They were simple devices: circuit boards, batteries, and light-emitting diodes. The images they displayed were flat, crude characters from an obscure adult cartoon, *Aqua Teen Hunger Force*. As part of a guerrilla marketing campaign, these placards were placed in ten cities. In most, they were ignored or removed as litter. In Boston, on January 31, 2007, they were seen as something else.
A transit worker spotted one under a bridge near the I-93 highway. It had wires. It had a circuit board. It was, in the parlance of a post-9/11 world, a “suspicious device.” The police bomb squad was called. Sections of the highway and a stretch of the Charles River were shut down. The city’s counter-terrorism protocols hummed to life. News helicopters circled. The device was neutralized with a water cannon.
Only then did the analysis begin. The “bomb” was a Lite-Brite for the internet age. It depicted the cartoon character Ignignokt, a mooninites from the show, giving the finger. The panic revealed a vast gap in contextual understanding. The authorities saw wires and intent. The public, or a segment of it, saw a meme. The two frameworks could not communicate. The marketing executives were charged with perpetrating a hoax, though the charges were later dropped. The event was a farce, but a telling one. It measured the temperature of a nation’s nerves. It showed how a culture’s detritus—a cartoon, a marketing stunt—could be misinterpreted as its deepest fear. The city had not been attacked by terrorists, but by its own heightened vigilance, triggered by a drawing of an angry cartoon milkshake.