Dig the Fucking Hole

About

Dig the Fucking Hole is an exploitable meme format in which an armed soldier forces a deluded person into doing hard work, such as digging holes or mining. Spawned by a meme about communism, the format achieved virality online in late 2022 with people altering the two characters and the text in the speech bubbles.

Origin

Prior to September 27th, 2021, user JJones posted a comic that imagined a supporter of a communist revolution being forced by an armed soldier into digging holes despite his plans on being a video game streamer. On September 30th, Memedroid^[1] user Dranklestein made the earliest found reupload of the image, with the post gaining over 440 votes on the site in one year (shown below).

Spread

On October 2nd, 2021, Twitter^[3] user @vrilbro posted the earliest found edit of the image, with the post garnering over 20 retweets and 130 likes in one year (shown below).

In October 2021, the original version of the meme was widely circulated online, most notably on Reddit.^[4][5] Starting on October 3rd, users in the /r/PoliticalCompassMemes subreddit posted Political Compass versions of the meme. For example, on October 3rd, Redditor^[6] Regionalyonker35 posted a version that gained over 1,200 upvotes in one year (shown below, left; another version shown below, right).

On January 26th, 2022, a reversed version of the meme in which a person is getting forced into writing books was posted on Tumblr,^[7] where it received over 1,500 reblogs and 3,500 likes in one year (shown below).

Through 2022, the format saw extensive use online, with several versions going viral across all major social media websites. For example, on September 27th, 2022, Twitter^[2] user @jonnysocialism tweeted a variant, garnering over 70 retweets and 680 likes in three months (shown below).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References