The oldest internet maxim is up for auction: "No one on the internet knows you're a dog"

"On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog" is an aphorism and Internet meme, first published by The New Yorker on July 5, 1993, and is universally recognized for capturing the anonymity essence of the Internet and its liberation from popular information. The original artwork is now for sale.

The work was originally the title of a comic drawn by Peter Steiner, and the reprint rights alone have since earned Steiner over $250,000, a figure that will be significantly increased when the artwork is auctioned on October 6 (2023) by Heritage Auctions, which estimates the comic will sell for between $40,000 and $60,000.

The current auction record for a single piece of comic art is an illustration of "The Adventures of Tintin" by Hergé sold for $3.84 million in 2021.

Bob Mankoff, the New Yorker's cartoon editor at the time, said, "This cartoon alerted us because we were wary of simple appearances that anyone with basic knowledge of HTML might make."

Considering the timing of this comic and the use of the term "Internet" in 1993, many believe it was at this point that the term entered people's lives, even though people were still using AOL and dial-up modems to wait hours for a single image to be transmitted and downloaded. Even so, the internet remains elusive to some. In fact, just a year after the comic was published, Bryant Gumbel still asked his Today Show colleagues, "What is the Internet?"

Bill Gates first reprinted the comic in his 1995 book The Road Ahead, for which he paid a $200 reprint fee. Another major milestone in the comic's path to global recognition came on February 29, 2012, when Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg projected the comic directly behind her as she announced the opening of advertising opportunities to marketers on the social network, which at the time had 1 million users, a step toward an initial public offering of the company's stock.