One thing we knew going into this investigation is that acoustic interference can occur where you least expect it. Several years ago, Fu became annoyed by an ear-piercing sound coming from a lightbulb in his apartment. He took spectral measurements and noticed that the lightbulb tended to shriek when the air conditioner turned on. He eventually concluded that the compressor was pumping coolant through its pipes at the same resonant frequency of the filament in the bulb. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem. But in this case, the coolant pipes ran through the ceiling and mechanically coupled to the ceiling joist supporting the lightbulb. The superintendent opened up the ceiling and separated the joist from the pipe with a piece of duct tape, to dampen the unwanted coupling. The sound stopped.

Viewed through the lens of the people first posting him, Pepe makes nothing but sense. The original comic panels from which Pepe is excerpted feature him getting caught peeing with his pants pulled all the way down, his ass hanging out. Surprisingly, he is unashamed of this, "feels good man" he tells his roommate.

The grotesque, frowning, sleepy eyed, out of shape, swamp dweller, peeing with his pants pulled down because-it-feels-good-man frog is an ideology, one which steers into the skid of its own patheticness. Pepe symbolizes embracing your loserdom, owning it. That is to say, it is what all the millions of forum-goers of 4chan met to commune about. It is, in other words, a value system, one reveling in deplorableness and being pridefully dispossessed. It is a culture of hopelessness, of knowing "the system is rigged". But instead of fight the response is flight, knowing you're trapped in your circumstances is cause to celebrate. For these young men, voting Trump is not a solution, but a new spiteful prank.

Amid all the talk about Facebook and troll farms we shouldn't forget about the social base described here.