The "In" Crowd

The other day, we had a small kickback for my fraternity. Present parties were myself, the co-president and treasurer, and a friend who is running for historian next term. We were on call over Discord working on our own projects and having a lively conversation when we landed on the longevity and evolution of Loss.Jpeg as a meme. Naturally, what follows is the discussion of these coded symbolic identifiers as someone who is an “insider”, which has striking similarities to, well, a lot of things: Greco-Roman mythos, early Christianity, Freemasonry, modern college fraternities, and 4chan.

Memes

Let’s start from the beginning. What is a meme? A meme is an idea, or a cultural more, transmitted and mutated over time in a way similar to the gene in a mechanism mirroring evolutionary biology. Memes evolve or die out over time depending on how useful they are to us, as it was theorized, over similar patterns of survivability. This term was coined by a guy we love to hate, Richard Dawkins, in his 1976 work The Selfish Gene. Right around when I was finding my voice online was when the term really gained traction: the nascent forum of 4chan and other image boards, before they reached the mainstream, provided fertile ground for the acceleration of the movement of ideas in the form of image macros, or what we now know as a hyper-specific application of the term “meme”.

Memes as we know them today are more than just images or phrases that we laugh at. They often rely on layers of established knowledge and as these layers evolve, so do the memes. As the layers of reference mutate and change over time, they become something of a shibboleth and an indicator that yes, we are in on the same thing, we are in the same group. It often evolves to the point where the original joke is completely unrecognizable and the point of humour is that all who laugh at the reference are laughing at the fact that they all know the reference moreso than the original joke itself. I’m not going to mansplain the meme much more because I’d like to use loss.jpeg as a spectacular case study in the mass appeal of the ever-present shibboleth.

Loss.Jpeg

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When I was a wee lad, I was a big fan of those gaming-themed webcomics with two guys who would talk about video games. I even wrote my own, crudely drawn with a mouse on Paint Shop Pro and posted to an early SmackJeeves over about three weeks before I gave up. These gaming buddy duo comics were a dime a dozen; Penny Arcade, VGCats, and of course, the poorly drawn and melodramatic Ctrl+Alt+Del. One prime example of its melodrama is the tone-deaf miscarriage arc and its climax in the strip titled Loss, pictured above. As people who have been awake and online for the past 16 years would know, this became a meme and has since been referentially mutated to the point where a simple sigil can be used to identify it, such as the image below.

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Hopefully this should catch anyone unaware up to speed. I will not dwell on this further, but I will talk instead about the phenomenon of symbolism and recognition.

To do this, I am going to take you on a long and weird journey following historical examples of the shibboleth.

The Christian Mystery Cult

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In the early 100s CE of the Roman Empire, religion was markedly different than it is today. There were the public festivals, the offering of incense to Caesar (more akin to the everyday patriotism of standing for the national anthem) and other forms of civic religion, there were the ethnoreligions such as Judaism in diaspora, and a significant though often poorly understood part of religious life of the Greco-Roman world were the mysteries, or mystery religion. These were religious groups complementing the more public civic religion where the contents of the religion itself (its symbols, group leaders, mythos, et cetera) were hidden in secrecy and revealed upon the initiation of trusted newcomers, with further rungs of knowledge often obscured by further degrees of ritual.

One prime example of this is the Mithraic cult. We also have others: the Eleusinian mysteries, the Samothracian mysteries, the Orphic mysteries, et cetera. Most of the rituals of these cults are lost to time. My personal favourite is the Dionysian mysteries, but in fact, early post-Judaic Christianity was often practiced in similar ways and could have even begun as a Jewish-themed mystery cult. Given the quality of documentation, I will use surviving Christian symbolism as an example.

Since these religions were practiced in secret, and you had to be initiated to know more, you needed a test to safely determine if someone was “in” the group, which is to say, a shibboleth - a Hebrew term meaning something that is meaningful only to people within the group. What we now know as the Latin-derived term sacrament was originally termed a mystery - or in Greek, μῠστήρῐον (mysterion), a term used by mystery religion all around, which for the Christians at the time included baptism (an initiation into Christian faith using Jewish ritual) and the eucharistic meal. So in a day when your religion is ridiculed and on and off persecuted, and in protection of the secrecy you swear to your fellow practitioners, how do you safely know if someone is a fellow traveler on the path of the Christian mysteries? Well, one way is to test them on their knowledge.

An example of a shibboleth is the Icthys. Icthys refers to the Jesus fish symbol we know today, but it was originally also an acronym that, in its original Greek, spelled out “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior”): "Ἰησοῦς Χρῑστός Θεοῦ Υἱός Σωτήρ", or ΙΧΘΥΣ (icthys; fish) - fittingly so, because the fish is a popular Christian symbol that shows up multiple times in new testament writing. This symbol had a sigil, which is the image shown above: a circle with two crosses upon each other, within laying the combination of the letters of the acronym.

How this would be used is like so:

You meet a traveler on the road to Ephesus. You want to know if he is a fellow Christian, but it’s unsafe to ask aloud; you are in company with many other travelers, among whom are undoubtedly pagans and practicers of the empire’s civic religion. So you take your walking stick and draw a circle; he draws the +, and you draw the X, completing the symbol. Ok, so he is a fellow traveler. If he were to not complete it, well, you would have kept your identity safe, and by doing so discreetly, you also keep him safe.

In this case, the shibboleth maintains the safety of each other and the secrecy of the meaning of the symbol. It identifies you both as fellow travelers in the same faith, as brothers under your religious belief, and insiders on a shared truth - in this case, the truth of the religion you both practice.

The Fraternal Society

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Freemasonry is the oldest living fraternity in the world, or so it claims. It traces its origins to the guild of operative masons, or the masons who were doing actual stone masonry, and the secrecy and brotherhood surrounding their physical skills and workmanship. The idea is that the guild that eventually begat Freemasonry apprenticed you through the degrees in the physical skill and artistry required to hone stones and turn them into cathedrals and shit. Anyone coming onto the job can be tested on their knowledge by shibboleths of their own that indicated not only that they were in fact skilled masons, but the level of their skill. They eventually started allowing people in who weren’t operative, working stonemasons - which is what we call an accepted mason, because they’re accepted into the group despite not being operative. It only grew from there.

At least, this is the official origin of Freemasonry. What is left out of their descriptive discussion is the purpose of the guilds in general then, which was a prototypical form of what would later become a union. Being in the guild allowed you access to work in negotiation with fellow workers, and the guild would often support charities locally and bolster local governments. What was once operative guilds would later be retooled, except instead of governing negotiation with each other, it would be to negotiate with bosses and management.

In any case, though the necessity of recognizing a mason for his literal stonemasonry skill was deemed somewhat vestigious upon the explosion of accepted masons, the appeal of being “in” only grew. A symbolism and mythology of moral growth arose out of the tools used in the operative trade to describe moral lessons for an ideal man, organized into 3 degrees mirroring the stages of apprenticeship: entered apprentice, fellow craft, and master mason. (It’s worth noting that the mystery cult, as with native paganism in Europe, never truly died; rather, its form and framework just changed over time, although in this case it is a bit of a backwards etymology that arose alongside new scholarship in fields such as classics and Egyptology.) As with the operative masons, there were secret handshakes you would use to determine if someone is a brother, and passcodes and whatnot. The difference is he might not be able to build a cathedral and his skill is more in some level of moral reasoning rather than stoneworking.

They’re honestly not all that secret and you can even find videos of their ritual online if you like, though it is considered distasteful. The chief benefit is simply the brotherhood and its moral lessons, and the only secrets are their symbols’ exact meanings and the ways in which they learn to recognize each other - their shibboleths. What they are about is written on the sleeve: “a system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols.”… just biblical allegories and symbols referencing stoneworking. Knowing that someone is a mason is a bit more than knowing that someone is a brother and can be trusted with a secret, but that part is certainly a big portion of the allure.

The compass and square in the above symbol is the symbol of Freemasonry today (being stoneworking tools used to illustrate a moral point), but below it is a chain of 3 links, which is the symbol of the Odd Fellows. This is a far more contemporary secret society, with its origins likely in the 1700s from the later fraternal benefit societies.

Fraternal benefit societies are what we had before we had insurance. You joined one, you were initiated in a ritual, and you paid regular dues, and those dues would in turn pay your family in lieu of your working income if something happened to you. They focused a lot of their work socially towards charitable causes - in the Odd Fellows motto, “visit the sick, relieve the disressed, bury the dead, educate the orphan”. As welfare both via social gospel and government protection expanded, and as more secular insurances grew in breadth, these societies turned instead towards brotherhood. Odd Fellows, too, have three degrees, not including initiation, and named after their values: friendship, love, and truth. Again, there are handshakes, symbols, codephrases, and other shibboleths to recognize an Odd Fellow on the street.

These secret societies were wildly popular in the days of industrialization from the late 1700s through the early 20th century, to the point where even the Flintstones had its equivalent, under the assumption that it was a relatable experience because your dad was probably in one of them. Most people men, for a decent stretch of American history, were in one secret society or another, and it was considered the mark of someone worth trusting, of someone invested in community. While there were significant periods of anti-secret society sentiment, the mass appeal never really died until the mid-20th century.

The College Fraternity

Turning more towards inspiration from scholarship of the mystery cults, of course our universities want their own form of in-group brotherhood. Beginning with early American university literary societies, fraternities grew out of political schisms in groups dedicated to the study of Classics. These literary societies, starting around the mid-1700s, would create offshoots that would become today’s longstanding collegiate fraternity. The first group we formally recognize as a “fraternity” in the way we understand it today was Phi Beta Kappa (now an honor society), founded in 1775 at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, although two other secret societies predate its creation at William & Mary. Its Greek letters referred to a Greek language motto only known to its members and its initiation mirrored somewhat anecdotally what was then known of the mystery cults.

Inspired by Freemasonry, literary society predecessors, and dining clubs, and representing an intersection of all three, the fraternity model started by Phi Beta Kappa was wildly popular. In the coming century leading up to the civil war, myriad Greek-letter groups would pop up, many of whom survive to this day. Others were merged with existing fraternities to create larger national systems, or they simply died out. This explosion of secret society membership was unwelcome with University administration, so early fraternities would meet at an off campus “lodge”, much as with Freemasonry, in a prototypical version of what would become a fraternity house.

Being that they started from literary societies and being that many of the earliest fraternity brothers were also Freemasons, the rituals and shibboleths reflect the classical scholarship of the time of creation. Some fraternities have degrees of knowledge and lessons, others don’t, but what they all share are Greek letters, an initiation ritual, a code of recognizing brothers in the world, and some degree of inspiration from either classical mythology or the Bible. Fraternities also quickly adopted tests to determine who is or isn’t in the group - hand signs, code words, handshakes, mottos, and more, depending on the specific fraternity.

After a notable pause during the civil war, the growth continued. Chapters of existing fraternities were established nationwide, new fraternities arose all across the North and South, and membership continued to soar. Generally speaking, after a few notable court cases in their favour, fraternities were tolerated well enough by the larger college campuses and things stayed much the same up until the aftermath of World War I and World War II… which is where we got today’s systems of pledgeship and hazing. (After the GI bill, as men got off the train at their new college, existing fraternity brothers would “rush” to pin them with their fraternity badge to quickly bolster their numbers. Pledgeship was invented here as a means of vetting these complete strangers before they were able to be initiated, and in turn, hazing was introduced by veterans of WWII as a way of encouraging brotherhood within a pledge class of complete strangers.)

These days, we view fraternities with an earned amount of disdain. Characterised by conservative future finance tech bros, dangerous parties, and deadly hazing, the fraternity of today, largely disinterested in the seemingly obsolete study of classics, seems on the surface to have little to offer a young student. So why do people keep joining? Not only do people keep joining, but the more recent introductions of pledgeship and hazing shows no sign of stopping. In fact, it is often stated as part of the appeal - an “earned” brotherhood, so to speak.

Simply put, even in the 21st century, the allure of brotherhood, the allure of its initiation, of being “in” with the group with the secrets, of having a group of people to identify with, of going through the same thing as all those before you and all those after, endures.

Tumblr

“I like your shoelaces!”

“Thanks, I got them from the president.”

In Obama-era Tumblr, this was a popularized invented test for determining who was or wasn’t a Tumblr user. Writing that already gave me a headache so I’m not going to delve much further (too soon, bro) but it’s another example of an in-group using a shibboleth as both a joke and a test to determine group membership. If you saw someone who looked alternative, who had an anime messenger bag or something, and you wanted to know if they were online with you in the same space (brotherhood), this became an effective (if residually cringe) way to determine such. In fact, many of the popular Loss.jpeg sigils came from this era of Tumblr, wherein it got to experience something of a resurgence in the post-video game webcomic crowd.

The Binding Power of the Shibboleth

Okay but actually, what the fuck does any of this have to do with Loss.Jpeg?

Let me tell you about my experience growing up on 4chan.

Humans have a need for brotherhood. We are a communal species; maybe not highly so as in the hivemind of say, ants, but in the way that many mammals are communal, we are as well. All evidence of society prior to the industrial revolution points to a people who care for their worse to do: prehistoric honourable burials of people disabled long before they died, records of pre-palatial castles where the soldiers and the king and queen slept in the same hall, communal mixed class bathing facilities that we often still embrace, et cetera. Post industrialization, in the capitalist family-unit-oriented world we live in, we’ve had a hell of a hard time achieving this sense of communality - you know, brotherhood - perhaps leading to the concurrent rise in secret society membership in the 18th century and the enduring popularity of Greek life on our college campuses. This is a need we will always try to fill. Right now, the political right is effectively capitalizing on the need, treating their sports fields and churches and fraternities as de facto leadership and strategizing schools. Us lefties have yet to fill the niche of our own right, though we really should.

Not only do we have a need for brotherhood, but we have a thirst to have a sense of identity about it - to have things known only to us on the inside, accessible only to insiders, for us and us alone. We thrive on this sense of identity. It’s why the right wing has a great time reaching to lost, disaffected, emasculated young men. They prey on a thirst for these in-group experiences. This is part of the appeal of fraternities and a portion of the conservative growth in Eastern Orthodoxy; it is here where the modern man can have mystery and can earn his way into being “in” through layers of secrets.

Well, when you’re a shy middle schooler who can’t drive yet, 4chan is the degenerate, infantile way that you meet that need. At the time, in the mid-2000s, the board that was popping was /b/ - the “random” board. Naturally, being that it was the mid-2000s in peak offensiveness and peak “random” culture, this was the board I frequented. Though there is no scriptural “initiation”, there was often an analogous experience (perhaps, say, a first website raid or DDoS after a decent period of lurking), and there were certainly informal, naturally arisen degrees, past which you would gain access to greater knowledge, albeit in the form of poor taste racist jokes. You could call this the democratization of the human need that created the mystery cult.

Memes, sometimes starting off as demotivational posters in the style of office decor or other simple image macros, quickly accelerate their evolution into a complex memetic language of self-reference. You could construct an entire book completely coded or otherwise illegible to a layperson, but layered with narrative meaning to the “in” group of channers. It was here, fairly soon after its publication, that I first saw the harsh reaction to Loss.jpeg.

It’s been a long time since I felt the need to go on 4chan, and my social life is a lot better for it, but largely because I subbed out my high school friends as my brothers rather than complete strangers posting anime NSFW. As we, too, parted ways, I found other avenues to fill the need for brotherhood, and came upon other shibboleths to identify with the brothers I found. I did eventually embrace Greek life, albeit via an unusual path. I have travelled far since my days as a preteen lurking /b/, but Loss.Jpeg has never died. Like Jesus, we roll back the stone in front of the tomb to find the tomb empty and Loss.Jpeg living and well. It survived on LiveJournal, then Tumblr, on Twitter, and now on Bluesky. It lives on in infamy, and as it morphs and evolves its origins will soon be forgotten, but the purpose remains the same: to identify someone as “in”.

It’s strange living through such tumultuous times yet seeing the same things pop up again and again. The psychological effects of the shibboleth have the ability to linger, even when you no longer identify with the group it belongs to. It has been 16 years since I first stumbled upon Loss.jpeg, and my experience of brotherhood has changed drastically, but the levity, understanding, and the quiet affirmation of being “in” on the joke will forever and always feel the same.