On the other side of the phone, on the other side of the country, Leo Barrera, the lone admin of Azure4001 on Instagram, tried to relate to my East Coast lifestyle.
"I was visiting my brother in New York last year,” he said. "I actually witnessed Brat Summer happen in Bushwick."
The words hung in the air.
"I didn’t necessarily enjoy that album, and I don’t hate Charli XCX,” he continued, ”but seeing all the people in the green shirts was so interesting.”
The observation, like one from an invisible man, I would soon learn, is integral to Barrera’s worldview:
Everything is interesting. Everything is worth watching.
It's woven into his Instagram page, which, like many repost-only pages, reflects the web like a funhouse mirror, flirting with labels like archive, scrapbook and diary, but never bringing any of them to a second location.
(It’s better to play the field. It makes it more interesting.)
But Barrera would be the first to tell you that Azure4001 isn’t special.
To him, it looks like many other meme accounts, but what sets it apart from the pack is Barrera (duh) and how he views the act of reposting.
Who I met on the phone challenged my opinions on face reveals, AI slop and the fear of death, as in, a meme page owner’s fear of getting deleted—and although he didn’t wear green during Brat Summer, he really appreciated that people did and that it happened; that anything happens, ever.
First off, what does the phrase “Minecraft Steve feels” mean to you?
[Laughs] That was the original conception of the page. It was a page called @minecraftsteve.feels that I made in the summer between eighth and ninth grade.
There was this trend in Instagram irony pages at the time, I think it still exists, of people choosing a character and making an ironic “feels” account.
Yeah, can you explain the “feels” movement?
Well, I don't know if anybody remembers the concept of “kinning.” It was very prevalent back then. Usually, very young, super, hyper online people would become attached to a certain fictional character.
I couldn't tell when it was, but there was a point when it tipped, when most people who were “kinning” were actually doing it ironically.
People started making pages that were named “[insert character].feels,” which would be a person roleplaying online as the character. So my first page that I ever made was @minecraftsteve.feels.
I was inspired directly by this other page called @shel.feels. It was supposed to be a Shel Silverstein feels page [laughs].
I didn’t really post Minecraft-related memes, but that page got to like 7K or 8K, which at the time like felt like a lot. But then I clicked on the wrong link and somebody got the password. When I made the page, I think I typed in my email wrong. So the email that didn't actually exist, somebody made that email and then stole my page.
I was in ninth grade.
It was really bad.
What was the next day at school like?
Honestly… Only a couple of my friends actually knew about the page, and they were like, “That's crazy.”
And then nobody cared.
So, I was looking at your page’s first posts… Why did you wanna see the hacker's Fortnite page?
I have no idea [laughs].
Wait! Oh, yeah, he was trying to get a ransom. I was like, “Bro, I'm literally fucking 12 years old.” He was trying to get the Season 10 Battle Pass gifted to him.
But I was asking for his Fortnite account to kind of “troll” him, but I was honestly coping so hard 'cause I was really sad. I was like, “Wow, this is so over.”
I was actually like, “Wow, I'm gonna have to grow up now.”
He ended up changing the account’s username to @minecraftsteve.jokes, which is still around. He blocked me, though. But he never ended up selling it, so…
What's the meaning behind the name “Azure4001?”
There is no meaning. I just thought it sounded cool. I was inspired by that page @a7xgh. I don't think he really posts anymore, but I always liked his name.
Azure4001 really means nothing. I just think “azure” is a cool word. Usernames go really well with word→number, and my username’s short. It sticks.
Why did you make a meme page to begin with?
I was actually thinking about this the other day. In third grade or fourth grade, we got to experience that first wave of Chromebooks.
I remember we made a Google Drive slideshow, like a shared slideshow. It had like 200 slides where we made an interactive game throughout it. There were like 50 kids participating on it and we would make our own games in it, and then also just post random memes in between them.
Back then, I was like, “Okay, this is a form of communication that I understand,” like, “I like jokes and stuff.” It's just a fun thing to do.
Making the page came from that. I don't think I ever intended it to ever be this big.
What's your earliest memory of being online?
I have a distinct memory of playing Kingdom Rush. That was one of the first games I played 'cause I didn't have any game systems when I was young. My parents didn't get me any video game stuff.
They also didn't let me watch cable TV [laughs] because they “didn't want me to get infected by the advertising” or whatever.
I had my mom's laptop. I’d play Minecraft on there. I watched this one Spider-Man animated show in clips on YouTube. I would watch that on my mom's computer. They let me on YouTube way too early, honestly.
If you have kids, are you gonna let them on the internet early?
I think my first instinct is to say no, but in like 10 years or so, when I'm having children, the landscape will be so different that I probably won't fully understand it.
My parents were planning on not giving me a phone until I got to high school, but it became such an important part of the social culture, of being a teenager, that you kind of needed to have a phone. At a certain point, they just caved.
I assume that will probably happen for me, with whatever it is, microchips and the like. I'll give my best to keep them away from screens at least.
Kids share freaky stuff, like in that Google slideshow I was in, some kids got in trouble for the stuff they posted. But I would never post anything explicit in elementary school [laughs]. I was using it on my iPad, that my sister and I shared, where I used to go on iFunny…
Yeah, when I talk to meme page admins, iFunny seems to be a shared experience. Like, getting featured on iFunny felt like the most massive thing ever.
Yes, which makes it- Well, I don't know how you feel about modern day iFunny, but the fall from grace… It’s just the pure “Hey, fellow kids” now.
Maybe that’s harsh.
There are a lot of pages that I have ties with or whatever, like people like @yungstarbeam, who now do collab posts with iFunny…
Obviously, it's funny to a certain extent, but if it's every post and like five people are collabed, and, “Oh, it’s iFunny.” I don't know. There is some financial benefit, I guess.
I think I try to make a conscious effort not to be a hater in a lot of circumstances because, like, I do have the tendency to be a cynical person, especially about things that I care a lot about, which, at the end of the day, I do care about Instagram.
You care about Instagram, can you elaborate on that?
I don't necessarily think this is a good thing, but I do care about Instagram as it exists as a medium for people to communicate.
I think it's a really flawed medium—and I don't think it's crazy to say that it's inherently evil—but I think that even though it is evil and definitely a net negative for society, I think Instagram’s an interesting point in history where so many people are using this really messed up communication tool.
Okay, this is such a cliché, but like, it connects so many people, but it also drives so many people apart through connection.
At the end of the day, I do care about it, in the sense that I’m curious what it will cause in like 10 years or 50 years. Or when I'm on my deathbed, what are people gonna be saying about Instagram?
In your daily Instagram posting habits, how do you express care for what you're doing?
There's def a difference between posting with care versus posting carelessly.
I think I do try to at least think about the things that I'm posting in a critical way before I post them 'cause I know for a fact that memes are one of the most powerful forms of communication, and it's really dangerous too when people don't realize what symbolism they're using or what sort of messages they're sending without intending it.
Read the rest of this piece on the 65,000 website.
