Forget the A.I. Apocalypse. Memes Have Already Nuked Our Culture.
April 8, 2026 at 12:25AMAs inactive as I am on social media these days, I somehow feel more inundated by it. There’s a good reason for that, one that Willy Staley articulates well in this breezy thinkpiece: These platforms, via the people who harness it to create social capital for themselves, have become the wellspring for culture both online and off. Congressional representatives saying “6-7” wasn’t the beginning, and it definitely wasn’t the end.
The “6-7” meme was revelatory because of the immense gap between its symbolic payload — essentially nonexistent — and its cultural penetration. It worked like tracer dye running through our information ecosystem, revealing its functions and dysfunctions. And the strange thing about this meme, or slang, or whatever you want to call it, is that our shared world of people, places, things and events didn’t factor into it. It simply flowed out from social media platforms into that world — with an extraordinary degree of success, and for no real reason at all, a secret message to us from the world within the phone.
Or perhaps a demonstration of force: This is how things are going to go from now on.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/04/07/memes-nuked-our-culture-nytm/
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