4

Shoenice

Vice

Go to Reddit and search for Shoenice22 and then put your baffle shoes on, because you're going to be baffled. It's like being flabbergasted, but fewer people get hurt and the sexual undertones are more subtle. Shoenice is a man who makes YouTube videos. Dozens and dozens of YouTube videos, and each one is essentially the same. Mr. Nice, an affable enough fellow whose giant head fills your screen, speaks with a slow, semi-slurred voice and ingests things. All kinds of things. From full bottles of vodka to furniture cleaner to a dozen eggs with their shells and everything in between, he seems to eat it if you ask him to. Sometimes he almost seems to puke, all the time he seems completely shitfaced to the point of transporting himself directly into the mental state of Lennie from Of Mice and Men, and never does he stop to question why you'd want to watch him, because if people can watch E!, they can watch a dude eat a poster of Justin Bieber.

3

Anonymous

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Offline, your mom may have heard of Anonymous and thinks they protested something in New York last summer. Online, Anonymous is everything an online journalist is too lazy to research or too ignorant to care about. They're hacker hippie vegan pedophile anarchist European teenager punk liberals, and there's only six of them. They spend all day on 4chan sharing tentacle porn. Sickies.

Except when they don't. Because there's no telling who is calling themselves Anonymous, which is sort of the point -- you can't say who they are or what they're doing a lot of the time. Are they protesting Scientology? Seems like they have in the past. Are they sharing anime porn on 4chan? Well, someone is, anonymously. But they do spring forth on occasion with a few shining moments that the rest of the Internet gets behind -- particularly when it comes to abused animals, child pornography and bullying.

2

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

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If each field of knowledge were to be represented by one single person, Neil DeGrasse Tyson would represent science. Kim Kardashian would represent vacuous suckholery, which you can major in at DeVry.

Any time a media outlet needs to talk to a scientist, they go to Tyson. He's pop culture's answer to every question it doesn't currently have an answer to because the question is really tough and sciencey. It used to be Bill Nye the Science Guy, but he's starting to look more and more like the Hyper-Chicken from Futurama in his old age.

Tyson, an educated, knowledgeable and insightful man, seems like a great idea for a hero. He should be the kind of person young folks look up to, dadgummit. But recall that the Internet is the place where, in 1999, half its population believed the Blair Witch was a real thing because an ad campaign for a movie told them so. The Internet is the place where Nigeria 409 scams were brought back to life thanks to people who honestly thought rich African princes had just stumbled onto their AOL email addresses and needed their help. The Internet is where goatse was not only born, but found a home.

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1

Bacon

Getty

Bacon is cured pork meat. You use brine or dry pack it in salt to preserve it, then maybe you smoke it. That's literally as complicated as bacon gets. However, bacon is pretty much the number one food on the Internet today, and it's only as a joke now.

KnowYourMeme.com tells me there was a bacon site back in 2004, and shit has only spiraled out of control since then. Books, memes, songs, cartoons, Epic Meal Time, bacon lip balm, bacon jelly beans and bacon lube all exist for the love of bacon. No one likes bacon enough to literally, sincerely want to use it as a sexual lubricant, and if, perchance, some mental deficiency gave rise to that desire, they'd never find another suitably despicable person to bacon hump.

If we take it for granted that, yes, bacon can be delicious and there's nothing wrong with eating a Baconator once or twice a year, but no, no one gives as much of a shit about bacon as its presence on the Internet indicates, then why is it so damn popular?

Bacon is subversive.

Bacon is counterculture awesomeness. We all know we need to avoid trans fats. We should wear sunscreen and make sure we're getting enough folate. We need prostate exams and pap smears as genetics dictates. We should drink water and maybe replace that side of fries with a nice garden salad sometimes. We should exercise and stop jerking off in the back seats of cabs. Bacon is the freedom that society very politely asks us to deny ourselves.

No one is making anyone be healthy, and the news is happy to tell us all, every day, that we're not healthy. There's an obesity epidemic. I'm sweating just typing this. There's no call to action, no government mandating that you change your life at all, but it's implicit, all the time, that you're scum for being unhealthy. You're what's wrong with America, you fat, lazy American. And you lift your middle finger, which is wrapped in crispy, greasy pork fat, and you don't give a shit.

It's human nature to push back when pushed, and bacon is the push back that Internet culture, a culture of people who have to sit in one spot and not do anything, produced. It represents freedom from the tyranny of low-fat vegan hot dogs and fun runs. It represents what's good. Even if you'd probably die and prove all those health nuts right if you ate even a fraction of what the Internet thinks is acceptable.

For more from Fortey, check out The 5 Most Ridiculously Awful Computers Ever Made and 10 Popular Porn Scenarios That Seem Highly Implausible .