Pepe the Frog Information Cascades
This video has some strong evidence that points towards a pepe information cascade. Pepe was originally a cartoon character that received the meme treatment starting around 2015, ultimately, he was classified as a hate symbol in 2017. Well, that escalated quickly. Pepe’s rise to Nazism started when he became overly popular in mainstream culture, he became a well known meme that most people our age know about. To evaluate his level of cultural penetration know that I am not a memester (despite the fact that I have now written two blog posts about memes, they seem to be the easiest way to see network effects) nor are any of my friends memesters yet pepe had penetrated my friend group by early 2016. To combat his rise to popular culture, people started to create pepe memes that were incredibly insensitive and offensive while also catering to a certain type of humor. This behavior was meant to make the casual users uncomfortable about using pepe as a meme. This ultimately led to two different cascades that the video does not go into as much as I feel it should. There was the cascade of the “wholesome” pepes that appealed to the masses, these got spread to the far corners of the internet and stayed there gaining popular cascading interest as everyone started to see them and become interested in trying to make their own pepe meme that eventually was also spread.
Meanwhile, the not so casual, bitter and ultimately racist (or at least enablers of racist behavior) people are sitting in their dark hole of the internet feeding each other pepe memes that are not so wholesome. They say “This will show those casuals not to mess with our memes. This isn’t racist, it is to prove a point.” When these memes escape the dark hole they immediately get blown to pieces by the people in the world that know these types of memes are wrong. The people in the hole are unaware that what they are doing is not actually working and double their effort thinking that the more they do the quicker pepe will be left alone by the casuals. This shows that there are two side by side cascades that are completely missing each other. The cascade happening in the hole is propagating solely within the hole and there are gatekeepers preventing it form getting out. On the other hand, the real world is cascading the wholesome memes and then are kept out of the hole because they are thinking that the people in the whole are insane, which they very well might be.