"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" is an adage and Internet meme about Internet anonymity which began as a caption to a cartoon drawn by Peter Steiner, published in The New Yorker on July 5, 1993. The words are those of a large dog sitting on a chair at a desk, with a paw on the keyboard of the computer, speaking to a smaller dog sitting on the floor nearby. Steiner had earned between $200,000 and $250,000 by 2013 from its reprinting, by which time it had become the cartoon most reproduced from The New Yorker. The original was sold at auction for $175,000, setting a record for the highest price ever paid for a comic.
History
Peter Steiner, a cartoonist and contributor to The New Yorker since 1979, has said that although he did have an online account in 1993, he had felt no particular interest in the Internet then. He drew the cartoon only in the manner of a "make-up-a-caption" item, to which he recalled attaching no "profound" meaning, seeing that it had received little attention initially. He later stated that he felt as if he had created the "smiley face" when his cartoon took...