The guy behind the LOLcat empire is obsessed with figuring out what makes the Internet work. Here’s how he uses it.
I Iove tech, it consumes all of my life, and I spend a shit ton of time trying to hide it from our lives. It is clunky. It feels unnatural. When I travel I have an 11-inch Macbook Air, and then I think, can't I replace this with an iPad? I'm always trying to minimize and shrink it.
I have a stack of seven tablets on my nightstand right now: The Kindle Fire, iPad1 and 3, a Window Surface Tablet. I have a Dell laptop with a floppy screen.
I want to understand where tech is going and what humans are doing with it because that influences how we see the world, how we interact with each other, consume content, and laugh. Technology that serves the users the best ends up winning. I want us to be where that is going.
Even from legal perspective: What does it mean to have the government spying on us? How are people responding that? What is it that is so interesting to people. At the WWCS. What were people enjoying and laughing about? What were people making fun of?
My job at this point at Cheezburger doesn't involve touching the content. The whole circle has come around. I am using the site like any other user. I want to understand the world like the user. I am the guinea pig.
Every once in a while I will make a meme. But mostly I am a lurker. The last big one was Tac Nayn, the opposite of Nyan Cat.
The world of memes is so varied and diverse. It used to be few years ago that memes had a shelf life of several weeks and month and you could get to know it and rebuild on it. And now memes are fused with entertainment in general and it's hard to separate one from the other. I'm trying to figure out what that means to people. Who is the next level of adoptees?
Animated gifs and memes are more high production in quality. TV is more audience engaged and user generated. There is an art form to animated gifs. The mainstream media, like CNN or the New York Times tried to do an animated gif and I wanted throw up it was so jaggedy.
[My favorite memes] are rage comics. They have a Seinfeldian format about everyday life. Their crudeness is a great format to share personal and common frustrations.