Wojaklore Historiography

a live, an index, and problems for meme studies

Welcome to this paid post — first, I wanna share with you this livestream I did with

Adam Aleksic

, the brilliant Etymology Nerd. We talked about “the algorithmic gaze” and some of the ideas we’ve each been working on from our respective angles. We’re planning another one this Wednesday, April 2nd, at 6:00 PM Eastern Time — mostly to talk about AI slop. John Pork and Jean Baudrillard may be discussed as well. If you’re free and wanna leave it on in the background as you cook dinner or ask/offer your input in chat, pull up!

Now, for what this post is about. When I worked at Know Your Meme, one of my proudest accomplishments was the construction of a Wojak Index, which took nearly all our memes involving Wojak and organized them. Here is a link to my index (please click it so KYM gets the pageviews) and below, a screenshot of a part of it.

I am one of the few people in the world to have rigorously approached Wojaklore historiography. As a big fish in a small pond (or the sole tadpole in a puddle) it behooves me to share some findings with you and sketch out what looking at Wojak tells us about the internet’s history. I’ll also describe some of the problems, as I see them, in meme studies methodology and their possible solutions.

Wojak started around 2010, on decentralized image boards. Over the next few years, the meme turned into a kind of digital everyman, representing the you or us of posters. But Wojak also turned into a Barbie doll you could bully, deployed to represent groups that users didn’t like and create little tableaux illustrating various debates and narratives. My previous piece on NPC Wojak covers one strain of this posting.

What fascinates me about Wojak most is the turn this memelore seems to take around late 2019 to early 2020, with the emergence of various “Wojak Comics” formats that incorporate female Wojaks like Doomer Girl or Trad Girl, and which normal people liked. It’s likely that if you’re familiar with the meme, these are the Wojaks you’re thinking of. Around this same date range, there were a number of revivals of memes from the early 2010s, like Are Ya Winning, Son and the Cover Yourself in Oil Rage Comic. Now, this could be a coincidence — but I don’t think it’s crazy to see it as a kind of nostalgia cycle, similar to what we see in other kinds of fashion or art.

So through Wojak’s decade-plus journey on the internet, we see a story that unfolds: a generation grows up with a meme, uses it, and reinterprets it. A meme that begins on a janky image board, likely posted from a desktop computer, today lives on a video-centric, algorithmic social platform built for smartphones. Along the way, Wojak has been applied to many important conversations, and influenced them (if you talk of “Trad Wives,” “Zoomers,” or “Doomers,” you participate in discourses where Wojak memes have played a formative, anchoring role). Understanding the development of memes is key to understanding these discourses.

What we need right now is a long view on the internet. Meme history is one way of finding such a view. Traditionally, internet culture reporting latches onto a story because it is popular right now or is about to be big. Viral happenings which bubble up from the social internet every few hours should be monitored, and the best craftspeople of this art, like

Taylor Lorenz

(whose Substack is an invaluable resource) provide insightful, fast, and probing analysis. But we also need to draw a map of the forest in addition to the 4-1-1 on each tree and turn along the path we’re speed-running.

Taking such a long view is a challenge. As social scientist

Kevin Munger

(whose newsletter you should definitely read) describes, studies of social media tend to be years behind — the space is so dynamic that research timelines can have difficulty keeping up. Plus, the platforms often don’t want to give data.

Which is why we need criticism and narrative history about internet culture. Science is good but too slow. Trend journalism is good but isn’t built to take the long view. So we need people to sit at their laptops and think about this stuff all day in a rigorous, informed, and humanistic way. My aim is to produce takes that are not just hot, but cooked: carefully-assembled, grounded in close reading, historical context, and awareness of broader structures. Dear reader, it is up to you to let me cook: