2011·The social era
Scumbag Steve
The Advice Animals template for the friend who ruins everything, and its subject's decade of living with it.
A meme
This Moment began as a photograph, not as a video.
- SourceNot an upload originally
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
A sixteen-year-old in a doorway: backwards Red Sox flat-brim, gold chain, fur-collared puffer, an unfocused stare. Blake Boston posed for the picture at home in Millis, Massachusetts, in 2006; his mother Susan took it. Captioned from 2011 onwards it became the Advice Animals image for petty selfishness — borrows your car, returns it empty.
It first appeared in 2011, during the social era.
It is the clearest case of the Advice Animals era's central problem: a real teenager, identifiable, whose photograph became a stock character for being a bad person. Boston gave interviews about the harassment almost immediately, and by 2012 was releasing a rap single under the name — a response Slate read as a meme becoming self-aware.
Boston has spent more than a decade as the face of a joke he did not make, alternately monetising and objecting to it. The template outlived him: Scumbag Steve's hat became detachable, applied to politicians and companies as a standalone mark of bad faith.
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Related
Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as a photograph, not as a video.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- A sixteen-year-old in a doorway: backwards Red Sox flat-brim, gold chain, fur-collared puffer, an unfocused stare. Blake Boston posed for the picture at home in Millis, Massachusetts, in 2006; his mother Susan took it. Captioned from 2011 onwards it became the Advice Animals image for petty selfishness — borrows your car, returns it empty.