Antoine Dodson spotted at ROFLcon practicing what he preaches… hiding

Last weekend, our co-founder Mallory and our designer Leia drove up to Boston to attend ROFLcon- the biennial convention for Internet memes held at the MIT campus. Friday and Saturday were filled with panels about all things Internet- from the future of the web to the nostalgia of geocities and angelfire.

Our favorite memes were present, and surprisingly… real people! Antoine Dodson hid in a trashcan, Old Spice guy skyped in topless, dude behind Double Rainbow spoke about his first video “One Huge Intense Rainbow”, 3frames creator Aaron Meyers spoke to the therapeutic value of gifs, Tron Guy gave hugs to the children, and our Google client gave testament to the fight for an open internet alongside Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian. 

Sadly this was the final year of ROLFcon, but stay tuned for more adventures into the depths of the internet.

This January, 15 million people and countless companies came together to stop the SOPA. Taking advantage of the SXSWi festival’s internet enthusiast magnetism, we flew down to throw a party for Mozilla, Google, Reddit & FFtF to bring together the web properties and individuals who protested the act, in order to continue the open internet dialogue and come together to celebrate the death of SOPA.  

Here’s what came out of that celebration since:

• OPEN NET DJ MIX: RAC DJs, who played at the party, released an Open Internet Mix on Hype Machine in honor of the party. Check out the post, and listen at 22:49 for a secret message ;)

• STOPPED SOPA PHOTOS: We made custom speech bubbles with protest action items & open culture sentiments and also built out a STOPPED SOPA photobooth. The hundreds of photos are now up on Facebook. Tag yourself, tumble + tweet them to show you support an Open Internet. (We also had over 200 attendees fill out meta-data forms we uploaded to iworkfortheinternet.org!)

• OUR OWN BILLBOARD: Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of Reddit, inspired by the tagline of the party, announced at the event that we’d be crowdfunding a Don’t Mess with the Internet billboard in SOPA author Lamar Smith’s district. It was fully funded within 48 hours. Stay tuned for the actual billboard.

• STAY INVOLVED: We were really excited about the response from people at the event in getting involved in the fight for internet freedom. There are a bunch of organizations doing great work in this field, and here are some of our favorites. For creators, remixers, hackers: fightforthefuture.org, for political activists: demandprogress.org, for startups: engineadvocacy.org, for musicians: futureofmusic.org

Lastly, we want to thank our sponsors, Mozilla, Conduit, Google, Reddit, Tumblr, Engine, Future of Music Coalition, Fight for theFuture, Change the Ratio, GirlDevelopIt, Cheezburger Network and New York Tech Meetup, and every single one of you for standing up for an open internet. You guys are the future of democracy, and this is just the beginning.