For a certain subset of Internet users, “Sudo make me a sandwich” may as well be “Take my wife … please.”
Perhaps some explanation is in order. Before giving up the goods, however, we should heed the warning of Randall Munroe, the 23-year-old creator of xkcd, a hugely popular online comic strip (at least among computer programmers) where the sandwich line appeared. Mr. Munroe believes that analyzing a joke is like dissecting a frog–it can be done, but the frog dies.
If you ever watched the Star Wars Kid and Homestar Runner, or gawked at the Tron Guy and Web comic Xkcd, you’re changing the future of celebrity. You’re building a world where Paris Hilton and Tom Cruise will be replaced by captioned pictures of cats and clever comics about algebra. At least, that was the premise of a conference held over the weekend at MIT called ROFLCon, which brought together the Web’s most famous meme-disseminators to prove that In The Future, Fame Will Be Different. Will it really?
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