In the early 1920s, one of the cottage industries of digital journalism was debunking Internet memes: a journalist would identify the source of a popular image or joke, just as you might dig up the etymology of a word. I was looking for that trope as a freelance writer in December 2013, when I became curious about the origins of a meme known as Doge. It was a photo of a Shiba Inu dog lying on a couch with its legs crossed, giving an ominous side view; Social media denizens covered the image with multicolored text phrases like “so amazing” and “much wow” in Comic Sans. My investigation was, I admit, not a Watergate-level affair: I did a reverse Google Image search for the photo template; found the popular pet blog of a Japanese woman named Atsuko Sato, who shared photos of her cats and her fluffy yellow dog; and contacted her via the site. Sato and I ended up discussing the dog’s surprising internet fame through a translator. A subsequent article I wrote for The Verge appeared on New Year’s Eve, after a lightning-fast edit. Unsurprisingly, the piece proved to be a big hit on Twitter, which was in its heyday. Sato told me that the dog, rescued from a puppy mill, was named Kabosu, after the Japanese citrus fruit that the dog’s round face resembled.
Two weeks ago, Sato announced on her blog that Kabosu had died at the age of eighteen. Kabosu wasn’t the first animal behind a meme; Grumpy Cat, the famous frowning cat, died in 2019 at the age of seven. But Kabosu’s death reminds me how much has changed in the decade since Doge rose to fame. Internet memes once functioned as shibboleths, references that indicated someone belonged to a particular online tribe. I cringe now to think of my friends using the Doge vocabulary out loud and saying “a lot of wow” and the like, during the same millennial peak moment with American Apparel skinny jeans and side-swept bangs. The infantilized language spoke of the peculiar duality of those years, a post-financial crisis desire to stave off an already faltering adulthood. My favorite riff in the meme was a photo of Kabosu, cozy in bed between fluffy blankets: “so tired,” “so beauty rest.” I must confess that I have designed at least one party invitation in Doge’s style. Boomers were just starting to adopt Facebook at the time. Instagram had barely entered the mainstream consciousness. Overall, the internet felt more isolated from everyday reality – an illusion that would be fatally shattered by the election of Donald Trump in 2016, with the help of targeted advertising on social media and the fragmentation of news consumption on the internet. personalized social media feeds.
Doge had no defined symbolism or agenda; there was no corporate entity behind its popularity, no sponsor or dedicated platform promoting it. There wasn’t even an official social media account when the meme appeared: no @Doge on Twitter, just Sato himself. The word’s origins may be traced back to a 2010 post on Reddit, when a user captioned the photo of Kabosu on the couch: “LMBO LOOK @ THIS FUKKIN DOGE.” (Creative misspellings had already become a staple of Internet humor; LOLcats, the meme that spawned phrases like “I can has cheezburger?”, had appeared in the mid-2000s.) The image template and its attendant goofiness The phrasing was honestly created by their digital ubiquity, which belonged to both everyone and no one. As a result, Doge projected a sense of hopeful naivete about the Internet, which has lately disappeared from digital culture as we are increasingly confronted with the dark consequences of social media on a global scale. For example, compare Doge to West Elm Caleb, a male designer in New York City who became infamous on TikTok in 2022 for ghosting his dates. When Caleb became a meme, an online manhunt and intimidation campaign against the real person ensued; TikTok creators have jumped into the topic to harness the potential for algorithmic promotion. Today, virality has become instantly exploitable or punitive, something to be avoided at all costs. Doge’s revelation, on the other hand, only seemed to increase its charm. At the time, Sato viewed the meme with warm amazement. “Honestly, some of the photos are strange to me, but still funny!” she told me. She added, “Maybe I don’t understand memes very well because I live such an analog life.”
The fact that Doge wasn’t pre-optimized for fame is perhaps what sets it apart greatly from what tends to succeed on the internet these days. The popularity of the Internet was still decentralized and rooted in many different areas at once, and thus was more difficult to use to sell advertisements or promote products. Ultimately, the twenty-somethings charted a clear path between online exposure and financial gain. Now, internet fame is concentrated on a smaller number of platforms and is being commodified more quickly. When the marketing videos of a Chinese glycine factory called Donghua Jinlong ironically went viral last spring, influencers immediately capitalized on its fame with a slew of T-shirts and other swag. There are now more than two hundred Donghua Jinlong-related products listed on Amazon. Social media accounts have become tools for strategically gaining attention; an aspiring influencer can direct viewers of, say, a popular TikTok video via “links in bio” to a series of other accounts — Instagram, Patreon, YouTube — where clicks can more easily generate revenue.
This is not to say that the Doge phenomenon was entirely innocent or imperishable. As the internet changed, so did the meme. Just before I discovered Doge’s source, a cryptocurrency called Dogecoin was created as a friendlier riff on Bitcoin. A cryptocurrency gains value primarily by gathering buyers; the meme made it easier to market the currency, which in turn became a commercial proxy for Doge’s fame. The value of Dogecoin has increased over the years to approximately sixteen cents per coin, giving the coin as a whole a market capitalization of roughly twenty-three billion dollars. This value is of course theoretical; only a small percentage of that currency could be liquidated before its price plummeted, similar to the stock of a publicly traded company. But the freewheeling joke has been transformed into a financial entity, something that can be traded in a market of attention. In 2021, Sato sold a non-fungible token (NFT) version of the original Doge photo and made $4 million, at the time the highest price ever paid for an NFT. It’s hard to maintain an air of frivolity around a cute puppy when the price tags are so high.
However, lamenting our lost online innocence feels disingenuous, because the Internet is made up of everyone who uses it. We can still look for the kind of silly, random creative acts that made Doge fun in his early days. But I think ultimately what made that fun possible was the way that everyone who remixed the meme felt like it was, in a way, theirs too. Doge taught me that the Internet can be about meaninglessness. Kabosu, the real dog, meanwhile lived to an admirable old age and had a good life with a kind family, with comfortable furniture for her to lie on, which, judging by the proclivities of my own rescue dog, seems like a dog are. highest ambition. In 2013, Sato told me she hoped the meme’s popularity would raise awareness for dog adoption, “and thus help those abandoned animals. It would be nice if Kabosu could play that role.” Last year, a bronze statue of Kabosu was unveiled in Sato’s hometown of Sakura, funded, of course, with the help of Dogecoin holders. ♦
