Like it or not, it's looking like memes are going to be one of the current generation's crowning cultural legacies. People will look back at and with the same kind of reverence and fascination that we have when we look at Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, or dirty graffiti from Ancient Rome. But the internet is a cruel mistress, and behind a lot of those image macros, misjudged tweets, and embarrassing videos lie some very real and very damaging consequences for some very real humans.
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So if people do look back at our with any kind of anthropological curiosity in the future, they really ought to know the full, naked truth about viral superstardom and the damage it can leave in its wake. Let's help them out with that. Among other monumental bummers, 2016 will be remembered as a particularly bad year for high-profile deaths, with the sheer volume of reaching almost absurd levels over the course of the year. In the middle of all this was, the 17-year-old silverback gorilla who was shot dead after a 4-year-old boy climbed into his enclosure in the Cincinnati Zoo. While the incident initially inspired a seemingly genuine outpouring of sadness and anger, this soon gave way to increasingly ironic memorializing and a veritable bounty of goodness.
But for a while there, the outrage was very real. Among those targeted were the Cincinnati Zoo's staff, with zoo director Thane Maynard's Twitter account a couple times and bombarded with Harambe memes during the period. In an email, Maynard expressed his staff's immense grief over the death of the gorilla and how the constant memes were making it difficult for them to mourn their loss properly and move on.But the continuum of blame and harassment really leaned most heavily on the child's mother, Michelle Gregg.
As reported by, Gregg suffered a torrent of harassment online, including. Celebrities are certainly not immune to the ways of the meme-makers, and quite often they're more than happy to play along.
Even Sad Keanu earned a seal of approval from the man himself. But sometimes things are a little more complicated, like when Prison Break actor Wentworth Miller found himself the subject of a poking fun at his weight gain in March 2016. Originally posted by the LAD Bible on its Facebook page, the meme consisted of a promo pic of Miller from his Prison Break days side-by-side with a more recent photo of the actor sporting a slightly paunchier frame. The accompanying caption read 'When you break out of prison and find out about McDonald's monopoly.'
The creator of the character, artist Matt Furie, described the hateful appropriation of his work as his 'worst nightmare. To be tangled in forever with a symbol of hate.' As reported in September 2017, he spoke out vehemently against it and tried to take legal action against a number of online personalities in an effort to enforce his intellectual property and reclaim the peaceful little guy, but with little luck.Ultimately Furie managed to symbolically sever ties with the character by in a new strip. As banal as it might seem to some, it can't have been easy for an artist to watch one of his creations become so thoroughly misrepresented, then try for months to reclaim it, only to concede bitter defeat in the end. Feels bad, man. The bullying sucked in real life, too. Speaking to 10 years later, Raza said classmates would climb on tables to hurl insults at him.
Being told he should commit suicide was a regular occurrence. Raza ultimately prevailed and has acted as a model of solidarity and perseverance for those who might be going through the same thing. As one of the first to ever be exposed to that kind of insanity without any kind of map or model to help him navigate it, it might be said that he represents this form of triumph better than anyone else.
He and his parents sued those responsible for uploading the video and received an undisclosed settlement. Raza now has a law degree, and he has actively worked to be a source of support and understanding for other victims of cyberbullying. Now that's how it's done.
In 2012, activist and filmmaker Jason Russell posted a video online as part of a campaign against Ugandan militia leader and wanted war criminal Joseph Kony (above). Titled 'Kony 2012,' the video accumulated more than 100 million views online in six days, leading Time to designate it the. Then things got.It wasn't long before 'Kony 2012' became something of a punchline. Russell and his movement were for misrepresenting the facts and painting an oversimplified picture of the situation in Uganda, and for receiving lots of donations but not actually achieving anything. As reported by in 2013, Russell ran himself ragged trying to defend the campaign to the media and the angry hordes online in the days after the viral explosion, and his mental wellbeing took a hammering, culminating in a and very naked mental breakdown on the streets of San Diego. He was detained and hospitalized, and cited 'extreme exhaustion, stress and dehydration' as the cause in an interview with Oprah Winfrey.
The movement petered out. Kony is still. It's, and a woman's dog has defecated on the subway in Seoul, South Korea. She makes no attempt to pick it up, fellow commuters are agitated, and one takes a picture and posts it online. The outrage and memes flow like water. There's a nationwide witch hunt, and within hours her personal information and that of her family members is obtained and posted online.An internet lynch mob was well and truly activated, harassment ensued. The woman even started being recognized by strangers on the street, and she ended up quitting her university.
We should be encouraged to clean up after our dogs, obviously, but this is more than a little ridiculous. Ah, adolescence. Remember those run-of-the-mill days when you'd wake up, go to church, clock in for your shift at Target, then find yourself with hundreds of thousands of new Twitter followers at the end of the day and hordes of enamored teenage girls swooning en masse over a trending picture of you? Probably not. But this was what happened to 16-year-old Alex Lee, who was hurled into meme stardom in 2014 when a photo of him taken while he was working the cash register was uploaded to Twitter with the caption 'YOOOOOOOOOOO,' entirely without his knowledge.
# started to trend, and Alex even eventually to talk about his newfound internet fame. But, predictably enough, there was a dark side to all of this attention. It was during the 'F.ckparade' electronic music festival in Berlin on July 8, 2000, that artist Matthias Fritsch took those first hallowed steps toward making internet history, when he filmed a towering, jacked, and super-intimidating bare-chested dude dancing down a street to pulsing techno music. Fritsch uploaded the four-minute clip to his own site, it made its way to YouTube in 2006, and it went viral in 2007, spawning spin-offs, remixes, and T-shirts made and sold by Fritsch himself.As it turned out, the still-anonymous Technoviking himself was about the whole thing, according to Wired, and decided to take legal action against Fritch for infringement of personality rights. The resulting legal fees ultimately left the artist bankrupt and in deep dept. Fritcsch tried raising $10,000 on Indiegogo for a documentary about the Technoviking and the legal struggles of the last few years, but lady luck continued to evade him and he. He ended up making and releasing a anyway.
During her journey from New York to South Africa in 2013, tweeted out some dumb, caustic, and apparently sarcastic tweets to her relatively meager 170 Twitter followers before falling asleep for the rest of the flight. The worst offender: 'Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. Everyone from Sacco's employer to the workers at the hotels she was meant to be staying at had something to say about it.
#HasJustineLandedYet was trending worldwide, and she had no idea.Sacco received tens of thousands of angry tweets, death threats (classic internet), and a boycott by the workers at the hotel she had booked. Also, she lost her job. A number of her relationships were damaged in the fallout, according to a, and she claimed to be finding it impossible to date again. However, as of January 2018, she was, this time for a spinoff of her original company. Honesty and vulnerability are not always safe traits to reveal on the internet. College student Ashley VanPevenage took a before-and-after acne cover-up picture for her make-up artist friend's Instagram account, and the internet reacted as it often does: with thoughtless cruelty. As summed up by, the bullying snowballed as the photo spread. The relatively innocent early caption 'I don't understand how people can do this and I can't figure out how to conceal a single pimple on my face' eventually morphed into the less kind 'The reason why you gotta take a b.tch swimming on the first date.'
Both captions garnered the worst sorts of hurtful comments. Taiwanese model Heidi Yeh's professional life started to when a poorly judged photoshoot for a plastic surgery advertisement was taken wildly out of context and spread across the internet like wildfire. The photo was intended to depict an attractive husband and wife (Ms.
Yeh) posing for a family photo with their children, who've been photoshopped to look as goofy as possible, with a caption that read 'The only thing you'll ever have to worry about is how to explain it to the kids.' It didn't take long for, complete with a brand-spanking-new caption: 'Plastic surgery — you can't hide it forever.' But the nightmare was only beginning. In 2012, the photo ended up in a Chinese tabloid attached to a fake story about a wife who kept her plastic surgery a secret from her husband, and this was spread far and wide across the eternal, unforgiving hellscape of the internet. A lot of people thought it was real, to the extent that Ms.
Yeh had trouble finding work outside small ad roles because of it. As late as 2015, thinking about it.
Her boyfriend at the time even left her out of embarrassment. Think before you meme, kids.
As you scroll through your social media timeline of choice and try to muster up some kind of enthusiasm for your friend's new manicure or your old boss's selfie at the airport, maybe it's hard to imagine a time when every mundane aspect of life wasn't deemed worthy of constant documentation. But in 1996, when camera phones weren't a thing and consumer webcams could only record and stream footage as a series of still images, this was the world we lived in, and Jennifer Ringley's JenniCam project was the game-changer hinting at the future. Between 1996 and 2003, Ringley streamed her life to millions of internet dwellers a day, 24/7. As recounted by, her camera captured everything she did in grainy snapshots spaced 15 minutes apart, from staring off into space to mild. So you can probably guess what she's doing on this list.There were lot of the you'd expect (harassment, hacking, etc.) and the lack of privacy eventually started to wear her down, but the barrage of criticism became overwhelming after she broadcast an affair she was having with a married man. Desperate to reclaim her life and take herself out of the public eye, Ringley brought JenniCam to an end in 2003 and opted to avoid any kind of social media presence from then on. There's a cautionary tale here, but most of us are too distracted.
These Instagram accounts aren't going to update themselves. In 2006, athlete and entrepreneur Aleksey Vayner made the video resume to end all others. Filled with with gems of pseudo-wisdom and unironically overblown feats of physical skill (with some ballroom dancing thrown in for good measure), Vayner intended his video to be seen by recruiters only, but it found its way online and the rest is meme history. It was on How I Met Your Mother, and actor Michael Cera created his own.Vayner tried to take legal action, but this only stoked the flames of what ultimately became a very tragic story, as detailed.
As the meme grew and spread the internet acted mercilessly, and Vayner was subjected to the mocking, bullying, and death threats. Though he seemed to have gotten things together a few years later, he died of a drug overdose in 2013.