Rest in Peeves: The Death of Grumpy Cat
Grumpy Cat dies aged seven: 'Some days are grumpier than others'. A loss the meme world. Memes, what are they? Do they have some property that makes them reproduce more effectively than other ideas.
Things mentioned in this podcast:
- Guardian obituary
- The Independent’s ‘Top Ten Memes of All Time’
- Know Your Meme
- A Unified Theory of Meme Death
- Dancing Spiderman (not Ze Frank)
- Ze Frank
- The 'E Meme'
For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email podcast@alephinsights.com
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast, produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. And this week, sadly, we're discussing the death of Grumpy Cat. Peter, I think we're in safe hands with you. Tell us, lead us through what's happened.
Speaker B:Well, at this dark time of national mourning.
Speaker C:Yeah, these are dark times indeed. So Grumpy Cat, in case you've been living under a rock for the last 10 years, Grumpy Cat has been a source of many... He was seven when he died. Seven, okay. Well, he was the poster boy for the prevalent internet-based cat memes. And probably one of the peak memes in the last 10 years or so. So his real name was Tardarsauce, T-A-R-D-A-R, sauce. No wonder he was grumpy. Yeah, well, yeah, indeed. And the reason why he looked so odd, he suffered from feline dwarfism, which meant that he had short legs and a sort of contorted, shrunken face, which gave him this sort of grumpy appearance.
Speaker B:Is that okay, then? Is it okay to laugh at disabled cats?
Speaker C:According to those who knew him, he was just a perfectly normal cat.
Speaker A:He sounds like Nick, this cat.
Speaker C:The temperance of a normal cat, friendly and playful. But his appearance made him look like he was permanently frowning. So yeah, so he dies at age seven, great loss to the internet meme world. So what sparked in my mind was like, well, what are internet memes? What makes them so popular? What makes them so effective? And what makes some spread more... What makes some more prolific than others?
Speaker A:Okay. So at this point, I mean, what I have to confess is, well, let's answer that question, because I suspect you mean it in a more profound way than I want to say, but I don't really understand what a meme is. On one level, I do. It seems to me it's a thing that people talk about on the internet. It's a thing. But is that it? And if it is... It's a thing. I think we can do better than that. Help me out here, because I just, I see this word all the time. It's not so much that I don't understand it, but I would never feel comfortable using the word.
Speaker C: of meme was first posited in: Speaker A:Okay. So it doesn't have to pertain to the internet?
Speaker B: et was in Wired, Mike Godwin,: Speaker A:starting to become clear now. And I can see why in our podcast notes, we mentioned the word there, we talk about parasitism. And I can also see why. Yeah, why the internet fits with memes, right? Because it's such a sort of fast method of communication is such a network thing.
Speaker B:And I think the first one that I remember people talking about was the all your base are belong to us. Remember that one? All our what? All our base? Oh, come on. He's too young and you're too old. But the it was all our base. All your base are belong to us. How can you not know this? It was basically someone sort of rediscovered in the early 90s. I can't remember when it was about 94 95. A from an arcade game that there was this really funny mistranslation from Japanese to English and part of it involved this person saying all your base are belong to us. Okay, I'd looking any kind of very serious space looking guy and it was people thought it was funny and strung it together in a gif. And, and that was transmitted, you know, by email, people were sending it to each other and linking to websites and stuff. And that was the first one I really remember, you know, thinking, Oh, that's interesting. Like, this was the thing that no one knew about. And now everyone knows about it. There was the dancing baby, you might remember the dancing
Speaker C:baby from about the same time. Yeah, I mean, it's similar to the first I remember is the dancing Spider Man. Do you remember that? That was made by I think it was made by Frank. Oh, and it both accelerated him to fame, but also financially ruined him because he was hosted on his web server and he's been charged for sort of for the web traffic.
Speaker B:But the I mean, the concept of the main obviously itself, just like any meme, the concept has evolved. And you would say that probably the classical form like the traditional the idealized form of the internet meme is a single still image and some words in impact impact font at the top and the bottom. Okay, you know, so that's that's when you think of a meme, that's the standard sort of meme. But that isn't actually if you want to know more about internet memes, there's the website to look at is know your meme, which looks at the history of, you
Speaker C:know, it's an excellent resource, actually, it's that some of the some of the research that goes into is phenomenal. A real, I think memes in general, internet memes in general are going to be a fascinating resource for future historians, not and not not and not least because the there's already a lot of contemporary historians who do a lot of work into looking into memes. And there's a huge there's a huge memetics, generally, which is a study of memes has has has critics, but it's very widely studied thing on the internet about how these these ideas are formed, take off and
Speaker B:how they die without I mean, there isn't really a formula. You know, it's not like anyone's identified. Well, this is how and in a way, I think I think that's part of it is resistant to becoming formulaic. I mean, memes tend to start in the sort of the slightly more offbeat areas of the internet, like 4chan, the kind of where actually, it's sort of slightly it's an obscure sort of culture. It's a website and and culture of sort of message set of message boards where a kind of certain culture has grown up. And, you know, in places like that, which the average internet users probably aren't aware of, but which, you know, actually have a strong, if you look at some of these, the most famous memes, like Rick Rowling, or lolcats, or Pepe the Frog, they all started on 4chan. And then memes find their way out, they leak out, and they get into slightly more mainstream places like Reddit. And and then they, when memes, well, this is what sort of, you know, elitist meme snobs say, you know, the death of a meme is when it hits Facebook. So it's when it's when sort of 40, 50 something mums are sharing, you know, minion memes, that's then that's it. That's the end of the meme life cycle. Yeah, exactly. But they're often
Speaker C:counter memes then arise. Yeah, about a sort of meta memes about that meme will arise as a result
Speaker B: o, which said, memes memes in: Speaker C:space of a day. Yeah. And it strikes me that they're not only kind of entertaining, but some of them is like an expression of, of, they are they are an art form in their own right. Even though some of them are pretty silly, but it's a very accessible way of expressing oneself. So the minimal effort to produce, and even just sharing it as an expression of what what one finds, finds funny or entertaining or impactful. So there's like, it's an accessible art form in that sense. But they do get extremely, they do get extremely sort of postmodern. So this is the, as a meme kind of evolves, it'll start off being just funny, explicitly funny in its own right. But they, they often inevitably become ever more sort of satirical or, or abstract as they as they sort of progress along to the point where they become an in joke for only a very small number of people. An example I've got is the E-meme. Yeah, I love that. So the E-meme is worth looking up on, on Know Your Meme. But it's centered around this composite image, which was photoshopped together of, there's a famous YouTuber slash blogger, I think he's a lifestyle kind of guy, the face of Lord Farquaad from Shrek, all pasted together in place of Mark Zuckerberg at the, when he was giving evidence in front of Congress, with simply the capital letter E written on it. And presumably this was a massive in joke for some people somewhere and they understood what it meant and had much hilarity as a result. But that, parts of that have now become memes in their own right. So when things get a bit too meta, somebody will whack a big E on a meme to indicate that
Speaker B:it's kind of become to that point of metaness. Yeah, like, there are certain screenshots from games which are popular. There's one, I can't remember which game it is, but where there's a funeral and it says press F to pay respects. And so now people will just, when someone recounts something bad on an internet forum, someone will just type F and they'll know that's like saying, oh, sorry, mate. And then the other one, which is press X to doubt. So I can't remember which, I think it might be Skyrim or something where you've got the option to doubt what someone's saying. It says press X to doubt. And now people just put press, you put X when someone says something they don't believe, they just type X. So yeah, it's great. It's really interesting. But yeah, I think all of that means that it is very resistant to formulaism. I mean, as soon as something, as soon as someone were to write down, here's the formula for making a successful meme, or God forbid monetizing them, you know, that the meme would die instantly.
Speaker C:Yeah. And that's a really good article in the Atlantic, which was exploring this. The title was a unified theory for meme death. And that was basically, that was what they said. As soon as anyone starts deconstructing a meme to work out why it's funny, it stops being funny. As soon as it becomes mainstream enough that there's a comment article written about it, it's dead.
Speaker B:But I think the looking at, I mean, although the sort of classical meme is, internet meme is, you know, an image with impact font. If you look at some of the things which probably, I mean, qualifies as memes, which are not, they're not necessarily just, you know, famous images, they're really more ways of doing things. But also, so I think Rick Rowling is an interesting
Speaker A:one. What's Rick Rowling? Oh, for crying out loud, Grandad. Do you know what? I feel so out of my depth in this podcast. I have no idea what we're all talking about. Rick Rowling is the practice
Speaker B: chan in, I think,: Speaker C:life and say, oh, come over, I've got something really important to show you. And you bring them over and then you just click on it and it'll play that on YouTube. Play Rick Astley on YouTube.
Speaker B: called Boys Club. And then in: Speaker C:I think I read somewhere on a deep dark part of Reddit somewhere that that that the let some some left meme people had deliberately tried to tie Pepe to the alt-right after it become associated with Trump as part of the anti-Trump campaign. And then the alt-right said, Yeah, we'll have that. But that's, we'll take that on. And you're looking completely lost.
Speaker A:I am. I just feel totally lost. But I've got a couple of things I want to move on to. I want to move on to comparing memes with other kinds of behavior and thinking about comparisons with evolution and parasitism, things like that. But also, it just seems to me from from from what you've been saying, another element, I might, I might have missed this in what in your explanation of what a meme is. But there's a kind of a knowingness element, there's a kind of an identification almost that this is a meme, because I was thinking, for example, there's a couple of things actually both really annoy me in recent modern history. One of them is young people, I guess it is kind of related to young stuff. So walking with a limb. Yeah. So here's my question. It's becoming more and more prevalent in the UK for people to say, H instead of H. So before you answer, I want to ask if that's a meme, because it doesn't have that kind of knowingness, that element of sort of that you've talked about. That's one thing. But there's another one, which is something that really, really annoys me, is people always talking these days about loving stuff and liking stuff. You know, I'm loving this. I'm loving this tree. And that all goes back to... The present continuous is somehow irritating. Well, no.
Speaker B:If I said I love that, I love that. But if I say I'm loving that, it's annoying.
Speaker A:It's no, but it being the present continuous being used in the wrong way. Okay.
Speaker B:Well, it's not. People understand what people mean.
Speaker A:Well, let me finish. But like it or love it or loving it or liking it or hating it. My question is the same. So this all goes back to a bloody McDonald's advert. Okay. I'm loving it. That's where all this comes from, I think. Okay. Is that a meme? So that's my question.
Speaker B:Everything's a meme. So basically, I think memes are software. Think of memes as the software. If there's some identifiable piece of behavior, which includes ways of talking, ways of holding a knife and fork, types of clothes that you wear.
Speaker A:What's this got to do with software?
Speaker B:That's the software in your brain.
Speaker A:I didn't know I had software in my brain.
Speaker B: xact same conversation in the: Speaker A:Yeah. Okay. So just to round things off, I want to return back to poor Grumpy Cat and see if we get some predictions. What's going to be the next Grumpy Cat? Either you can be as specific or as general as you like your predictions. What's the next big meme?
Speaker C:So I've got a general prediction. So I think as you have now, there are websites you can go to and just select an image, any image, and it helps you build your own meme. And it guides you in the sort of correct, inverted commas, use of that meme. So it's like previous memes. So it's more likely to be sort of accepted by the community. I predict that deep fakes will become a new rich source of memes. So people will just release videos of Donald Trump saying things he's never said and that kind of thing. So I think deep fakes will be the next technology which really opens up a whole new stream of memes.
Speaker B:Obviously, like, Photoshop is integral to memes. There's a particular meme of Donald Trump holding up something that he signed, which I think was probably originally some presidential order. And it's now usually like a picture of a cock and balls or something. And he looks really proud. So that, you know, yeah, Photoshop. I think I agree with Peter on that one. I think you can imagine this becoming a great tool for humorous, you know, I guess. And I guess, you know, do you remember the tourist guy after 9-11? There were photos purporting to be of a guy who was on the roof of one of the Twin Towers. And just below him, you could see an airplane coming in. And that was a meme at the time. It was very widely shared and believed by some people it wasn't. It was a Photoshop job. But it worked. The reason it was successful was that it was good fiction. You know, it was just it was like that's what it ought to have been like. We kind of feel like that is a really interesting thing to think about. And I suspect just like with all these memes starring, you know, people like Donald Trump doing things where you think, well, this is how it all ought probably to be. That's that's what is going to mark a good successful deep fake as if it's actually getting them right in some way.
Speaker A:Yeah, very good. Yeah, I feel a bit bewildered. I feel I sort of know more. I definitely know more than I did 20 or 30 minutes ago. But I still can't see myself fully immersing myself in this world of memes in the way that you have. So, yeah. But no, very interesting. All right. We'll wrap up there. I just feel like a bit of an old fuddy duddy. Yeah, get with the program, Grandad. Yeah. All right. We'll wrap up there. Thank you very much, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights. And until next time, goodbye. Bye.
