Interview: YouTuber 'Frankie Fey' Talks 'Bad Art History,' Lab-Grown Memes, The Impact Of AI On Meme Culture, Kirkification And More

Дата публикации: 22-06-2026 14:49:42

Since posting her first video on YouTube in 2024, Frankie Fey has become one of the fastest-rising internet historians on the platform. With nearly half a million subscribers, Fey is best known for her "Bad Art History" series, which deep dives into the fascinating stories behind the most bizarre and viral pieces of online art and memes.
Whether she's covering furries, a disgusting story from the depths of 4chan, or the strange world of Mpreg art, Frankie approaches her topics with detailed research and a delivery that strikes a perfect balance between analytical and entertaining.
Now, you can also catch her on the Know Your Meme YouTube channel, where she hosts similarly in-depth looks at some of the most iconic and impactful memes in the history of social media.
We recently spoke with Frankie for a full interview on her history as a YouTuber, her fascination with bad internet art, AI in memes, the death of Tumblr, the downfalls of the "five app" model and much more.
Q: Hey, Frankie. Can you give us a quick rundown of what you do online?
A: I'm Frankie Fey, I am a YouTuber. I got started relatively recently, my channel's about two years and change old, and I cover bad art and baffling memes and the images in those memes and who makes them and where they come from and why they look like that. All of art history, to the extent that it exists on the internet.
Q: Some of your earliest content is animations. How did you go from posting animations to your current content?
A: I have a basic art degree. I always thought I was gonna be an animator. I never had any fundamentals. I just loved making art.
I had an Instagram where I used to just post art and animation from time to time, and I didn't have any expectation that anything was gonna happen. It was this pie-in-the-sky dream, you know, one day I'm gonna be like the next Genndy Tartakovsky. Just like all Zoomer animators who are too rejection-sensitive to actually learn how to do it the right way, like me.
And that kind of abruptly stopped. At the time, I had a normal job. I was working at a VFX studio. I was doing some After Effects stuff. That's my domain, really, and they did mass layoffs. I got let go, and it was like the ground fell out from under me. I had never not had a job. I've been working since I was 14. Working is the only thing I really know how to do, and I'm still working. I'm good at it, I think.
So it was a pretty big blow, and I figured, okay, it sucks. I've never really been let go before. It happens to everyone. Something will come along. Two weeks pass, and I don't have a new job, and that's never been the case before, and then two weeks turn into a month, and then a few months, and I was just freaking out.
I could not figure out what to do. I thought, I'm going to try to leverage this art animation thing. Maybe I can do commissions or something.
I started just going out, hanging out with people, and going to parties, and I met a lot of people during this time. I actually met a few people who were in the streaming space and the YouTube space, and it just never crossed my mind. I'm really, really introverted. Like, the last thing I ever want to do is be in front of a camera, ironically enough, but it was just like months and months of trying to find a job, and it was so demoralizing.
It's just cringe. You know, it makes you feel bad, and it just popped into my head one day. Oh my god, I'm hanging out with these people, and I know for a fact that they're funding their lifestyle with the internet.
They're on the internet, they turn on their computer, and then money comes out. That wasn't actually my goal or anything, but I have to stress I was trying to find anything. After ruminating on this for months, I was like, you know what, fine, I'll do it.
I'm going to try and upload something on Instagram or YouTube. I want to see how this works, and I thought maybe I could passively make like a couple of hundred bucks a month, something like that, and then I realized I really liked it. I didn't think I would like it. I thought it would be a weird, embarrassing thing
Q: Your first video is about the "Wonder Bread Guy." Why did you decide to make videos about bad online art history?
A: I'm very online. I have this crazy repository of information about all the weird art I've ever seen online. I just didn't think anybody cared about that kind of thing. All this stuff was just occupying the horizon of my mind for like a year while I was searching for a job.
I got totally radicalized by LinkedIn. I'm kind of joking, but I'm not joking. It's like, "You know what? Oh, I'm not employable? I'm gonna make myself so unemployable you'll all want to give me a job."
I have no idea where I came up with this Wonder Bread thing. I just knew about it in the background, and I thought it would make an interesting video. I didn't know anything about fetish art. I didn't know anything really. I kind of had like the bare essential knowledge.
Actually, I went on Know Your Meme. That's where I started with that story in particular. I started clicking links. One thing led to another, and suddenly, I realized I have this bare bones editing skill because I kind of barely know how to animate, and I'm super online. I like to talk a lot, so I'm just going to put all this together, and I don't know.
It was just like the grace of God. I don't know what happened. The video blew up, but not right away. I think it got like 5,000 views in two weeks, and I was completely new to this. I thought, oh, my God. This is crazy. I'm going to be like a Z-list YouTuber. This is so awesome. And then it just kept growing.
Q: Your channel has had pretty significant growth in just a few years. Why do you think that is?
A: I've picked up a few tips. I knew, for instance, you've got to be consistent. You've got to let a lot of videos flop. It's super demoralizing.
The algorithm likes it when you're consistent. It likes to see you invest an effort. I figured I'll make a few videos on these weird fetish art topics. People seem to like this. Maybe a couple thousand people are going to watch it. I ended up feeling very passionately about this stuff, and I really wanted to do a good job.
I think that goes a long way. One video led to another. Views kind of fell off a cliff after the first two videos. It was a little bit humbling and cringy, but I just kept pushing because I didn't really have any expectations at all. I didn't think any of this would happen. I didn't think anybody cared about weird meme art or fetish art. So basically, I just kept pushing it until I made it work.
Q: What would you say to someone who is hesitating to post their first video?
A: If I can impart literally one thing, just try it. Just do it. Because I had no media training. I did not know how to talk into a microphone. I literally had no idea what I was doing. Whenever I had a job interview, I had no idea what I was doing.
Whenever anyone's like, "Oh, I don't know. Should I try? Should I maybe?" Yes! Yes! Because I was the least qualified person on earth, and it ended up working out. I really think anyone who wants to should try. Just upload a video. If no one watches it, then nothing happened. Please let me be your living proof. If you want to try being a YouTuber or a TikToker or whatever, oh my god, just try it. Because it accidentally worked for me.
Q: Would you say you grew up on the internet?
A: I'm an older Zoomer. I was a kid in the early 2000s. We had a low-tech household, so we still had the big beige CRT-type computer. I don't know if that's what it's called.
The big beige Windows 95 machine in the basement with the modem and the router that sang the little song when you turned it on. You couldn't use the phone. We were doing that until 2006.
The computer was always there. I loved playing games. I loved going on the internet. I was maybe six or seven years old. I didn't even know what was going on yet.
I didn't even speak English fluently yet. But one of the first websites I ever visited, I had this cool older cousin. She used curse words and stuff. I was so impressed. I'd go over to her house, and we'd play on her GameCube. She'd show me what I realized later were YTPs.
She told me about this website, Funny Junk, which I guess it was like 9GAG in the sense that it was like a repost haven. So I just obsessively surfed on Funny Junk. I ended up seeing a lot of memes that were very, very not age-appropriate. It was that quintessential experience. A lot of this stuff I was seeing as a kid was genuinely everything but physically dangerous.
I shouldn't have seen any of that. It desensitizes you to the extent that you feel like the internet is your second home. Nothing surprises you. I think in order to become terminally online, you have to get hooked like that. Like really, really young. Before you can understand the difference between what it is that you're seeing on the screen and what is acceptable human behavior.
Q: There's an idea that whatever you post on the internet stays on the internet forever. But with this increased interest in documenting the internet and uncovering lost media, do you think that's true?
A: I would say that one is really weird and bifurcated because there's no middle ground with that statement. Some things do live on the internet forever. Some don't.
I think our obsession with lost media absolutely points to the fact that, try as you might, you can't preserve everything online. There's a video that I saw on Newgrounds as a kid, some kind of AMV set to like, "Bring Me To Life." I've never been able to find it. I remember exactly what it looks like. I've looked it up in every conceivable way. That didn't survive on the internet for whatever reason.
I think this is like a truly emergent social problem we're having. You have your lost media, which qualifies as stuff that gets lost on the internet, and then you have your "live forever" stuff. Your live forever stuff, to me, seems to be mostly people having a bad day, people being humiliated, you know, the lolcow obsession.
I think a lot of us are bloodthirsty. I think we have a truly punitive urge, and we can't find a socially acceptable way to exercise it, but we'll find clips of someone embarrassing themselves like 10, 15, or even 20 years ago now. We just don't let anything go. People are not allowed to mature or to learn or to change or whatever.
You need to be frozen in this constant present of the stupid thing that you put on the internet or said on the internet when you were a kid or when you were out of your mind or whatever the case may be. I really do worry about younger people.
Q: Why do you worry about younger people?
A: I worry about Gen Alpha a lot to the extent that, first of all, I don't think a seven-year-old should have a phone or TikTok or an internet presence, but they do. That's the world we live in.
Those kids are putting stuff on the internet and there's no telling if it's going to stay or if it's going to leave or it's going to disappear into the ether. I appreciate the ability of the internet to fossilize stuff insofar as finding archives of original artwork, because that's my domain.
It's cool when you can find like, a blog post from 2003 about Naruto ship art that's been perfectly preserved in internet amber. I would say that's the most positive manifestation [of internet preservation], the historical record stuff. But I feel like even though a normal person, capital "N" normal person, who uses the internet, probably is not familiar with the concept of lolcows. I think people are a lot more tuned into that kind of ritualistic humiliation than they want to admit.

So in that way, the internet does live forever. I actually think that's increasingly going to be a problem as we age. They go and manufacture a Chris-Chan out of thin air, and they just keep doing it. There's too many of us online right now.
Q: On the topic of "manufacturing" a lolcow or meme, it seems like it's a lot easier to force a meme these days. Would you say that's the case?
A: This is unpopular, and I'm not even saying this to be a contrarian, six-seven is the least funny s--t I've ever heard in my life. I don't get it. It's like the definition of a forced meme.
I get it. Like I'm not nine. So I'm not, no offense, not the target audience for six-seven. Like I get it. I feel like that meme with Tony Soprano, where it's like, "I get it. I get 'Skibidi Toilet' as a concept." I understand, but this only exists because you're all forcing it because you are all six and/or seven years old. I just don't think children, teens and adults qualitatively have the same mental understanding of what a meme is.

A meme is not just an image or a sound that elicits laughter. I think in the most crude analysis, yeah, that's probably what people think. I think it goes a little bit deeper than that, which is also why I agree that forced memes are stupid and bad.
There are memes that are like the apples and potatoes of the earth. You know, they come out of the ground or a tree, whatever. And then you've got like your seed oil memes, your red 40 memes, that's what six-seven is.
You guys are manufacturing this stuff in a lab. I don't believe you [think it's funny]. I've never seen an adult laugh at it. I have a bone to pick with six-seven. Like, am I just old? No, it's the children who are wrong.
But lowkey, it is sometimes the children who are wrong. They have their own society. They have their own grammar. They have their own mimetics. They're a different species than the rest of us.
Q: AI is behind so many popular memes today, including major, largely beloved memes like Tung Tung Tung Sahur. Do you think AI has had an overall negative or positive impact on memes and meme culture?
A: I do think AI has really taken the edge out of memes. You feel cheated when you find out this thing that made me laugh, this thing that I thought was designed by the loving hands of another human, some incomprehensible algorithm made it not funny anymore. I think AI is definitely affecting the quality of memes and it's making the quantity absolutely explode.
And it sounds like, "Yeah, who cares?" But I think memes are a very, very salient part of communication right now. We use memes as shorthand for all sorts of serious stuff. So this stuff actually does matter. We're using memes to communicate serious, sincerely held opinions.

There's this idea that no one can be sincere right now because it's considered cringe. So we use memes. But when you use a meme to express your sincerely held opinion or your viscerally felt emotion, it's important that we don't pollute our meme vocabulary with random bulls--t. What is this [AI meme] meant to express? This is nothing to me. Six-seven. This is nothing.
Q: Do you think AI and the way memes are pumped out, quantity-over-quality, these days, is destroying meme culture? Or just changing it?
A: I don't think meme culture can be destroyed, but certainly the culture of the 2010s [can be destroyed]. That's inevitable. People move on, people get older, they stop caring, and your sense of humor changes.
Pre-COVID, people were mostly on the same page. You had millions of people, for instance, who were using Reddit. I remember when dank memes were a thing. There were very few places you could go on the internet where you were around people that you recognized as your peers. You could show someone [outside of those places] a meme, and they would just have no idea what you were talking about.
This is normal now. COVID happened, and people got locked indoors. Suddenly, tens of millions of people became extremely active online in an environment that is completely foreign to them. So they cultivate their own language; they have their own memes. Now you have a society of 14-year-olds who have colonized their particular corner of the internet.

I'm not even saying that derisively. They've got their own meme culture. It's completely incompatible with the rest of us. We're incompatible with all these other emerging groups of people, too. We don't have a common language anymore.
It's like that meme recently with the AI baby. I'm axiomatically against AI because I think that human beings need to be making the art and the music and the memes. AI can do the deep-sea oil rig drilling and whatnot. I think most people probably feel that way.
But the AI baby got a laugh out of me. It's fine. It's fine to find AI memes funny. What stopped it from being funny, and this is such a specific gripe, is when I started seeing edits of that AI baby in the comments section that were obviously aimed at like tween girls. The baby was yassified.

In the edit, there were babies with butterfly locks and babies with blonde hair. They had become a completely different thing. They were now customizable avatars. The purpose of the meme, the image had for all intents and purposes, had been completely removed from its original context. It was just yassified, and people realized they had no use for it. It immediately fell out of use.
For me, it seems that memes used to be organic, and now they're lab-grown, and that's weird, and I don't like it. Not only are they lab-grown, but machines are making them for us now. I could old man yells at cloud about this one all day. I have a lot of opinions on AI and memes.

Q: Your videos mostly focus on online art that blurs the line between art and meme, with many of the artworks becoming popularized through memes. Are memes art?
A: It's hard to say what qualifies as art.
When I try to figure out where an image comes from or the context surrounding it, it's easier for me to view a lot of these memes as artwork, because if you think of it as artwork, then you have a framework for understanding it. You can identify an artist. You can identify a specific interest that it appeals to. If it's fetish art, which, a stunning amount of the time, it is. It's not more than half, but it's a lot. That's really important context.
That indicates to you why it appeared on a certain forum. That's why you only see this image or this meme, even if it's not art to you. It only appears in certain communities. I guess you don't have to think of memes as art. Your analysis can go somewhere else.
But I've definitely taken the stance that if someone sat down and drew this thing, whether as satire, or they drew it as a sincere expression of their libidinal feelings towards like an animated serial mascot, whatever it is, that's your artwork. You spent time on that. You drew that, or you 3D modeled it, or you took a picture, or you edited the picture, or whatever.
A human being manipulated this with their minds and with their hands. Then they disseminated this thing on the internet. Sometimes nobody sees it, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of people see it. They make their own version of it. They make their own derivative or fan art.
I'm not saying memes are art. They are to me, but I think there's a very, very good argument against that. That's the problem because it starts getting incredibly subjective. I think intent has a lot to do with it. It's hard because it's very hard for people to define what exactly art is.
If you want to put it really, really vaguely, anything done well can be an art form. There's certainly an art form to making memes. There's an art to posting and being a good poster. You have to have the skill, either rhetorically or artistically or musically, whatever it is that you're doing.
Q: Why did you choose to focus on so-called "bad art" on your channel, and what's your fascination with this type of art?
A: I called it bad art history because I just couldn't come up with a name. I can't stress enough. I didn't think this channel was going to be a thing. I gave it very little thought. I just called it bad art history because sometimes the art's bad, but I'm not saying it's bad because that's very subjective. I'm not about to point to someone's creation and say that sucks. That's a little bit mean.
I guess I'm just morbidly curious. I just want to know where things come from. If someone makes something weird and gross, and it makes me laugh, I want to know why it made me laugh. I want to know what it is that I can do with this grotesque image that, instead of typing out the full sentence to my friend, I could just send it to her, and she knows exactly what I mean.
I've always been interested in art. I've always wanted to be an artist in some professional capacity. I think the reason this Bad Art History series worked is that the information is already out there. That was one thing that really struck me. It's not that hard to do research for these videos if you know how to Google things and you know how to reverse search things. Not everybody knows how to do that, which is crazy because it's not a mechanically difficult thing to do.
It just doesn't really occur to people. The one thing that I thought was really cool is that any meme or any drawing on the internet, you can totally figure out where it came from. 99% of the time, you can find it. There's always a story around it. It's never nothing.
Also, I really like that you can talk about something [so funny] and be that serious about it in a serious academic tone. While you're talking academically, there's a thirst trap image of the Green M&M taking up your entire screen. I'm telling you with deadly seriousness why this matters and what this says about Western civilization. I think it's really funny.
Maybe this is pretentious, but I think it might benefit people in general if they were a little bit more intellectually curious about this meme that I like. What does this actually mean? Where did this come from? If this is art and if that's something that you're interested in, what kind of art is this? What kind of community sprang up around this thing? Why does this exist? I don't have a specific crux with the bad art history stuff, but I like to think that holistically, those videos answer all those questions.
Q: With so many topics to choose from, what is it that makes for a successful topic for a YouTube video?
A: Gross and funny, that's pretty much the key. If I think of any YouTube video that I like, anything that's a frequent rewatch for me, it's got to be gross and funny. It's got to push you away because it's disgusting and weird and objectionable, but it's got to inherently reel you in because why does this exist? Why are there hundreds of pictures of thirst art of Tony the Tiger, the serial mascot?
It's got to make you laugh. That's it. The cool thing about memes and the weird art that gets featured in a lot of memes is that they inherently have the tendency to do that. You just have to gross people out, and they'll show up. It's all out there. That's the thing.

Q: What's a topic you'd really like to cover, but haven't had the chance yet?
A: Have you heard of Gachimuchi?
There was this specific type of s--iposting tradition that came out of Niconico, a Japanese YouTube-like site, where a couple of guys took gay wrestling tapes, except they would make YouTube poops out of them. Not really the p--n scenes, but the other scenes. Despite the language barrier between Japanese and English speakers, everyone on Niconico could tell that the acting [in the tapes] was horrible and that nobody's heart was in it, and they thought it was really, really funny.
People started remixing them into YouTube poops, their equivalent of YouTube poops, and then they started getting really creative. They started cutting it up and making music out of it, making these crazy, incredibly animated, completely transformative sequences. All from cut-up videos of gay p--n from 1999.
The animators who work on this for free are spending weeks of their lives putting together the craziest thing you've ever seen in your entire life for free. It's like the s--tpost to end all s--tposts. It's an effort post, that's what it is.
I wish we had more things like that, but maybe that were a little bit less gay p--n oriented, so I could share them with people who might be interested. It's not really a dinner-time conversation type of thing. I'm not suggesting this to anyone below the age of majority, but look it up. It's pretty crazy.
Q: You cover some truly insane and potentially off-putting topics on your channel. Are there any niches or topics that might be related to your beat, but that you avoid for some reason? Anything that passes your limits?
A: I've never been into anime, which means that I don't really report on memes related to anime or anime topics just because I would have no idea what I was talking about. I don't even know enough about it to know what I could be getting wrong. Plus, anime brings with it a lot of gooner bait-type memes.
I feel like I could just talk about art and the internet in general now, because I don't really see anybody doing that. I might as well expand the niche. Also, it gets really mentally draining [talking about fetish art all the time]. I don't actually want to talk about fetish art all day. It's weird to me. It does make me uncomfortable, believe it or not. I actually do have limits.

One of the benefits of letting go of the fetish art thing is that I stopped getting bombarded with requests. Basically, people were sending me p--n. They were sending it to me under the guise of, "Hey, can you make a video explaining this?" It's just someone's very obvious fetish. Their interest would be the fact that they knew that I opened that DM and I read it.
I'm not impugning anyone who likes anime, but my experience has been that covering or talking about anything remotely anime-adjacent sends a signal that wakes up the sleeper-cell gooner people. They swarm you and will swarm your comment section. They'll be you to talk about this weird p--n image of their favorite VTuber, who also lowkey looks like a six-year-old. I don't want to touch that. That whole universe is something that I'm not interested in.
Q: Furries are another topic you've visited on your channel several times. Furry culture has been massively impactful on the internet and in meme culture for a long time now. What is it about furry-related internet history that makes for a good video?
A: I can see the appeal of a video where it's like, "The furry that ate his own feces and started a war." Everyone wants to hear that story. My experience has been that literally the easiest community I've ever dealt with has been furries. They're nice people.
They tend to be very intellectually curious, and they tend to be very, very open. They tend to be in search of someone who just wants to understand what their deal is without doing the whole point-and-laugh thing or the whole gross-out story thing. I've definitely done a few gross-out pieces on furries, but I try to pick my topics very carefully.
First of all, furries are radically accepting. They're people who, and I don't want to use the word "marginalized" because that's such an overused word right now, but they are marginalized to the extent that they are very identifiable from their look and their behavior online. They tend to be radically accepting, and they are more than willing to welcome literally anybody, which can be very good and very, very bad because you tend to get the extremes.
If you welcome literally anybody into your club, and you have aspects of your club that are maybe more adult and maybe some of them are a little bit more extreme than others, you're going to get some outliers. Inevitably, those people are going to make some headlines.
It seems that the proportion of sex-crazed maniacs in the furry community might be higher than your average normal person population. I don't think there's anything mean about saying that. I think that's just what it is. It's not the majority. But I think radical acceptance, the inability to push certain people out, the fear that condemning any part of your community looks bad, because people are already so predisposed to not wanting to understand you, to make fun of you, to accuse you of all sorts of crazy things, leads to some extreme members in the community.
In the most impartial way possible, a lot of furries have autism. It is what it is. I think the radically accepting portion of their community definitely incentivizes people who have autism and who tend to hyperfixate [to join the community], whether it be [a fixation] on a certain animal species or a certain tactile sensation or whatever it is.
There's just something about interfacing with the world behind the animal mask that actually, for some people, I think makes it easier to communicate and easier to express whatever it is they want to express or make the art they want to make.
I think for a lot of people who are furry and autistic, the furry thing gives them a vehicle to communicate without feeling judged or without feeling compared to non-autistic people, constantly having to filter their behavior through this lens of, "Will I be understood?"
This is just what I've observed. I could be wrong about this. It seems to me that a lot of autistic people who are furries, because they hyperfixate, they'll draw the same thing over and over and over. You get these pockets of the fandom that produce completely inexplicable artwork.
I'm sure there are other online communities that are similar to this. With furries, it's well-known. They have a lot of meme material.
They foster a certain type of artistic impulse and a certain type of behavior that I think just gets filtered out by less accepting communities. All of this to say, every group is entitled to its outliers. Everyone's entitled to their bad guys.
When you have a collection of such extremes and absolutely no ability to police them, and it happens to be in the furry community, when someone does something bad or when someone makes some truly objectionable, offensive, dangerous art, and by dangerous, I think you know what I mean, the whole community is going to get in trouble. It's a problem of representation. It's the nature of their interest.
It's the nature of how this community is organized. There's nothing you can do. The point being, furries are very, very intense for good and for bad. They're very welcoming for good and for bad. They make a lot of art for good and for bad. That's why every time one of them messes up, you hear about it.

Q: For a while now, there's been increasing discussions about how the whole internet feels like it's made up of only four or five major websites now, like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc., as opposed to the internet of two decades-plus ago. What do you think of this model of internet usage?
A: You know, I noticed this, and this has been driving me freaking crazy. How are we in 2026, and we're still making videos about the same two 4chan incidents from 15 years ago? Nothing new is happening. We're stuck.
I think most people who know about this think the "four app model" is bad. I think it's destroying diversity on the internet. When I say "autistic fixation," I don't mean that pejoratively whatsoever, but back in the day, I think it was a lot more common to see, for example, a guy who has autism and is particularly obsessed with Star Trek. He'd have a blog or run a forum or something with this meticulous, encyclopedic documentation of this thing that he loves.
People used to just do that. It was easier to hyperfixate. You had so many tiny little niche websites and blogs with no real profit incentive. They didn't make any money. There was no incentive and really no structure to obsess on the apps like there is now. Blogging has been reduced basically to tweeting.
There is Substack, but I think the art of the long-form blog and certainly the private blog is not a thing anymore. Everything has been completely externally oriented. Everyone is constantly being funneled to put their entire life on this app in a video for everyone to see, for everyone to tear you apart.
There's no privacy. Why do anything if you're not going to post it? I just think fundamentally this was not a thing when the internet was more of a niche thing, when it was more of a weird guy thing. Even as recently as Tumblr.
I was so on Tumblr when I was in high school, from 2012 to 2016. I had multiple side blogs. I was an aesthetic blogger. I was so in love with the ability of people on Tumblr to just go off. You would have people who had maybe six followers. I would know because I was one of them. All they would do was just obsessively blog about their interests and curate resources and links and PDFs and images and stuff that you just can't find anymore.
As the internet centralizes, these websites inevitably get pruned out. Even if Tumblr continues to exist, which I don't think it's long for this world, they're not going to exist for much longer because there's no infrastructure for small, weird, obsessive blogging anymore. I think that defined the character of the earlier internet way more than anybody realizes.

We're all talking past each other now. There are too many of us online, and we're all getting corralled into four big pens. We're not having normal conversations. We're calling each other slurs. That's not new, but I don't think that used to be the default mode of communication on the internet.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm sheltered. But I feel like the tone of conversation has, overall, gotten a lot more hostile. People are much more willing to misinterpret you deliberately, no matter what you're saying. All the apps are just fights now. Every comment section is just a fight. I think it's a problem of overcrowding. I am so not predisposed to conspiratorial thinking. Now that that's the most popular thing, it annoys me to death.
However, if I had to think of a conspiracy where all of humanity is getting divided and pointing the finger at each other and looking for someone to blame and constantly incentivized to do nothing but waste money and scream at each other and strangle each other over the internet, I would say the four app model is definitely working.

No one's having real conversations. You can't talk about a specific thing without it getting completely destroyed or without the constant threat of shills appearing and saying things specifically because they were paid to say so.
I think this is so funny. Redditors have a reputation for a reason, but I think, really, the last stand that isn't small forums is Reddit because it's the only place to get specific tech information for when your computer does that weird thing, and you can't find an answer anywhere else. There's always some random subreddit with a comment posted 15 years ago that's got three upvotes that solves your specific problem.
I think that aspect of the internet is very, very much going away. We are automating the s--t out of that. Now, you type whatever it is into Google, and even if you put Reddit at the end of your question, the AI overview will still redirect you somewhere else, will still answer your question for you.
I don't like when things change because I'm unc, and it makes me sad because the internet of our childhoods has been supplanted by something shillier and meaner and with the intent to sow as much discord as humanly possible. I just don't think that's good for the human race.
Q: Vagueposting has to be one of the most annoying trends in internet discourse lately. What are your thoughts on vagueposting?
A: Oh my god. Say what you mean. Sorry, I actually tweak out over this. It annoys me so much. My favorite thing is when someone posts like, anything, and then somebody else quote tweets it with, "Girl." They get 60,000 likes.
What does it mean? Is it positive? Is it negative? What form of commentary are we accomplishing here? I don't know what anyone is talking about anymore. It makes me feel stupid, and that makes me feel angry. This might be a me problem, but it is really annoying.

The one that I kind of miss, just because it was so annoying, was when people would go, "My sweet summer child." You don't say it in real life. I can tell that you're saying it for the first time through text. You're not slick. We can all tell. If you're going to be condescending, you should just come out and say it.
"I'm going to hold your hand when I say this." I'm very literal-minded. I have a really hard time with figures of speech. So when people say things like this, passive-aggressively, especially through text, I'm not going to get it. I don't actually know you're making fun of me. Now we're both angry because I misunderstood you, and I made us look stupid.
Vagueposting is not going to work for me specifically. What's the matter, vague boy? Afraid you might say something awesome?
Q: Is there any specific meme or trend happening right now, or in the last few years, that you think will eventually become an important piece of internet history worthy of documentation by YouTubers like you?
A: This is not something I'd make a video on just because the topic is so sensitive, and I think it's going to remain that way. It would be like making a video on 9/11, because I think it's actually something of a similar scope, not similar scale. That would be the Kirkification thing.
In 10 years, 15 years, you know, it might be shorter, this entire early Kirk meme wave is going to be very, very fascinating.

We're up close right now. We can't get an objective picture of where it started, which specific mimetic tradition thing derives from, you know what I mean? I'm not touching it, but I would love in the future for someone to do a full, impartial analysis of all the Charlie Kirk memes and what the impulse is. Why is there an absurdist impulse to just take things like that and endlessly render them into something else until they're completely unrecognizable?
I think the reason the Kirk thing would be such a good case study is that it's a huge meme. Tens of millions of people are aware of this. This is an event, you know, that absolutely transcended American politics.
You've got people in Indonesia, uploading TikToks of them dancing to the Charlie Kirk phonk remix with like the vaguest awareness of why that exists. I really want to know what's up with that. I want to understand the deeper impulse that allowed a meme like that to stick.

Because this is absolutely sticking. Like if this were just any fleeting meme, it would have had its two weeks and then disappeared. But it's just that this is such a politically radioactive topic. If you really wanted to take a step back and be weird and scientific about it, then yeah, I would love someone to study this and explain it.
It's just that we've so removed the human being [Charlie Kirk] from the equation that it's strange and abstract now. It's odd to me. What happens when you make a meme about a human being who was very recently alive and you remove everything but his name and face from it? It's odd.
It starts mutating very, very quickly into something unrecognizable. I saw this edit of the AI dancing baby, but it was a Kirk edit. It had his face. People love to say, "Show this to a Victorian child, they would blow up." But we really do take for granted the layers of context that we are constantly absorbing and referencing just to make sense of these completely ridiculous images.
These things are total pastiches of our culture right now. It's just that if you try to explain it to someone in real life, you sound insane. I think it's fascinating, and I think it's funny too, because it makes me laugh whether I want it to or not. I don't know why I'm laughing. Is it the funny face? The dancing? Is it the familiarity with the fact that I've seen this guy's face so much now that I see him as often as my own family? There's something about it.

Q: Going back to memes about controversial tragedy and deaths, like 9-11 or even Harambe, it seems like, on the internet, there's no real rule regarding what we can or can't joke about, or when the time to make jokes is right. Do you think there's any limit?
A: I don't think it's worth going, "Some things are too precious to joke about, and some are not." Obviously, that's not the case.
I think with Harambe, our culture is, and this is the most milquetoast take ever, very divided. We can agree on very, very little. We don't have a lot of shared heroes and villains right now.
But when someone like Harambe came along, before we were as divided as we are right now, it was very easy to valorize someone like Harambe. He's not a guy whose political leanings and bad takes you can uncover if you just search him up enough. He was a cool gorilla who got assassinated. That's basically how they told the story. But we valorized him, and we made all this lore around him.
He could do no wrong. He became a total icon, totally abstracted from whatever that was. I think to the opposite extent, we did the same thing with Charlie Kirk. Instead of valorizing, we Harambe-ed Charlie Kirk for sure. I just think that people still, because we're too close to the actual assassination of Charlie Kirk, cannot admit to themselves that they are uncomfortable joking about a real guy who died.
So we dress everything up in these constant layers of self-referential irony. We're kind of giving it the Harambe treatment the whole time so that we can constantly laugh at something and admit to ourselves that it's terrible. It might actually force us to think, but we can always keep it at arm's length.
It's easier to do that with someone like Harambe because he's not like a problematic person. He's not someone whose Twitter still exists. He's not someone who made constant statements. Charlie Kirk was very, very high profile. The guy was in the news cycle a lot. A lot of people also learned about him after his death via the memes, which is like an entire other layer.
But we've made him into kind of an icon because we don't have shared heroes and villains right now. I don't think people have properly sorted him. They've made him kind of like a Pagliacci of the culture.

We actually totally Harambe-ed Epstein, too, because he's so comically evil.
Everything about him is so unbelievably bad that it wrapped all the way around and now people are making everything short of, I don't want to say endorsements, but when you see memes of him flying in the air towards Agartha and partying with people, if you didn't know that this guy was a famous evil p---phile, you would think he's someone we were all completely obsessed with and loved. That's weird. That's strange to me.
It's hard to joke about a famous p---phile without coming across like you're endorsing something. If you joke about him that often, you've got to step back and consider that you're using a bad guy as a vector, constantly, to communicate things you actually feel. Do you think that is a sustainable life choice? I'm not judging people for the memes they use. I just think we have to really stop with this.
We have to step back from this irony poisoning for just a minute. We have to consider if premising our entire late-2020s humor on ironically valorizing the worst people on earth is good for us. Does this help us identify good and bad people in real life? Is this possibly confusing? If we're going to embrace all the worst stuff ironically for the bit or whatever, how long are we all prepared to do that before some of us start to overlook what made these people infamous in the first place?

Q: What's something happening online that you're over?
A: I'm so over the cringe thing. All right, I'm cringe. I've been accused of being cringe because I am, which means that this accusation is powerless against me. We need a new insult for people who are prepared to be genuine online. I don't think that's going to be an attack that works for much longer.
The lolcow thing, also. It's lame to admit that you take pleasure in bullying people on the internet. It's just that everyone kind of wants to do it. So we don't want to use the word "lolcow" for it because you don't want to impugn yourself. You don't want to suggest that your morbid curiosity from watching public freak-outs is something that you're going to do secretly, even if you condemn it.
Our obsession with spectacle is leading a certain pocket of people online to obsessively try to create a lolcow at all costs. I just watched a video on this guy, Joshua Block. There is an entire subculture now of people who follow this guy around, either in person or on the internet, and send him money so he can buy alcohol for the express purpose of generating this completely lab-grown lolcow.
We can't admit to ourselves that cringe compilations are kind of cringe. We're trying to find a way around [cringe videos] that is still kind of cringe. But you're never going to defeat the human impulse to want to feel better than someone else being punched down on.
When I was a teenager, I found the Chris-Chan antics funny because they were very, very funny. But the older I got, the more I started giving this some thought. There's something so profoundly antisocial about the [lolcow thing] and the number of people that are participating in this weird spectator culture.
I'm not trying to pearl clutch, I'm not saying I'm better than anybody else. I just worry that this lolcow phenomenon kind of exists everywhere. We just don't use that word for it. That's how you get people like Joshua Block. That's how you get this industry of triggering these people into freakouts or outbursts. Then you get YouTubers whose job it is to just make videos about that person's latest crashout. Rinse and repeat
Q: Thank you so much for talking with us, Frankie. Any final words for the Know Your Meme readers?
A: I would encourage you, if you want, please consider donating a couple of dollars to the Wayback Machine, the Internet Archive. If you don't know, they're a project that takes digital snapshots of websites as they exist at that moment.
You can view a website as it existed at many, many points in time. It's just a really cool time capsule. It's completely free. It's a really good way to preserve parts of internet history and get a look at how people used to communicate online. So definitely give Internet Archive a couple of bucks if you want. I think they're doing really, really good work.
You can subscribe to Frankie Fey on YouTube, follow her on Instagram and Twitter, and hear her discuss meme history at length on the Know Your Meme YouTube channel.

Основное содержимое страницы с новостью.

Whether she's covering furries, a disgusting story from the depths of 4chan, or the strange world of Mpreg art, Frankie approaches her topics with detailed research and a delivery that strikes a perfect balance between analytical and entertaining.

Now, you can also catch her on the Know Your Meme YouTube channel, where she hosts similarly in-depth looks at some of the most iconic and impactful memes in the history of social media.

We recently spoke with Frankie for a full interview on her history as a YouTuber, her fascination with bad internet art, AI in memes, the death of Tumblr, the downfalls of the "five app" model and much more.

Q: Hey, Frankie. Can you give us a quick rundown of what you do online?

A: I'm Frankie Fey, I am a YouTuber. I got started relatively recently, my channel's about two years and change old, and I cover bad art and baffling memes and the images in those memes and who makes them and where they come from and why they look like that. All of art history, to the extent that it exists on the internet.

Q: Some of your earliest content is animations. How did you go from posting animations to your current content?

A: I have a basic art degree. I always thought I was gonna be an animator. I never had any fundamentals. I just loved making art.
I had an Instagram where I used to just post art and animation from time to time, and I didn't have any expectation that anything was gonna happen. It was this pie-in-the-sky dream, you know, one day I'm gonna be like the next Genndy Tartakovsky. Just like all Zoomer animators who are too rejection-sensitive to actually learn how to do it the right way, like me.

And that kind of abruptly stopped. At the time, I had a normal job. I was working at a VFX studio. I was doing some After Effects stuff. That's my domain, really, and they did mass layoffs. I got let go, and it was like the ground fell out from under me. I had never not had a job. I've been working since I was 14. Working is the only thing I really know how to do, and I'm still working. I'm good at it, I think.

So it was a pretty big blow, and I figured, okay, it sucks. I've never really been let go before. It happens to everyone. Something will come along. Two weeks pass, and I don't have a new job, and that's never been the case before, and then two weeks turn into a month, and then a few months, and I was just freaking out.

I could not figure out what to do. I thought, I'm going to try to leverage this art animation thing. Maybe I can do commissions or something.

I started just going out, hanging out with people, and going to parties, and I met a lot of people during this time. I actually met a few people who were in the streaming space and the YouTube space, and it just never crossed my mind. I'm really, really introverted. Like, the last thing I ever want to do is be in front of a camera, ironically enough, but it was just like months and months of trying to find a job, and it was so demoralizing.

It's just cringe. You know, it makes you feel bad, and it just popped into my head one day. Oh my god, I'm hanging out with these people, and I know for a fact that they're funding their lifestyle with the internet.

They're on the internet, they turn on their computer, and then money comes out. That wasn't actually my goal or anything, but I have to stress I was trying to find anything. After ruminating on this for months, I was like, you know what, fine, I'll do it.

I'm going to try and upload something on Instagram or YouTube. I want to see how this works, and I thought maybe I could passively make like a couple of hundred bucks a month, something like that, and then I realized I really liked it. I didn't think I would like it. I thought it would be a weird, embarrassing thing

Q: Your first video is about the "Wonder Bread Guy." Why did you decide to make videos about bad online art history?

A: I'm very online. I have this crazy repository of information about all the weird art I've ever seen online. I just didn't think anybody cared about that kind of thing. All this stuff was just occupying the horizon of my mind for like a year while I was searching for a job.
I got totally radicalized by LinkedIn. I'm kind of joking, but I'm not joking. It's like, "You know what? Oh, I'm not employable? I'm gonna make myself so unemployable you'll all want to give me a job."
I have no idea where I came up with this Wonder Bread thing. I just knew about it in the background, and I thought it would make an interesting video. I didn't know anything about fetish art. I didn't know anything really. I kind of had like the bare essential knowledge.

Actually, I went on Know Your Meme. That's where I started with that story in particular. I started clicking links. One thing led to another, and suddenly, I realized I have this bare bones editing skill because I kind of barely know how to animate, and I'm super online. I like to talk a lot, so I'm just going to put all this together, and I don't know.

It was just like the grace of God. I don't know what happened. The video blew up, but not right away. I think it got like 5,000 views in two weeks, and I was completely new to this. I thought, oh, my God. This is crazy. I'm going to be like a Z-list YouTuber. This is so awesome. And then it just kept growing.

Q: Your channel has had pretty significant growth in just a few years. Why do you think that is?

A: I've picked up a few tips. I knew, for instance, you've got to be consistent. You've got to let a lot of videos flop. It's super demoralizing.
The algorithm likes it when you're consistent. It likes to see you invest an effort. I figured I'll make a few videos on these weird fetish art topics. People seem to like this. Maybe a couple thousand people are going to watch it. I ended up feeling very passionately about this stuff, and I really wanted to do a good job.
I think that goes a long way. One video led to another. Views kind of fell off a cliff after the first two videos. It was a little bit humbling and cringy, but I just kept pushing because I didn't really have any expectations at all. I didn't think any of this would happen. I didn't think anybody cared about weird meme art or fetish art. So basically, I just kept pushing it until I made it work.

Q: What would you say to someone who is hesitating to post their first video?

A: If I can impart literally one thing, just try it. Just do it. Because I had no media training. I did not know how to talk into a microphone. I literally had no idea what I was doing. Whenever I had a job interview, I had no idea what I was doing.
Whenever anyone's like, "Oh, I don't know. Should I try? Should I maybe?" Yes! Yes! Because I was the least qualified person on earth, and it ended up working out. I really think anyone who wants to should try. Just upload a video. If no one watches it, then nothing happened. Please let me be your living proof. If you want to try being a YouTuber or a TikToker or whatever, oh my god, just try it. Because it accidentally worked for me.

Q: Would you say you grew up on the internet?

A: I'm an older Zoomer. I was a kid in the early 2000s. We had a low-tech household, so we still had the big beige CRT-type computer. I don't know if that's what it's called.
The big beige Windows 95 machine in the basement with the modem and the router that sang the little song when you turned it on. You couldn't use the phone. We were doing that until 2006.
The computer was always there. I loved playing games. I loved going on the internet. I was maybe six or seven years old. I didn't even know what was going on yet.
I didn't even speak English fluently yet. But one of the first websites I ever visited, I had this cool older cousin. She used curse words and stuff. I was so impressed. I'd go over to her house, and we'd play on her GameCube. She'd show me what I realized later were YTPs.

She told me about this website, Funny Junk, which I guess it was like 9GAG in the sense that it was like a repost haven. So I just obsessively surfed on Funny Junk. I ended up seeing a lot of memes that were very, very not age-appropriate. It was that quintessential experience. A lot of this stuff I was seeing as a kid was genuinely everything but physically dangerous.

I shouldn't have seen any of that. It desensitizes you to the extent that you feel like the internet is your second home. Nothing surprises you. I think in order to become terminally online, you have to get hooked like that. Like really, really young. Before you can understand the difference between what it is that you're seeing on the screen and what is acceptable human behavior.

Q: There's an idea that whatever you post on the internet stays on the internet forever. But with this increased interest in documenting the internet and uncovering lost media, do you think that's true?

A: I would say that one is really weird and bifurcated because there's no middle ground with that statement. Some things do live on the internet forever. Some don't.
I think our obsession with lost media absolutely points to the fact that, try as you might, you can't preserve everything online. There's a video that I saw on Newgrounds as a kid, some kind of AMV set to like, "Bring Me To Life." I've never been able to find it. I remember exactly what it looks like. I've looked it up in every conceivable way. That didn't survive on the internet for whatever reason.

I think this is like a truly emergent social problem we're having. You have your lost media, which qualifies as stuff that gets lost on the internet, and then you have your "live forever" stuff. Your live forever stuff, to me, seems to be mostly people having a bad day, people being humiliated, you know, the lolcow obsession.

I think a lot of us are bloodthirsty. I think we have a truly punitive urge, and we can't find a socially acceptable way to exercise it, but we'll find clips of someone embarrassing themselves like 10, 15, or even 20 years ago now. We just don't let anything go. People are not allowed to mature or to learn or to change or whatever.

You need to be frozen in this constant present of the stupid thing that you put on the internet or said on the internet when you were a kid or when you were out of your mind or whatever the case may be. I really do worry about younger people.

Q: Why do you worry about younger people?

A: I worry about Gen Alpha a lot to the extent that, first of all, I don't think a seven-year-old should have a phone or TikTok or an internet presence, but they do. That's the world we live in.
Those kids are putting stuff on the internet and there's no telling if it's going to stay or if it's going to leave or it's going to disappear into the ether. I appreciate the ability of the internet to fossilize stuff insofar as finding archives of original artwork, because that's my domain.
It's cool when you can find like, a blog post from 2003 about Naruto ship art that's been perfectly preserved in internet amber. I would say that's the most positive manifestation [of internet preservation], the historical record stuff. But I feel like even though a normal person, capital "N" normal person, who uses the internet, probably is not familiar with the concept of lolcows. I think people are a lot more tuned into that kind of ritualistic humiliation than they want to admit.

So in that way, the internet does live forever. I actually think that's increasingly going to be a problem as we age. They go and manufacture a Chris-Chan out of thin air, and they just keep doing it. There's too many of us online right now.

Q: On the topic of "manufacturing" a lolcow or meme, it seems like it's a lot easier to force a meme these days. Would you say that's the case?

A: This is unpopular, and I'm not even saying this to be a contrarian, six-seven is the least funny s--t I've ever heard in my life. I don't get it. It's like the definition of a forced meme.
I get it. Like I'm not nine. So I'm not, no offense, not the target audience for six-seven. Like I get it. I feel like that meme with Tony Soprano, where it's like, "I get it. I get 'Skibidi Toilet' as a concept." I understand, but this only exists because you're all forcing it because you are all six and/or seven years old. I just don't think children, teens and adults qualitatively have the same mental understanding of what a meme is.

A meme is not just an image or a sound that elicits laughter. I think in the most crude analysis, yeah, that's probably what people think. I think it goes a little bit deeper than that, which is also why I agree that forced memes are stupid and bad.

There are memes that are like the apples and potatoes of the earth. You know, they come out of the ground or a tree, whatever. And then you've got like your seed oil memes, your red 40 memes, that's what six-seven is.

You guys are manufacturing this stuff in a lab. I don't believe you [think it's funny]. I've never seen an adult laugh at it. I have a bone to pick with six-seven. Like, am I just old? No, it's the children who are wrong.

But lowkey, it is sometimes the children who are wrong. They have their own society. They have their own grammar. They have their own mimetics. They're a different species than the rest of us.

Q: AI is behind so many popular memes today, including major, largely beloved memes like Tung Tung Tung Sahur. Do you think AI has had an overall negative or positive impact on memes and meme culture?

A: I do think AI has really taken the edge out of memes. You feel cheated when you find out this thing that made me laugh, this thing that I thought was designed by the loving hands of another human, some incomprehensible algorithm made it not funny anymore. I think AI is definitely affecting the quality of memes and it's making the quantity absolutely explode.
And it sounds like, "Yeah, who cares?" But I think memes are a very, very salient part of communication right now. We use memes as shorthand for all sorts of serious stuff. So this stuff actually does matter. We're using memes to communicate serious, sincerely held opinions.

There's this idea that no one can be sincere right now because it's considered cringe. So we use memes. But when you use a meme to express your sincerely held opinion or your viscerally felt emotion, it's important that we don't pollute our meme vocabulary with random bulls--t. What is this [AI meme] meant to express? This is nothing to me. Six-seven. This is nothing.

Q: Do you think AI and the way memes are pumped out, quantity-over-quality, these days, is destroying meme culture? Or just changing it?

A: I don't think meme culture can be destroyed, but certainly the culture of the 2010s [can be destroyed]. That's inevitable. People move on, people get older, they stop caring, and your sense of humor changes.
Pre-COVID, people were mostly on the same page. You had millions of people, for instance, who were using Reddit. I remember when dank memes were a thing. There were very few places you could go on the internet where you were around people that you recognized as your peers. You could show someone [outside of those places] a meme, and they would just have no idea what you were talking about.
This is normal now. COVID happened, and people got locked indoors. Suddenly, tens of millions of people became extremely active online in an environment that is completely foreign to them. So they cultivate their own language; they have their own memes. Now you have a society of 14-year-olds who have colonized their particular corner of the internet.

I'm not even saying that derisively. They've got their own meme culture. It's completely incompatible with the rest of us. We're incompatible with all these other emerging groups of people, too. We don't have a common language anymore.

It's like that meme recently with the AI baby. I'm axiomatically against AI because I think that human beings need to be making the art and the music and the memes. AI can do the deep-sea oil rig drilling and whatnot. I think most people probably feel that way.

But the AI baby got a laugh out of me. It's fine. It's fine to find AI memes funny. What stopped it from being funny, and this is such a specific gripe, is when I started seeing edits of that AI baby in the comments section that were obviously aimed at like tween girls. The baby was yassified.

In the edit, there were babies with butterfly locks and babies with blonde hair. They had become a completely different thing. They were now customizable avatars. The purpose of the meme, the image had for all intents and purposes, had been completely removed from its original context. It was just yassified, and people realized they had no use for it. It immediately fell out of use.

For me, it seems that memes used to be organic, and now they're lab-grown, and that's weird, and I don't like it. Not only are they lab-grown, but machines are making them for us now. I could old man yells at cloud about this one all day. I have a lot of opinions on AI and memes.

Q: Your videos mostly focus on online art that blurs the line between art and meme, with many of the artworks becoming popularized through memes. Are memes art?

A: It's hard to say what qualifies as art.
When I try to figure out where an image comes from or the context surrounding it, it's easier for me to view a lot of these memes as artwork, because if you think of it as artwork, then you have a framework for understanding it. You can identify an artist. You can identify a specific interest that it appeals to. If it's fetish art, which, a stunning amount of the time, it is. It's not more than half, but it's a lot. That's really important context.
That indicates to you why it appeared on a certain forum. That's why you only see this image or this meme, even if it's not art to you. It only appears in certain communities. I guess you don't have to think of memes as art. Your analysis can go somewhere else.
But I've definitely taken the stance that if someone sat down and drew this thing, whether as satire, or they drew it as a sincere expression of their libidinal feelings towards like an animated serial mascot, whatever it is, that's your artwork. You spent time on that. You drew that, or you 3D modeled it, or you took a picture, or you edited the picture, or whatever.

A human being manipulated this with their minds and with their hands. Then they disseminated this thing on the internet. Sometimes nobody sees it, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of people see it. They make their own version of it. They make their own derivative or fan art.

I'm not saying memes are art. They are to me, but I think there's a very, very good argument against that. That's the problem because it starts getting incredibly subjective. I think intent has a lot to do with it. It's hard because it's very hard for people to define what exactly art is.

If you want to put it really, really vaguely, anything done well can be an art form. There's certainly an art form to making memes. There's an art to posting and being a good poster. You have to have the skill, either rhetorically or artistically or musically, whatever it is that you're doing.

Q: Why did you choose to focus on so-called "bad art" on your channel, and what's your fascination with this type of art?

A: I called it bad art history because I just couldn't come up with a name. I can't stress enough. I didn't think this channel was going to be a thing. I gave it very little thought. I just called it bad art history because sometimes the art's bad, but I'm not saying it's bad because that's very subjective. I'm not about to point to someone's creation and say that sucks. That's a little bit mean.
I guess I'm just morbidly curious. I just want to know where things come from. If someone makes something weird and gross, and it makes me laugh, I want to know why it made me laugh. I want to know what it is that I can do with this grotesque image that, instead of typing out the full sentence to my friend, I could just send it to her, and she knows exactly what I mean.
I've always been interested in art. I've always wanted to be an artist in some professional capacity. I think the reason this Bad Art History series worked is that the information is already out there. That was one thing that really struck me. It's not that hard to do research for these videos if you know how to Google things and you know how to reverse search things. Not everybody knows how to do that, which is crazy because it's not a mechanically difficult thing to do.
It just doesn't really occur to people. The one thing that I thought was really cool is that any meme or any drawing on the internet, you can totally figure out where it came from. 99% of the time, you can find it. There's always a story around it. It's never nothing.
Also, I really like that you can talk about something [so funny] and be that serious about it in a serious academic tone. While you're talking academically, there's a thirst trap image of the Green M&M taking up your entire screen. I'm telling you with deadly seriousness why this matters and what this says about Western civilization. I think it's really funny.

Maybe this is pretentious, but I think it might benefit people in general if they were a little bit more intellectually curious about this meme that I like. What does this actually mean? Where did this come from? If this is art and if that's something that you're interested in, what kind of art is this? What kind of community sprang up around this thing? Why does this exist? I don't have a specific crux with the bad art history stuff, but I like to think that holistically, those videos answer all those questions.

Q: With so many topics to choose from, what is it that makes for a successful topic for a YouTube video?

A: Gross and funny, that's pretty much the key. If I think of any YouTube video that I like, anything that's a frequent rewatch for me, it's got to be gross and funny. It's got to push you away because it's disgusting and weird and objectionable, but it's got to inherently reel you in because why does this exist? Why are there hundreds of pictures of thirst art of Tony the Tiger, the serial mascot?
It's got to make you laugh. That's it. The cool thing about memes and the weird art that gets featured in a lot of memes is that they inherently have the tendency to do that. You just have to gross people out, and they'll show up. It's all out there. That's the thing.

Q: What's a topic you'd really like to cover, but haven't had the chance yet?

A: Have you heard of Gachimuchi?
There was this specific type of s--iposting tradition that came out of Niconico, a Japanese YouTube-like site, where a couple of guys took gay wrestling tapes, except they would make YouTube poops out of them. Not really the p--n scenes, but the other scenes. Despite the language barrier between Japanese and English speakers, everyone on Niconico could tell that the acting [in the tapes] was horrible and that nobody's heart was in it, and they thought it was really, really funny.
People started remixing them into YouTube poops, their equivalent of YouTube poops, and then they started getting really creative. They started cutting it up and making music out of it, making these crazy, incredibly animated, completely transformative sequences. All from cut-up videos of gay p--n from 1999.

The animators who work on this for free are spending weeks of their lives putting together the craziest thing you've ever seen in your entire life for free. It's like the s--tpost to end all s--tposts. It's an effort post, that's what it is.

I wish we had more things like that, but maybe that were a little bit less gay p--n oriented, so I could share them with people who might be interested. It's not really a dinner-time conversation type of thing. I'm not suggesting this to anyone below the age of majority, but look it up. It's pretty crazy.

Q: You cover some truly insane and potentially off-putting topics on your channel. Are there any niches or topics that might be related to your beat, but that you avoid for some reason? Anything that passes your limits?

A: I've never been into anime, which means that I don't really report on memes related to anime or anime topics just because I would have no idea what I was talking about. I don't even know enough about it to know what I could be getting wrong. Plus, anime brings with it a lot of gooner bait-type memes.
I feel like I could just talk about art and the internet in general now, because I don't really see anybody doing that. I might as well expand the niche. Also, it gets really mentally draining [talking about fetish art all the time]. I don't actually want to talk about fetish art all day. It's weird to me. It does make me uncomfortable, believe it or not. I actually do have limits.

One of the benefits of letting go of the fetish art thing is that I stopped getting bombarded with requests. Basically, people were sending me p--n. They were sending it to me under the guise of, "Hey, can you make a video explaining this?" It's just someone's very obvious fetish. Their interest would be the fact that they knew that I opened that DM and I read it.

I'm not impugning anyone who likes anime, but my experience has been that covering or talking about anything remotely anime-adjacent sends a signal that wakes up the sleeper-cell gooner people. They swarm you and will swarm your comment section. They'll be you to talk about this weird p--n image of their favorite VTuber, who also lowkey looks like a six-year-old. I don't want to touch that. That whole universe is something that I'm not interested in.

Q: Furries are another topic you've visited on your channel several times. Furry culture has been massively impactful on the internet and in meme culture for a long time now. What is it about furry-related internet history that makes for a good video?

A: I can see the appeal of a video where it's like, "The furry that ate his own feces and started a war." Everyone wants to hear that story. My experience has been that literally the easiest community I've ever dealt with has been furries. They're nice people.
They tend to be very intellectually curious, and they tend to be very, very open. They tend to be in search of someone who just wants to understand what their deal is without doing the whole point-and-laugh thing or the whole gross-out story thing. I've definitely done a few gross-out pieces on furries, but I try to pick my topics very carefully.

First of all, furries are radically accepting. They're people who, and I don't want to use the word "marginalized" because that's such an overused word right now, but they are marginalized to the extent that they are very identifiable from their look and their behavior online. They tend to be radically accepting, and they are more than willing to welcome literally anybody, which can be very good and very, very bad because you tend to get the extremes.

If you welcome literally anybody into your club, and you have aspects of your club that are maybe more adult and maybe some of them are a little bit more extreme than others, you're going to get some outliers. Inevitably, those people are going to make some headlines.

It seems that the proportion of sex-crazed maniacs in the furry community might be higher than your average normal person population. I don't think there's anything mean about saying that. I think that's just what it is. It's not the majority. But I think radical acceptance, the inability to push certain people out, the fear that condemning any part of your community looks bad, because people are already so predisposed to not wanting to understand you, to make fun of you, to accuse you of all sorts of crazy things, leads to some extreme members in the community.

In the most impartial way possible, a lot of furries have autism. It is what it is. I think the radically accepting portion of their community definitely incentivizes people who have autism and who tend to hyperfixate [to join the community], whether it be [a fixation] on a certain animal species or a certain tactile sensation or whatever it is.

There's just something about interfacing with the world behind the animal mask that actually, for some people, I think makes it easier to communicate and easier to express whatever it is they want to express or make the art they want to make.

I think for a lot of people who are furry and autistic, the furry thing gives them a vehicle to communicate without feeling judged or without feeling compared to non-autistic people, constantly having to filter their behavior through this lens of, "Will I be understood?"

This is just what I've observed. I could be wrong about this. It seems to me that a lot of autistic people who are furries, because they hyperfixate, they'll draw the same thing over and over and over. You get these pockets of the fandom that produce completely inexplicable artwork.

I'm sure there are other online communities that are similar to this. With furries, it's well-known. They have a lot of meme material.

They foster a certain type of artistic impulse and a certain type of behavior that I think just gets filtered out by less accepting communities. All of this to say, every group is entitled to its outliers. Everyone's entitled to their bad guys.

When you have a collection of such extremes and absolutely no ability to police them, and it happens to be in the furry community, when someone does something bad or when someone makes some truly objectionable, offensive, dangerous art, and by dangerous, I think you know what I mean, the whole community is going to get in trouble. It's a problem of representation. It's the nature of their interest.

It's the nature of how this community is organized. There's nothing you can do. The point being, furries are very, very intense for good and for bad. They're very welcoming for good and for bad. They make a lot of art for good and for bad. That's why every time one of them messes up, you hear about it.

Q: For a while now, there's been increasing discussions about how the whole internet feels like it's made up of only four or five major websites now, like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc., as opposed to the internet of two decades-plus ago. What do you think of this model of internet usage?

A: You know, I noticed this, and this has been driving me freaking crazy. How are we in 2026, and we're still making videos about the same two 4chan incidents from 15 years ago? Nothing new is happening. We're stuck.
I think most people who know about this think the "four app model" is bad. I think it's destroying diversity on the internet. When I say "autistic fixation," I don't mean that pejoratively whatsoever, but back in the day, I think it was a lot more common to see, for example, a guy who has autism and is particularly obsessed with Star Trek. He'd have a blog or run a forum or something with this meticulous, encyclopedic documentation of this thing that he loves.
People used to just do that. It was easier to hyperfixate. You had so many tiny little niche websites and blogs with no real profit incentive. They didn't make any money. There was no incentive and really no structure to obsess on the apps like there is now. Blogging has been reduced basically to tweeting.

There is Substack, but I think the art of the long-form blog and certainly the private blog is not a thing anymore. Everything has been completely externally oriented. Everyone is constantly being funneled to put their entire life on this app in a video for everyone to see, for everyone to tear you apart.

There's no privacy. Why do anything if you're not going to post it? I just think fundamentally this was not a thing when the internet was more of a niche thing, when it was more of a weird guy thing. Even as recently as Tumblr.

I was so on Tumblr when I was in high school, from 2012 to 2016. I had multiple side blogs. I was an aesthetic blogger. I was so in love with the ability of people on Tumblr to just go off. You would have people who had maybe six followers. I would know because I was one of them. All they would do was just obsessively blog about their interests and curate resources and links and PDFs and images and stuff that you just can't find anymore.

As the internet centralizes, these websites inevitably get pruned out. Even if Tumblr continues to exist, which I don't think it's long for this world, they're not going to exist for much longer because there's no infrastructure for small, weird, obsessive blogging anymore. I think that defined the character of the earlier internet way more than anybody realizes.

We're all talking past each other now. There are too many of us online, and we're all getting corralled into four big pens. We're not having normal conversations. We're calling each other slurs. That's not new, but I don't think that used to be the default mode of communication on the internet.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm sheltered. But I feel like the tone of conversation has, overall, gotten a lot more hostile. People are much more willing to misinterpret you deliberately, no matter what you're saying. All the apps are just fights now. Every comment section is just a fight. I think it's a problem of overcrowding. I am so not predisposed to conspiratorial thinking. Now that that's the most popular thing, it annoys me to death.

However, if I had to think of a conspiracy where all of humanity is getting divided and pointing the finger at each other and looking for someone to blame and constantly incentivized to do nothing but waste money and scream at each other and strangle each other over the internet, I would say the four app model is definitely working.

No one's having real conversations. You can't talk about a specific thing without it getting completely destroyed or without the constant threat of shills appearing and saying things specifically because they were paid to say so.

I think this is so funny. Redditors have a reputation for a reason, but I think, really, the last stand that isn't small forums is Reddit because it's the only place to get specific tech information for when your computer does that weird thing, and you can't find an answer anywhere else. There's always some random subreddit with a comment posted 15 years ago that's got three upvotes that solves your specific problem.

I think that aspect of the internet is very, very much going away. We are automating the s--t out of that. Now, you type whatever it is into Google, and even if you put Reddit at the end of your question, the AI overview will still redirect you somewhere else, will still answer your question for you.

I don't like when things change because I'm unc, and it makes me sad because the internet of our childhoods has been supplanted by something shillier and meaner and with the intent to sow as much discord as humanly possible. I just don't think that's good for the human race.

Q: Vagueposting has to be one of the most annoying trends in internet discourse lately. What are your thoughts on vagueposting?

A: Oh my god. Say what you mean. Sorry, I actually tweak out over this. It annoys me so much. My favorite thing is when someone posts like, anything, and then somebody else quote tweets it with, "Girl." They get 60,000 likes.
What does it mean? Is it positive? Is it negative? What form of commentary are we accomplishing here? I don't know what anyone is talking about anymore. It makes me feel stupid, and that makes me feel angry. This might be a me problem, but it is really annoying.

The one that I kind of miss, just because it was so annoying, was when people would go, "My sweet summer child." You don't say it in real life. I can tell that you're saying it for the first time through text. You're not slick. We can all tell. If you're going to be condescending, you should just come out and say it.

"I'm going to hold your hand when I say this." I'm very literal-minded. I have a really hard time with figures of speech. So when people say things like this, passive-aggressively, especially through text, I'm not going to get it. I don't actually know you're making fun of me. Now we're both angry because I misunderstood you, and I made us look stupid.

Vagueposting is not going to work for me specifically. What's the matter, vague boy? Afraid you might say something awesome?

Q: Is there any specific meme or trend happening right now, or in the last few years, that you think will eventually become an important piece of internet history worthy of documentation by YouTubers like you?

A: This is not something I'd make a video on just because the topic is so sensitive, and I think it's going to remain that way. It would be like making a video on 9/11, because I think it's actually something of a similar scope, not similar scale. That would be the Kirkification thing.
In 10 years, 15 years, you know, it might be shorter, this entire early Kirk meme wave is going to be very, very fascinating.

We're up close right now. We can't get an objective picture of where it started, which specific mimetic tradition thing derives from, you know what I mean? I'm not touching it, but I would love in the future for someone to do a full, impartial analysis of all the Charlie Kirk memes and what the impulse is. Why is there an absurdist impulse to just take things like that and endlessly render them into something else until they're completely unrecognizable?

I think the reason the Kirk thing would be such a good case study is that it's a huge meme. Tens of millions of people are aware of this. This is an event, you know, that absolutely transcended American politics.

You've got people in Indonesia, uploading TikToks of them dancing to the Charlie Kirk phonk remix with like the vaguest awareness of why that exists. I really want to know what's up with that. I want to understand the deeper impulse that allowed a meme like that to stick.

Because this is absolutely sticking. Like if this were just any fleeting meme, it would have had its two weeks and then disappeared. But it's just that this is such a politically radioactive topic. If you really wanted to take a step back and be weird and scientific about it, then yeah, I would love someone to study this and explain it.

It's just that we've so removed the human being [Charlie Kirk] from the equation that it's strange and abstract now. It's odd to me. What happens when you make a meme about a human being who was very recently alive and you remove everything but his name and face from it? It's odd.

It starts mutating very, very quickly into something unrecognizable. I saw this edit of the AI dancing baby, but it was a Kirk edit. It had his face. People love to say, "Show this to a Victorian child, they would blow up." But we really do take for granted the layers of context that we are constantly absorbing and referencing just to make sense of these completely ridiculous images.

These things are total pastiches of our culture right now. It's just that if you try to explain it to someone in real life, you sound insane. I think it's fascinating, and I think it's funny too, because it makes me laugh whether I want it to or not. I don't know why I'm laughing. Is it the funny face? The dancing? Is it the familiarity with the fact that I've seen this guy's face so much now that I see him as often as my own family? There's something about it.

Q: Going back to memes about controversial tragedy and deaths, like 9-11 or even Harambe, it seems like, on the internet, there's no real rule regarding what we can or can't joke about, or when the time to make jokes is right. Do you think there's any limit?

A: I don't think it's worth going, "Some things are too precious to joke about, and some are not." Obviously, that's not the case.
I think with Harambe, our culture is, and this is the most milquetoast take ever, very divided. We can agree on very, very little. We don't have a lot of shared heroes and villains right now.
But when someone like Harambe came along, before we were as divided as we are right now, it was very easy to valorize someone like Harambe. He's not a guy whose political leanings and bad takes you can uncover if you just search him up enough. He was a cool gorilla who got assassinated. That's basically how they told the story. But we valorized him, and we made all this lore around him.

He could do no wrong. He became a total icon, totally abstracted from whatever that was. I think to the opposite extent, we did the same thing with Charlie Kirk. Instead of valorizing, we Harambe-ed Charlie Kirk for sure. I just think that people still, because we're too close to the actual assassination of Charlie Kirk, cannot admit to themselves that they are uncomfortable joking about a real guy who died.

So we dress everything up in these constant layers of self-referential irony. We're kind of giving it the Harambe treatment the whole time so that we can constantly laugh at something and admit to ourselves that it's terrible. It might actually force us to think, but we can always keep it at arm's length.

It's easier to do that with someone like Harambe because he's not like a problematic person. He's not someone whose Twitter still exists. He's not someone who made constant statements. Charlie Kirk was very, very high profile. The guy was in the news cycle a lot. A lot of people also learned about him after his death via the memes, which is like an entire other layer.

But we've made him into kind of an icon because we don't have shared heroes and villains right now. I don't think people have properly sorted him. They've made him kind of like a Pagliacci of the culture.

We actually totally Harambe-ed Epstein, too, because he's so comically evil.

Everything about him is so unbelievably bad that it wrapped all the way around and now people are making everything short of, I don't want to say endorsements, but when you see memes of him flying in the air towards Agartha and partying with people, if you didn't know that this guy was a famous evil p---phile, you would think he's someone we were all completely obsessed with and loved. That's weird. That's strange to me.

It's hard to joke about a famous p---phile without coming across like you're endorsing something. If you joke about him that often, you've got to step back and consider that you're using a bad guy as a vector, constantly, to communicate things you actually feel. Do you think that is a sustainable life choice? I'm not judging people for the memes they use. I just think we have to really stop with this.

We have to step back from this irony poisoning for just a minute. We have to consider if premising our entire late-2020s humor on ironically valorizing the worst people on earth is good for us. Does this help us identify good and bad people in real life? Is this possibly confusing? If we're going to embrace all the worst stuff ironically for the bit or whatever, how long are we all prepared to do that before some of us start to overlook what made these people infamous in the first place?

Q: What's something happening online that you're over?

A: I'm so over the cringe thing. All right, I'm cringe. I've been accused of being cringe because I am, which means that this accusation is powerless against me. We need a new insult for people who are prepared to be genuine online. I don't think that's going to be an attack that works for much longer.
The lolcow thing, also. It's lame to admit that you take pleasure in bullying people on the internet. It's just that everyone kind of wants to do it. So we don't want to use the word "lolcow" for it because you don't want to impugn yourself. You don't want to suggest that your morbid curiosity from watching public freak-outs is something that you're going to do secretly, even if you condemn it.
Our obsession with spectacle is leading a certain pocket of people online to obsessively try to create a lolcow at all costs. I just watched a video on this guy, Joshua Block. There is an entire subculture now of people who follow this guy around, either in person or on the internet, and send him money so he can buy alcohol for the express purpose of generating this completely lab-grown lolcow.
We can't admit to ourselves that cringe compilations are kind of cringe. We're trying to find a way around [cringe videos] that is still kind of cringe. But you're never going to defeat the human impulse to want to feel better than someone else being punched down on.

When I was a teenager, I found the Chris-Chan antics funny because they were very, very funny. But the older I got, the more I started giving this some thought. There's something so profoundly antisocial about the [lolcow thing] and the number of people that are participating in this weird spectator culture.

I'm not trying to pearl clutch, I'm not saying I'm better than anybody else. I just worry that this lolcow phenomenon kind of exists everywhere. We just don't use that word for it. That's how you get people like Joshua Block. That's how you get this industry of triggering these people into freakouts or outbursts. Then you get YouTubers whose job it is to just make videos about that person's latest crashout. Rinse and repeat

Q: Thank you so much for talking with us, Frankie. Any final words for the Know Your Meme readers?

A: I would encourage you, if you want, please consider donating a couple of dollars to the Wayback Machine, the Internet Archive. If you don't know, they're a project that takes digital snapshots of websites as they exist at that moment.
You can view a website as it existed at many, many points in time. It's just a really cool time capsule. It's completely free. It's a really good way to preserve parts of internet history and get a look at how people used to communicate online. So definitely give Internet Archive a couple of bucks if you want. I think they're doing really, really good work.

You can subscribe to Frankie Fey on YouTube, follow her on Instagram and Twitter, and hear her discuss meme history at length on the Know Your Meme YouTube channel.

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Interview: YouTuber 'Frankie Fey' Talks 'Bad Art History,' Lab-Grown Memes, The Impact Of AI On Meme Culture, Kirkification And More

Дата публикации: 22-06-2026 14:49:42

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