Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mike Godwin coined the term Internet meme in the June 1993 issue of Wired, describing how memes spread through early online communities including message boards, Usenet groups, and email. The underlying concept of the meme was introduced earlier by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.
In The Selfish Gene (1976), Dawkins used meme to describe a unit of cultural transmission that replicates, mutates, and evolves, analogous to the gene in biology. By 2013, Dawkins described the Internet meme as a hijacking of his original concept, because Internet memes spread through deliberate human creativity rather than random mutation and accurate replication.
Video game retailer GameStop is recognized as the first meme stock. Its share price surged significantly in 2021 due to discussion on the subreddit r/WallStreetBets and activity on the financial platform Robinhood Markets.
Zoe Roth, photographed as a 4-year-old in Mebane, North Carolina, in January 2005, sold the Disaster Girl image as an NFT for US$539,973. The sale included an agreement giving Roth a 10 percent share of any future resales of the NFT.
Dank memes are a genre characterized by oversaturated colors, compression artifacts, crude humor, strange captions, and abrasive audio. They reached mainstream prominence around 2014. The term dank, originally describing cold, damp places, was repurposed to describe memes fitting these deliberately low-quality aesthetics.
Internet memes have been used as tools in elections since at least the viral Dean scream clip from Vermont governor Howard Dean's speech. During the 2020 US presidential campaign, Michael Bloomberg sponsored Instagram accounts with a collective following of over 60 million to post campaign-related memes. A study of the 2017 UK general election found memes delivered basic political information to audiences who would not otherwise seek it out.