Back in the summer of 2000, I was really upset about the 2000 USA election. It seemed like the issue of Bush v. Gore had come down to a legal battle of what you can get away with, and not what is right and honest and fair. A president should not want to win by supressing votes, but that is exactly what happened. You had one side, Gore, said count everything, even legit absentee ballots they could argue, said count everything. With 20/20 hindsight now it has been proven that if all the intended votes for Gore in Florida were counted, Gore wins. I'm a poker player. It's what you might call and "angle shoot", what Bush got away with, not against the rules, but not cool man, not cool. You argued to NOT count people's votes that were legit votes.
So, I started a website, BushCartoon.com which launched in the summer of 2000 with a Dukes of Hazard parody that broke the intenet. There was no Youtube, and my movie was like a 1 meg Flash file so I had to host it myself. One day, June 2000 on my third host already, guy says: Yer lookin at about $80 a day to host this site, if this traffic continues. We made a deal, I put an ad in the next video for his hosting company, he hosted me for free. Good to go from there, of course I put the page black on 9/11 (and I was there and saw it live in downtown Manhattan) but before that I had started to post my photoshop artwork. This was the first one:
This idea has been copied a thousand times since then. People are trained to laser focus on money. Dirty, gross cash, I even saw a "Bitcoin Chick" post on Twitter a stack of cash, like a giant ham sandwitch next to her face. And the caption was "Thank you Bitcoin". I did not respond. I think those tweets have been deleted. Hopefully someone learned something.
Anyway, so that "Zero dollar bill" was like a thing, I printed out maybe 50 of them. If you have an original print with the rubber stamp on the back, that's rare. But I was actually concerned that by printing fake money, even with a zero, it could draw the attention of the secret service. It's funny, one of my fans actually worked in the Pentagon. The BBC contacted me wanting to do an interview. I was too broke to make the long distance call. It was a thing though, I made stickers and posted them around NYC. I sold the domain for my costs and broke even in 2004, during the election. Emails from idiots was a popular idea right away and other people copied my format of responding to hate mail publicly. It was clear to me back then, that there were a lot of uneducated, rednecks if you will, that are being tricked into voting against their own best interests. That's how the 1% stays the 1% ... you trick people, and you stop votes from being counted. That has been the Republican modus operandi for the past 20 years. Then you get in power, keep the people under control using fear. Unleashed, this has gone all the way to crazy town with Donald Trump.
Here is, published in October of 2001, what may be, the very first political meme:
As far as I remember, the sort of general meme format, black, Impact font type was already a thing. I honestly can't remember exactly, it was 17 years ago, after all. We never again beat the 60k unique views in one day that we got in June 2000, but we got to work with some really cool people like Bad_CRC who made the famous "All Your Base" video. He made a version of Tetris, called "Bushtris" that was only available on BushCartoon.com
And then they shut down EvilBert.com and I made this:
Also in 2001. Go ahead, wayback machine Bushcartoon.com and look at the "Picture of the Month." Early memes.
I think there is some earlier memes, but that "Evil Bert" one was kind of a big deal.
In the end, I sold the domain for not very much money, but retained my rights to the content. Were "memes" a thing before 2001? It's hard for me to remember.
Also, if you would like to help me out, these days I run https://CryptoNinja.co where I promote cryptocurrency.