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By Root 813 0

if somewhat modestly, as an Internet meme of its own. It had emerged ex nihilo and found a sizeable audience within a single week. Antibuzz had not worked to stop buzz, but it had built buzz of its own, selling a peculiar brand of bitterness to adherents and detractors as well, all of whom paid repeated visits. If creating memes is a craft, then false controversy is a key ratchet in its chest of tools.

As it happens, there are many other wrenches to master. In chapter 3, we will examine the nascent craft of pure meme-making—that is, the creation of viral culture for no reason other than to see it spread—its growing crowd of practitioners, and the singular pleasures (and profits) to be found in this peculiarly twenty-first-century pursuit.

3.

I HAVE A MEME

EXPERIMENT: THE RIGHT-WING NEW YORK TIMES

MEME MACHINE

As our online culture is built, more and more, on short-lived sensations, this in turn changes how we make culture. How could it not? When one blog post (or MySpace song, or YouTube video) attracts ten times more traffic, or a hundred times more traffic, than all the others do, how can we help but scrutinize the popular one, hoping to divine some rules behind its sway? By the grace of the Internet’s constant churn, we are presented with an unending stream of such successes: every hour brings new tiny nanostories, little contagious spikes, to analyze and interpret and understand. This phenomenon is especially vivid on the “collaboratively filtered” information sites, communities where content is presented in ranked lists based on the real-time whims of the hive-mind; the three largest of these (Reddit, del.icio.us, and especially Digg) each can drive tens or even hundreds of thousands of visitors to the day’s top sites, leaving content creators to dream up the right formula—aka “Diggbait”—to draw the hordes in their direction.

Thus does online culture grope toward a particular sort of ideal: a meme ideal. And thus do culture-makers take on a new and distinctly contemporary role. They become what Richard Dawkins, following the meme/gene parallel to its natural conclusion, called “memetic engineers,” amateur experts who calibrate how to conceive, launch, and promote memes so as best to ensure their propagation. Some of the new engineering techniques are designed to operate on single terms, such as the “Google bomb”—a technique where confederated websites all collude to try to create a particular top ranking on a Google search. This technique was used by opponents of George W. Bush in making his official White House page come up as the top search result for the phrase “miserable failure”; similarly for Tony Blair and the word “liar.” After the former senator Rick Santorum delivered some appallingly homophobic remarks in an interview, his surname was turned into a sexual slang word, which a Google search for his last name today—long after he lost his reelection bid—still returns as the number-one result. Similar campaigns have been launched to create DIY memes, with the goal not just of conquering a Google term but of advancing an idea or selling oneself. Dan Savage, editor of the alt-weekly The Stranger and originator of the “santorum” campaign, also tried to start an anti-Bush meme called ITMFA (Impeach That Motherfucker Already), with results that one can only call mixed: it currently gets 118,000 results on Google, but as of this writing the MF remained regrettably un-I’ed.3

As commerce and culture have increasingly migrated online, the stakes in memetic engineering have heightened considerably, and our experiments have become less idle, more pointed. Every month we see new viral sensations, personalities like Ze Frank (host of his own online video show) or Amanda Congdon (from a news video site called Rocketboom) or Jessica Rose (the actress-star of the Lonelygirl15 videos), who parlay Internet stardom into a version of the real thing, and we scheme about how their path to fame might become our own. We see collaborative product sites like Threadless.com, where T-shirt designs compete to be sold