Ben Huh

Ben Huh is an entrepreneur and internet-freedoms advocate. He is a pioneer of participatory culture, an individual who saw the early potential of the internet to generate innovation in media and culture. On purchasing the website I Can Has Cheezburger? he “felt like that there was a pretty good possibility that we were buying into a cultural phenomenon, a shift in the way people perceived entertainment” (Ben Huh).Currently, his site acts as a culture hub, showcasing user-generated content, “with users allowed to upload images and add text captions throughout its network of sites. The best are culled by Cheezburger employees and users and posted to the front pages daily” (Ben Huh).

This content encompasses categories such as politics, science, films, literature, and, of course, the “sillier” side of culture as well. All of this is catalogued within a group of sites, creating an archive of culture presented as entertainment.

Without the ability to effortlessly create, share, and re-appropriate cultural symbols, however, Huh’s site would amount to little. Perhaps this is why he is such an ardent defender of internet freedoms and anti-copyright policy. In regards to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), he states that he feels, “like a man who almost got shiv’d in the back in broad daylight. I don’t feel at ease with the current state of the world…There are too many ways for the anti-Internet Freedom lobby to win.” (Huh, 2012). And there are. Governmental agencies rely on blatant and covert mechanisms to pass laws. As stated by David Sirota, a political commentator and radio host, in regards to passing legislation “the ones [fights] that aren’t even fights typically are ones where all the money is on one side, all the corporations are on one side, and just millions of people on the other side” (Felix, 2014). However, SOPA, an initially heavily favored bill in congress, was defeated by individuals such as Huh and companies such as Google. These individuals used their affluence to prompt a political movement for the masses to express their opinions in regards to policy. In essence, individuals such as Huh are necessary to get the public to rise up and force their legislators to act in accordance with the public, rather than moneyed interests. Without people like Huh, there is a good chance that individuals would not rise up against these moneyed interests due to apathy. In the participatory culture Huh has created with his site, individuals interact and express many different perspectives. Some of these are related to humor, some related to more serious aspects of culture, but many components to his site incorporate these elements together, creating an engaging cultural atmosphere that represents an antithesis to the apathy induced by moneyed interests in a consumerism society.