Hi there! You’re reading a story from Sixth and Lavaca, a short fiction EP for SXSW 2012 hosted at saladonions.tumblr.com. If you like it, add a short tale of your own to http://sxswstories.tumblr.com. From a tweet to a novella, everything’s welcome!
I was there, son. I was there the day the memes ran out. I should remember, because I caused it.
We joke about it now, of course, like it was all just a silly dream - but back then, in 2010, it felt like the memes were the only real thing out there. It was the statistics that felt like they couldn’t be real: five hundred thousand views in a day, five million views in a week… We were drunk on power that night, son. Power, and an agency-funded bar tab. Everyone remembers where they were when Sarah Palin was elected, don’t they? Well, I can see that last night at Barrio Central as clear as HD.
I’d just finished my third tequila with Diego; we’d been working on a long blog post on the re-fragmentation of hyper-local cross-media, and had finally finished, so we’d let ourselves loose at the bar, high on organic lattes and self-confidence. We were talking about our how poorly paid we were, when Liza walked up:
“Sup, boys?”
Diego looked up: “NM Liza.”
She looked blank for a second before Diego deigned to put her out of her misery: “Not much, Liza, not much.”
She flushed with embarrassment at having missed such an obvious and obviously cool new acronym. Diego smiled, and I knew at that moment that he’d just invented it to torture her. She whipped her hair back and forth – as women often did in those days – and soon, she was back to her usual effervescence. “So guys, coming to MemeFest on Thursday? It’s going to be epic.” She lol’d, but we didn’t lol back. We’d been deep in thought for the past two hours, ever since I’d mooted the idea of a new type of digital agency. One that was paid purely based on how many social mentions it generated for its brand, and nothing else. There was no doubt that it could work of course; we’d just spent the time trying to think of a new name. Flush. Or The Engagement House. Currently, Stalin25 was my favourite.
Looking back, I can’t believe I was wrapped up in that stuff. It’s funny how you can get blinded by what’s in front of you. You can obsess over a poke war so much you don’t even realise you’ve been Facebook raped. Hmm? Oh, of course. You don’t know what Facebook is. Was. That’s another story.
But that moment is what I remember most of all; Liza, Diego and I, in that final hour, masters of a universe that was about to crumble beneath us. An expectant hush had overtaken the crowd as a bespectacled, lanky man with curly hair stepped up to the microphone. This was Martin. Liza had had a thing for him when he passed a thousand followers, but she’d got over him when he hit two thousand and became in her words, “too obviously successful”. He usually oozed a kind of nerdy mastery, but something was different that night. His mop of hair drooped, he was sweating slightly. His lip quivered, just a fraction. He looked like one of those guys who’d invested a lot of money in minidiscs.
“Guys…” he began, but faltered. He looked he was about to vomit the words up.
“Guys… the memes have run out.”
While I can’t be sure what really happened at this point, and what seemed like it should, it’s the details that stand out in my memory. The sound of a glass smashing against the floor. A nervous, uncertain ‘lol’ from the back. And Diego’s dark expression. Liza whipped her hair back, but not forth.
The first to speak was Andre, an engagement specialist from across town. “What are you talking about? There’s always another meme.”
“Not this time,” Martin replied with a quiver, “we’ve been monitoring the blogs for a whole week now and we tried to keep it quiet, but it’s the truth. No more memes have been produced. Not a single one.”
“No autotuning?”
“Nope.”
“No bacon?”
“None.”
“No cats?”
“Not even that. Nothing. Until yesterday, when this was posted on 4chan.”
Behind him, the projection flicked over to one picture we had no chance of forgetting. There, in 148-point white Impact text in front of a picture of Milhouse, just three words: NO MORE MEMES. From the back of the room, a Junior Planner let out a low, plaintive moan. It rippled through the ranks of checked shirts until it reached the front, as an angry hum.
Son, I remember asking my dad about the gulf war. He said that trying to remember it was like buying a jigsaw puzzle from a charity shop: you were almost sure you knew what the overall picture was like, but there were certain bits missing that you could never get back. At the time I didn’t understand him, but as I try to think back to that night in Barrio I can feel that same sense of confusion. Chairs were being pushed back, voices raised, Liza grabbing my hand, saying “it’s not safe here”. Diego disappearing in the confusion… and the two of us, Liza and I, rushing upstairs, stumbling out into Poland Street and along to Bermondsey, like Lot fleeing Sodom, not daring to look back.
That night was like a bad dream. Three hours scouring the web from an internet cafe in Dalston, looking for something, any trace of a meme. Liza urging me to get some sleep, but equally unable to tear herself away from this surreal nightmare. I imagine that same scene was being played out across the urban centres of the world: fearful strategists, gorged fat on the creativity of others, now suddenly being shown a much darker, scarier vision of the world and desperately seeking some evidence to refute it. Eventually, I must have passed out at the computer. In my fever-dream, a talking cat appeared to me and told me I was wasting my life, as it slowly transformed into my mother. And then it was telling me that the apocalypse was coming, so I should hide my kids, hide my wife-
I woke with a start. Liza was shaking me by the shoulder. “Look!” she cried, holding our her phone. It was Diego’s foursquare page, and he’d just checked in. At our old office, the one we’d shared when we were interns.
We boarded the first night bus going anywhere near the centre. What did I expect to find, back in Soho? A burned out warzone? A neo-agrarian society? I don’t know. The rest of London was surprisingly calm. Like they didn’t realise the massive cultural bomb that had hit us all just six hours previously. Like anything in their lives still mattered. But they didn’t get the magnitude of it, of course. Son, you have to understand. Memes had become our creative oxygen. Our creative heroin, even. And we were truly addicted. We had thought memes were never gonna give us up. Never gonna let us down. Never gonna run around and desert us. But they had, and now it was up to us to pick up the pieces. But first, we had to find Diego. There had been a look of dark will on his face that night, like the man who sees the iceberg coming, but knows where the lifeboats are.
* * *
We trudged across the Square and down Frith Street, furtively scanning the road ahead. I remember Liza saying she’d read reports of marauding gangs of search engine optimisers ambushing travellers for their water and food. Someone had heaped thousands of business cards into a makeshift bonfire as a source of heat. A blood-spattered fixed-gear bike lay in the gutter. To be honest, I’m glad I don’t remember more.
As we stepped across the threshold into ACCH, passing between the giant statues of the founders on one side and an oversized plastic llama on the other, we heard a shout from the next floor. Looking down from the balcony above, there was Diego. And he was smiling.
We came upstairs onto the glass mezzanine, and there he was, with a small piece of plastic in his hand. I remember this part, oh yes. As he turned to face us, the pieces of metal in the plastic caught the light and I saw that it was a small blue memory stick. Which he was holding over a shredder.
“They told me this would happen,” he said. “They told me it couldn’t last forever.” Diego told us that that culture couldn’t just go on eating and regurgitating itself, wallowing in its own absurdity and parody. That we were sacrificing any sense of creation – and for what? Fame? Fame amongst the anonymous masses of the internet? A few seconds of partial interest from the disaffected? His eyes were wild now, bulging.
He said that he knew - had always known, because they had told him - that the age of the meme had to come to an end.
I wanted to ask him: “and knowing this, you still put your life behind it? And you dragged me along too?”
But I already knew his answer. The money was good, so good. And the living was easy, wasn’t it? Searching, copying, seeding. Find some bloggers, pass it on, collect your cheque. Even if it wasn’t to last, who could resist an offer like that?
Liza looked incredulous, but couldn’t take her eyes off Diego as he spoke: “Will, Remember when we were interns here? In 2005. Remember how we struggled against the system that only rewarded blockbuster campaigns, that only kept the big boys in charge, the ones who had budgets of millions and real cameras and connections? Remember how back then, we would have given anything for a break?”
I remembered. Of course I remembered. The days had been long and cold in our bedsit. I remembered how we would spend lonely nights drawing out complex seeding strategies and scamps onto A2, only to burn them to provide a little heat. How we would watch Sony Balls, over and over, our eyes wet with tears of frustration at a system that said make it bigger, bigger, bigger. And, as I thought back to that time, I remembered how it had all changed so suddenly. How at first a trickle, and then a flood, of simple videos, pictures, words, all entwined and referencing each other, began to appear across the web. How some had been shared and copied in their millions while others flickered and died without trace. How nobody, no matter how hard they analysed, what models they built, what talent they bought in, nobody could decipher which would be popular and which would fail.
Nobody… except Diego. And suddenly, I knew exactly what he was going to say, and what he was going to do. He held the memory stick aloft.
“Here they are,” he said, flatly, as though he didn’t quite believe it himself. “The memes. All of them, and enough for years more. Created from mystery, released by me, seeded by us, predicted by us. We were the golden boys of the industry. But Will, it’s time to stop.”
And I felt in my stomach that he was right. But Liza didn’t. What I’d never understood at the time, my son, was that behind that carefree smile of hers burned dark hunger, hunger and jealousy. Liza had always been the third wheel on our bike, slowing us down, unnecessary, always a step behind, always the butt of Diego’s jibes. And she knew it too, but for four years she hadn’t known why. But now she knew, oh yes.
Those next five seconds felt like treacle then, but I can barely hold on to them now. I have to hold onto them, for her sake. With an animal yell she hurled herself at Diego, at the memory stick that held all her answers. Diego wasn’t expecting that, and didn’t offer enough resistance to her lunge. He crumpled as she crashed into him, and the pair of them flew back through the glass barrier and down, down the ten metres to the marble floor of the entranceway.
I looked down after them. And from that grisly tableau I’ll always remember three things. One, Liza’s dead face, a mixture of astonishment and anguish. Two, illuminated by the rising sun, a double rainbow, all the way across the sky. And three, in Diego’s lifeless hand, a small blue memory stick.
Well, you never know.
Track 2: same time tomorrow.
