Today’s rant is going to be a special one. It’s a comment on Internet culture – as useful a topic as any to complain about for it will be as effective as shouting into a hurricane. But I am annoyed, dear reader, and what better place to post my annoyance but on this personal little chunk of cyberspace reserved just for my aggravation.

I don’t know if this is the actual origin of the Doge meme though it’s certainly the most copied image of the damn dog.

For those between the ages of “dead” and “not old enough to be consumed with raising children” (which is could be shorted to between ‘dead’ and ‘dead’) you may have heard of the Doge meme. Perhaps this delightful bit of highbrow online couture has consciously slipped by your notice and if you are like Derek and I, without a finger on the staggered, sickly pulse of what passes for the world’s collective attention deficit users, then your introduction to Doge was likely through some obnoxious parroting by an unnamed party. ‘Such wow’ they blithely stammer as if the first signs of severe damage to Broca’s area was manifesting. ‘So edge’ flies across their mind in some self congratulatory half mockery of the mentally disabled.

For most people unfamiliar with the origins of this… activity, they will probably dismiss these utterances as some peculiar form of verbal Parkinson’s. It’s like the mind is rapidly hemorrhaging half composed thoughts into the thought-sphere of the wider world. Alas, the unfortunate truth is that people say this with sincerity and intention. They are referencing the Doge Meme. And it is such a stupid practice that it annoys me to no end.

Now, that may be an unfortunate confession to make, as a great driving force in the development of Internet culture is the cultivation of ‘trolling.’ This activity is devoted specifically to making the practitioner as obnoxious as possible. It’s how things like Rick-rolling have become a thing. However, what truly aggravates me about Doge is that it is not designed to be annoying – it is the ubiquitous blind replication of it that crawls beneath my skin. Every time I get a steam message from someone going “Such wow, many whatevers,” God kills a kitten. I know this is true, because I keep a box of the cute little creatures and squeeze the life from them as if they were a fuzzy, mewling stress ball.

There are two things that I hate about Doge. One is that it is stupid. It was never funny. Originating as some lame internal monologue tumblr captions overlaid pictures of Shiba Inu, I would consider it racist towards Japanese if I gave two shakes of a rat’s tail about tumblr activism. I don’t so the cheap joke at the broken English of Asian speakers doesn’t rile me up. The lazy joke itself is the problem. It’s not funny. It never was funny and mostly exists as part of that weird cultish worship of cute things that also predominates the Internet.

Second, the meme’s spread is so mindless as to be a virus. It shows up everywhere. Unlike Rick-rolling, perhaps its closest analogous entity, it isn’t meant to inconvenience or ‘troll’ the audience. It is a lazy reference to an obscure captioned image. It’s the white noise of someone’s verbal diarrhea as they make a brainless flatulence of popular culture as if the very act of reproducing the tripe is somehow forcing some ounce of wit into its lifeless husk. I’m tired of commentators spewing out in my Dota matches as if their mimicry were evidence of how ‘hip’ and ‘up to date’ they are. Which is an ironic goal since the damn meme has been flopping around for months – a staggering time for anything birth on the Internet – too pathetic to be truly prominent and too miserable to finally die and be forgotten.

What’s worse, unlike other memes were learning its origins can often add some quantifiable ounce of amusement from ‘being in on the joke,’ the Doge is too lame to even get better with the knowledge of what it’s truly about.

Maybe one day I’ll do a proper rant against/for actual memes in general. Suffice to say, the Doge meme is representative of all that’s wrong and apprehensible about those things. It’s sole existence is through the thoughtless japing of its existence as if blind adherence to what everyone else is doing will somehow grant its user some measure of popularity. It doesn’t. All it does is make you sound like an idiot.