Philosophy of Memes Conference: On The Ethics of Archiving Memes That Involve A Person
An informal write up of my paper for the Philosophy of Memes conference at the University of Bucharest.
Introduction:
As social media eventually overtook the Internet, and the Internet shrunk down more and more to a few monopolies, generated content and got closer to the “dead internet theory”. Literature on trying to control, modulate or interact with memes and their own countries laws and real life started to flourish in all sorts of bad-ways. This has become more and more apparent when the “age of Authenticity” turns into the “age of Profilicity” and the stakes of real-life and Internet profiles are now ontologically conjoined. I aim to try untangle this mess, help return the older Internet teleology, and also explain the “immortality line” for legislating memes. Taken from the lineage of 'The Makropulos Case’ writings, I set a line of declaring when the figure in the meme has become separated from the signifiers of the person. Allowing it to be become “immortal”, sealed and then archived without relation to the original person. I believe this will also cut out the ideology-driven cases found in US law.
Firstly, we must understand the difference between the early Internet and internet (lowercase i), “avatarism” and the problems of “prolificity”. Mostly because I (personally) believe that not only returning this principle helps clear up a lot of other Internet related issues, but also provides a good lesson to us in interacting with the new style internet. This is what I considered the teleology of the Internet; originally it was filled with Platonic forms, fuelled by sites with simple purposes that built up a chain all surrounding the central concept of the stateless, free, utopian Internet. Just as Heidegger noted what happened post the Enlightenment with the Objective-Subjective switch, we now see the internet revolving around the person. From algorithm-based content, cookies, singular accounts etc, the internet is to be around you with your projected ideas onto it. In the post social-media world we have ended up in a world of what Hans-Georg Moeller calls “Profilicity”. This is where instead of selling a mask-that-is-not-a-mask to other people we create curated profiles filled with sign values. They are transient, need constant reaffirmation and when we die on the Internet, this is most likely what will be preserved on the Internet. This has meant that we are now burdened with real-life “stakes” on the profile. This isn’t concrete, and I’ve written before why I feel we’ve accelerated beyond it, but I need this to be understood to differentiate between older “avatarism” and “profile” because there’s a lot of literature that consistently conflates the two when talking about being immortal on the Internet.
Take for example Kasket’s Ghost In the Machine, she looks at multiple, various attempts at digital immortality, but focuses on two main areas: Economic and social media. In conversation with a man who runs a cemetery with an online component; QR codes and a profile of the person attached, that even when cemeteries are rehoused, or headstones turned into patios the social media profiles linked in the QR code will be eternal and the economic costs between data storage versus the land cost of cemeteries will allow able to keep functioning. A further interesting point that is touched on is further in – ‘online dead that acted dead, not the online dead that acted alive’[1] but fails to expand upon this, instead of talking about the World Wide Cemetery and the nature of sending messages to loved ones or their curated profiles. This once again is too focused on the profile. On the preservation of a person, that there is a united front between a person, and their online presence. This to me, is a very post-social media point of view and one that I found lacking.
A (Brief) overview of the law:
In the US Law, we seem to see a non-split deal with memes and a person, with it always coming back to the original person or consent of the party of the person (such as a parent.) What’s interesting in that despite change in precedent this hasn’t changed much from 2010s reviews, to more modern 2022 reviews.
A good example to cut between this, is that in a 2016 review of current meme-law. There’s an interesting line concerning the mixing of privacy and copyright concerning memes in the US Law:
· Even when not depicted in the meme itself, the copyright harm caused by memes is often more personal than the usual copyright infringement. For instance, the photographer of the photograph of Skittles that Donald Trump, Jr., used on Twitter to illustrate an argument against welcoming refugees sued for copyright infringement. Although he did possess the copyright in the photograph at issue, the complaint reads more like a privacy tort complaint, with allegations that the photograph is being associated with “offensive” ideas (understandably, because the photographer is himself a refugee).[2]
This mixing of being associated with a meme, or sign-values from the meme being transferred to the person has been an extreme expression of the refusal to split or abstract personhood. This has bloomed in the world of NFTs, political tension and more virulent political action post-2016 general election. This was a big tipping point where copyright and sign value had to tip their hat at each other and this started causing even more of a mess – legal defences and discourse that were once credible began to fail and American law was desperate to keep it away from personhood.
The biggest one of these was “abandonment of copyright” that used to exist quite implicitly on the Internet but now has fallen to the protection of the “profile” of the person in the meme than any protection of the person for any of the actual reasons we’ll go into surrounding archiving memes (such as harassment). Success Kid[3], for example, the mother of the baby and who took the photo gave implicit abandonment of copyright in a Facebook post then successfully reclaimed it in two counts of ideologically-based claims: Firstly against a republican senator who she did want her child to be related with (despite the child now being older); and again on grounds of her objecting against the use of a baby on a protein shake. Once more she’s invoking copyright, but also a privacy claim in the sense that the sign values (of being republicans) are interfering on her child’s profile (by way of the meme), that wasn’t the explicit reason but it’s the associated reason within the damage done to a “brand” on the person. Replicated with Pepe the Frog’s creator versus Infowars, despite explicit abandonment of copyright, free use for monetisation and essays about how Pepe became a cultural piece of art – the artist “reclaimed” his privacy and copyright of Pepe when Infowars produced a poster that contained Pepe. By all accounts of traditional fair-use and the aforementioned abandonment of copyright, all fell to ideological grounds. This is fascinating to us, because what I aim with my immortality line is try peel off the person from the profile and the meme. As well as try to return the older teleology of the Internet when this staking of sign value and real life gets split back apart.
In Europe, however, it’s rather the opposite. Abstraction tends to be on the hate-side of things and personhood tends to be directly identifying in signifying terms. For example, Scarlet v SABAM concerning piracy was more concerned with protection of rights and personhood over copyright arguments. On the other side within the ECHR currently is the case of Hurbain v Belgium, concerning the ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ involving a crime reported in a newspaper in 1994[4]. This judgement ruled that the article should be anonymised, since judging by time passed since the incident and the affects towards the man’s private life. However, the courts forced no obligation for the media to check their archives or follow up on any developments that may happen. What we see here is that signifying information that leads to personhood is negative, but raw copyright “branding” is not. The Digital Services Act in widening more and more to new types of hate, has started to eat itself in terms of “irony” and “dogwhistles” where any sort of stochastic terrorism claims begin to trip out, contradict itself and become unusable. In ‘Is This a Hate Speech?’ The Difficulty in Combating Radicalisation in Coded Communications on Social media Platforms[5] the authors posit this by showing how archived memes get transformed, lose their original hateful connotations and sometimes even switch political sides. It makes such things as the EU Handbook of Hate Memes effectively useless, and even more frustrating when trying to deal with the ethics of archiving a person.
On a side note to all of this. It’s even worth noting that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is also being used as a censorship device or even as a doxxing apparatus to silence victims or abuse victims, or for people hiding evidence or simply to get information against their enemies. In which to counter file a DMCA, one must give over their entire identifying information – which is very dangerous in an internet culture that has been conflated persona and anonymity. So severing copyright from branding and personhood has more uses than just “RETVRN” to the older Internet.
The Makropulos Case and Immortality:
Now when we look at immortality, it’s better to first lay the ground work on what we mean, so we are not beholden to “ghosts” or “profiles” and other debated terms. We’ll take a very specific type of immortality set out by Bernard Williams from The Makropulos Case. Using the original Czech opera as a base – In short, where a lady who has lived 337 years has the choice to drink another batch of immortality juice but instead chooses not to because of boredom and afterwards nobody in the village takes the juice either - he sets out why immortality leads to boredom, apathy and eventually a want for death. What is interesting with this is two things, the two types of desires:
1) Conditional: Can be long or short term, conditional to our existence only – everything from “I want a burger” to “I want to write a novel”
2) Categorical: Life-fulfilling, what makes you, you desires. I’d take it as far to be a Lacanian desire in nature, something that goes almost beyond you, while still being you.
See, now what inspired the Immortality Line was actually Smutt’s objection to William’s arguments and you’ll see how these two intersect:
(1) In order to live forever meaningfully it must really be you who lives forever.
(2) You would be a different person if your categorical desires were, in any way, different.
(3) Therefore, you must have a static set of categorical desires to live forever [From 1 and 2]
(4) Having a static set of categorical desires would mean doing the same kinds of things over and over again in an attempt to fulfill these desires.
(5) Doing the same kinds of things over and over again is boring.
(6) Having a static set of categorical desires necessarily leads to boredom [From 4 and 5]
(7) Therefore, if you live forever you will get bored [From 3 and 6][6]
But since, for Smuts, premise 2 is false, since we can acquire new categorical desires, he thinks Williams’ argument fails. While this is an objection I don’t particularly agree with, it’s actually pretty useful for memes. We can infer from this that detachment, loss-of-self is actually the goal. We can infer from Smuts’ objection that (2) is wrong and therefore Williamson is wrong but what if that’s what we want! Instead of the traditional views of considering memes “dead” when they fade out, it is better to see them as “immortal”. When they become immortal they become fossils in a sense, and this abandonment of humanity by neglect of signifiers is a better cut through of both sides of the pond’s legal arguments. The desires of the memes, are a way of exploring the hate-side of memes and their need for mutability and the simple archive of dead memes, and allows us to sever the person into an abstracted, dehumanised (in a positive way) sense.
Memes and Horizontality:
This always requires one to make a difference between an internet meme, and Dawkins’s Cultural meme, for it can be easy to conflate the two when we begin to look at our case study. Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, described memes in memetic theory as ‘a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.’[7] These ‘memes’ are passed on as culture, evolved and move in cycles throughout time. I want us to keep this in mind when we talk of immortality. Let us work through Castaño Dias’s 2013 definition of a meme, because at the start it appears the same as Dawkins’s meme: ‘internet meme is a unit of information…which replicates by passing on via Internet…in the shape of a hyper-link, video, image, or phrase. It can be passed on as an exact copy or can change and evolve.’[8] A piece of culture or pattern that is replicated, but the difference here is already starting to be seen: the medium, is the difference. The medium (or ‘shape’) can be the meme, and that meme can be replicated in different mediums while being the same meaning, whereas Dawkins’ has it simpler - that it is a single unit of cultural ‘meme’. Dias further extrapolates a very important difference which is in mutability:
‘The mutation occurs by chance, addition or parody, and its form is not relevant. An [internet meme] depends both on a carrier and a social context where the transporter acts as a filter and decides what can be passed on. It spreads horizontally...’
Let’s play with this concept with this example:
Firstly, it demonstrates the uselessness of such moderation tools from the ECHR. If you read from left to right, one does not know they have consumed “hate” until they reach the end, if you read right to left you now carry the knowledge to understand to think a hate-crime. Being charged with the capacity to understand a potential hate meme means we must go back and understand what we are going to deal with the abstraction. Let us also declare that this meme is not immortal, it is attached to a profile to be drawn and re-attached, it needs to be almost consistently reaffirmed with new categorical desires by horizontal mutability.
In comparison, we have a meme that involves a person:
The little girl in the ableist meme is immortalised. It's static, unchanging, became bored and eventually fell out of Internet usage or considered “dead”. In Lacanian terms, the signifier and the signified have been severed. The gaze and interaction of that is only what the gaze projects on it. The categorical desire of the original person has evolved and continued, but this has become immortal, bored and disconnected. The backlash to the reestablished ontological link, the reestablishment of signifiers was only done by the mother when she contacted journalists and spread it around that it was her daughter the ontological link was made. In her doing this, she made the meme not quite as immortal. And people noticed this too – from a YouTube comment on this matter:[9]
“The truth is that the greatest defence for this girl was removed when the mother came out against it. Anonymity is the best thing here and prevents it from really being anything personal. When you fight against it you make it personal and thus more hurtful.”
This is often the repeated thing on the older Internet; anonymity. And that’s true, but there is a sort of deeper ontological anonymity which is to destroy the actual signifier and signified not just the referrer and signified. By this I mean in avatarism, the avatar can have an entire Theravada-Buddhist cycle; it can die and be reborn on a different forum and its lessons have been taking in cultivation before eventually it sleeps on the stilled sea of the Internet. This is not the same as just the twitter avatar on twitter being free to learn or die - it will be absorbed; still get followed by bots, still be part of the ecosystem before eventually probably being another bot account. Not to mention all the difference in OpSec nowadays (as the Kiwifarms Hall of Shame will show you) but because many a time to the avatar becomes the brand. A vtuber resembles a person, it can have a profile just like Moeller says companies do now, but when it “graduates” (note the use of living language instead of death or stillness or negation) people still follow the tied voice actor or character or draw art from it, sometimes the character even just changes network while having one letter changed. Yet the voice of Pippa Pipkins is still followed even if it’s not the girl or voice herself such as in seiyuu culture. A furry will have their brand tied around the fursona and their money or other such things all tied to this. This isn’t anonymity, it’s a false version of avatars, it’s just Profilicity. Don’t get it confused with this as an outcome of capitalism, but merely that Profilicity creates a demand for the media to cater to and the media gives us reinforcement by selling us avatarism back, brutalised. Structural coupling where I am asking, begging, for it to be severed once more.
This establishing of the ontological link between avatar and real-life disabled girl moves the gaze not in the immortal, dehumanised abstraction of ableism, but the ableism directed at her, her profile and the meme has been given a new categorical desire. The immortality line is to protect her from that, remove signifiers and reduce her towards a closed logo. What is interesting out of all this is we have a weird take on this via Getty Images, who came out of the blue to reclaim their copyright over the penguin from Socially Awkward Penguin:
The observed differences are actually the same, but merely cutting off the original image. It’s destroying it, returning into the logos because the American copyright seems to only care about the referrer and signified. I would like to reiterate that I do not accept this concession from National Geographic however, I don’t want just the referent and the signifier to be distinct but the signified and signifier to be distinct – the historical revisionism, changing of culture into “acceptable” versions is not good archiving of culture but that is a debate elsewhere.
Application to a case study:
So let’s try draw this together with our main case study:
In both my slides and my (original) paper I present three photos of CWC:
1) A photo posted by Christine back in 2007
2) A (old) photo from the archives used in 2021 by yahoo news
3) A photo used in updated archives from a twitter at some point in 2020
The first interesting thing to point out here is that Yahoo News knew that Chris-Chan was now known as Christine or the Goddess Blueheart. They would have to dead-name her in a sense, of their previous identity in order to get people to click. Not even Chris-Chan probably would’ve sufficed, they needed the logos. They have to the balance the weight of people knowing 3) with 1), When the news broke of Chris-Chan’s arrest, many people did not link 3) to 1) at all, and found great surprise when their ontological link had been updated. Websites know this and it turns out, just like National Geographic, accepted there is indeed something different between 2) and 3).
1), is a person. It has categorical desires, it has conditional desires, and it can curate a profile. It has a type of internal consistency and desires, which drives them forward. They are able to change, develop but stagnation does not have to be held in place purely by the gaze. 1) (person) is not 2) (meme) but curates 3) (profile) but does not maintain 2) or 3). However only 1) can embody 2) and 3) but does not have enough gaze-sustain to keep these two from becoming behind oneself.
2) is the meme. It is responded back from the gaze. In a meme, the person depicted often becomes the subject of attention, with others viewing and interpreting their actions or expressions. This dynamic mirrors the subject/object relationship inherent in Lacan's gaze, where one person's gaze (the subject) directs attention towards another (the object). It is a voyeuristic consumption of the logos of a person, the breaking down into colours, symbols, and combing out what is essentially being referenced. Once its categorical desire runs out, it simply becomes immortal, bored, apathetic and eventually wishes to die (to no longer be reposted).
3) is the profile, in Moeller’s terms. It’s inauthentic, in a sense that it is not a mask-that-isn’t-a-mask or any sort of the Mask in Lacanian terms. Moreso, it is a conflation of the screen and projection, and can only be sustained by the validation from others’ gaze. It can never be immortal because it needs too much validation to stay attuned and any too hard of a horizontal change in the categorical would be seen as inauthentic because what it observed as “authentic” behaviour can only be limited it in the vertical sense. In my original paper, I had observed this being the confusion with a lot of immortality-on-the-internet books. Funnily enough, in the Q&A for this paper, I was asked about this conflation concerning a tv show named Upload. Perhaps it is an extension of the wider destruction of suspension of disbelief (be it relating to the player character in a videogame or simply that there is a divorce between avatar and person) that this conflation has been more common.
Let us also point out that I am "logoising" the human here, which is dehumanisation but not in a signifying way. It is also neither a version of dehumanisation that the Handbook of Hate Memes recognises nor a direct singular image. Contrary to the ECHR’s definition of being too singular and monopolised, dehumanisation is instead too imprecise and could label nearly anything that has been transformed – be it song, country, person, or abstract stereotype. The protection of de-humanisation iwhich the disabled girl benefitted from is ignored, and is similar to the ‘anonymizing’ that the GDPR calls for.
When Chris-Chan was parodied in the cartoon Sonic Boom, it is generally considered just that – a parody – even if it’s close to identifying her. At this point their own "profile" was far far beyond anything represented, but the cultural artifact was maintained. You could understand what the episode was about (categorical desire) – that fans must understand boundaries and the dangers of para-social relationships, which was different to what the show presented (conditional desires) of a Chris-Chan-like image in the same colors with a different OC. It’s still the cultural artifact, it’s still the meme but it has gone so far horizontal that it is now distinct from the person. Recall also our happy merchant slide, at what point of abstraction are we signifying it is Christine? How deformed or down to colours do we have to go? An old school Japanese anime and manga meme was boiling characters down to 4-5 blocks of colours and asked you to guess who it was. This is why I advocate for an "immortality line", preserve the apathetic, immortal, empty desire meme, because it can do nothing but fade into tedium while still keeping the culture preserved and known.
Let us return to law, because given all of these we have to try to smash copyright law and ECHR law which are both more traditionally focused on historical and economic principles which was a difference noted by Matalon: “The Facebook user who takes copyrighted material and fashions it into an internet meme is not the same as the unscrupulous copier in the classic copyright accounts. She usurps none of the returns that would otherwise be due to the copyright owner.”[10] Yet Matalon’s article, in its extensive look at the copyright and internet memes, still takes the tangible issue, that you could take yourself as a trademark, but that still doesn’t answer the core of the ethical issue when the trademark is oneself yet is not a person. He uses examples that we have in this paper – such as advice animals – but neglects to touch upon the original person, he skirts on the nature of the ‘heart’ in a copyrightable project but always leaves it as that. That it’s social, and not economic, that’s it is not a product but we see from the other side that there are other wider goals such as dehumanisation or stochastic terrorism. To return all the way to start of this part: if 1) is a human being, and perhaps 3) is a Person of interest then what is 2)? To call it a brand or a trademark is hard because of what Matalon refers to as “unpredictability”. While whether a brand or trademark may fail or succeed in value is an economic risk, memes simply are not bound to that type of predictability and are not always started off with intent or the original owner’s intent. This is why looking at self and immortality provides a better perspective than trying to configure old laws to fit newer problems especially being beholden to economic terms.
Addressing the pitfalls:
There are obviously two: Stochastic Terrorism and Harassment.
When an entity becomes separate from the ‘meme’, there are two factors here that have come into light as organisations such as the Anti-Defamation League began to observe internet memes: Dehumanisation and Stochastic Terrorism. From the EU’s European Observatory of Online Hate ‘Handbook of Hate Memes’, they define dehumanisation as ‘The dehumanization (denial of humanity) of an individual places the victim outside the moral universe of human interactions.’ From this they gather it can be achieved in multiple ways: Animal comparison, machine comparisons or toxicity (act of calling something toxic to a person’s way of life), While the handbook concludes they lead to violence, I find this extreme, when the damage done tends to be much more subtle and pernicious. Take for example ‘ween’ culture surrounding Chris-Chan; Where it was very common for people to call up, make trips to his house, order him pizza, send him emails etc. The term ‘ween’ (Coming from the old internet phrase “to score an epic win”) was born precisely to describe the type of people who saw Chris-Chan as nothing but a meme, something off of which you could score a ‘win’, or achieve fame. To combat this behaviour because “cow-tipping” was considered negative, many interactions began to be labelled with negative sign values. “ween” itself sounds bad, but many of the most common things, such as yelling “Julay” down the phone gained even more negative stigma, and sign values in order to destroy the ween’s profile. Often this has led to community policing but also infighting with the people in the orbit themselves which eventually allows the original meme to be immortal and still again. Several people have gained careers out of documenting Chris-Chan’s life and archiving everything that he does, this is still dehumanisation but not in the violent or political way that the handbook outlines. Keeping the cultural ‘meme’ of Chris-Chan alive (known as ‘Christory’) has also had positive benefits for herself: funding trips to conventions, toys, and a lawyer. It is also neither a version of dehumanisation that the handbook recognises nor a direct singular image.
Stochastic terrorism then follows suit, defined by Hamm and Spaaij as ‘the use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable’ . It is controversial when deciding on archiving something, especially something that could affect protected groups in society (Minorities, Transgender, disabled people etc.) that you are contributing to or enabling behaviour. This applies to abstract concepts such as antisemitism, even if there is no identifying information in the same way the ECHR might define it as. To make the argument that something resembles a person or group, is not only a tricky situation to grasp, but something that copyright law in itself has struggled with.
But you know, dumping all of this onto Section 230 protections and placing a useless social media figurehead in front of some judges isn’t going to magically fix any of this. It’d get worse because now your counter-revolution lefty de-colonial website just got entrapped by a rogue actor dumping pepe-in-a-clown-wig or a potato girl meme on your website. Makes a good quick snappy way to get you bumped off of payment processors or a platform. Reminder that a lot of entrapment literature is still behind on this, with some even co-signing the use by government agencies on using memes to infiltrate and entrap potential terroristic groups. The definition of any of these things being far more flimsy and wide spread than my concept of the immortality line.
And you know, it’s like plastic straws discourse. Yeah individual things make a difference, but uh, the plastic straw ban isn’t going to stop the council off loading recycling to a dumping plant.
To put it quite brutishly, you can tell corporations and countries to fuck off. Every time ground is given, they take more. It’s not like we don’t have precedent for this. When the FBI seized Megaupload in 2012 it was considered absolutely disastrous. A country had planted its flag in and started policing the Internet in a way beyond their means. That’s not to say I’m saying we need the Silk Road to be allowed to be on the main web or scam sites not to be snipped, but that is how the ball gets rolling. Stripe or Mastercard gets away with pressurising art sites about NSFW, citing things abhorrent (3d child models, bestiality, hypnosis, scat etc.) and then starts going down to furries and – more recently – diaper artists. Now you might not agree with this, actually you’ll probably think it’s a good thing, but then it comes for porn bans, then Gumroad nukes all NSFW stuff. This is a global and borderline imperial thing, an American processing company having access to Japanese artist business accounts is probably not a good thing. Don’t think it won’t keep going down too. You’ve got AI bots going after keywords in financial articles, completely devoid of whether the context was a quote, or being critical.
This is the same for harassment claims about my immortality line. Yes, you should do better OpSec, and I know I’m a bad one talking, but it goes both ways. We shouldn’t have multiple websites and companies dedicated to feeding your employer private information, we shouldn’t have scanbots to instantly comb through an employee’s social media – sometimes without it even being given over via google links and connections. The level of privacy invasion that we have agreed to doesn’t just mean the damn cookies or data collection. It means enforcing avatar rules or not being trust worthy unless you have a certain email or a linkedin. You shouldn’t be punished by captchas because you choose not to take an identifier with you everywhere.
And listen, I know spam is bad. I know we are jettisoning towards the dead internet theory especially with things like the king of clickbait. But do you know what? The fillers of spam, the cheap shitty journalists who still harass Star Wars Kid years later deserve to die to ChatGPT. People have always been screwed with, even in real life on the Internet and that won’t stop (just get worse as everyone has to provide their face to use a platform. Hey do you remember Gab?) but we can at least limit it. Hell, even the Chris-chan archivers have had constant fights with this – such as decrying certain memes as “dead” or “bad” and assigning as many negative-sign values as possible to dissuade the average ween from scoring things on their profile.
You’re pincered from both ends.
Interestingly though, it’s not like there isn’t precedent with all this in the actual art world within the lights of the statue arguments. For example, whether a statue of Robert E. Lee is actually supposed to be portraying him, or it’s supposed to be a sign of conquest, racism and to represent eyes on the black population. In a documentary surrounding the royal art collections, talks about King Charles II getting a portrait of his face from three angles for the sole purpose to show that he wants /himself/ to be seen, not merely the act of authority or previous small locket-sketches made for simply representing allegiance. So the idea there that the semiotic, person, and profile being portrayed has always been floated about, but it’s become more striking on the Internet.
[1] Kasket, E., 2019. All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of your Personal Data. 1 ed. London: Robinson. p.179
[2] Lantagne, Stacey, Famous on the Internet: The Spectrum of Internet Memes and the Legal Challenge of Evolving Methods of Communication (April 1, 2017). P.402
[3] Cases and expansion from: Smith, Cathay and Lantagne, Stacey, Copyright & Memes: The Fight for Success Kid (August 3, 2021). 110 Georgetown Law Journal Online 142 (2021),
[4] For further reading: https://www.stibbe.com/publications-and-insights/data-privacy-day-2023-highlighting-the-most-impactful-ecj-judgments-from
[5] Farrand, B. ‘Is This a Hate Speech?’ The Difficulty in Combating Radicalisation in Coded Communications on Social media Platforms. Eur J Crim Policy Res 29, 477–493 (2023).
[6] Gorman, A.G. (2017) “Williams and the Desirability of Body‐Bound Immortality Revisited,” European journal of philosophy, 25(4), pp. 1062–1083. P.5.
[7] Dawkins, R. (2006) The Selfish Gene By Richard Dawkins. 30th anniversary edition [i.e. 3rd edition]. Oxford ;: Oxford University Press. p.192
[8] Carlos Mauricio Castaño Díaz, (2013) Defining and Characterizing the Concept of Internet
Meme, 6 REVISTA CES PSICOLOGÍA, July–Dec. 82, 87–88
[9] Heidi Crowter ("I Can Count to Potato" girl) - Midlands Today 12/04/12 (Internet Trollers) (youtube.com)
[10] Matalon, L.J. (2019) ‘Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions: Internet Memes and Copyright’, Texas law review, 98(2), pp. 405–437.