a short history dissecting the nature and the evolution of memes
Why is the internet so weird, is a question I ask myself every other day and question myself for not asking every single day. Surfing the internet today feels like entering a netherworld from which there is no escape, you are stuck in this absurd world that feels totally alien to anything that came before in human civilization.
While earlier mediums like the radio and the television had a tendency to orient us in a space and a time, bringing with it a terrestrial character, the internet is an incredibly disorienting place. Precisely because it occupies no space and one need not go to it to access it, the internet is an omnipresent ghost that constantly trails our thoughts and bodies wherever we go.
You have to go to a TV, while the internet comes to you – from anywhere, at any time, through sunshine and rain. This deterritorial character of the internet is incredibly hard to digest for our primal brains, it causes a dizziness characteristic of being lost in a sea of garbage.
This is because everything collapses in on itself in a spaceless world, a relic of the 5th century BC precedes a reality show from the 21st century, a victim of war is succeeded by a cute puppy rolling on the ground. There is no such thing as time, no object is ordered. The internet surfer does not see the world vertically or horizontally or chronologically, he sees the world in a collage with several layers on top of each other, melting into each other.
In a medium that is out of time and space, it makes sense that the things it creates or the things created through the medium are bound to be weird.
Memes, as with the beginning of any art form, began with simple clear rules guiding it. There was a clear demarcation of what a meme was: an obviously funny picture with some kind of text that complements the accompanying picture. The text was a clear joke, with the humour direct and transparent. If there was a punchline, it was apparent, if there was irony it was palpable.
The earliest kinds of memes on the internet, straightforward and goofyIn the 2010s we saw the rise of meme pages on social media platforms such as facebook and reddit, facebook was the original progenitor of the meme, whereby we saw slightly edgier jokes infused with irony and sarcasm. The second stage of the development of the meme happened with the rise of the ‘dank meme’: dank originally being a word to denote what was cool and edge. The dank phenomenon was a response to the sanitized humour that permeated the early years of the internet.
The dank meme was intentionally absurd, bizarre and ironic hence, they were a precursor to the absurd memes we see today, they had the seed of irony and provocation in them, while retaining a semblance of meaning that we so rarely see today.
The start of the ‘dank’ era: intentionally bizarreTheo Marlowe, a blogger, writes in an article written in 2025 writes that the launch of Vine in 2013 was a seminal moment in the evolution of memes. He writes –
“Vine introduced six second sketches that compressed humour into pure speed. TikTok later built on that model with powerful editing tools and a massive user base. The result: humour that can shift genres within seconds. A clip may begin as a sincere dance routine and end with a distorted scream and a cartoon filter”
The birth of Vines in 2013, instrumental in forming today’s humourThis was transformative for the medium of memes as people began experimenting with multiple genres, thus normalizing the juxtaposition of different genres in a meme. It opened up a whole world of possibilities for memes.
After the mid 2010s we saw a revolt against the ‘dank’ meme, the term went through a life cycle of its own and it was now being used to refer to internet memes that were passé and uncool. Within a couple of years, the definition of what was cool was constantly being reinvented. This is characteristic of the internet and its rapidly escalating speed.
Here we see the dawn of the truly absurd memes, memes that build on top of each other, referring to other memes, remixing itself to death. Now we start to see memes that require a whole lot of context for one to get it. This was in essence, a response to the ‘dank’ era, a Gen Z rebuttal and rejection to what they saw as a sterile kind of edgy humour, characterised by a millennial goofiness.
A lot of people lose their minds over memes that do not make sense, memes that do not have a traditional set up and a punchline, what they do not understand is that this exclusivity is the point. Part of the humour comes from the fact that people without context cannot get it.
An example of absurdist humour, Ohio becomes a shorthand for anything cursed/chaoticThe prime example of this kind of meme is the 67 meme, a meme that is functionally and literally meaningless. Its comedic value only comes from the fact that there is an ingroup who get it and an outgroup who does not. In fact, the humour mostly comes from the inability of the outgroup to make sense of something that cannot be made sense out of.
(Another fascinating meme of this mold is the meme that is so saturated with irony that it returns to being sincere. Those are the kinds of memes that are attempting to make fun of the group that is already in, by trying to be intentionally unfunny.)
Nathan Fielder is a pioneer in absurdist humour, adding layers of irony to the point of seeming sincereNathan For You is a show that builds on so many layers of irony that it comes returns to a kind of sincerity
What is funny is the absence of context, people scrambling over racking their brains desperately trying to find meaning over these random memes. That is very revealing of the world today.
We are living in a world where young people are doing this very thing: trying and scrambling for meaning, scrambling for survival in a time of acute anxiety. And maybe watching the older generation fumble over themselves, getting frustrated over silly memes is some kind of grace. Some kind of miniscule revenge for leaving us with a broken world.
What sets Gen-Z and Gen alpha humour apart is that it consists of self-referential memes, irony to the point of returning to sincerity, surreality and a juxtaposition of moods. All this strangeness reflects a world that is uncertain of itself and of the future.
With the birth of artificial intelligence, growing technological surveillance, destructive weapons of mass destruction, increasingly unrealistic housing prices, it is hard for a young person to imagine any kind of future. This sense of increasing volatility seeps into everything that the youth does, you see it in their music with the rise of one minute song with distorted bass lines, with the replacement of their movies with 24 hour streaming and memes that reflect a growing paranoia with the state of the world.
What we should be asking is not what these memes mean, but what is happening in the world that has led to the rise of this seemingly meaningless and ultimately cynical meme world.
