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Edit: typo in the title. I meant to say "possibly"

As a disclaimer: The topic is inspired by This VICE/Motherboard article I feel this article is relevant to this site and its mission to document memes.

The article in question is about the author's search for the dankest of dank memes, and the ethical dilemma that ensured for her. She talked several people including, college students (one of whom has a PhD in memes, the editorial board of a different meme site and the author of a book about hacking and hacktivism.

Some of the concepts involved in the article are "ethical sourcing"…

Amy Johnson, a PhD student at MIT and a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society told me that, in general, it's useful to consider "ethical sourcing" as a way to examine the labor practices and environmental impact of producing and consuming a product.

"What environmental impact, broadly construed, does sharing a dank meme from an extremist site have?," she said. "To answer this, we'd need to know if the meme is branded or otherwise indicates its original site. If it is or does, then sharing it serves to advertise the site, and in a positive way. That seems bad."

Johnson, it should be noted, is "investigating what happens when online parody is taken too seriously," which makes her uniquely qualified to discuss my seemingly ridiculous ethical quandary. Unmarked memes that hide the source of origin, on the other hand, raise their own problems.

"This seems a bit like intentionally not telling your vegetarian friend that there's chicken in the super delicious dish you just handed them and then watching them eat it," she said. "You've decided that sharing the deliciousness of the dish outweighs your respect for their principles."

and "decontextualisation"

Ryan Milner, meanwhile, has a PhD in the study of memes (really), and says that transplanting beautiful memes from gross sites (Nazi subreddits, 4chan, weird Discords) to slightly less gross ones (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr), is a time-honored tradition and can likely be ethically done if performed carefully and meticulously.

"As long as you're not taking explicitly problematic content and as long as you're not explicitly amplifying the troublesome sites, then you're doing that decontextualizing work that comes with memes, and kind of sanitizing them by the mere fact that you're lifting them out of the shit," Milner told me in an email.

"You can sanitize and popularize the images by releasing them among the normies, thus making alt Nazi cool kids whine about how the mainstream ruined their meme magic," he said. "You can be like the Tumblr kids who ruined Pepe and made the 4chan kids all indignant (before the Nazi thing, of course). And that, my friend, is your ethical good."

As members of a site (or two) that is connected to meme culture by default, what do you think about the article and its concepts and subjects?

“This seems a bit like intentionally not telling your vegetarian friend that there’s chicken in the super delicious dish you just handed them and then watching them eat it,” she said. “You’ve decided that sharing the deliciousness of the dish outweighs your respect for their principles.”

Well, let's take the now iconic controversy frog Pepe.

The original webcomic is written – A lettuce base salad with a few differences in sauce composition, a house dish not particularly special.

The character, Pepe, is taken into reaction images and mutations – People notice that the sauce is actually quite good and begin making recipes out of the sauce only.

/pol/ makes politically charged pepe's: Some edgelord decides to make one of these sauces out of meat, it turns out to be quite good.

Election 2k16: Flame bait on the vegetarian debate spreads like wildfire.

"Hate Symbol": People associate the sauce with it's meat based variant, and everyone screams at each other.

Notice that the meme has mutated into something so irrecognizable that the technical "source" for the meme, (Matt Furie) is completely ignored.

Also, keep in mind that many of these offensive sites have multiple boards and communities, which may not be completely universal in ethics.

However, there might be a truly extremist based meme, and not simply mutation prime, in which case, show me an example.

Or a charged meme which isn't obviously charged.

>"transplanting beautiful memes from gross sites (Nazi subreddits, 4chan, weird Discords) to slightly less gross ones (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr), is a time-honored tradition and can likely be ethically done if performed carefully and meticulously."
>"What environmental impact, broadly construed, does sharing a dank meme from an extremist site have?"

In other words: how can we steal /pol/'s memes without being redpilled.

Okay, so it looks like the promising discussion potential this thread had didn't really take off, so I'll post some things that I've noticed.

One day on Tumblr, I saw a user that posted a meme image. Couldn't tell you exactly what it was about, but it wasn't fanart, it was more "traditional" meme thing, and it did make me laugh. At the bottom, of the post (not in the image) they wrote something along the lines of that they thought the image was great, but the OP was a fascist/Nazi account, so they reposted it so people could reblog without guilt.

Obviously, I have no way of knowing if the OP blog they referred to was legit "only the Aryan master race should live on this earth" or if they were a just slightly right of center and therefore literally Hitler. Still, it was the first time that I had really seen a "meme theft justified" because of the ideas behind this thread.

Like I said before, the image in question was largely inoffensive, which fits well into the "As long as you’re not taking explicitly problematic content and as long as you’re not explicitly amplifying the troublesome sites, then you’re doing that decontextualizing work that comes with memes, and kind of sanitizing them by the mere fact that you’re lifting them out of the shit"

However, as a meme documentation place… it's frustrating. I know this is taking the idea of "memes" as something "legitimate with real world consequences" a bit far, but hear me out.

Many inventions have origins that are often a product of things we often would like to leave in the past. Two examples off the top of my head:

The Haber process, (synthesizing inert atmospheric Nitrogen into usable ammonia) while one of the greatest achievements of agriculture of all time, was initially used by Germany in WWI to make bombs. Some even speculated that the war would have lasted less than a year and cost millions fewer lives if this process had been discovered.

The rockets that pushed the Space Race forward were largely those improved on by Germany in WWII. While the concept of rockets were old, rocketry was able to be pushed forward due to these plans and scientists later joining the Us and Russia.

Obviously, both of these still play a role in the taking of human life, However, the amount of good these inventions have created (ability to feed the world, creation of space travel and quick global communications) almost everyone would argue, far outweighs the bad. However, while yes, the good these technologies provide does supersede the harm the groups that worked at developing them caused, I think that knowing how and why they originated is still important. To separate it fully from it's origin, by lying about it, just feels wrong. I'm not saying we need to praise Nazi Germany for the fact that mankind can go into space. By the contrary, I'd say the opposite is a much more appropriate reaction. Despite their attempts at using this technology to conquer the world and kill those who opposed them, rocket technology now enables us to grasp a deeper understanding of the vastness of the cosmos, and how insignificant our mote of dust is among the universe.

Of course, that's with real things that actually matter, and not internet memes. Still, both of these cases above do share the commonality that the "Nazism" of them is not actually present in the "final product" even if they may have originated there.

I do have a bit of a mindset that one should try and save everything, as you never know what will be important in the future. As a meme documentation site, especially, I think this is important. Sure, many memes have uh, unsavory origins, but that is sometimes critical to understanding the meme itself. However, as I've seen by comments here an on othr sites, once it gains a KYM article, no matter how throughouh you document the origins, it becomes a "normie" meme.

As such, going based on this quote:"You can sanitize and popularize the images by releasing them among the normies, thus making alt Nazi cool kids whine about how the mainstream ruined their meme magic,” he said. “You can be like the Tumblr kids who ruined Pepe and made the 4chan kids all indignant (before the Nazi thing, of course). And that, my friend, is your ethical good.”

This could mean that making a KYM article about it might possibly be seen as a somewhat rough equivalent to the "Despite their attempts at using this technology to conquer the world and kill those who opposed them, rocket technology now enables us to grasp a deeper understanding of the vastness of the cosmos, and how insignificant our mote of dust is among the universe."