🔴 It’s not your video anymore

You are trespassing on private property. You film a video of a man telling you as much. You upload it. Is it still your video?

— Francis Zierer, Lead Editor

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Two weeks ago, idly scrolling Instagram Reels, I lingered on a PoV video of an old man in a white pickup truck, shot from a chest rig. The person wearing the camera is, apparently, fishing somewhere he shouldn’t be, and the old man pulls up with a bone to pick.

“You got permission? Written permission, from Trey Taylor?”

“I thought this was state property.”

“State? State?! This is private property.”

The original video, uploaded to TikTok in August 2025, has over 20 million views. It’s a short and compelling drama — and I’ll get to that in a moment — but that’s not why I wanted to tell you about it.

The video that I’m calling “State Property” is an extremely generative meme.

“The remix is the KPI,” as my friend, creative strategist Nick Susi, constantly reminds his social media followers (he produced an essay on the idea alongside Domingo Beta last year). In this context: the success of a media product can be measured by the number, quality, and reach of riffs it spawns. By its effectiveness as a memetic seed phrase.

I have no way of counting the number of riffs and rips State Property has spawned, though I’ve saved over 100 on Instagram and scrolled past dozens more.

Why did a 14-month-old video and its spawn appear so suddenly and prolifically just now?

Tools like Higgsfield have enabled rapid, near-seamless video editing — especially video iteration, like replacing any character in a video with any other. Last week, in his Garbage Day newsletter, journalist Ryan Broderick wrote about how OnlyFans models have been inserting themselves in stand-up comedy videos using these tools.

This is a character-driven meme.

There is nothing new about memes, characters, or character-driven memes. They’re as old as campfires. What is new here is the memetic reproduction using AI tools.

Why is this video so generative as a meme? First, two things hook us:

The visuals provide the initial hook, but the audio carries the meme.

You have to hear it to believe it. You could practically build Rome in the time it takes him to carry the “i” in “private”. Then the hard consonants of “property” — like ten-foot-wide bubbles popping.

His is an accent you cannot fake.

Hundreds — at least — have tried! In English, in German, in Spanish. They all pale. You will find yourself trying, too, once you hear it. Here’s one of the more impressive examples, where the speaker understands how to capture some of that magic on “private property” even in another language:

There are two main approaches to adapting the video, each with various branches, just a few of which I’ve included below:

(There are, of course, well-edited riffs that you might first take as AI (if you’ve now trained yourself to doubt the provenance of anything you see on social media), but were created manually, like this Minecraft version.)

There is a clear and succinct history of this video on Know Your Meme if you’re after a little more detail. But to the question of property, private or state, let’s get a few things straight:

Was the remix an effective KPI for Bird28thegr8 or Norman Taylor? No.

As soon as Bird28thegr8 uploaded the video to TikTok, its status as “his” property began degrading. You can see this in his following:

I’m writing this only 2–3 weeks into the meme’s resurgence, but there does not seem to have been any significant effect on his following this month.

As for Norman Taylor, he does not seem to be active on social media, certainly not in an audience-seeking sense. Looking for any social accounts that might belong to him, I instead found a People article from this time last year reporting that he was “charged with misdemeanor sexual battery in Nottoway County, according to online court records.” He is now canonized as a meme, whether he wanted to be or not.

There is no permission in a meme. The moment an image, a video, anything is uploaded to the internet, everybody on the internet is given permission to replicate it; uploading turns it into raw material.

Legally, of course, that permission is not necessarily granted. But the pace and scale of the internet public render both letter and spirit of the law as effective as a toothpick deadbolt.

At the start of the year, I looked at TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram’s terms of service documents, curious how they addressed ownership. The most surprising clause I found, relevant to State Property, was in TikTok’s terms:

It’s not quite private property; it’s not quite state property. It’s not really property anymore, in the same sense that the individual words I’m using to write this sentence are not, by themselves, property.

For whom is the remix an effective KPI? It depends on what the party’s other goals are. Product sales? Sheer reach? For a musician, the remix is certainly the KPI; they would like to see as many short-form videos as possible using their song as audio. Many musicians pay for the privilege.

For the video itself, the remix was an effective KPI. The author, per Barthes, is dead; the video has a self distinct from its creator.

Duolingo France got in on the meme this week. It’s a smart play by their social team — and benefits nobody involved in the making of the original video.

In the age of generative-AI reproduction, individual creators and major companies alike constantly profit from creative work produced by others, work to which the companies especially may technically have a claim, codified in a platform’s’terms of service.

Whether or not the remix is your KPI, the remix is simply inevitable. Plan for it so you can gain from it.

Understand that you must bake the message you wish to disseminate into the video itself — the words, the manner of speech. This is what matters when the visual itself becomes interchangeable.