Rule 34

Synonyms:
See also:	Brain Bleach, SurveyFail
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Rule 34 refers to the meme that if something exists, then there is porn of it. In fannish terms, this means that any conceivable fictional or real people pairing, inanimate object anthropomorphic, or crossover, no matter how strange, has probably been written (and if not, there's always Rule 35).

Rule 34 does not just apply to the porn being written, but also drawn, or made into a movie, leading to revelations such as Ozarque's:

In 2004, I was forced to admit that, "If you can imagine it, you can find video of people having sex with it on the internet."^[1]

Rule 35 (or 34a) states that if porn of something does not exist, making this fact known will inspire someone to create porn of it. This corollary is sometimes used as a warning, reminding people not to mention "impossible to porn" pairings or topics.

1 Origins of Rule 34
2 SurveyFail and Rule 34
3 External Links
4 References

Origins of Rule 34

It's not clear where or when Rule 34 was invented. The earliest known use is stored in a compilation of 4chan posts:

1993-09-5039 08:39

Rule 34: If it exists, there is porn of it. In the deepest pits of Slashfic Hell, there's an AU where Mestor successfully copped one off with Peri, and their offspring is Chipo Chung. From outer space.^[2]

Other references appear in a 'geek quotes' listing which Google notes as January 31, 2001 ^[3] , and in a 2002 signature of a post on a German board-game forum ^[4].

The meme was widely spread by the XKCD web comic, August 2007: ^[5]

The dominant Wikipedia editorial group considers Rule 34 to be so unimportant that they not only delete all information about it, they added an alternate Rule 34 page about US legal procedure and made it protected so no one else could change it, they also put the Rule 34 (Internet Meme) version on "Speedy Delete" so it is flagged whenever anyone puts content into the page with that name. ^[6] ^[7] ^[8] ^[9]

SurveyFail and Rule 34

In late August, 2009, a pair of post-graduate cognitive scientists sold a book to be called "Rule 34: What Netporn Teaches Us About The Brain". Then they posted an intrusive, badly-designed and biased survey, which was quickly savaged in SurveyFail.