Teh FAIL and teh Mainstream

Teh Pwnd. All your banks are belong to us.

Internet culture, to the uninitiated, is probably very very confusing to outsiders: in a world of LOLcats and other memes expanding faster than c, it may seem like a huge, confusing inside joke -- and probably more so to people older than 40.

FAIL has expanded into the mainstream after someone held up a cardboard sign shouting out "FAIL" behind Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke during one of their various and sundry "we really don't know what the hell we're doing but we're faking it 'till we make it" testimonies on Capitol Hill.

'Nuff said.

Slate attempts to explain how FAIL is the 21st century schadenfreude:

Why has fail become so popular? It may simply be that people are thrilled to finally have a way to express their schadenfreude out loud. Schadenfreude, after all, is what you feel when someone else executes a fail. But the fail meme also changes our experience of schadenfreude. What was once a quiet pleasure-taking is now a public—and competitive—sport.

It's no wonder, then, that the fail meme gained wider currency with the advent of the financial crisis. Some observers relished watching wealthier-than-God investment bankers get their comeuppance. It helped that the two events occurred at the same time—Google searches for fail surged in early 2008, around the same time the mortgage crisis started to pick up steam. And the ubiquity of phrases like "failed mortgages" and "bank failures" seemed to echo the popular meme, which may have helped usher the term out of 4chan boards and onto blogs. It's rare that an Internet fad finds such a suitable mainstream vehicle for its dissemination. It's as if LOLcats coincided with a global outbreak of some feline adorability virus. The financial crisis also fits neatly into the Internet's tendency toward overstatement. (Worst. Subprime mortgage crisis. Ever.) Only this time, it's not an exaggeration.

If he's going with LOL speak, that EVAR to you.

Linguists study these things professionally. I'd love to have that job -- diagramming teh FAIL and yr doin it rite, aktsully all day long.

Also, if you're looking for more ways to view the humilliation of the m****f***ers who have gotten us into this s***tstorm and have no clue on how to get us out of it, visit LOLfed.