Making Memes for the Global “Oat Milk Élite” | the New Yorker

(In Filterworld, everything must be a meme, like a remixable joke or image optimized to travel across the Internet.)

So there’s a weird thing going on where there’s abundance, and yet, at the same time, we’ve become really conservative about our own styles, because people fundamentally don’t want to adopt things that feel inauthentic to them, or will be judged inauthentic.

And because culture is so ephemeral, there’s just more stuff that people are worried that —

Or Grant McCracken put it,

”If you are under 25, popular culture is on perpetual spin cycle. Everything is in motion. Except you.”

Memes by definition are idea viruses. And it feels like our cultural immune system is able to move on quicker and quicker. Perhaps built in remixing features on platforms have helped the viruses spread, but has diminish