We as a society sure haven’t earned a deity like Bill – what with our racism, and sexism, and selfies, and posting about the weather on Facebook – but, damn it, do we need him.
Bill is merely a stick figure, but one of utmost divinity. He’s perhaps the most necessary meme since the dawn of the internet, and prime candidate for President of the World if we could be so lucky to elect one.
So, who is Bill, exactly? Created by 23-year-old Moldovan meme expert Eugeniu Croitoru, Bill has emerged as the authority on acceptable social behaviour both online and offline. His Facebook page, ‘Be Like Bill’, features Microsoft Paint-generated instructional cartoons that urge people to conduct themselves in a manner Bill would endorse – like not taking photos with iPads, rage-quitting FIFA, forwarding chains, or accepting email money transfers from a Nigerian prince.
He doesn’t ask for anything more of you than to simply ‘Be Like Bill’.
Bill’s popularity has exploded over the past few months, which, on top of monumental adoration, has also spawned a fair share of haters. Some academics have even chimed in about the bigger picture of it all.
“The claim that the Bill figure is not political is dissemblance,” says Janet Sayers, a professor at New Zealand’s Massey University. “It is a replication, perhaps even a hyper-replication, of social life” – social life that “is itself strict in its rules, brutal in its judgments and biased in the way both are applied,” as the Independent writes.
Debabrata Nath, co-creator of the ‘Be Like Bill’ Facebook page, meanwhile, would prefer it if people didn’t read so much into any of this. And to those who simply can’t handle a fictional stick figure non-authoritatively policing their lives, they should probably be more like Bill:
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