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'Disaster Girl,' The Stuff Of Memes, Sells For Nearly $500,000 As NFT

Disaster Girl
Dave Roth
Disaster Girl

Zoë Roth was internet famous before many of us knew what that was.

When she was 4, her dad took a picture of her standing in front of a burning house and a firetruck. She's looking back at the camera knowingly, leaving the viewer to suspect she had something to do with this disaster.

But in reality, the fire scene was part of a training exercise for firefighters in Mebane, N.C., near where Zoë and her father, Dave Roth, lived.

After he entered it in a photo contest in 2007, it soon became the stuff of internet legend, launching "disaster girl" memes around the world: Zoë looking back as the Titanic sinks, Zoë looking back as a mushroom cloud rises, Zoë looking back from the burning house saying, "She Should Of Made Me Cookies!!!!"

Now, Zoë is a 21-year-old senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who works at an Italian restaurant. Earlier this month came a big payoff for all this fame: A "nonfungible token," or NFT, of the original copy of the iconic photo sold at auction for nearly $500,000. The buyer is 3F Music, a music studio based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, which has collected several other NFTs.

NFTs are part of the latest internet craze.

As NPR's Bobby Allyn explained: Nonfungible means "you can't exchange it for another thing of equal value. A $10 bill can be exchanged for two $5 bills. One bar of gold can be swapped for another bar of gold of the same size. Those things are fungible. An NFT, though, is one of a kind. The token refers to a unit of currency on the blockchain. It's how cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is bought and sold."

An NFT of a video clip of LeBron James dunking recently sold for more than $200,000. Nyan Cat, a popular meme from 2011 that features an animated flying cat, sold for nearly $600,000. That's relatively small potatoes. Last month, a JPG file made by a digital artist known as Beeple sold for nearly $70 million.

As for Zoë Roth, all that internet fame has continued to puzzle her.

"As long as I've been on social media, it's also been there doing its own thing," she recently told The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. "So I've never been able to separate myself from it."

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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SOMOS CONNECTICUT es una iniciativa de Connecticut Public, la emisora local de NPR y PBS del estado, que busca elevar nuestras historias latinas y expandir programación que alza y informa nuestras comunidades latinas locales. Visita CTPublic.org/latino para más reportajes y recursos. Para noticias, suscríbase a nuestro boletín informativo en ctpublic.org/newsletters.

The independent journalism and non-commercial programming you rely on every day is in danger.

If you’re reading this, you believe in trusted journalism and in learning without paywalls. You value access to educational content kids love and enriching cultural programming.

Now all of that is at risk.

Federal funding for public media is under threat and if it goes, the impact to our communities will be devastating.

Together, we can defend it. It’s time to protect what matters.

Your voice has protected public media before. Now, it’s needed again. Learn how you can protect the news and programming you depend on.

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