Who owns our digital sense of humour? Building meme archives for collective futures

3 min read

Memes are the internet’s cultural currency. From the instantly recognisable distracted boyfriend template to the many images spoofing the vice-president of the United States, JD Vance, memes are shared jokes that shape how we think, feel and even protest. The role played by meme-ing in the production and distribution of images on the internet cannot be underestimated. Memes have shaped popular culture for just under two decades now. Among other things, during that period they have become the symbols of political uprisings from Morocco to Nepal. In many ways, memes are public digital cultural heritage. 

In light of all this, how could an archive possibly cope with the living, breathing form of the meme? We at the Inclusive AI Lab and the Internet Archives ask ourselves, whose version of culture tends to be archived in public digital memory in the age of memes?

The paradox of archiving memes

Memes are caught in a paradox. Their nature is to morph, evolve and pass from user to user. To pin one down, to make it archivable, one must choose a moment in time, an iteration in its life in which it is deemed to be most emblematic of itself, most honest in representing itself. However, a meme is never in earnest. 

We have seen this in the lifecycle of Pepe, the infamous cartoon frog. Once categorised by the Anti-Defamation League as a hate symbol, given its rampant use by white supremacist movement in the USA it was later reclaimed by the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Hong Kong protesters adopted it as a symbol of hope and solidarity, and as such it has since been popularised by inflatable frog costumes protesting against ICE incursions in Portland, Oregon. 

Creative data justice

Creative data justice entails recognising and valorising the forms of creative and cultural work happening everyday on the internet, especially by those who typically are marginalised by the extractivist logics of data extraction. Memes in this sense represent public cultural heritage and living repositories of social change, documenting how people respond collectively to crises, imagine alternatives and reframe power. 

At the Inclusive AI Lab, we are reimagining participatory infrastructures as sites on which creative work can happen freely and be recognised as forms of cultural labour that underpin our digital economy. However, this recognition of agency extends beyond the act of creation. Participatory cultures also have a right to control how they want to be remembered. This is not a problem unique to digital culture or creative labour. If care is properly valued, curation and collaboration will become key skills for the future of work. 

Building the meme archive

The archiving of our digital culture should take into account the »polyphonic« quality of memes, as multiple, distinct voices or perspectives speak at once. They are made up of individual voices, remixing, resharing, reiterating, but together they conjure up a picture of a crowd, a powerful collective. We have to meet digital ephemera on their own terms; understanding how they travel, how they are passed from user to user and platform to platform and how users valorise them are all crucial to understanding meme archiving.

Turning to the users already involved in archiving and curating memes, we may see both private and public initiatives to record our digital heritage. What can the bigger archives stand to learn from these grassroots perspectives on archiving? 

• Meme accounts on mainstream social media sites such as Instagram curate, organise and preserve memes. This demonstrates that the digital literacy skills involved in being a digital custodian have evolved in parallel with the evolution of digital practices. In cases such as these, the role and taste of the curator comes into its own as particular users base their collections on their own vision of the internet canon. 

• User-led and community-based archival sites such as KnowYourMeme have emerged to catalogue the ever-growing evolution of meme movements. KnowYourMeme is an internet meme database organised in accordance with the same principles as Wikipedia and has been running since 2008. Contributions are open to all but overseen by an independent professional editorial and research staff. This results in lengthy, encyclopaedic entries that attempt to account for all iterations of a single meme. In this case, KnowYourMeme relies on fellow internet users to catalogue regional meme variations, taking a completist approach to meme archiving.

• The Internet Archive has a special repository of GIFs, the GeoCities Animated Gif Search Engine (Gifcities), which was a special project of the Internet Archive conducted as part of our twentieth anniversary in 2016 to highlight and celebrate fun aspects of the cultural history of the web, as represented in the Wayback Machine. Mining the Internet Archive’s GeoCities Closing Crawl collection, the organisation extracted over 4,500,000 animated GIFs, and in 2025 released an updated version of GifCities that included improved search, interface improvements and the ability to make and send GifGrams. Through its vast and open-access collection, the Internet Archive pays homage to digital creativity and the spirit of creativity that has always defined the web.

Digital public memory in the making 

Archiving is a public duty of care, but how can it be inclusive and honour the principles of creative data justice? Different perspectives on meme archiving show us that human skills, including curating, organising and play, are essential to preserve our digital cultural heritage. We call for a new vision of digital archiving, one that honours everyday creativity as a vital public resource for inclusive and responsible AI futures.

The Inclusive AI Lab at Utrecht University is dedicated to incubating leaders and helping to build inclusive, responsible and ethical AI data, tools, services, policies and platforms, with a special focus on the Global South.

Dr Lucie Chateau is a digital aesthetics scholar and media and culture researcher. She is Assistant Professor of Screen Media at Utrecht University and the lead of the Diversifying Creative AI cluster of the Inclusive AI Lab, where she leads research on distributed creativity and collaborative authorship in digital culture using AI. Lucie is currently researching the impact of GenAI aesthetics on meme culture and the digital cultural economy.

Beatrice Murch is Programme Manager of the Internet Archive Europe and helps run the Dutch Foundation dedicated to bringing collections to life using AI tools and Shared Cultural Heritage. Her work is aimed at fostering partnerships across Europe and implementing multiple projects to showcase access to digital cultural heritage.