DOGE- A brief Meme Biography
In 2010, the Japanese kindergarten teacher Atsuko Satō uploaded a picture of her dog, Kabosu, a female Shiba-inu to her personal blog. Kabuso, now better known as doge, which is an intentional misspelling of “dog” , stood pretty much anonymous except for Satō’s blog until the year 2013, when a doge thread , featuring a picture of Kabosu, was posted and stuck to the top of the 4chan board S4S (Shit 4chan Says). The thread gathered over 500 replies in less than a week. A meme was born. In a matter of hours, many edits, remixes and reposts of doge images began to appear in the most diverse corners of the internet, generally following a pattern: a picture of doge, with several short phrases written with poor grammar in English, in many different colors, always with the comic sans font. Soon, the meme went out of peripheral platforms such as tumblr and 4chan, migrating to more established sites, with many more users, such as Reddit and Facebook. From this point, Kabosu, or Doge was no longer only Satō’s dog, she had become an internet culture icon, she was meme.
A picture of Sato and Kabosu, Extracted from Twitter
The popularity of doge memes exploded in the year 2013, there were uncountable montages made with the dog’s face, sometimes following the original formula seen in the first picture and other times exploring some subversive, creative and chaotic approaches to the composition. Doge was a major meme in 2013, to the point of becoming a cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, a few months after the meme’s growth in popularity. The value of dogecoin can be checked in real time here.
Besides being a main meme and a cryptocurrency, doge was also very relevant as some sort of avatar. In Hindu Mythology, an avatar is an incarnation of the divine into a physical body, in a very similar way in digital interfaces and internet culture, an avatar is some sort of empty vessel that can be used to manifest one’s identity, emotions and intentions. Doge, being having a very expressive face that is disconnected to stereotypes related to ethnicity, gender, nationality and age, was and still is very relatable to the most varied segments of internet users. Added to the great relatability of doge, there is an ease to edit and transform the dog’s face in a virtually infinite amount of ways, and this potential to edition was and still is widely exploited. There are many memes that derive from the original doge, and it’s transformation can be chronologically observed within a few minutes of internet research. The images below show some variations, editions, mutations and evolutions that doge suffered through the years.
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Despite doge, as a meme was never forgotten, it never went back to the huge popularity it had between 2013 and 2014. Not until late 2019, when another variation of doge took the internet by storm one more time. We are talking about the Swole Doge vs Cheems template, also known as the strong dog and weak dog meme, or the two dogs meme. This template is part of what could be called a rhetorical tradition in internet debate, which is further analyzed in a chapter that you can find in this website called “This good That Bad”, in which the ideas and preferences of the author are portrayed as happy, strong, and powerful, while the antithesis to their opinions is portrayed as weak, pathetic and sad. One digital community that exploited this form of visual rhetoric to its limits were the incels or involuntary celibates, a group of men that relies on pseudoscience and misogyny to justify their loneliness, claiming the existence of a complex sexual economy and hierarchy that privileges strong and cunning males, which they refer to as “Chads” or alpha males, while undermining and excluding men that are perceived as unattractive, weak and incapable. The incel community is related to a series of hate crimes, which is no surprise considering the misogynistic and almost paranoid nature of their ideas. Nevertheless, incels managed to gain some considerable relevance in mainstream internet culture through their memes. The best known meme produced by the incel community clearly is the Chad vs the Virgin template, which has been circulating the web since late 2016. The simple and rude and yet potent rhetoric of the template, portraying a powerful, colorful and strong man in contrast with a desaturated, shrugged and pale man communicates the idea of opposition of desirable vs disgusting, successful vs failed, good vs bad in a very powerful way, that can be called hypersinthesis. This Powerful visual argumentation quickly became popular in many communities that would portray themselves as “Chads” and their antagonists as “virgins”. The chad beer drinker vs the virgin wine collectionist. The chad cat owner vs the virgin dog person. This template was highly successful outside of the incel community, often being used by many people that would know nothing about incels or their ideas.
About six years later, in 2019, doge, out of its many shapes and evolutions, would rise again, and claim the chad vs virgin format to itself. The strong dog, vs the weak dog. Differing to the original format, which featured a somewhat big amount of text , the strong dog vs. weak dog features only four or less sentences. Besides being more synthetic than the chad vs virgin, the strong doge format was almost completely clean from the hateful and controversial ideas of incels, while keeping or even improving its rhetorical capacity, in a very high form of hypersynthesis. Doge is a meme that in its almost ten years of existence has passed through many changes, beginning as an unpretentious post of a dog picture in 2010, becoming a major meme and an actual cryptocurrency worth actual money in 2013, suffering countless transformations around 2015, going back to be a major meme from 2019 to 2021 widely popularizing a format while distancing it from its original, dangerous and controversial creators. Atsuko Satō, could never have predicted in 2010 that her dog, Kabosu, would be called Doge, that her face would be in a cryptocurrency into which many people invest huge amounts of money, she could never have predicted that her doge would appropriate a meme format from potential terrorists and make this format go viral for over three years. Satō had no control over the picture after it was uploaded. Neither do you or anyone over anything we post online. The internet is a huge, chaotic, beautiful and unpredictable place. Be safe while surfing here. The waves produced by a single dog picture might become a dank tsunami that creates laughter, oversimplifies debates, or even weakens the democracies sovereign States. Anyone who underestimates the power of memes is doomed to have their lives highly affected by them.