The world is aware of her as ‘Disaster Girl.’ She offered an NFT of her meme for $500,000

Written by Marie Fazio
The identify Zoë Roth won’t ring any bells. But chances are high you’ve seen her photograph.
One Saturday morning in 2005, when Roth was 4 years outdated, her household went to have a look at a home on hearth of their neighborhood in Mebane, North Carolina. Firefighters had deliberately set the blaze as a managed hearth, so it was a relaxed affair: Neighbors gathered and firefighters allowed youngsters to take turns holding the hose.
Roth remembers watching the flames engulf the home when her father, an beginner photographer, requested her to smile. With her hair askew and a understanding look in her eyes, Roth flashed a devilish smirk as the fireplace roared behind her. “Disaster Girl” was born.
In the years since Dave Roth, Zoë’s father, entered it in a photograph contest in 2007 and gained, the picture has been edited into varied disasters from historical past, with Roth grinning impishly as a meteor wipes out the dinosaurs or the Titanic sinks within the distance. Now, after greater than a decade of getting her picture endlessly repurposed as a significant a part of meme canon, Roth has offered the unique copy of her meme as a nonfungible token, or NFT, for practically $500,000.
The meme offered for 180 Ether, a type of cryptocurrency, at an public sale on April 17 to a person recognized as @3FMusic. As with any forex, the worth of Ether fluctuates, however as of Thursday, 180 Ether was valued at greater than $495,000. The Roths retained the copyright and can obtain 10% of future gross sales.
Zoë Roth and her father, Dave, in Badlands National Park in 2019. (The Roth Family by way of The New York Times)
The marketplace for possession rights to digital artwork, ephemera and media generally known as NFTs, is exploding. All NFTs, together with the “Disaster Girl” meme Roth simply offered, are stamped with a singular little bit of digital code that marks their authenticity, and saved on the blockchain, a distributed ledger system that underlies Bitcoin and different cryptocurrencies.
In the meme corridor of fame, “Disaster Girl” ranks alongside “Ermahgerd,” a pigtailed teenage lady posing with “Goosebumps” books; “Bad Luck Brian,” immortalized in a grimacing yearbook photograph with braces; and “Success Kid,” a toddler on a seaside with a clenched fist and an expression of intense dedication.
In an interview, Roth mentioned promoting the meme was a manner for her to take management over a state of affairs that she has felt powerless over since she was in elementary faculty.
Before making the choice to promote, Roth consulted “Bad Luck Brian” himself — his actual identify is Kyle Craven — and Laney Griner, the mom of “Success Kid.”
“It’s the only thing that memes can do to take control,” Roth recalled Craven telling her.
“Disaster Girl” memes have unfold far and vast. Once, a bunch from Poland requested permission to make use of the meme for instructional materials a few dying Indigenous language. Someone in Portugal despatched Roth footage of a mural with the meme.
“You just make it fit however you want to fit it,” she mentioned. “I love seeing them because I’d never make any of them myself, but I love seeing how creative people are.”
Over the years, she’s seen a whole bunch of iterations of her image. One shared final summer time throughout racial justice protests was amongst her favorites, she mentioned.

“Once it’s out there, it’s out there, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” Dave Roth mentioned. “It always finds a way to stay relevant with whatever new kind of awful, terrible bad thing is happening, so I’ve laughed at a lot of them.”
Roth, now 21, is a senior on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill learning peace, warfare and protection. She has by no means been acknowledged as “Disaster Girl” outright, she mentioned, however most of her pals and acquaintances know of her meme fame.
“People who are in memes and go viral is one thing, but just the way the internet has held on to my picture and kept it viral, kept it relevant, is so crazy to me,” she mentioned. “I’m super grateful for the entire experience.”
Even so, she mentioned, she hopes to someday do one thing significant sufficient to shift “Disaster Girl” to the second web page of search outcomes for her identify.
After commencement, Roth plans to take a niche yr earlier than pursuing a graduate diploma in worldwide relations. She mentioned she would donate the fortune she has constructed from her likeness — which remains to be in cryptocurrency type — to charities and to repay her pupil loans, amongst different issues.
When she’s house, she typically walks previous the lot the place it began and wonders if locals know that it’s a “meme place,” she mentioned.
“People who are in memes didn’t really have a choice in it,” she mentioned. “The internet is big. Whether you’re having a good experience or a bad experience, you kind of just have to make the most of it.”

Ben Lashes, who manages the Roths and stars of different memes together with “Nyan Cat,” “Grumpy Cat,” “Keyboard Cat,” “Doge,” “Success Kid,” “David After Dentist” and the “Ridiculously Photogenic Guy,” mentioned his purchasers had cumulatively remodeled $2 million in NFT gross sales.
He mentioned that NFT gross sales had helped set up memes as a classy artwork type and “serious pieces of culture.”
“I think anytime you can find a collector — no matter what the price is — who respects the art behind it and is going to cherish it, that’s a successful sale, whether it’s one Ether or 200 or 300,” he mentioned.