Where Does Web Culture Go From Here? That’s the Big Question at ROFLcon III

By Brian Raftery
May 6, 2012 |
4:56 pm |

It's not all fun and memes at ROFLcon III.

Photos: Brian Raftery/Wired

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts — With meme-production an increasingly commercial venture, and Washington looking to pass copyright-protection legislation, is the unchecked, often insular and happily antagonistic spirit that fuels so much web comedy in danger of being snuffed out?
In a wide-ranging talk at ROFLcon III, 4chan and Can.vas founder Christopher “moot” Poole — the inadvertent enabler of such web phenoms as Caturday and Anonymous — discussed the current state of the meme. While noting that he didn’t want to come off as a crotchety old baud-father, he did sound wistfully nostalgic for the slower-speed good ol’ days.

“When I think back to my best times on the internet, I think of AOL,” he told a crowded auditorium here Saturday, noting that the hunt-and-peck nature of the web — which required a huge amount of time and investment — often led to tighter, stronger communities.
Now, he says, the party’s so big, and memes so ubiquitous in the mainstream, those kind of devoted and decidedly idiosyncratic web communities are dying. “Memes were the instruments with which we used to play music,” he said. “The way things are going, we’re going to lose our song.”

So, where does web culture go from here? While semi-annual web-comedy confab ROFLcon had some lighter moments — including Old Spice spokesman Isaiah Mustafa speaking via Skype and “Bed Intruder” crooner Antoine Dodson goofing off in a garbage can — that was the big question.

Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh addressed an equally packed house Saturday, discussing the recent battle over SOPA, and noting that one of the country’s biggest exports is content — a fact that he says was largely ignored this spring. Huh criticized current copyright law, noting that, in order to thrive, the remix community needs legally sanctioned access to newer works.

“The future of job creation,” Huh said, “is only going to come from our ability to create content.” During the Q&A that followed, Huh was heckled by one crowd member, who repeatedly asked, “Why are you raping the internet, sir?” — a reference to Cheezburger’s commercial success with such web-derived properties as LOLcats.

The antagonizer was soon ejected, and the whole kerfuffle felt like a missed opportunity, on everyone’s part: ROFLcon is a rare chance for some meatspace back-and-forth on the kind of controversies usually relegated to comment threads and angry IRC chats. But it’s hard to have a sensible public debate when stuck in caps-lock mode.

There was no such friction at ROFLcon’s closing panel, “Defending the Internet.” That’s a shame, because if any single event needed a viable counterpoint, it was this discussion about the recent efforts to counter SOPA and the still-lingering fight over PIPA.

While it was compelling to hear representatives from reddit, Google and Fight from the Future make their cases for an unrestricted internet, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the ROFLcon audience was in need of such convincing. Having a representative from the MPAA, or even one of the bills’ supporters, on hand to argue his or her point — and to listen to the concerns of the web crowd in person — would have been far more illuminating.

Without such a voice, the panel felt oddly incongruous — a rallying cry for free speech and diverse viewpoints, delivered in a single voice.

Isaiah Mustafa, aka the Old Spice guy, talks to ROFLcon via Skype, with the viral commercial's co-creator Craig Allen in the foreground.

Brian Raftery is a contributing editor to Wired magazine, and the author of a poorly titled (yet lovingly reported) book about karaoke.
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