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Jamie Wilkinson
Evan Roth
James Powderly“Meme theft”, commercial co-option, and the one true raid
Anonymous/’channers/btards are infamous for getting incredibly butthurt over “meme theft”. E.g. leaving nasty comments on anything about LOLcats, spouting things to the effect of “we invented cat macros, you cannot have them.” Sticklers like Richard Dawkins might argue this is the very function of memes but I digress.
Butthurt provides the fuel for raids, where masses of anonymii join forces to DDoS servers and leave nasty comments and send infinite faxes of black paper, á la the Project Chanology raids against Scientology. But invoking the wrath of Anonymoos might not always be accidental, as one anonymous pink blogspot figures it…
The hive mind raids for 3 reasons, lulz and revenge and lulz. But sometimes anonymous sees something so ridiculous and vile that he has a dilemma on his hands…is not raiding the true raid?
Just such a case is The Second Longcat Crusade, a raid on the sad little online world of Gaia [ed: where game items are available for real-world sale]
Or maybe not so sad as anonymous thought?
Maybe they are in fact so devious and cunning that they have hatched a plot to USE ANONYMOUS FOR MARKETING.
Exhibit A: Meme theft- longcat scarf.
Exhibit B: Meme theft- TLDR hat (they’re doing it wrong!)
Exhibit C: Meme theft- YARLY hat
Exhibit D: Meme theft- Epic Fail hat (“made of fail and barf” -wtf?)
More choice quotes:
I’m tired of [meme theft]. After we reclaim longcat, we need to raise money and copyright all of our memes. Gaia is too big of a target for our usual attacks, and what will happen when someone bigger somes? We need to nip this one in the bud. No exceptions. –anonymous
