There was an early 2000s meme of unknown provenance where people would dispute the authenticity of images by saying “This looks shopped. I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time.” And I’m not saying we should revive this for the deepfake boom, but what I am saying is that as lengthy debates about image authenticity come back in style, the keys to the kingdom await whoever can express skepticism in the dumbest-sounding way
what do you mean early 2000s. I say this at least once a month. you trying to say something about me
The only reason I haven’t put together a “favourite pre-2000 Internet meme” poll to complement all those “favourite 2000s Internet meme” ones is that nobody actually remembers when the 1990s ended and I know for a fact that the notes would just be a solid wall of people going “dude, you forgot X” and me replying “bro, X is from 2005”.
If you DO eventually do one, the dancing baby better be on there! That’s the first big internet “thing” I remember as a middle schooler back in the day. I remember having it on my computer and hearing about it on the news, and then it was on ally mcbeal. first “meme” I knew of in my internet life
An incomplete list of Internet memes that are actually from the 1990s:
All Your Base*
Colin Mochrie
Dancing Baby
Evil Bert
Hampster Dance
Mr. T Ate My Balls
Stick Death
* the phrase itself, but not the the viral text-to-speech video; the latter first appeared in June of 2000
An incomplete list of Internet memes which are popularly cited as 1990s memes which actually debuted in 2000 or later:
Annoying Thing/Crazy Frog (the sound clip of a guy making motor noises with his mouth is borrowed from an earlier meme, but the creature itself was created in 2003)
Chuck Norris Facts (popularised in 2005)
Hatten är din (the song is from 1981; the Swedish flash video that made it a meme is from 2000)
Homestar Runner (though the eponymous character existed as early as 1996, the webtoon series that spawned the associated memes just barely misses the cut, debuting in January of 2000)
O RLY? (though it’s uncertain precisely when the originating image macro was created, the owl photo it’s based on is not known to have been present online before 2001)
Real Ultimate Power (the website went live in 2002)
Tunak Tunak Tun (the song was published in 1998, but it didn’t achieve viral meme status until 2006)
YTMND (Finding Forrester did not exist in the 1990s)
i finally found the political cartoon they showed us in high school where nobody in the class, not even the teacher, understood what it was trying to say
I assume it’s about e-commerce stuff? Like, there are a bunch of customers with carts full of goods, but the hacker has them in his cart.
Someone needs to do an Elon!twitter update of this classic GamerGate meme of Vivian James, personification of video games, leading anons into exile, in which they’re coming back out of the desert as a conquering army, Muhammad-returns-to-Mecca style
Raceplay videos where they have to specify the identities with onscreen flags and you have no idea what the dynamic between those two means
Also, “white” signified by
the Stormfront logo, black being
the flag of the African Union, and “Good Night White Pride” iconography to represent black male/white female pairs as ethnic cucking. Oh my, this is rich
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