‘Lurk More’: An Interview with the Founders of ROFLCon

We’re excited that you’re both giving us your time, in part because we see this issue as a direct extension of ROFLCon. I [Laine] was at the 2012 ROFLCon and that was where I met a number of our contributors. We don’t think the issue could have happened if not for this long trajectory that goes back several years and begins with something you founded in 2008. For our readers who are uninitiated, what was ROFLCon? Could you talk about how it came about?

ROFLCon is basically a convention/conference about internet culture and internet communities. We are very adamant about the convention/conference part. We came up with the name first, then when people asked us what the ‘Con’ stood for, we realized that we wanted it to stand for both things because it is in equal parts a celebration of internet culture and a gathering space for people who were interested in seriously discussing it and didn’t really have anywhere else to go. We were college students at the time and very steeped in this culture of academic conferences, and ROFLCon was born partially out of a frustration with some of the dialogue that we were seeing happening at these conferences. So it was extraordinarily silly but there were also important academic people moderating the panels or giving keynotes. We asked a lot of really hard questions but we also had people draw wolves on the chalkboard. So it was kind of all over the place. For the flagship event there were three instances: 2008, 2010, 2012. And then there were a few other satellite, smaller one-day events in Portland, San Francisco, and New York. And there was a web comic gallery show.

I think we sort of stumbled into the whole process of doing the conference. It was a little bit worrisome because when we started putting it together we also realized that we had actually no experience at all planning any events of any kind. In 2007 we went to an event that was being held by Randall Monroe from [web comic] xkcd. He had published a comic that signalled ‘At this time and this day, at this place, something will be happening’ (see Figure 1) and no one really knew what it was. Having read the comic and living around Cambridge [Massachusetts] at the time, we thought ‘why don’t we just go and check it out?’ A lot of people who later ended up involved as volunteers at the first iteration of the conference were there as well, but we didn’t meet them at the time. We were all just sort of drawn like moths to some internet light.

Keep in mind at this point we had not only no experience organizing but also no money, no venue, nothing. Basically when it happened we were at the [xkcd] event joking, ‘wouldn’t it be funny if Tron guy and the Goatse dude were in the same room’, and Tim went home –Tim’s really good at this – Tim went home and put together a WordPress website. It was like the ugliest – sorry –

It was really bad, yeah.

It was just this crappy site, but Tim has a long history of making things sound very serious and official. So the site’s messaging was very ‘We are having this conference and it’s definitely happening.’

Christina’s trying to tell you it was a scam.

It was a scam! ‘If you’re interested, contact blah-blah-blah.’ But at that point we really had no clue, so we were lying to everyone about what we had. We were telling the venue that we had money and guests and attendees, and we were telling the attendees that we would have a venue and guests, and we were telling the guests that we had money and the venue, and it was like, we had none of these things.

I’ve heard that most conferences are run this way. But that’s the origin story, it was 2007. In terms of fixing it in time, it was just when lolcats were starting to be a thing, which due to the incredible pace of this stuff seems like a long time ago now.

Were there any surprising changes or transitions that occurred from the first ROFLCon to the second to the third? Or anything that surprised you by staying the same?

In 2012 we were on the phone with Grumpy Cat’s agent, and it was like, ‘This cat has an agent.’ I think that fact alone was a really big indication of how the space of internet culture had changed in a four-year time period. In 2008 you could email most of the people and they would actually email you directly back. I think in the intervening period there was the rise of a lot of sort of ‘middlepeople’, agents, booker people –

An industry had sprung up around it.

I don’t want to say, ‘Ah man it was so punk back then and now it’s less punk’, because the original conference was sponsored by the Barbarian Group, an interactive marketing agency. But I think the ‘profession’ of internet culture was something that you could say changed quite a bit. The second thing that always comes up in my mind was this interaction between two panelists we had in ’08, 2010, and 2012, which is the characters of Ben Huh who runs I Can Haz Cheezburger and Chris Poole, who actually we didn’t even know was Chris Poole at the first conference, he came under some other name.

We all became friends with him and then two months later this Wall Street Journal article came out and we were like, ‘Guess our friend’s name is not Rob.’

Those two panelists ended up being this interesting cross-section of internet history in that period. In ’08 they were very diametrically opposed. Ben sort of played ‘The Businessman’, who was here to make funny cats the new medium for popular culture, and then there was Chris who was like, ‘Well, no, you can’t commercialize this stuff. 4chan has been this really great thing for the internet just because it has been this big open space that people have not tried to extract value from.’ And I think they both still are kind of on these poles but they’ve gotten closer to one another over time. I think partially [it’s] because of personal changes. Ben has become so successful with his business that he’s now like, ‘Ok, well now how do I give back to support the openness of the web and think about these broader picture issues’, and Chris simultaneously has gone through the process of doing a start-up which I think has moderated his views in some ways.

What was really fascinating to me was that the first time we did it, it wasn’t just that no one had an agent, it was that people were shocked that we wanted to talk to them. For the most part people’s reactions to being invited were, ‘I can’t believe you want to actually hear from me.’ I think for me and for a lot of the people attending that first one, it was this weird moment. If you think of a real celebrity, you know that person actually exists in the world. You see them eating burgers in magazines; you know that they’re real. People knew somebody was making Homestar Runner, for example, but they had no idea who the personalities behind them were. So there was just this repeated shock throughout the whole weekend of like, ‘Oh my god, that guy’s a real person’ or ‘there are people behind these things that we thought just popped up on the internet.’ So it went from a more content-driven thing in 2008, to 2010, a much more personality [-driven thing], and by 2012 there was a business to be made based on the fact that you were a personality. I remember in 2010 we dealt with our first agent for the I Kiss You Guy from Turkey, and we were so overwhelmed by how weird it was to deal with an ‘internet person’s agent’. But by 2012 it was like everyone had an agent. And it was just very tangibly different.

[It was] also different in terms of expectations. The first time we did it, our sponsors, attendees, and guests [all] knew that it was basically a hobbyist’s shitshow. They had no expectations of polish. But by 2012 we had some big ticket sponsors and managers for these guests who were expecting a certain level of professionalism and commercialism. We had to be like, ‘Look, we’re just a couple of college kids doing this for no budget and no pay, we’re doing this for fun’. We came up against the wall of internet culture becoming an industry.

Do you think that had anything to do with why 2012 was the last one? Or is there another story of why there hasn’t been a 2014 ROFLCon?

I think there are a lot of reasons why we wanted to put it on ‘indefinite hiatus’ which is the technical term. But that was definitely one of the big reasons. Another key reason was [that] in 2008 we created this because we really saw a gap we could fill: nobody was talking to these people who were obviously very smart and very culturally savvy. No one was asking them about how internet culture was happening. It was a time when internet culture was [becoming] a really popular thing to talk about, but we would go to these academic conferences and there would be people who clearly were not part of that community talking about it, wildly speculating about what the ‘kids these days’ are doing, and we were like, ‘Why don’t you just ask them?’

We wanted to be a conference that embodied internet culture rather than a conference about internet culture in some sense.

In 2012 we were still able to do that and I think honestly we could have kept doing that for a long time, but it was clear that other things had come up to fill that gap. Daily Dot was interviewing these people on a regular basis, and Buzzfeed or whoever. Nowadays when somebody makes it big on the internet, they end up in The New York Times. Before, you wouldn’t even know their name. Internet culture is mainstream enough that for me I really wanted to take a step back. If we were to do another ROFLCon, I want to make sure that we’re doing something actually useful and interesting and unique, not just repeating the thing that was useful and interesting and unique in 2008.

I do some work with the EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation] and those types of organizations. EFF started as an activist shop to protect online rights, but one of the problems that they’ve run into is, as time goes on, everything is becoming online rights, everything has to do with technology. So they’ve actually had to say, within the space of all the internet things we could look at, what are the few issues that we have to do [with]. And there’s a number of internet research centers that are in the same situation now, where they’re like, ‘We study the internet, or we study cyberlaw’, but one of the problems now is that it’s just everything, so they can’t possibly do it. And I think the same is true of the conference. As the years went on it was a little bit more difficult to pull out who belongs here versus who wouldn’t qualify, in terms of speaking [as a guest at the conference]. [It’s unclear] what internet fame means any more. It incorporates both traditional celebrities who have a strong online presence [and] people who started out on the internet but are now traditional celebrities. There is so much crossover that it became more difficult to draw the boundaries, and we didn’t want to become a conference that was about ‘media’ because that’s difficult to encompass in a tight conference.

Also, we were at maximum capacity at MIT in 2012. We had hit that wall a while ago. Unfortunately in Cambridge once you hit a conference of around 1000 people and you want to go up, you’re looking at booking at the convention center. So we had a choice of, ‘do we keep it around the same size, do we go smaller, or do we go way bigger and turn it into like a Penny Arcade Expo or something like that?’ ROFLCon could be easily monetizable but neither of us were interested in those parts at all, and since it was our project, we didn’t want to pursue a path for it that was going to make us unhappy and not add value in the way we want to add value and, instead see if other people will pick up the slack, or see if we can carry parts of that into our work elsewhere.

I personally expected that someone else would jump in and run a conference of their own, to build that out into a huge kind of con. We haven’t really seen that. I don’t know what accounts for that, but that was something that surprised me. It may just be that it’s happened so fast that we’re actually no longer part of what’s really happening. All the really cool, just-on-the-edge-of-popular-internet-culture stuff may just be happening somewhere else. The Grumpy Cat universe has already been settled, there’s cities and goldmines being built on it. Maybe the frontier is elsewhere. If we had the chance to do another ROFLCon, I think it’d be really exciting if we had someone who could help us do it internationally somewhere. In some ways ROFLCon was limited because it captured only a particular part of internet culture and that universe is just extremely, extremely broad. The really interesting stuff may just be happening elsewhere, both geographically and socially.

It seems like from the list of people that you brought in, the guests, there was a real palpable desire to see the ‘authentic’ originator of the meme, like who’s the person who made it, or who’s the person in that picture, or who’s the person behind the web comic.

It was less about the person behind the thing and more about that person’s stories. The way that we tried to figure out who to represent each meme was who could best tell the story behind how it happened. And each year we did it we did a deep dive panel. ’08 was lolcats. We had people who were talking about every angle of it. In 2012 we did Three Wolf Moon.

That’s actually one of my favorite panels. It was super cool. That was to the point of extremity because we brought in the person who wrote the first Amazon review.

We brought in the guy who owns the company that made the t-shirt and the woman who is the artist, who didn’t speak any English. She was like, ‘I don’t speak English, I’m just gonna draw stuff on the blackboard behind you guys.’

Even after we had written up our list, we realized that we actually didn’t know most of the real names of the people who were behind all these memes. It was perpetually ‘Tron Guy’ or ‘xkcd Guy’. It was nothing we had planned for but one of the really valuable things that we were able to accomplish was this idea that when you come to ROFLCon, you realize that the internet’s actually made of people. It turns out that someone has to be the person who gets the video together and there is this cat that exists out there. When we were bringing Tron Guy there was a lot of stress because Tron Guy became famous on the internet largely because he was mocked at scale by the internet, and we thought it would be terrible if we brought him and that experience was replicated in the real world. But what’s interesting is: he came, people really liked him, and people treated him with a lot of respect. In 2012 he even ended up being this odd, ‘elder statesman’ character. A lot of people told me they took away from the experience this realization that, ‘yeah, this colossal amount of human effort and experience is going into the generation of the internet every day’, and you sometimes don’t think about it because your experience of it is just a wall of images.

That emphasis on stories rather than people, or stories rather than ‘authentic-person’-gawking, allowed us to keep it relatively civil. We had very few issues, shockingly, with widespread disrespect or people being mean to any of the guests. Even people who were widely mocked and that’s why they were there. We tried really hard to think about questions that were deeper than ‘how do you feel about this?’ For each guest we thought about how to present them and how they related to everyone else so that there was some sort of narrative or story or discussion that came out. I’d say the vast majority of the time we spen[t] planning ROFLCon [went] into the programming, because we [were] nerdy college students. That showed, because we tried to figure out what those conversations were going to be about and not just say, ‘These are some fascinating people, let’s hope they get along and say interesting things.’

This reminds me of how the audience responded to ‘the trolls’ that came. There were people who came with the explicit purpose of being ‘the troll at the event’. They ended up following us from event to event to event and after a while became like the cranky uncle that everybody’s just like, ‘Ah it’s just the trolls again.’ I think the space created by ROFLCon is such a late 2000s thing where it’s this idea that the internet is this thing that you can discern as ‘the internet’ [draws box with fingers], and this is where we all kind of hang out when we’re apart. I think the discussion has moved on from that in some ways, which is good. It’s really healthy, because the discussion has turned into, ‘Well the internet isn’t just one place where everybody hangs out.’ Now there’s all these divisions, the hope of a united internet hasn’t materialized in a lot of ways and maybe for a brief space of time we were able to create that feeling.

Or imagine it. We definitely ran into problems very early on and it was a huge learning moment for me. After we ran the first event, somebody criticized us very publicly about not having enough women and not being representative enough of the true diversity of the internet. Part of that learning moment for us was, ‘Oh, we didn’t think about that because we literally just wrote down a list of people who we thought were cool when we were 13.’ We didn’t know their genders but it wasn’t a thoughtfully put together thing. What I realized doing ROFLCon between ’08 and 2010 was that this thing I had thought of as a monolithic internet culture or an internet community, because I grew up inside it, was actually kind of a lie. Because at the same time that I was doing those things on the internet, lots of other people were doing lots of other things on the internet. My internet culture experience, just because it’s the one that is more often pointed to, doesn’t mean that the other experiences are invalid at all. We took a lot of steps to try to address that by 2012 but it took us a little while to figure that out. I think the fact that we’ve moved on from that moment – there are bad things about it but also really good things, like the fact that we have enough internets now for everyone to have one.

I [Laine] found that one of the more provocative tensions I experienced at ROFLCon was between the diversity of the planning committee against the way in which the attendees tended to skew very white male. We know that internet culture has this diverse range of participants. Did you ever figure out why it [was] that the attendees seem[ed] to affirm this stereotype that none of us reflect?

ROFLCon, basically every year we did it was organized by a majority of women.

Often an overwhelming majority.

I think by 2012 you [Tim] were just like the last dude standing. It’s an unfortunate thing that happens, but I think it has something to do with the way that people conceptualize themselves as ‘other’ and are made to feel that way. When you say ‘nerd’ the image that comes to mind, for everyone, including nerds, including nerds who aren’t white male, is a white male nerd. If you want nerds who aren’t white male nerds to show up sometimes you have to resort to saying, ‘this is a girl geek convention’ or ‘this is a black nerd convention’ or whatever. Then people who are in that sector of the group are like, ‘Oh, this is for us.’ I think the same thing was happening with internet culture. Part of this is of course our responsibility, in that we just didn’t think about it for the first two years. I think that unless you are able to explicitly state that this conference is a safe space and actively, actively, actively promote it that way, it’s really really hard to get that number of people. It’s also Boston. The internet community in Boston is pretty specific in some ways.

The memes that we chose to represent at ROFLCon were also a signal for particular groups of people.

A lot of the things that have helped me understand all of this complicated race and gender stuff actually happened at ROFLCon. I remember a key turning point was in 2008, when our friend Kevin Driscoll gave this amazing talk about the rise of Soulja Boy, how he basically came up through the internet and how he was very masterfully asking his fans to participate and create this phenomenon which then landed him a record label and so on and so forth. I had this major revelation, like ‘Wait, that’s internet culture, Soulja Boy is absolutely internet culture, but it’s not what we think of as internet culture.’ That was the really big tension. By 2012 we were having conversations like, ‘We need to invite the people who run WorldStarHipHop to come and talk to people because that’s internet culture.’ It’s not the internet culture that I grew up on but that doesn’t make it not a part of it. But with the absolute sheer number of those communities and how they intersect with the real world, it’s really tough to try to build any sort of coherent thing around it.

Our next question goes back to that tension between conference and convention. Your programming was quite assertive about trying to blend producers, cultural critics, and theorists. What allowed you to conceptually straddle these worlds?

I think [it was] the fact that we were just naturally straddling those worlds. For us the harder part was actually keeping it fun because it was really easy for us to go full on academic. I think the guiding principle was like, ‘This is an event we’re putting on literally because it’s fun for us so if it’s not something that’s ridiculous and funny and in keeping in with “the spirit of the internet” (large, large, large, air quotes), we don’t think it has a place here.’ And we wanted to make sure that people who weren’t super steeped in academia would feel comfortable in that place. The last thing we wanted was for us to invite all these people and then make them feel very condescended to or excluded from the conversation. It was just kind of natural on our part and deliberate mostly because we wanted to enjoy ourselves.

Maybe it also comes from the legacy of how Christina, I, and Diana [Kimball] met, through the Berkman Center which was technically academics and law professors, but if you’ve met Jonathan Zittrain he’s probably more comedian than law professor. It was already a world in which there were academics who were titled as such but had a bearing and approach that was quite different. [We also met each other] within the context of doing stuff with the Students for Free Culture which was a student movement that was started by a law professor but was also actually a DIY-get out-there-and-do-creative-stuff movement. It was already in this vein where academia was constantly paired up with doing stuff and getting out into the real world and bringing that into whatever you were doing.

From your vantage point in 2014, what work is still left to be done? What do academics still need to be doing that they’re not?

A conference that I would love to do would ask the question, ‘what are the thousandth to two-thousandth most popular videos on YouTube?’ These are videos that you probably have not seen, but millions of people have; they have enormous audiences. Similarly for communities, if you were going to order all the communities or social networks on the internet by size, what exists in the world from 1000th to 2000th? I guess the work that’s left to be done is thinking about how multilayered internet culture is. We’ve designed platforms that focus very much on the top ten or the number one. YouTube only exposes the most popular, Google in some sense does as well. I wish there were more ways of navigating and exploring the sheer depth of content that exists and the sheer depth of human interaction that exists as well. So a good deal of work left to be done, by academics but also just by people who are working in this space, is asking, ‘how do we open that up, how can you see the internet in a way that’s deeper than the most popular thing?’ In some ways you could argue that our view of ‘popular internet culture’ is the same view we have of ‘popular television’. What is ‘TV culture?’ Well, it’s the top five most popular TV shows, in America if you want to make it even more limited. A lot of the work has to do with showing that there’s actually tons of interesting things all the way down and that those are valuable in their own right. [My conference] would be sort of ‘ROFLCon again but for communities you’ve never heard of before.’

I think I have three requests of the academic community. One is archiving; archiving is so hard. I remember writing the 2012 foreword in the ROFLCon Program and trying to remember what the internet was like in 2008, and short of milestones like Rick Astley at the Macy’s [Thanksgiving] Day Parade there were not that many things that could help me understand what that world looked like. There are all these moments that are happening that to us feel so permanent and impermanent at the same time, and are so impossible to archive. I would love to see someone figure out how to capture more of the internet, whether it’s like what people did for Geocities (there’s now this ghost-Geocities that you can wander around which is so cool). Like that, but for other things that are happening online.

My big pet peeve right now that I think academics could do a really good job of steering the conversation towards – over the last two years I feel like Twitter and internet discourse in general has gotten incredibly combative. It’s a really complicated issue but the thing that makes me least happy about it is people’s misunderstanding of trolling and the nuances of that. Because Twitter is such a shorthand medium a lot of things get condensed, but I see a conflation of people who are being actually aggressive and threatening online with people who are being playful online. That’s a whole spectrum and I feel like in popular discourse people haven’t quite figured out how to talk about those different types of negative interactions on the internet in a way that’s constructive rather than like, ‘trolls’. Because saying ‘trolls’ at this point is basically like saying ‘haters’. Yes, it’s a good way to get on with your life but I feel like there are a lot of dangerous things happening around that conflation, brewing under the surface, and they will bite us in the ass in five years or something.

I think that research into the history of how certain, super ubiquitous parts of the internet were designed, and why, and by whom, and for whom, is really interesting. So much of our world is UI [user interface] now and those UIs I think have such a big impact on how people talk to each other and create culture. It’s not entirely deterministic – obviously people have and will always generate bypasses – but I’m always just fascinated by subtle ways in which tiny decisions that don’t seem important can end up with these sweeping effects.

Is there a principle that meme makers or meme spreaders live by? If there’s a driving ethical precept, what would it be?

I don’t think there is one, unfortunately. And if there was one, that standard would move really quickly based on lots of other parameters, like how much money you can make, for one thing. Being a content creator and a creator or facilitator of an internet phenomenon are not the same thing, and it always really frustrated me when I saw people who made some super iconic piece of internet culture attempt to take ownership over it. It’s a hard thing because on the one hand I totally want those artists to get paid; on the other hand, half of the time the reason why their thing is famous has basically nothing to do with the thing [itself] and everything to do with how the internet decided to adopt it. I would love to say that there’s some code of ethics that was like, ‘if the internet blows your thing up, the internet gets public domain ownership over it, at least enough so they can continue making fun remixes of it or fun memes or whatever.’ But it’s tough. I think also we have to train media companies. They’re getting better at it, with letting things go so people can play with them, but yeah, copyright law is messed up y’all [laughs].

It seems like you can’t be a good producer without being a really good consumer of this stuff. Even the most popular people on the internet don’t appear to be master artists, at least in the realm of, like, funny cats. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of ‘I’m going to go into my cave and come up with the one image that’s going to change the internet.’ I think the most successful people on the internet, and the most successful platforms on the internet, just have this constant ingestion and exertion of different things. I think maybe there’s a community norm that knowing what has happened and what is happening on the internet is a prerequisite to then playing a role in it.

‘Lurk more.’