Or, the feeling of paralysis when bombarded with bad news to the point of sensory overload. The dog – with its blank expression – has come to embody the unique impotence felt when seeing multiple disasters play out in real time, on Twitter. As is always the case with memes, it has mutated over time and been shaped – by the collective consciousness of those who communicate with it – to convey a very specific mood. Rising sea levels, catastrophic hurricanes, humanitarian crises up to the eyeballs? “This is” – and I cannot stress this enough – “fine”.Ĭloser to home, as the 2010s draw to a grand finale of biggest Labour defeat since 1935, and the likelihood of yet another decade under the loafers of sociopaths, the “this is fine” dog makes another appearance. The dawn of a post-truth age in which the spread of misinformation is eroding democracy as we know it? “This is fine”. And what began as a webcomic by artist KC Green, published in 2013, has now been posted by thousands on social media as a reaction to every political upset, natural disaster and peer reviewed doomsday prediction of a decade that has been so closely defined by all of these things. This illustration in question will be familiar to anyone who’s been even slightly online over the past several years, as one of the most popular and enduring memes of the decade. In the unlikely event that civilisation is still intact fifty years from now, A-level history students will be presented with a two panel comic of a dog sitting in a room engulfed by flames, uttering the phrase, “This is fine.” They will be asked to explore the ways in which this image is emblematic of life in the 2010s.
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