LOADING CANON...
A chronicle of the self-replicating image as a serious cultural object, from wartime graffiti through Usenet forums, image boards, Tumblr, the Pepe-and-politics era, cryptomemes, and AI brainrot.
Richard Dawkins coined meme in 1976 to describe a unit of cultural transmission that replicates and mutates like a gene. He was thinking about tunes and catchphrases. He could not have predicted Doge.
This chronicle takes the meme seriously as a primary cultural object of the late 20th and early 21st century. From Kilroy Was Here scratched in wartime barracks to "Where's the Beef?" going national in 1984 to Pepe the Frog getting ADL-classified as a hate symbol to Skibidi Toilet defining Gen Alpha vocabulary. Every folio is a moment. Most of them animate.
An oracle, trained on the corpus, sits at the bottom of every page.
An interactive walk through the canon, scene by scene and era by era. Browse the story of the self-replicating image from Kilroy to brainrot, or play it through as a single arc.