INSPIRING QUOTE

Wilde Masks, Honest Words

When people speak using real names and identities, “in their own persons,” they often feel inhibited and constrained by societal expectations. But allow people to wear “masks” whether literal as in theater or figurative as in pseudonyms or anonymity and people feel liberated to express their true thoughts, unfiltered by fear of judgment, social norms, or retribution.

Oscar Wilde believed that artifice and performance could reveal deeper truths than unfiltered self-expression. “Masks” allow individuals to transcend their mundane identities and access a more profound, creative truth.

Unfortunately, Wilde’s quote feels incomplete as it omits half the core truth, that a man with a mask can also persuasively “tell you the lie.” That’s the dark side which empowers people to use masks for nefarious purposes.

✒️ The Unmasked Truth Trapped in a Witty Line

Wilde didn’t need to write anonymously to be a conduit of humanity’s inner truths, but most of us don’t have his wherewithal in communication.

He wasn’t just one of the most successful playwrights and fiction writers of his era, he was a linguistic provocateur. Wilde also mastered the epigram: a short, sharp passage designed to sting, surprise, or seduce.

The best epigrams don’t just state truths, they tease them out through paradox, elegance, and wit. They’re like elegant verbal traps: you laugh, and then you realize you’ve been caught in a truth.

♾️ The Eternal Epigram

Wilde didn’t invent epigrams, of course.
They go back almost 3,000 years, carved into Greek tombstones and traded by Roman satirists.

Epigrams are really just a speck in the universe of ideas, and more specifically, epigrams are from the planet of cultural replicators. In 1976, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins used the word “meme” to coin cultural replicators and defined them as ideas which enter popular culture then evolve and disseminate, similar to how genes mutate and spread.

Like epigrams, modern internet memes distill complex truths into shareable forms, capturing the essence of a moment or idea with wit and brevity.

Memes were once drawn on cave walls with red ochre and etched in marble.
Today, in the age of algorithms, the meme wears a new mask in the form of pixels.

CREATIVITY SPOTLIGHT

The Power of Anonymous

“Say cheese,” Laney Griner said to her 11-month-old son, Sam, on the beach.

Instead of smiling, Sam grimaced. He held a fistful of sand and looked determined as if he’d just saved the universe! Or maybe he just wanted to eat the sand?

Click. Laney snapped an iconic photo.

She posted it on Flickr. No caption. No intention beyond sharing a moment.

Four years later, somebody on the Internet added a caption to the photo: “"I Hate Sandcastles.” Thanks to that somebody, it officially became a meme.

The caption evolved quickly into “Success Kid”, not because Sam loved sandcastles, but because the Internet loved how Sam’s expression and gesture conveyed one of humanity’s optimistic, inner truths:

So, go ahead, pump your fist like you haven’t been there before!

From there the meme officially went viral.

Suddenly, Sam’s little face was everywhere from celebrating job offers, passing tests, landing promotions, and surviving Mondays (Success Kid!). In 2015, the “Success Kid” meme appeared in Coca Cola’s Super Bowl commercial, among other brand sponsorships.

That year, Sam’s father needed a kidney transplant. The family started a fundraiser and the internet remembered the meme. $83,000 was raised in a matter of days. A child’s photo became a father’s lifeline.

But who can the family thank for the caption that started it all? Who gave the first voice to ‘Success Kid’? Why isn’t this meme’s creator famous? Instead, they’re another anonymous creative spark… now lost in the digital ether.

⚡ Why Anonymous Creativity Is So Powerfully Honest

An internet account is a modern-day mask, a digital one. And when an internet meme has no name behind it, it doesn’t feel like someone is speaking at you. It feels like the culture and the truth are speaking to you.

🔹 Anonymity frees creators to share bold truths.
Anonymity creates a safe distance between the idea and the self.
And digital anonymity allows people to express ideas they’d otherwise hesitate to share, unburdened by fear of judgment or backlash.
For example, the Distracted Boyfriend meme conveys that we are distracted by what rewards us quicker (girl on left side) from what has real substance (girl on right side).

So keep reading, don’t be distracted by that text you just received!

🔹 Anonymity prioritizes resonance over recognition.
Without the need to take credit, creators focus on impact: Does this idea hit?
It shifts creativity from “What does this say about me?” to “What does this do for you?”
The result is an idea that stands naked and fearless.

🔹 Anonymity dissolves ego for pure expression.
When the ego steps aside, pure expression steps in.
This expression isn’t self-conscious… but selfless.
And something more powerful: the idea becomes the star.
With anonymous creativity, we create to connect and to pass on an idea and a feeling to others. Maybe to do that most effectively we need to let go.

In a world obsessed with visibility and personal brands, the meme is a paradox: the loudest ideas often come from invisible creators.

🔥 Behind the Meme: Truth, Power, or Both?

Is this anonymity a selfless act or simply an ambiguous condition in our collective human nature?

Again, we can’t forget the latter explanation incentivizes selfish acts. Those who want power aggregate and weaponize attention, and consequently, use memes. Political memes have surged on social media, reflecting their growing influence in shaping public discourse.

But that’s a story for another edition.

Next time you laugh at a meme, ask yourself: Who really made this? And why does it speak to you so clearly? Sometimes the truest voices don’t wear names.

Wilde’s Epigrams as Internet Memes

Oscar Wilde didn’t just write epigrams, he wrote proto-memes.

Here are two examples that I created to show just how effortlessly his wit fits today’s most viral formats.

BLINKS, THINKS & LINKS

Curiosity Candy

• 🖼️ Create your own meme with a template.

• 📊 Watch a time series animation of the most popular memes per year from 2001 to 2023

• 🎸 A Johnny Cash video uses an explosion of creativity from anonymity and constraints to audience participation.

ACTIONABLE PROMPTS

Wearing Masks Practicality

This week’s opening quote inverts the assumption that authenticity requires radical transparency by suggesting that a mask reveals deeper truths.

In everyday life, adopting a “creative mask” can help bypass self-doubt, fear of judgment, or the pressure to sound impressive. Here are five practical ways to experiment with anonymity:

• 🔥 Anonymously post your boldest, rawest ideas online to test their resonance.

• 👻 Anonymously share your work online to receive unbiased feedback on merit alone.

• 🗳️ Share anonymous suggestions in feedback boxes, forums, or workplace systems.

• 🧨 Share anonymous stories of failure to help others learn without risking your reputation.

• 👥 Challenge yourself to include more anonymous-like communication in conversations with your more frequent groups like friends, family, and colleagues. The results will be powerful.

The question isn’t “Will this help solve more problems?”, but rather “Can you handle the truth?”

Thanks for reading,

V.C. Hanna
Founder, Kreatio