Social Capital of Memes

 The meme that I decided to write about is the very obscure meme of "change the world...my final message". If you have stumbled on the dark corners of 4chan, Tumblr, and YouTube, you are bound to find this really obscure and kind of creepy meme about a rat smoking a cigarette and giving his "final message" to the world before he disappears into thin air. At the time of writing this, the video posted on YouTube has about 600,000 thousand views, and is filled with comments posting about how the meme makes them feel. Most of the comment are of how the YouTube algorithm pushes video that your subconscious needs to see and how they are randomly available to you, when the algorithm itself thinks that you would like to watch said video. The meme itself is about 10 seconds long and it is surprising how many other people had a similar reaction to mine, in which we felt that this 10 second video was not just something made randomly on the internet, but a piece of art, and by extension a piece of someone who decided to express themselves in a surreal way. The video invokes a sense of sadness, loneliness and peace. The way the video plays out is that there seems to be a really bad quality photo of a rat smoking a cigarette, in what is presumed to be a sewer. Under the video is a hard coded caption that looks like it was from an old GameCube video game. The rat in a robotic voice then says "Change the world, my final message, goodbye". And the rat disappears into thin air. The music in the video also adds to the creepy atmosphere as the first track is from a horror video game (Silent Hill), and the second track that plays is from the Windows 95 startup sound. It is implied that the rat ascends to another world after his "death" in the video. It is also implied by myself and other YouTube commentators that the rat symbolizes the creator of the video. 

There are many other ways to interpret the video, but that is not the point. The effect that blows me away is that such a short video, and such a silly one at that gave so many people on the internet who don't have any connections with each other had the same reactions, and feelings that the video seem to imply the rat was facing. It really goes to show how powerful simple, dumb, silly, irrelevant, random, weird, surreal memes on a screen can have on humans and how even more impressively we can make meaning when there really was nothing to make meaning of.