When it comes to selfies, you don't get more revolutionary than a grey-haired Chinese man in shorts and socks, firing his thigh like a gun. Given the man is artist and activist Ai Weiwei, you have yourself an explosive meme.
The question, of course, is what Ai intended with his aggressively acrobatic pose, posted to his Twitter and Instagram feeds at 5.49pm on a recent Wednesday. An e-mail to his team elicited no response, while the internet elicited more stabs in the dark than a production of Hamlet.
One blog retweeted by Ai, Beijing Cream, noted the similarity of the pose to one seen in the Chinese ballet The Red Detachment of Women, one of eight model operas that monopolised the 1960s national landscape during the Cultural Revolution.
Coming, as it has, just after the 25th anniversary of the protests in Tiananmen Square, suddenly Ai's photo looked a lot like a satirical comment on China's onerous cultural control. Forget giving state oppression the finger: this is cocking your leg at the regime.
Or is it? While a reference to The Red Detachment of Women is no doubt subversive - riot girl band Bikini Kill used it as an unofficial video for their 1993 single Rebel Girl - it is also playful. Many of Ai's followers have labelled their photos with the #endgunviolence hashtag but there are also plenty of people excitedly proclaiming "the rifle - new dance move!" or asking "Is this the new planking?"
The 100-plus photos submitted by Ai's followers, re-enacting his pose, range from the sublime to the ridiculous. In one, a small boy fires his leg at a huge ceramic tortoise. In another, a woman points her stilettoed leg at a pug. There are leg-guns on skateboards, feet pointing at tanks on TV, assassination scenes, calves trained on wall-mounted stag heads, a leg-firing Kermit the Frog, and one man holding up his toddler's chubby leg.