul2007/sb20070713_202390.htm, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118798557326508182.html, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/business/21online.html?ex=1187668800&en=b63b5b4971bececb&ei=5070