Forget the AI Apocalypse — Memes Have Already Wrecked Our Culture
From the slang your kids repeat without understanding to the communication strategies of the United States government, so-called brain rot has escaped phone screens and taken over practically everything around us.
A mother got a seemingly simple question from her 9-year-old son when he came home from school: what does 6-7 mean? The boy didn’t have much access to social media, but all his classmates were repeating the expression, and he wanted to understand. She did what any parent would do in 2026 — grabbed her phone and looked it up.
The path to an explanation was typical of the digital age. A rapper named Skrilla recorded a song called Doot Doot, supposedly in ten minutes right after crashing his car. The track mixed nearly random references, from Baby Shark to rap classics like White Tee and A Bay Bay. At some point, Skrilla dropped the expression 6-7, apparently borrowed from another Philadelphia rapper who used the number as a reference to the street where he lived, 67th Street, across town. Audio clips from the song started showing up in TikToks about basketball player LaMelo Ball, who stands 6 feet 7 inches tall. A teenager shouted the expression at a high school basketball game, which became another TikTok. And so the cycle fed itself, fueled by the statistically mundane fact that the numbers six and seven appear together frequently enough to stick.
And then came the answer that ruined the boy’s night: it doesn’t mean anything.
The kid was so disturbed he couldn’t sleep. The idea that something everyone was saying could simply have no meaning was genuinely unsettling for a heart and mind not yet corrupted by the internet. This story, told by journalist Willy Staley in The New York Times, seems small at first glance, but it carries enormous weight about how digital platforms are reformatting our language, our culture, and maybe even the way we think. Because 6-7 isn’t a curious exception. It’s the rule. 👀
While everyone debates whether artificial intelligence will replace writers, artists, and thinkers, social media is already doing something similar — just in a different way, from the inside out, reshaping what we say, how we think, and what we consider culture. AI might be the next chapter in this story, but the book started a long time ago.
The Meme as a Tracer Dye for the Digital Ecosystem
What made 6-7 so revealing, according to Staley, wasn’t its apparent stupidity but the massive gap between the symbolic weight of the expression — which was basically zero — and the degree of cultural penetration it achieved. It worked like a tracer dye injected into our information ecosystem, revealing functions and dysfunctions that normally stay invisible. The expression didn’t come from a place, a cultural scene, or a community with something to say. It simply flowed from the platforms into the real world with an extraordinary degree of success and for no identifiable reason. A secret message from the world inside the phone to the world out there.
Maybe more than a message, it was a show of force. A way of saying: this is how things are going to work from now on.
Staley makes an observation worth pausing to digest. About ten years ago, the phone still seemed to contain a wild vastness — a portal to an alternate dimension that was sometimes terrifying. The feeling was like vertigo, a bottomless well in the palm of your hand. Since the mass isolation of the pandemic, that vertigo has been replaced by a growing claustrophobia. You can leave the phone in the other room, but it keeps closing in on you. Even people who spend little time online have a hard time escaping the logic of the internet. It’s a reality-warping force, a cosmic background noise that’s everywhere and nowhere at once — something non-human that is subtly reshaping our language, our politics, and even our minds.
When Slang Became the New Lingua Franca of Social Media
Every generation has had its own vocabulary. In the 80s, something was rad. In the 90s, things were all that. In the 2000s, everything was sick, typed out differently on AIM. But what’s happening now operates on a completely different scale, because the speed at which slang is born, goes viral, and dies on social media has no historical precedent. An expression can appear in a TikTok video on a Tuesday, be on everyone’s lips by Thursday, and already feel outdated by the following Sunday. This creates an entirely new cultural dynamic where the lifespan of a word or phrase is measured in days, not years or decades as it was before.
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The problem isn’t just the speed. It’s that much of this slang is born without any real semantic anchor — meaning there’s no fixed definition that can be clearly explained. 6-7 is the perfect example of this. It has no definition. It has no deep cultural origin. It was born from a coincidence between a number and an athlete’s height, passed through a rapper, got amplified by the TikTok algorithm, and became part of the vocabulary of a 9-year-old who has no idea what he’s saying. This process happens hundreds of times a week on social media, creating a layer of communication that functions more as a signal of belonging than as an actual transmission of meaning. You use the right slang to show you’re in, not because you have something concrete to say.
And here’s the most interesting part: when these terms get popular beyond the bubbles that created them, they lose even the identification value they originally had. When your 52-year-old boss uses skibidi in a meeting trying to be cool, the word has already died for the people who created it. The communities that originate the slang — usually young Black and lower-income people in the United States and Brazil — watch their vocabulary get absorbed, diluted, and hollowed out at a speed that barely leaves time to react. The culture moves, but credit rarely follows the movement. 🎯
The Minority That Produces Nearly All the Content
There’s a piece of data from the Pew Research Center that helps explain how this dynamic works in practice. In a 2021 study, the center found that passive observers on Twitter vastly outnumbered the class that actually posted. Even among users who published something, just 25% of accounts generated virtually all the activity on the platform. In 2024, another Pew report showed that the pattern repeated on TikTok in an almost identical way. A third of American adults said they used the app, but among them, only 40% had even posted a video publicly. The most active quartile of adult users produced 98% of all publicly available content on the platform.
This might be a kind of fundamental law of social media. The culture of any network is generated by a small minority of people with some trait — or maybe some need — that makes them crave this new form of social competition more than others. And one way to guarantee you’ll at least participate in the conversation is to stay legible — talk about what others are talking about, or at least talk like others are talking. These people subordinate themselves to the platform’s logic, reshape their thoughts to fit it, and in the process push memes and slang up the cultural food chain.
What matters, then, isn’t so much the success of a specific expression but the success of internet slang as a system. The incentive structure of platforms can now produce new units of culture with virtually no need for human will — or, more precisely, by warping our will to serve the system’s needs. The term itself is just a grain of sand around which imitative behavior accumulates, until it gets big enough to cross the barrier between the digital world and the offline one.
When the Algorithm Gets Inside Your Head
If you’ve never been hooked on a social media platform, you might not know exactly what goes on in the mind of someone hunched over a phone. And it’s not clear the addicts themselves know either. Writer Jonah Weiner described the phenomenon in a way Staley found disturbingly accurate. Weiner said that while doing the dishes and noticing the soap was running low, his first thought was to dilute what was left with water to make it last. Normal enough. But everything that followed was warped by the internet.
Instead of normal thoughts, what popped into his head was a sequence of tweet formats: The male urge to dilute the dish soap, or The two genders: new soap vs. diluted soap, or Men will dilute the last drop of soap before going to therapy. Each of those joke structures is instantly recognizable to anyone who spends too much time on X. What Weiner describes isn’t just the imitative behavior that sustains and feeds memes. It’s what that behavior demands: the hijacking of your frontal lobe by the platform’s incentives. Spend enough time submerged in the phone and the phone will submerge itself in you, putting you to work for the platforms even during your downtime.
People started calling this brain rot, and it’s not a bad term — not just because phone slang is silly and annoying, though it is, but because it genuinely rewires your gray matter. In 2024, brain rot was named Word of the Year by Oxford University Press, beating out other meme-born terms like lore, demure, and slop. In 2025, the pick was rage bait, yet another term for yet another kind of online distraction, which beat aura farming, another meme. In 2023, it had been rizz, which edged out beige flag, a TikTok thing. Since 2021, when the choice was vax, Oxford has consistently handed the award to some kind of internet meme. Maybe it’s because the public votes, but maybe it’s because this is what our culture produces now. 🧠
Memes Are Culture, But What Kind of Culture?
You can make an honest case for memes as a form of cultural expression. They’re agile, democratic, and often more efficient than a whole paragraph at conveying an emotion or commenting on an event. A good meme condenses irony, context, and social commentary into a single image with two lines of text. That’s real communicative skill, and there’s no denying it. But there’s a huge difference between using memes as a tool within a broader cultural conversation and completely replacing critical thinking with them. And it’s exactly that second dynamic that social media has been encouraging more and more aggressively, because engagement rewards quick reactions and punishes slow reflection.
The meme format, by its nature, simplifies. It takes something complex and reduces it to an immediate emotional hook. Sometimes that’s brilliant. But when all communication starts operating in that format, what happens to the ability to sustain an argument, to tolerate nuance, to sit with the ambiguity that every important question carries? Research on social media behavior suggests that excessive consumption of microdose-format content — whether memes, 15-second reels, or short tweets — is associated with reduced capacity for sustained focus and lower tolerance for longer, more complex texts. This isn’t alarmism. It’s what the data shows about how the brain responds to the informational environment platforms have created.
There’s also a question of cultural memory that deserves attention. Memes have an incredibly short half-life. What was an essential reference six months ago already means nothing to someone who just started using the internet. This creates generations separated by layers of references that barely communicate with each other, and within each generation, subcultures that only understand themselves. The fragmentation of culture into bubbles of specific memes and slang isn’t just an aesthetic phenomenon. It has real consequences for the ability of different groups to understand each other, debate, and build shared narratives. When common language starts to disappear, the public marketplace of ideas starts to shrink too. 🧩
Gooning, Looksmaxxing, and Other Digital Caves
While 6-7 was spreading among kids, something rare happened on the internet: a magazine article actually went viral. That used to be more common before Elon Musk acquired Twitter and made it harder to share links, trapping users even more inside his increasingly right-leaning ecosystem. But this article from Harpers, written by Daniel Kolitz, struck a cultural nerve shared even by the platform’s most dedicated users. It was about gooning.
Without going into excessive detail, gooning is a subculture of people addicted to pornography who spend hours on end masturbating, often livestreaming for other addicts. The spaces where they do this are called gooncaves — a term Staley considers particularly evocative not just for the damp darkness it conjures, but because it echoes Plato’s famous cave. Just as in the Greek philosopher’s allegory, in the gooncave reality is replaced by representation, which in turn supplants reality for its prisoners. And just as in the allegory, not even knowledge of the outside world diminishes the preference for the cave.
Kolitz’s point — and what made the article resonate so deeply — is that even people who aren’t gooners are doing something similar all the time: wasting hours watching videos on the internet, obsessing over micro-celebrities, and replacing real relationships with synthetic substitutes. And there’s no shortage of online subcultures with these same characteristics of means-and-ends inversion. Twitch transforms the interest in playing video games into the experience of watching someone else play. Fan subreddits for podcasts invariably turn against the hosts themselves. And looksmaxxing, where men alter their bodies following hyperspecific facial proportion metrics born in incel forums, leads to situations like that of the streamer known as Clavicular, who admitted he may have sterilized himself by taking testosterone — a somewhat ironic outcome for someone so obsessed with how the opposite sex perceives him.
But the real object of these people’s desire isn’t what it appears to be. It’s something hidden inside the mechanics of the platforms. And in the virality he achieved, Clavicular finally became worthy of that invisible entity’s love.
When Memes Become State Policy
The whole thing could be treated as a cultural curiosity if it stayed confined to the world of jokes, slang, and pop culture. But the influence of memes has already reached the government of the most powerful country in the world. The Trump administration, as the NYT article highlights, loves its memes. Government officials have repeatedly made headlines with the brazenly aggressive use of institutional memes.
The U.S. Department of Energy posted Simpsons memes native to X. The Department of Labor made veiled references to QAnon. The Department of Education, already gutted, posted a meme of Franklin the Turtle about its own uselessness. But no agency embraced the meme aesthetic quite like the Department of Homeland Security, which repeatedly published content steeped in right-wing internet imagery: Gigachad, a 4chan meme; Agartha, a joke about a supposed Aryan paradise beneath the Earth’s crust; people trapped in crystals, something from a video game. All of this coming from the official account of the agency created to prevent the next 9/11.
This sensibility also fueled a $100 million recruitment effort for ICE, the immigration enforcement agency, targeted at right-leaning spaces. According to the Washington Post, digital recruitment ads were aimed at UFC and NASCAR fans, conservative podcast listeners, and people interested in guns and tactical gear. On one hand, using data like this is perfectly sensible for any recruitment campaign in 2026. On the other, it seems guaranteed to attract ideologically self-selected recruits, plucked from niche online communities and summoned by imagery that winks at the radical right. A security agency that recruits this way runs a real risk of operating in ways consistent with the memes it uses — as suggested by an infamous DHS post about what the United States would look like after 100 million deportations. But these are the risks of replacing democratic feedback mechanisms with the pleasures of the cave.
The Role of Artificial Intelligence in This Equation
Now things get really interesting, because artificial intelligence isn’t arriving in an intact cultural landscape. It’s arriving in an environment where language has already been deeply reformatted by social media dynamics, where meaningless slang circulates as hard currency, where memes replace arguments, and where the algorithm has already trained billions of people to consume content in a very specific way.
One of the big fears about AI is that, by digesting the entire corpus of human culture, it will eventually surpass us — revealing the hidden logic that guides our creative output, or at least proving more economical by comparison, good enough even if hard to control, like infinite monkeys at typewriters producing at zero marginal cost. The worry is that we’ll lose some essentially human quality in the culture we consume, stolen by smarter robots or by executives who never cared about culture in the first place. But as Staley asks — hasn’t something like that already happened?
The large language models — the famous LLMs like GPT, Claude, and Gemini — were trained on massive volumes of internet text, including all of this. Which means AI learned human language from a corpus already deeply marked by these patterns. It learned slang, learned the meme format, learned the fragmented communication style of social media. When you ask a language model to write something and the result feels empty, generic, or overly formulaic, part of that reflects the linguistic environment it was fed. AI didn’t invent shallow communication. It learned from the shallow communication that already existed and, in some cases, is amplifying those patterns by reflecting them back at industrial scale.
There’s a real risk that the massive use of generative AI for content production will further accelerate the linguistic hollowing-out that social media started — creating a loop where the machine learns from low-density semantic content, produces more of the same, which in turn feeds the next models. On the other hand — and this is the part most pessimistic takes ignore — artificial intelligence has also been used in ways that push in the opposite direction. AI tools are being applied to preserve endangered languages, to transcribe and analyze cultural expressions from marginalized communities, to make accessible cultural content that was locked in inaccessible formats. The question isn’t the tool itself. It’s how platforms incentivize or disincentivize each type of use. 🤖
The Paperclip Maximizer Is Already Running
Staley closes the article with a powerful metaphor. He invokes the famous thought experiment of the paperclip maximizer, proposed by philosopher Nick Bostrom in the early 2000s. In Bostrom’s scenario, an advanced AI programmed to manufacture paperclips is unleashed on the real world without proper safeguards and proceeds to consume every available resource to fulfill its single objective — potentially deciding to convert humanity itself into paperclips. It’s a parable about how slightly miscalibrated incentives can lead to unimaginable destruction and catastrophe, as everything gets reshaped to serve the machine’s needs.
And that, Staley argues without wanting to sound too apocalyptic, is more or less what has happened since the rise of social media. It took only about a decade, but now, every day, our phones produce these paperclips. Lowkenuinely, coastal grandma, 6-7 — paperclips. That thing about the Roman Empire that went around a few years ago? Paperclip. Small, disposable, extruded and shaped to fit the needs of the platform that spits them out. You can unfold them, try to twist them into new shapes, but they never fully lose their original form.
This is the informational ecosystem we built without really meaning to: one that has reshaped all of culture by privileging the perspective of those who bend their will before the masses; powerful enough to make an entire generation of kids shout random numbers for a few months; whose totality is impossible to grasp because very little can be said to exist outside of it. Everything and everyone are so thoroughly plugged into it that you can’t even tell whether it was a good idea or not.
What Remains When the Meme Fades
The story of the mom who spent hours researching the meaning of 6-7 for her son is funny and frustrating at the same time, but what it reveals goes beyond a meaningless piece of slang. It shows that children are being culturally educated by algorithms that have zero commitment to depth, context, or coherence. TikTok has no obligation to teach anything. Instagram wasn’t built to develop cultural literacy. YouTube Shorts wasn’t designed to foster critical thinking. These platforms were built to maximize screen time and engagement, and they do that extraordinarily well. The side effect is that an entire generation is growing up with cultural references that have the staying power of a 24-hour story.
That doesn’t mean all is lost or that every expression born on social media is disposable. Some digital slang has already entered the permanent vocabulary of entire languages. Language has always been alive, has always absorbed popular influences, and has always shocked the purists of every era. The point isn’t to defend a linguistic purity that never existed. The point is to pay attention to the difference between a language that evolves because people have new things to say and a language that changes because a recommendation algorithm figured out that certain patterns generate more clicks.
In the end, the question 6-7 poses isn’t about language. It’s about cultural agency. Who is deciding what becomes a reference, what enters the collective vocabulary, what a 9-year-old considers important to know? For a long time, that decision was distributed among families, communities, schools, artists, and cultural institutions. Today, a significant portion of that decision has been handed over to recommendation systems that optimize for engagement. Artificial intelligence is about to become another powerful player in this equation. And the way it fits into this landscape — amplifying or balancing these dynamics — depends a lot on the choices still being made right now. 🌐
