In each edition of web_crawlr we have exclusive original content every day. On Saturday our Video Producer Kyle Calise explores the origins and history of the most iconic memes online in his “Meme History” column. If you want to read columns like this a day before everyone else, subscribe to web_crawlr to get your daily scoop of internet culture delivered straight to your inbox.
There are memes that are about specific real-world events, memes that have to do with a particular attitude, and then there are ones that are really just borne from the subconscious, impulsive id of the internet. Guess which one we’re talking about today.
In order to fully appreciate Stonks, first we have to understand its main character, Meme Man.
No one is exactly sure where he came from originally, but according to a Know Your Meme patron, he was first posted to 4Chan forums quote, “long ago.” Urban Dictionary describes him as an “immortal being…everywhere but also nowhere.” Cruise through his subreddit, and you’ll find any number of bizarre, nonsensical memes about everything and also nothing.
In short, he’s a surreal, smooth-faced man standing in for surreal smooth-brained jokes wherever memes are created.
In June of 2017, Meme Man appeared in the original Stonks image macro on a Facebook page called Special Meme Fresh. This image soon spread to some of the weirder corners of Reddit—such as /r/Ooer, and, of course, Imgur.
On YouTube, someone posted a very short video emphasizing his godliness, which sounds like this.
In time, anybody living deep in the bowels of the meme world came to a certain degree of familiarity with Stonks.
In the Stonks context specifically, Meme Man represents the idea of success but also boneheadedness. Use it to describe some absurd situation that sounds like a good idea for a split second, but only a split second, or, use it to mock someone else who clearly doesn’t know what they’re doing.
Spin-offs include Shef, Tehc, Helth, and others, each of which are a little more specific, and represent a win in each of their own niches.
Memes, particularly the weird ones, usually fade with time. But Stonks has had more than one surge in interest in recent years and each is because of a specific thing.
The first came in June of 2019, almost two years to the day since its original appearance on Facebook, when a fake screenshot went viral on Reddit. In it, a couple is breaking up, and the meme is accidentally posted on-thread.
The second resurgence, predictably, was in March of 2020 amid the first wave of COVID-19 in the United States, and perhaps more to the point, amid the huge stock market dip that went along with it.
The third time was during the GameStop short squeeze of 2021. Here, we see massive interest in the Stonks meme in January when /r/Wallstreetbets was first talking about targeting GameStop, and again in March when the stock price became particularly volatile.
“Stonks” is now Reddit shorthand for any meme stock, the other most famous one being AMC.
Meme man, like his supporters, is a creature from the depths of the internet. He almost makes no sense, and he’s pretty darn weird, but he gets lots of upvotes whenever people post him.
Stonks.
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