On May 24, 2024, an 18 year old rescue dog named Kabosu died of leukemia at home in Japan, stroked by the owner who had loved her for more than a decade. By then her face had been cast in bronze, wrapped around a NASCAR race car, and attached to a cryptocurrency worth billions. It began in 2010, when kindergarten teacher Atsuko Sato started a simple blog about her pets and posted a photo of her Shiba Inu on a couch, paws crossed, giving the camera an unreadable sideways glance. By 2013 it was the fourth most popular pet blog in Japan, and Sato had no idea what the wider internet was doing with the picture.

This episode traces how strangers built a fictional persona on top of a real animal. The misspelled word doge came from a 2005 Homestar Runner puppet cartoon, and the meme acquired strict rules: Comic Sans text in garish colors and a broken internal monologue of so, such, many, and wow. From there the image escaped the forums and ran into finance, advertising, politics, and war, while Sato went on living what she called an intentionally analog life.

• Dogecoin launched in December 2013 as the first cryptocurrency based on an internet meme. In April 2014 its community crowdfunded a sponsorship that put Kabosu’s face on Josh Wise’s NASCAR car.
• When members of the US Congress began imitating the meme in late 2013, the Huffington Post declared it killed by politicians. Stockholm’s transit company still used it to sell summer tickets in 2014.
• After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the North Atlantic Fella Organization used Doge avatars to mock Russian propaganda and raise money for the Ukrainian military.
• In April 2023 Elon Musk briefly replaced Twitter’s bird logo with Doge while his lawyers sought dismissal of a $258 billion racketeering suit over Dogecoin.
• A bronze monument to Kabosu was installed in Sakura, Chiba, in 2023, followed by a manhole cover in 2024. That November, a proposed Department of Government Efficiency took the acronym DOGE.