(3) Christopher Poole
In 2003, 14-year-old Christopher Poole started the anonymous sticker community 4chan in his basement.
Christopher Poole
Originally, 4chan had only one section, where the juniors posted Japanese comics.
But soon, the “breath of freedom” permeated. Due to the anonymity and no archives, people can speak freely here, attracting masters of memes and sand sculpture netizens. It is like the sea of a bay gradually boiling. The time when 4chan quickly exploded coincided with the time when Pepe came out of the circle, so Pepe naturally became the creative material of 4chan netizens.
Everyone encounters interesting meme pictures and saves them, and then finds a suitable opportunity to use them. Save a picture, just two clicks, it’s easier than going to McDonald’s and ordering a hamburger and buying a pair of socks online. The fact behind it is: in the Internet age, the cost of copying a thing is lower than in the industrial age, as low as almost zero. This leads to a serious problem: a picture, you use it, and I use it too. The more people use it, the more rotten it will become, and its value will quickly depreciate.
This makes meme writers uncomfortable — because the pictures are popular, but no one knows about them; It also made the people who first used this meme feel boring — because he discovered a gold mine, but they were not famous themselves. Well, so to speak. . . Is it possible to make a meme picture also scarce? Like AJ shoes, artificial scarcity is good.
The wise men decided to give it a try. Soon, the author of the Pepe Terrier picture added a large watermark to the picture in order to prevent it from being “stolen”: “Rare Pepe, not allowed to be saved”. This “rare Pepe” was posted in the /r9k/ section.
One more thing, /r9k/ is originally a section on 4chan that encourages originality, and its rules are as follows: here, you must post original things. Whenever someone posts a sentence here, and you repeat it again, you will be banned for a period of time as a punishment. How does the system know if what you say is original? Look at the name of this section, r9k, which is actually the abbreviation of Robot9000, the “robot deduplication script”.
This script was written by comics writer and programmer Randall Monroe. At that time, Monroe was fed up with people on the Internet copying, pouring water, and sticking words that were not his own, so he wanted to build a “utopia” — if in a world, once someone said a word, everyone else I can’t say that anymore, what will happen? Hence the Robot9000 script and his famous stickman comics.
Randall Monroe
Back to “rare pepe”.
The foolish netizens in the /r9k/ section immediately felt that, yes, intellectual property rights must be protected! Therefore, everyone supported the author of the rare Pepe not to post the original picture anymore. If you want to use the rare Pepe to pretend, you have to spend money to buy it. I have to warn you: at this point, Pepe has absolutely nothing to do with its original creator, Matt. Matt can like or dislike Pepe created by netizens, but since Matt doesn’t mix with 4chan, no one cares about his opinion.
4chan is a closed universe — no one outside the universe can influence the history within the universe.
Soon, on the second-hand website eBay, some people began to sell their own Pepe, rare and without watermarks. And there are people who actually buy them. Because they think they will be the coolest on 4chan to have Pepe. . . At that time, there was a sensational event.
Someone packaged up 1200 rare Pepe for auction on ebay, and the price was eventually bid up to $50,000. Bullshit pictures, so it has something to do with money like this?? And everyone thinks it is justified, at least 4chan netizens are convinced.
🚀Read the next chapter
This article is translated from《NFT精神史：罐头、青蛙和平凡人的15分钟英雄梦想》written by a Chinese tech journalist Max Shi ZHONG and published on Qianhei.net. I translated it to pay my tribute to the author, it’s a legendary piece about NFT, even could be recorded in a history book. It is quite long, but 10000% worth reading it.