Forget the A.I. Apocalypse. Memes Have Already Nuked Our Culture. - The New York Times
From our jokes and slang to the White House’s policy messaging, internet “brain rot” has escaped our phones to take over … well, everything. Credit... Illustration by Erik Carter Supported by By Willy Staley A friend told me a story recently about her son. He’s about 9 years old and doesn’t have much access to social media. One day this past fall, he came home from school and told his mom that kids there were saying “6-7.” He wanted to know what it meant. So she pulled out her phone and looked up an explainer video that tells, for those who have been similarly perplexed, a familiar story: A rapper named Skrilla said it on a song called “Doot Doot”; audio from the song started being used in TikToks about LaMelo Ball (who is 6-foot-7); some goofy kid yelled it at a high school basketball game, which became another TikTok; and it went from there, aided no doubt by the fact that six and seven are statistically quite likely to appear in that particular order. “But what does it mean?” my fri
From our jokes and slang to the White House’s policy messaging, internet “brain rot” has escaped our phones to take over … well, everything. Credit... Illustration by Erik Carter Supported by By Willy Staley A friend told me a story recently about her son. He’s about 9 years old and doesn’t have much access to social media. One day this past fall, he came home from school and told his mom that kids there were saying “6-7.” He wanted to know what it meant. So she pulled out her phone and looked up an explainer video that tells, for those who have been similarly perplexed, a familiar story: A ra
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