The name Zoë Roth might not ring any bells. But chances are you’ve
seen her photo.
One Saturday morning in 2005, when Roth was 4 years old, her
family went to look at a house on fire in their neighborhood in Mebane, North
Carolina. Firefighters had intentionally set the blaze as a controlled fire, so
it was a relaxed affair: Neighbors gathered and firefighters allowed children
to take turns holding the hose.
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Roth remembers watching the flames engulf the house when her
father, an amateur photographer, asked her to smile. With her hair askew and a
knowing look in her eyes, Roth flashed a devilish smirk as the fire roared
behind her. “Disaster Girl” was born.
In the years since Dave Roth, Zoë’s father, entered it in a
photo contest in 2007 and won, the image has been edited into various disasters
from history, with Roth grinning impishly as a meteor wipes out the dinosaurs
or
the Titanic sinks in the distance. Now, after more than a decade of having
her image endlessly repurposed as a vital part of meme canon, Roth has sold the
original copy of her meme as a nonfungible token (
NFT), for nearly $500,000.
The meme sold for 180 Ether, a form of cryptocurrency, at an
auction on April 17 to a user identified as @3FMusic. As with any currency, the
value of Ether fluctuates, but as of Thursday, 180 Ether was valued at more
than $495,000. The Roths retained the copyright and will receive 10 percent of
future sales.
The market for ownership rights to digital art, ephemera and
media known as NFTs, is exploding. All NFTs, including the “Disaster Girl” meme
Roth just sold, are stamped with a unique bit of digital code that marks their
authenticity, and stored on the blockchain, a distributed ledger system that
underlies Bitcoin and other
cryptocurrencies.
In the meme hall of fame, “Disaster Girl” ranks alongside “Ermahgerd,”
a pigtailed teenage girl posing with “Goosebumps” books; “Bad Luck Brian,”
immortalized in a grimacing yearbook photo with braces; and “Success Kid,” a
toddler on a beach with a clenched fist and an expression of intense
determination.
In an interview, Roth said selling the meme was a way for her to
take control over a situation that she has felt powerless over since she was in
elementary school.
Before making the decision to sell, Roth consulted “Bad Luck
Brian” himself — his real name is Kyle Craven — and Laney Griner, the mother of
“Success Kid.”
“It’s the only thing that memes can do to take control,” Roth
recalled Craven telling her.
“Disaster Girl” memes have spread far and wide. Once, a group
from Poland asked permission to use the meme for educational material about a
dying Indigenous language. Someone in Portugal sent Roth pictures of a mural
with the meme.
“You just make it fit however you want to fit it,” she said. “I
love seeing them because I’d never make any of them myself, but I love seeing
how creative people are.”
Over the years, she’s seen hundreds of iterations of her
picture. One shared last summer during racial justice protests was among her
favorites, she said.
“Once it’s out there, it’s out there, and there’s nothing you can
do about it,” Dave Roth said. “It always finds a way to stay relevant with
whatever new kind of awful, terrible bad thing is happening, so I’ve laughed at
a lot of them.”
Roth, now 21, is a senior at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill studying peace, war and defense. She has never been recognized as “Disaster
Girl” outright, she said, but most of her friends and acquaintances know of her
meme fame.
“People who are in memes and go viral is one thing, but just the
way the internet has held on to my picture and kept it viral, kept it relevant,
is so crazy to me,” she said. “I’m super grateful for the entire experience.”
Even so, she said, she hopes to one day do something meaningful
enough to shift “Disaster Girl” to the second page of search results for her
name.
After graduation, Roth plans to take a gap year before pursuing
a graduate degree in international relations. She said she would donate the
fortune she has made from her likeness — which is still in cryptocurrency form
— to charities and to pay off her student loans, among other things.
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