Not a common meme or for the casual Twitter user. It was a Tumblr meme that divided the culture. Someone made a post about having a dream where there was a new meme where it was pictures of cats with the word “Bode” on them. Many thought to themselves that this meme was absurdist enough to be funny without context and easy enough to make, so why shouldn’t it become a meme?
It is important for me to be honest with my audience and tell them I was a tumblr girl. During my tenure as a tumblr girl we were big on self analysis of our internet usage as it was happening. Had I not been on that website then, I wouldn’t be writing this newsletter now. In my mind everyone on tumblr was exactly like me. I read every good post in the voice of a smart detached alt girl who would have been my friend if she were a real person and not a composite of every smart or funny thought I saw. I read every bad post in the voice of an over eager nerd who thought that they were very smart when in reality they were only kind of smart. The meme analysis came from both sides. Not all of it bad but not all of it good. Sometimes it was just talking for the sake of talking. Having a take to have a take. Arguing as a hobby. Analyzing memes was as much a meme for us as actual memes.
Bode came to us at the peak of these self analytics. It was the perfect opportunity to test out all the analysis we had been doing. It was an experiment and we were both the scientists administering the treatment and the rats receiving the electric shock. Could we make up a meme where we all knew the origin was a dream of one of our colleagues. It meant nothing and its backstory did not make it impossible to understand, were you to come across it organically. It was also easy to make and had the universal internet appeal of fat cats. Simple enough really that we could make this dream a reality because we knew, or thought we knew what made memes not only popular but good.
Something I don’t want to discount here is the power of dreams. Or more accurately the appeal of the power of dreams. I don’t dream about the internet much. Maybe during a light nap I might dream that I’m scrolling through Twitter because that’s what I was doing before I fell asleep. But when I’m settling into an 8 to 12 hour sleep after a cocktail containing various amounts of Melatonin, Weed, Benadryl, Zzzquil, and Tylenol PM, my dreams take on a very different shape. I am much more of an “Obama Pyramid'' dreamer. A dream about meme is fascinating to me as I’m sure it is to people whose dreams cannot come close to resembling real life. Dreams like these can easily be made to be prophetic because they are so similar to real life. That by announcing your easy to replicate dream you have changed and affected the future. There’s an element of fake mysticism here that adds a bit of fun. A meme came to someone in a dream and then we were able to make that meme real away from the context of the original post. A meme had been divined for us. Who were we to deny that meme popularity.
Just because we could make the meme doesn’t mean we should make the meme. The meme itself is boring to fine. We were more obsessed with the tumblr in-joke than the actual meme itself. It was a re-occurrence of “i like your shoelaces” but this one we wanted to show to the world. We were too in the spotlight. Too smart for our own good and too dumb to stop ourselves. The Tumblr to buzzfeed pipeline was too fast, too easy. It seemed that since 2014 all of us had gone off to college and were more than willing to turn state secrets on our silly little community. Give away any info we had for a chance to be noticed by the adults. Show off how smart and special we were. Explain why we thought something was funny so our moms would get it. This need for approval would lead to terminal teachers pet syndrome and endless gifted kid discourse.
Early on someone said the meme was too forced. That we were trying too hard to make it happen and therefore it was inauthentic. It was always more about wanting it to be a meme. That's what we really wanted. To dream the impossible dream, to make anyone special. We wanted who were on Tumblr to be our reality and any way we could make that happen was good. We were disgruntled teenagers who wanted to make an impact on the world and have that impact felt. We spent hours of young lives devoted to arguing about queer theory or feminism, thinking that being well versed in thought would help when we entered the real world. It did not. All that time spent thinking did not stop us from being stupid and young and making mistakes. The world is different now because of kids on Tumblr but not in a way I think any of us wanted. What we could not produce in terms of meaningful social change we made up for in throwing our collective weight behind getting something funny to happen. Bode was an opportunity we couldn’t not take. Proof that our actions mattered and anyone with an internet connection and a dream could affect the world, even in what turned out to be a neutral way.
one time I was talking abt bode with my brother and he was like "'if you will it, it is no dream' -theodore herzl" and i think about it every day so i appreciate this meme for that reason