this image is quite literally six years old now and that’s wild to me. there are actual real live human beings younger than this .jpg who are walking and talking unassisted. i feel so old. i feel death approaching. will i sleep? will i dream?
Old 4chan memes are so incomprehensible now. Matthew and I were just talking about this last night, I was describing a Hot Topic in 2003. “It was a simpler, more ancient time,” I said, “When a meme had a real longetivity to it. Years and years. And when somebody understood the bizarre reference, it was actually really cool, like: Yeah! We’re both internet weirdos! High-five! Now I see something funny and I’m already immediately exhausted by it, because tomorrow it’ll be on the Ellen show and my grandma will share it on facebook, and next week you can buy it on t-shirts at Urban Outfitters, and six months from now it’s going to be in a bunch of parody movie trailers. By the time South Park gets it in their show six days later it’s stale. It won’t go quietly into the night like ‘I’ma chargin mah lazers’ — an honorable death, at the highest it could go. It just immediately is sold and consumed and fucking awful. Immediately. And then it’s dead, before it even happened.”
i cannot fucking believe capitalism and consumerism ruined memes. of all things. memes. it fucking baffles me how the world could come to this. god help us all.
This is exactly why now we have so many absurdist memes.
Things that can’t be marketed and sold because they subvert that system.