This tale is a great example of synergy. It combines two things I don’t like into a story I freaking love.
The winsome tot above is Zoe Roth, better known to the world as Disaster Girl. Ms. Roth recently related the story of how this completely misunderstood image of her five-year-old self became a global internet phenomenon.
(Thing I Don’t Like #1: “Meme” is a word coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 to denote a piece of information or idea that replicates like genetic material. Nearly all the captioned images people call “memes” would be better termed cartoons.)
That Ms. Roth has been able to make the best of her odd and unsought celebrity speaks well of her outlook, I think. That’s why I’m happy that her Disastrous career has paid off.
This week it was reported that the original image that launched a thousand “memes” was encoded using the Ethereum blockchain into an NFT or non-fungible token.
NFTs are the Thing I Don’t Like #2. Put simply, they’re copies of digital information encoded so that that particular copy is unique. While you can go to a site and download a song of mine for 99 cents (or just rip it off YouTube or any number of rip sites like everyone else), I could use blockchain tech to make a non-fungible copy of that song and sell it for beaucoup bucks. It’s a silly idea taking the art/collecting world by storm because, honestly, people will gamble on anything. Details on NFTs here.
Now for the happy ending part. The NFT of the image Ms. Roth’s father snapped of her in 2005 just sold for 500,000 smackers!
Woman in Disaster Girl meme sells original photo as NFT for $500,000
Roth, now aged 21 and a university student, sold the image through Ben Lashes, an NFT, or non-fungible token, entrepreneur who has racked up about $2m in sales for sales including Nyan Cat, Grumpy Cat, Keyboard Cat, Doge, Success Kid and David After Dentist.
Roth, who says she plans to use the proceeds to pay off her student loans and donate additional money to charity, told the New York Times: “The internet is big. Whether you’re having a good experience or a bad experience, you kind of just have to make the most of it.”
She told the Raleigh News & Observer: “Nobody who is a meme tried to do that, it just ended up that way. Is it luck? Is it fate? I have no idea. But I will take it.”
Even though I find the concept of NFTs rather absurd, I’m glad Ms. Roth was able to finally get paid for her years of service in the cause of cheap internet humor.