America is truly a land of opportunity.
See, back in my day, teachers would always ask us kids what we wanted to be when we grew up, almost as if elementary school was the ideal time to lock in a career track for the rest of your life. Kids today, on the other hand, may never know that pressure, since it’s a good chance they’ll end up working jobs that don’t even exist yet. Figuring out the algorithms that control self-driving cars, for example— or maybe even driving a shuttle bus to the moon. Who knows? The possibilities are literally endless for creative people who’re willing to work hard.
In America, a young person could even make an obscene amount of money just by uploading cat pictures to the Internet.
I know that last one is possible, because it’s been done. In 2007, a software developer named Eric Nakagawa was having a bad day at work. He asked his friend, Kari Unebasami, to send him a cute photo to make him feel better— and what he got was a handful of cat pictures with misspelled captions.
In that moment, the two friends realized that they’d found their calling in life. They started a website— or rather, an old-school web blog— to post these photos for their friends’ amusement. The started the project anonymously, using only their nicknames— Eric was “Cheezeburger”, and Kari was “Tofuburger”— but when viewers couldn’t help but share all those cute pictures, the website exploded in popularity. When the site went viral, Eric and Kari cashed in by hosting a few paid advertisements, and the project became a massive business opportunity.
Now keep in mind, it’d be dubious to say that somebody can change the world simply by uploading cat pictures to the Internet. Eric and Kari weren’t exactly solving any world problems, or curing cancer, or anything like that— although to be fair, I guess you could say that spreading laughter could potentially be seen as some kind of noble calling? I guess that’s how Eric and Kari saw their project, especially after “I Can Has Cheezeburger” became one of the very first Web 1.0 sites to go viral.
Years have passed since then. Eric and Kari have cashed out and sold their website, so I can only assume that they’re enjoying a very early retirement out in Hawaii, spending their days trolling the Internet and wading through swimming pools of cash. But even though these two have ceded creative control of “I Can Has Cheeseburger”, their project has had a huge impact on modern communication by popularizing (or even creating) the Internet meme.
We’re probably all familiar with memes: those funny, captioned photos which have a way of popping up in your social media feed whenever a snappy response is called for. And those awkwardly phonetical captions even have their own vernacular— “LOLSpeak”. Yes, the same style of writing that Eric and Kari used in their earliest photos has been adopted by the next generation of Internet trolls. LOLSpeak is an extremely versatile language— depending on one’s mood, you could express humor, discontent, or even solidarity with the original poster. For those of a certain age and/or snark level, the ambiguity of LolSpeak is definitely a feature, not a bug.
And even better— today, I learned that the “I Can Has Cheezburger” website is still going strong! It looks a bit more corporate now, having absorbed a few other Web 1.0 classic sites, but don’t let that slick look fool you. Decades later, it’s still the best place to get your daily dose of cat pictures… which means that you still have at least one solid option for killing time during your work day!
