Pre-Internet & Proto-Digital

The Word Itself: Dawkins and the Birth of "Meme"

Every history of memes must begin with the word itself, and the word begins with Richard Dawkins. In 1976, the British evolutionary biologist published The Selfish Gene, a book that would reshape how we think about evolution, genetics, and, quite accidentally, internet culture. In the book's final chapter, Dawkins proposed that cultural information spreads in a manner analogous to genetic replication. He needed a word for a unit of cultural transmission, something that would parallel "gene." He considered the Greek word "mimeme" (meaning "that which is imitated") but wanted something that sounded more like "gene." He shortened it to "meme."

Dawkins envisioned memes as ideas, behaviors, or styles that propagate from person to person through imitation. A catchy tune, a fashion trend, a religious belief, a catchphrase -- all of these were memes in his framework. They competed for space in human minds the way genes competed for space in the gene pool. The "fittest" memes -- the catchiest, most memorable, most easily replicated -- survived and spread. The rest faded into obscurity.

It would be another two decades before Dawkins' academic term was repurposed by internet users to describe funny pictures with text on them. But the conceptual framework was already there: cultural units that replicate, mutate, and compete for attention. The internet would eventually become the most powerful meme-propagation machine in human history, but Dawkins had described the mechanism long before the infrastructure existed.

Proto-Memes: Kilroy Was Here and the Analog Age

Of course, memes in the broad Dawkinsian sense have existed for as long as humans have communicated. But certain analog phenomena deserve special attention as direct ancestors of internet memes. Chief among them is "Kilroy Was Here" -- a simple graffiti drawing of a bald man peering over a wall, accompanied by that iconic phrase. During World War II, American GIs spread Kilroy across every surface they could find: barracks walls, latrine stalls, bridges, tanks, and even the underside of the Arc de Triomphe. The image traveled with troops across continents, mutated with local variations, and baffled anyone who encountered it without context.

Kilroy was, in every meaningful sense, a meme. It was simple enough to reproduce from memory. It had no clear single author (its origins remain disputed). It spread through imitation. It carried an in-group significance -- if you knew Kilroy, you were part of the joke. And it was fundamentally pointless in the best possible way. No one drew Kilroy to sell anything or advance a political cause. They drew it because it was funny, because others had drawn it before them, and because leaving your mark on the world with a stupid little doodle is one of the most deeply human impulses there is.

Other analog proto-memes include "Frodo Lives" graffiti from 1960s counterculture, the smiley face (designed by Harvey Ball in 1963, then escaping into the wild as a free-floating symbol), chain letters promising fortune or doom, and "the game" -- a cognitive prank where the only rule is that if you think about the game, you lose. All of these share the core properties of internet memes: simplicity, replicability, participatory humor, and no centralized authority.

BBS Culture: The First Online Communities

The Bulletin Board System, or BBS, was the internet before the internet. Starting in the late 1970s, hobbyist programmers set up computers with modems that other users could dial into, one at a time, to read and post messages, share files, and play text-based games. A BBS was typically run by a single "sysop" (system operator) from their home, and its community was often local -- you were limited by long-distance phone charges, so most users lived in the same area code.

BBS culture developed many of the social dynamics that would later define internet communities. Users adopted handles (screen names) rather than using real names. Inside jokes and shared references created group identity. Flame wars -- heated arguments conducted in text -- became a recognized phenomenon. And certain pieces of content circulated from board to board, passed along by users who frequented multiple systems. ASCII art, text-based jokes, and humorous "text files" were the shareable content of the BBS era.

ASCII art deserves particular mention. Limited to the 128 characters of the ASCII standard, early computer artists created astonishingly detailed images using nothing but letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. Elaborate ASCII drawings of dragons, logos, and pop culture characters were traded and admired across BBS networks. This was, in a very real sense, the first digital art form that existed primarily for sharing and remixing. ASCII artists built on each other's techniques, developed recognizable styles, and competed for status within their communities -- all dynamics that would repeat endlessly in meme culture.

The Emoticon Revolution

On September 19, 1982, Dr. Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, posted a message to an internal bulletin board that would change the face of digital communication. The problem was simple: in text-only discussions, it was hard to tell when someone was joking. Misunderstandings were frequent. Fahlman's solution was elegant. He proposed using the character sequence :-) to indicate jokes and :-( to indicate serious statements.

"I propose the following character sequence for joke markers," Fahlman wrote. "Read it sideways." Those three characters -- colon, hyphen, closing parenthesis -- became the first widely adopted emoticon. The smiley spread rapidly through university computer networks and then into the broader online world. Within years, dozens of variations had emerged: winking ;-) surprised :-O tongue-out :-P and many more.

The emoticon is a perfect case study in memetic evolution. Fahlman created the original, but the community immediately began mutating it. No one asked permission. No one credited the source. The idea was simple enough to replicate and useful enough to spread, so it did. By the time the World Wide Web arrived, emoticons were already a universal feature of online communication. They would eventually evolve into emoji -- but that is a story for a later era.

Usenet: The Wild Frontier

If BBS boards were small towns, Usenet was the frontier. Established in 1980 as a distributed discussion system connecting university computers, Usenet organized conversations into "newsgroups" -- hierarchical categories like comp.sys.mac (Macintosh computing), rec.humor (jokes), and alt.folklore.urban (urban legends). Unlike BBS boards, Usenet was not controlled by any single operator. Messages propagated across a network of servers, making it perhaps the first truly decentralized social platform.

Usenet was the birthplace of many phenomena that would become foundational to internet culture. FAQ documents (Frequently Asked Questions) were invented on Usenet as a way to onboard newcomers without repeating the same explanations endlessly. The term "spam" for unwanted messages originated there, named after a Monty Python sketch (itself a meme). Trolling -- posting provocative content specifically to elicit angry reactions -- was refined into an art form on Usenet.

Godwin's Law and the Meta-Meme

In 1990, attorney Mike Godwin formulated what would become one of the internet's most enduring observations: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Godwin's Law was not merely an observation but a deliberate experiment in memetic engineering. Godwin was troubled by the casual way people invoked Nazi comparisons in online arguments, and he consciously created a counter-meme -- a pithy, quotable phrase designed to spread and to make people think twice before reaching for the Hitler comparison.

It worked. Godwin's Law spread across Usenet and eventually the entire internet, becoming one of the most widely cited "laws" of online discourse. It is, in a sense, a meta-meme: a meme about memes, a cultural replicator that comments on the behavior of cultural replicators. This kind of self-referential, recursive quality would become a hallmark of internet meme culture. Memes about memes, formats that comment on formats, irony folded upon irony -- it all traces back to this Usenet-era tradition of using humor to analyze and regulate community behavior.

"On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog"

In 1993, Peter Steiner published a cartoon in The New Yorker that would become one of the most reproduced cartoons in the magazine's history. It depicted two dogs at a computer, one saying to the other, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." The cartoon captured a fundamental truth about online identity that remains relevant three decades later: the internet enables anonymity, pseudonymity, and the freedom to present yourself as anyone or anything.

This insight would prove central to meme culture. Anonymity meant that content could be judged on its own merits rather than on the reputation of its creator. It meant that a teenager in their bedroom could produce content indistinguishable from that of a professional comedian. It meant that ideas spread based on their memetic fitness -- their humor, their relatability, their shock value -- rather than on the social status of the person sharing them. The democratic, meritocratic (or at least anarchic) nature of meme culture is inseparable from the anonymity that early internet platforms provided.

Chain Emails and Viral Forwarding

As email became widespread in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new distribution mechanism for memes emerged: the forward button. Chain emails -- messages that encouraged recipients to forward them to everyone they knew -- became one of the first forms of truly viral digital content. Some promised good luck if forwarded and bad luck if not. Others contained jokes, urban legends, or supposedly true stories that were too good (or too alarming) to keep to yourself.

The chain email was crude, but it established a pattern that would define the next three decades of internet culture: content that spreads by encouraging users to share it with their networks. Every retweet, every share button, every "tag a friend who..." post is a descendant of the chain email. The mechanism was the same; only the friction changed. What took five minutes of copying email addresses would eventually take a single tap on a phone screen.

Eternal September and the Loss of Internet Innocence

Every September, a new crop of university freshmen would gain access to Usenet through their school accounts. For a few weeks, the existing community would be flooded with newcomers who did not know the norms, the culture, or the etiquette. Regulars called this annual disruption "September." It was annoying but temporary -- by October, the new users had either learned the rules or drifted away.

Then, in September 1993, AOL opened a gateway that gave its millions of subscribers access to Usenet. The influx of new users was not a trickle but a flood, and unlike university freshmen, AOL users kept coming. The old norms could not be maintained. The culture shifted irrevocably. Usenet veterans called it "Eternal September" -- the month that never ended, the perpetual influx of newcomers who would never fully assimilate.

Eternal September is one of the most important concepts in internet history because it describes a dynamic that repeats at every scale. Every online community faces a version of this tension: the founding culture versus the mass of new arrivals. When Digg users migrated to Reddit, when Tumblr users migrated to Twitter, when your parents joined Facebook -- each was a local Eternal September. The fear that an influx of outsiders will destroy what makes a community special is baked into the DNA of internet culture. It is why gatekeeping exists, why "normie" became a slur, and why every platform's oldest users insist that things were better before.

Why the Internet Was Fertile Ground

Looking back at this pre-internet era, several factors explain why digital networks would become the ultimate meme-propagation machine. First, the medium was text-based, which meant that content had to be clever to stand out. You could not rely on pretty pictures or professional production values. Wit was the currency. Second, the communities were small and self-selecting, which created intense shared context -- the foundation of inside jokes. Third, anonymity freed people to experiment, to be weird, to fail without consequence. Fourth, the technology itself encouraged sharing: forwarding an email cost nothing, copying a text file was trivial, and there was no copyright enforcement to speak of.

Most importantly, these early online communities were populated by people who were, almost by definition, outsiders. In the 1980s and early 1990s, going online required technical knowledge, expensive equipment, and a willingness to spend hours staring at green text on a black screen. The people who did this were disproportionately nerdy, socially awkward, and deeply invested in humor as a social bonding mechanism. They built communities where cleverness was valued above all else, where the best joke won, and where shared references created belonging. This culture -- geeky, irreverent, self-referential, democratic, and just a little bit transgressive -- would become the template for internet humor. Everything that followed, from LOLcats to TikTok, grew from soil that was tilled in university computer labs and suburban bedrooms in the 1980s.

The pre-internet era did not produce memes in the way we now understand the term. There were no image macros, no viral videos, no trending hashtags. But it produced something arguably more important: the culture that would create all of those things. The inside jokes of Usenet, the ASCII art of BBS boards, the emoticons of Carnegie Mellon, the chain emails of early AOL -- these were the primordial organisms from which the entire ecosystem of internet meme culture would evolve. Every era that follows is, in some sense, a continuation of what began here.