this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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History must never be forgotten in all things
Not Even Doom Music
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Was at a cat cafe with my kids not too long ago. They had this breed of cat and it was being very affectionate with me and my son. So I say to her "you, you can haz cheeseburger" and my son (9 y/o) looks at me and asks "is that a reference to something?" So I pull out my phone and show him The Sacred ~~Jedi~~ Internet Texts
I thought has was spelled with a z. Am I misremembering it, or am I thinking of the variants that came after?
#NeverForget
Did we run out of memes? Did we circle back to the start?
some people think using sticks and stone tools was the first meme, others reckon it's spoken language.
I has a bucket
About that...
NOOOooo!!!
Indubitably I say they do be, good chap
Its ok.
Life goes on, people and things grow and die.
... but Minazo, Minazo will always can haz bucket.
This isn’t even close to the beginning.
The word meme was coined in the 70s to describe social phenomena of the time years before fax, email, or general internet memes became the norm.
Meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in the Selfish Gene (1976), where he meant to make an analogy between how...
....well, genes basically operate as a self replicating instruction set via things like plants and animals... or virii / viruses.
In that sense, we live in a gene-world, where genes perpetuate themselves, spread and grow and are the primary drivers of dramatic change and growth and collapses.
But ideas, notions, attitudes, philosophies... these become powerful enough once they are embodied by biology capable of contemplating them and acting on them, at scale, that they can actually override genes as the fundamental driver of change in the eco/biospehere, and they also propogate and essentially vie for dominance or prevalence amongst each other in similar ways as genes do.
So... 'meme', because it sounds close to 'gene', and also because of similar sounding roots in greek, 'mimesis' essentially meaning 'behavioral imitation'.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/meme
'Meme' itself was not widely used outside of basically academia untill it gained a more specific meaning in the roughly the late 90s / early 2000s, as referring to a kind of (usually goofy) image or video that spread virally across the online world.
To my knowledge, you did not broadly have people emailing each other goofy ascii art in the 80s and referring to that as a meme, nor widely or within a niche subculture referring to any kind of idea or cultural craze of the time... certainly at no where near the scale and popularity of the term nowadays.
If you wanted a meme from roughly the time that the term 'meme' was being broadly popularized to mean 'online internet joke image', you'd be looking at basically demotivational posters.
"Kilroy was here" is widely regarded as an early meme.
Just because they weren't using the word at the time, doesn't really mean anything.
Yes, many things are considered memes, with our modern vernacular, looking backward, anachronistically.
The concept of domesticating dogs, agriculture, wearing shoes, having a language, writing that language down...
Those are all memes.
Common and historically persistent symbols and artistc motifs...
All memes.
But, the history of how a particular meme propogates, that is its own thing.
And the idea of the particular word 'meme'... its etymological history, how it became to have the meaning and usage that it currently does, to describe a kind of replicated packet of information of some kind... that is also its own thing.
And then it is another thing to describe how the word has now morphed from its original academic meaning, to its modern meaning as specifically a kind of replicated image that is some kind of a joke.
Do you see the nuances here?
The word 'meme' ... is itself a kind of meme.
If you time travelled back to 1974 and described 'Kilroy Was Here' as a meme... no one would have any idea what you meant with the word 'meme', because it had not been invented yet.
Just because they didn't have a word for it, doesn't mean it wasn't a thing.
Ok, but you are saying 'Kilroy was here' was an 'early' meme dating back to the 1940s. By the 'thing described by a term can predate the term' logically, memes have always been a thing and you won't be able to cite an 'early' meme credibly.
The guy was agreeing that 'sure, that was a meme, but so too were many many things throughout history, basically life is a constant barrage of 'memes' in that sense.
I get what you are saying but even by that criteria I would still go back to the dancing baby gif, I Will Survive alien, the Happy Hamster Dance, or like something else from that time period.
I... think the dancing baby gif is significantly older than demotivational posters, and the other two you list.
All good choices though.
I'd go with StrongBad 'The System Is Down' rave, or All Your Base Are Belong To Us, personally.
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Ironic
Don't you think?
The ancient one awakens
The original, the legend.
Remember the good one days? Back in 2011, when we stayed up till 2am laughing at r/F7U12, Caturday Memes, and 60s Spider-Man.
Back when the memes were original and funny:
2011? Get off my lawn whippersnapper! I was lurking chan sites in 07 when I should have been underageb& and having a remotely decent time in highschool.
No one cries for EFG. His name has been long forgotten.
Seriously, I'm pretty certain EFG was the progenitor to f7u12, and 4chan was pissed that reddit kept stealing their memes and beating them until nothing but a horse shaped hole in the ground remained as reddit kept growing. Pretty sure I witnessed the first advice animal threads too. That little pup with the rainbow background was spammed to hell and back for around a month before it made its way to reddit.
removes onion from belt
holds it up toward a cloud in the sky
begins to clench onion-
... No. No.
Eh, howdy partner, you remember Digg?
Does anyone remember Digg?
... Remember when triforcing became a thing?
... Remember 4chan before the V for Vendetta mask got associated with it?
gaze drifts back toward onion
... Pepperidge ... farm... remembers...
grins strangely
SUDDENLY FIRES MAH LAZOR AAAUGH WAHRBARGBL!
Digg and Diggnation have recently been revived
True, but... unless they've changed substantially since the last time I looked at them, they seem to be basically completely different things, very corpo, more or less wearing the brand names as skin suits.
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Goddamnit.
I have seen this thousands of times, but this time, this particular time, for some reason...
The goddamned cheeseburger song from VeggieTales is now the soundtrack to my brain.
Whenever someone says 'om nom' I imagine the sound emanating from this cat eating a cheeseburger.
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