A mother on a rooftop party, holding a Nintendo Switch, being told by a stranger's caption that she has ruined the evening. That's where we're starting today.
That is a very specific doorway into the entire history of the internet, and I love it.
It's Daniel's. He wrote in with a whole thing about memes, so let me put it across properly.
His observation is that one facet of internet culture that has shaped societies is the use of memes to create visual anchor points. Things that lodge in the eye and sometimes spawn new vocabulary entirely.
And the part he finds strange. Technology has moved so far past the point where a GIF was the best available way to make a point. And yet they retain this natural appeal, this cache. He says he's noticed the word drifting too. Outside the strict original sense, people now use meme to mean any short, shareable visual that becomes iconic.
Then he gets specific. He wants to use the pejorative Karen. The term for a difficult white woman, as he puts it. He wants to look at how it gained a lot of its initial use by being spread as memes.
And there are three questions underneath. How did this phenomenon emerge, how has it shifted over time, and how can its fingerprints be seen on so much of what we today call viral shareability, even when the thing going viral isn't a GIF.
He's asking about the grammar of the internet, essentially.
He's asking why the joke we all learned to make in 2011 still shapes how we argue in the year we're actually in.
So let's start at the beginning. With a biologist who had no idea what he was unleashing.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, nineteen seventy-six. He needed a word for a unit of cultural transmission. A unit of imitation. He took the Greek mimeme, something imitated, and shortened it to something that rhymes with cream.
And deliberately sounds like gene.
Deliberately. That was the whole point. He wanted the cultural analogue sitting right next to the biological one. His own framing was that our cultural life is full of things that propagate virus-like from one mind to another. Tunes. Ideas. Catchphrases. Fashions. Ways of making pots or building arches.
Ways of making pots. That's the one that gets me. He's describing the transmission of pottery technique in the same breath as catchphrases.
And he's right to. A pot design and a joke travel through a population the same way in principle. Somebody copies. Somebody alters. Most versions die.
So when does it stop being biology and start being your group chat.
Nineteen ninety-three. Mike Godwin, the same Godwin of Godwin's Law, coins Internet meme in a piece for Wired. He's watching how these things move through message boards, Usenet, email. And by twenty thirteen Dawkins himself is calling modern internet memes a hijacking of the original idea.
Hijacking is a strong word from the man who invented the word.
It's precise, though. And it tells you the whole story. In Dawkins's model the meme mutates by random change and selection, the way a gene does. In actual internet culture, a person sits down with Photoshop and decides exactly how to alter it. That's not mutation. That's authorship.
So the thing he described as virus-like turned out to be deliberately engineered. Which is a real problem for the metaphor.
It's the central problem. And it's where the interesting scholarship lives. Limor Shifman at Hebrew University ran at this directly in her twenty thirteen book, Memes in Digital Culture.
A meme is a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, or stance. Created with awareness of each other. Circulated, imitated, and transformed by multiple users.
Group. Not item.
That's the load-bearing word. There's no such thing as a meme. There's a family of copies. Each one knows about the others, and each one is a deliberate response to the last.
Which is exactly why the Karen thing worked. Nobody made one meme. They made thousands of small variations on a person.
And that's the mechanism Shifman keeps pointing at. Memes spread by mimicry, where you recreate something in your own setting, or by remix, where you take the actual image and manipulate it. And then they diffuse through competition and selection. Except the selection pressure is now visible. The like count is the fitness function.
That's a grim way to describe a cat picture.
The cat picture is competing for reproductive fitness against forty thousand other cat pictures. And the ones whose captions fit the moment survive.
Henry Jenkins had a problem with all of this, didn't he.
He said the whole self-replicating framing sets his teeth on edge. Far too deterministic, in his words. It strips aside the role of agency.
Meaning it treats people as vessels for the meme rather than its authors.
And Shifman largely agrees with him. Her line is that what drives cultural diffusion is not the mysterious power of memes but the webs of meanings and structures people build around them. She wants less of the mystical virus language and more attention to who is actually making this stuff and why.
Which matters enormously. Because if the meme has a mysterious power, then nothing is anyone's fault.
Yes. That's the political weight of a seemingly academic argument. If virality is a force of nature, nobody designed the thing that reached forty million people. If it's agency, somebody sat down and built it.
So the Jenkins side wins.
I think the Jenkins side is more honest about how it works. But Dawkins's framing isn't worthless. There is something involuntary about how a tune gets into your head and refuses to leave. People feel like they caught something.
The feeling is real. The explanation is just too tidy.
Now. To your earlier point about GIFs being the old way. This is where the record corrects the intuition.
Go on.
The GIF was never the only way, and it wasn't really the first. The earliest internet memes are text. Scott Fahlman puts up the smiley face emoticon, colon dash close parenthesis, in nineteen eighty-two, to mark jokes on a message board so nobody would misread sarcasm. That is about as unvisual as a meme gets.
And LOL.
LOL traces to a mid-eighties bulletin board in Alberta, Canada. Also pure text. The visual stuff arrives later. The Dancing Baby in ninety-six. Hampster Dance in ninety-nine. Both spreading through email chains, both animated, neither one a GIF in the modern sense of the word, and both surrounded by a huge amount of plain typed text going the same route.
So the premise that GIFs were once the best available means of making a point is...
It's a softening. The historical record points to text as the earliest carrier. Emoticons, ASCII art, typed abbreviations. Then email chain animations. GIFs are one format among many, not a clear predecessor.
Daniel will be fine. He flagged it himself as something he noticed rather than researched.
And the deeper point he's making survives untouched. These things keep working when the technology around them changes completely. That's the mystery. Not the format.
So give me the arc of formats.
Email and Flash animations in the late nineties. Then the forums, Four Chan, Something Awful, where Lolcats come out of and where the image macro gets invented. Image overlaid with large text, white Impact font with a black outline. That template is one of the most durable design decisions on the internet and nobody signed it.
Then YouTube in two thousand five.
Then Reddit and Twitter. Then Vine. Then TikTok. Then AI. And at each step the carrier changes and the thing being carried stays recognizably itself.
Which is a lot like Dawkins's original point, ironically. The copying is the constant.
Now, there's a mathematical shape to this that's interesting. You can model meme spread with the same equations you'd use for an epidemic.
As in, actual epidemiology.
Wang and Wood in Applied Mathematical Modelling, twenty eleven. The S-I-R model. Susceptible, infected, recovered. A meme hits a population, spikes hard, and then tapers as the susceptible pool drains and the infected lose interest. The recovered are the people who've seen it so many times that seeing it again does nothing.
So we're all immune to some memes. That's not a metaphor, that's just true.
You personally are immune to the ones you've seen two hundred times. The joke is still being told. It simply cannot land on you anymore.
And that's before we get to the fact that the word meme is itself a meme, which is the part that makes my head hurt.
Shifman says it outright. The term meme is a great meme. It's been enthusiastically picked up by internet users. The word has undergone its own memetic evolution. Technical biology concept, then a noun for a joke, then a verb. You got memed on. I'm meme-ing. And then the whole subculture vocabulary around it. Memelord. Dank. Deep-fried. Moldy.
Moldy is a good one. That's a word for a meme so far past its peak that using it is itself the joke.
Which is a sophisticated thing for a picture of a frog to have generated.
So to Daniel's first question. What is a meme, and how did the word get from a biology book to a group chat.
A meme is a family of digital objects that reference each other and get made on purpose to spread. The word got there because it was the perfect word for something that didn't exist yet when it was invented.
Called its own shot.
Called its own shot, then got hijacked, and is now the standard term for both the joke and the stock and the social type.
Right. Let's do Karen.
The earliest trace Wordorigins and Vox can find of Karen as a generic name for an obnoxious woman is Dane Cook. Two thousand five, the album Retaliation, a routine called The Friend That Nobody Likes. The line is that every group has a Karen and she is always a bag of douche.
That is a real documented sentence. I want everyone to sit with the fact that this is the seed.
And note that it wasn't a meme yet. It was a comedian naming a type. The name had no image attached.
So how does it get an image.
Twenty sixteen. October twenty-first. Nintendo drops the Switch trailer. There's a woman in it carrying a console to a rooftop party. A Tumblr user called Joematar screenshots her and captions it. Oh, you know what, I'll just quote the shape of it. Karen brought her stupid Nintendo thing to the party again. We're drinking. We're having conversations.
That's the first Karen meme proper.
That's the one. And everything about it is downstream of what we just described. It's not the photo. It's a person reacting to a photo and attaching a voice to it. The meme isn't the image. It's the caption that turns a stranger into a character.
And the character has a haircut, doesn't she.
She acquires one. The subreddit launches in December twenty seventeen. r/FuckYouKaren. It goes from around four thousand subscribers to over four hundred and thirty-five thousand, and eventually past one and a half million.
Four thousand to one and a half million is the whole story of the internet in one number shift.
And the visual identity crystallizes fast. The first pejorative entry in Urban Dictionary shows up in March twenty eighteen, and it's brutally specific. A blonde woman with an ombre cascade hairstyle who wants to speak to the manager.
Ombre cascade. That is a level of dermatological precision for a joke.
It's doing real work. A stereotype needs a costume or it can't be deployed. You need to be able to point at a person and have the room understand without a sentence of explanation.
So by twenty nineteen it's mainstream enough to get nominated for Word of the Year.
The American Dialect Society nominated it in twenty nineteen. It didn't win. Their definition was the stereotype of a complaining, self-important white woman, typically a member of Generation X.
And then twenty twenty happens and the word stops meaning what it meant.
It turns twice that year. First turn, early in the pandemic, it's the anti-mask, anti-vax, I-want-your-manager figure. The person who won't be told what to do in a grocery store.
Stage two.
Then May twenty-fifth. Two things happen the same day. In Central Park, a white woman named Amy Cooper calls nine-one-one on a Black birder named Chris Cooper, and she does it while he's asking her to put her dog on a leash. And George Floyd is killed the same day.
Same day.
And the word moves again. Aja Romano's piece in Vox from July twenty twenty describes Karen becoming a searing symbol of white supremacy. The hairstyle drops away. The grocery store drops away. Now it's the act of calling the police on someone because they exist near you.
That's a genuine mutation. The earlier version was about being rude to staff. The later version is about endangering a stranger's life.
And the linguist Kendra Calhoun made the connection cleanly to Vox. Her point was that the impulse telling someone you don't have the right to tell me to wear a mask is the same kind of impulse as you can't tell me to put my dog on a leash. It's not about the mask. It's about being told what to do by someone with less power than you.
The complaint is a lever. The actual subject doesn't matter.
And then it becomes legislation. A San Francisco lawmaker, Shamann Walton, proposes an ordinance against false, racially biased nine-one-one calls, and he names it the CAREN Act.
Spelled with an extra E, so that the acronym works.
Which is itself a joke sitting on top of a serious policy proposal. The name had to be funny or the ordinance doesn't travel.
The meme ended up writing a piece of municipal law.
And the most recent move is the ironic one. Research out of CU Boulder found Karen now being applied to angry women of any race, age, or background. Which is the pattern linguists track across a lot of words about women. Gossip. Hussy. The word starts as a precise critique and ends up as a general tool for telling a woman she's not allowed to be angry.
So it has gone from naming a specific kind of white entitlement to a label you can stick on any woman who raises her voice.
Including women of color, including people nowhere near the original archetype. The meme ate its own definition.
And the word most likely doesn't have one origin, anyway.
Wordorigins is explicit about this. This use of the name most likely does not have a single origin incident or inspiration. It's a confluence of trends. Dane Cook, Mean Girls, Goodfellas, the Nintendo meme, an SNL sketch. Vox calls the origin nebulous.
There's no first Karen. There's a cloud of Karens that condensed.
Same problem Know Your Meme has with the whole category. Their line is that it's extremely difficult to nail down the first true meme. Even the first internet meme is contested, and a lot of early internet is just lost. There's no Garden of Eden for this stuff. There's a swamp and some of it has already dried up.
So Daniel's second question. How did Karen spread and gain traction through memes.
It spread because it was a name that could be attached to a haircut, and the haircut could be attached to a behavior, and the behavior could be attached to a real news story. Each layer made the next one travel further.
And that's the fingerprints question, isn't it. That's the machinery.
And the same machinery runs on things that have nothing to do with jokes. That's the third question Daniel asked, and it's the one with the widest blast radius.
Give me the finance version.
Meme stocks. GameStop being the flagship. Meme coins. Dogecoin. The pattern is identical to Karen. A symbol gets loaded with meaning by a group, the group coordinates, and the coordination itself becomes the thing people are buying into.
The story is the product.
The same thing runs in politics. Pepe the Frog. The Dean scream in two thousand four. The Ted Cruz Zodiac Killer thing, which is a pure meme with no factual content whatsoever and which Cruz himself eventually started playing along with.
Because denying it is worse than owning it.
Owning it is the only move that keeps you in the joke. That's the same regulatory logic as the CAREN Act. The name has to be funny to spread, even when the underlying thing is serious.
And social movements.
The Ice Bucket Challenge in twenty fourteen is the cleanest case. It's a meme. Cold water, a bucket, a person, a video, a nomination of three more people. It funded an ALS research breakthrough. A joke format produced a real scientific result.
I keep coming back to that one, because it's the strongest argument against the idea that memes are just noise.
It's the argument that the format is neutral. It's a delivery mechanism. Whatever you load into it goes wherever humans go, for better and worse.
There's a market where you can literally trade them.
r/MemeEconomy, where users buy and sell shares in memes as a satire of Wall Street. Which sounds like a joke about finance until you realize the actual stock market now behaves the same way on certain tickers.
The satire got outrun by the thing it was satirizing.
Which happens a lot.
Then Daniel's real question. Why do they still work when the technology has moved so far past them.
I think there are three reasons.
One. They're cheap to make and easy to read. The image macro in particular is a format you can learn in ten seconds. The visual does the emotional work in a quarter second and the text does the argument. Your brain resolves the whole thing before you've finished blinking.
Speed.
Two. They're participatory. You can't just consume a meme. You have to be able to make one, or at least recognize the ones that reference each other. That's why Shifman's definition matters. It's a group activity.
Belonging.
Three. They carry judgment without carrying a full sentence. A meme is often the shortest available way to say I think this person is ridiculous and also I think you'll agree. That's an accusation that fits in a picture. That's why Karen happened to the word and not to a paragraph.
The format survives because it does something no other format does as efficiently. It packages a social verdict.
It's a compressed accusation.
Which brings us to now. And I have to say, the current picture sounds like a hangover.
There's real fatigue in the system. TikTok users started complaining about a meme drought, and some of the blame landed on a cringe-culture community called SlimeTok, and a lot of it landed on the sheer volume of AI-generated brainrot content.
Brainrot. Which is a mouthful of a word for Gen Alpha slang. Skibidi. Rizz. Gyatt. Sigma. Fanum tax.
Brain rot entered circulation around twenty twenty-two to describe exactly that. High volume, low meaning, endless scroll.
And the response.
A loosely organized push called the Great Meme Reset. TikTok users frustrated with the AI content calling for a return to what they call classic memes. Nyan Cat. Big Chungus. The stuff from the twenty-teens.
Nostalgia for a decade people can still remember clearly. That's a strange place for a culture to be.
It is. But it's also predictable. If the S-I-R model is right, the recovered compartment fills up. The audience for any given format eventually becomes immune to it. And when the immune population is large enough, the format stops working and people reach for something older that they never got burned out on.
The meme drought isn't a failure of creativity. It's epidemiology catching up.
That's my read. And the AI content accelerates it, because AI can produce infinite variations of a joke, and infinite variations means no single version is memorable. A meme needs a scarce version to survive. If everything is available, nothing is.
The thing that spread by copying now has too many copies to be a copy of anything.
That's a real problem for the format. But I don't think it kills it.
Neither do I. Because the underlying dynamic isn't about the technology at all.
The technology was never the point. Text emoticons, Dancing Baby, Lolcats, Vine, deep-fried, brainrot. The carrier changed every time. The thing being carried is a human being trying to make another human being see something the same way. That's older than the internet.
Hilbert: Doesn't kill it. I had money in one of those.
Which one.
Hilbert: Doesn't matter which one. Four hundred and thirty dollars. I still know the number. That's the thing about those.
You were in the market for memes.
Hilbert: Everybody was in the market for a minute. A guy at work told me it was the safest thing he'd ever bought. I put in four hundred and thirty. It went up. I didn't sell.
And then.
Hilbert: Then it wasn't the safest thing he'd ever bought. I still hold it. Somewhere. I think. It's in an account I don't check.
You own a dead meme as a financial instrument.
Hilbert: On paper. It's not even on paper. There's no piece of paper. That's the part I can't get used to. I owned something and there was nothing to put in a drawer.
That's the whole decade in one sentence.
Hilbert: What's interesting is you two think the appeal is the joke. It isn't. It's the number going up. That's the appeal. The joke's just the thing that makes the number go up. If it didn't move, nobody would have made the picture.
The meme was the marketing.
Hilbert: The meme was the hook. Same as a good jingle. You don't remember the jingle because it was art. You remember it because somebody paid to put it in front of you until you couldn't get it out.
Which is Jenkins's whole point, isn't it. It's not a virus. Somebody bought the airtime.
Hilbert: Somebody always bought the airtime. The difference now is everybody can. Anyway, you're a hair hot on the second mic. I'll pull it down a touch.
There's a question here about whether the exhaustion is terminal.
I don't think it is. But I think the format is going through something it hasn't been through before. For the first time, the volume of new material is exceeding the human capacity to keep track of it. Every prior generation of memes had scarcity on its side. There were only so many people making them. Now there's no limit and no memory.
Which means the selection pressure changes.
Which means the selection pressure changes, and whatever comes out the other side isn't going to look like the twenty-teens. Nostalgia is a symptom. It's not the cure.
The misconception people hold about memes. I want to name the worst one.
Go ahead.
The idea that a meme is a joke. That it's a post you laugh at and move on from. The comfortable belief.
That one's wrong in a very specific way. A meme is a piece of infrastructure. It's a compression format for a social judgment. That's why it can carry a stock price, a political campaign, an ordinance in San Francisco, and a fundraising total for ALS research. A joke can't do those things. The joke is the coating.
The format is doing the work.
That's why Dawkins's word was right even though Dawkins's mechanism was wrong. He was describing a unit of culture that copies itself. He just didn't anticipate that the copying would be the most human thing anyone does all day.
One forward-looking thought, then, and I'll take it from what Hilbert said, because it's the right frame. He's right that the meme was never really the point. The number going up was the point. And if that's true, then the current drought isn't a failure of humor. It's a market that got flooded. The question worth sitting with is what replaces the format when the format stops being the cheapest way to move somebody.
Whatever it is, it'll look obvious in hindsight and absurd at the time. That's how all of this has gone.
That's the show. Our producer is Hilbert Flumingtop, who is currently adjusting a fader and has not yet told us whether he sold.
Hilbert: I haven't.
This has been My Weird Prompts.
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