In the early twenty-tens, one cottage industry in digital journalism was the unmasking of Internet memes: a journalist would identify the source of a popular image or joke just as one might dig up the etymology of a word... Sato told me that the dog, who'd been rescued from a puppy mill, was named Kabosu, after the Japanese citrus that the pooch's round face resembled.
Two weeks ago, Sato announced on her blog that Kabosu had died... But Kabosu's death reminds me how much has changed in the decade or so of Doge's fame... Internet memes once functioned as shibboleths, references that signalled one's belonging to a particularly online tribe.
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