Other notable memes were sold around this time, such as Bad Luck Brian (an unflattering school picture of a teenager who became synonymous with embarrassing social situations), Overly Attached Girlfriend (wide-eyed teenager who was portrayed as obsessive over their significant other), and Success Kid (an infant clenching their fist with a sense of achievement), but for lower prices ( Wired Dash Gallagher).Īll the memes sold during this frenzy feature either animals or white individuals, and none of the creators or subjects of the original files are Black.
In February 2021, the original animation file of the Nyan Cat meme (a rendering of a flying cat with a Pop-Tart body) was sold for 300 Ethereum, or US$600,000 (Griffith Kay) in April 2021, the original photo file of the Disaster Girl meme (an image of a smiling child in front of a burning home) sold for 180 ETH, or nearly US$500,000 ( BBC News) in May 2021, the original video file of the viral YouTube video “Charlie Bit My Finger” (wherein an infant bites the finger of their older sibling with glee) was sold for US$760,999, but no cryptocurrency was exchanged for this auction (Evans) in June 2021, the original image of the Shiba Inu who became Doge (image of a dog looking contemplative, often with text around the dog’s face) was sold for a record-breaking (for memes) 1,696.9 ETH, or US$4 million (Rosenblatt). Early 2021 saw Internet memes (memes, hereafter) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs, hereafter) articulated to one another when a series of trades ignited a “buying frenzy”. Through these transactions, Internet memes, or “the linguistic, image, audio, and video texts created, circulated, and transformed by countless cultural participants across vast networks and collectives” (Milner 1), were “minted” as non-fungible tokens-a marker within cryptocurrency economy that denotes the level of originality or irreplaceability of an (often digital) artifact ( Wired). Staples of early United States Internet meme culture were sold via digital auctions for cryptocurrency (except one, which was sold for cash) throughout 2021.
0 kommentar(er)
