sometimes i contemplate the cultural moment and where things like dabbing and bottle flips and our current slang vocab come from, and i have a moment of solidarity with the turn-of-the-century youths who said now-incomprehensible things like "23 skidoo" all the time
imagine being someone even as near as 100 years from now and encountering one of our memes - an image or video or text snippet so redolent in extremely specific cultural context that it's completely illegible without specialist training
specialist training! there are gonna be folklorists and historians who specialize in ancient memes!
@Mainebot they had no chance to survive, make their time
@typhlosion they probably feel about how I do every time we encounter some baffling new meme
@typhlosion "Yeah I'm signed up for MEME-302, Loss.jpg"
@dconley the idea of someone writing a thesis paper about loss.jpg fascinates and horrifies me in equal measure
Oh, I was just reading a sci fi comedy comic about that! "The Immortal Nerd" by Hanna-Pirita Lehkonen is about someone thousands in the future who goes to school to become a "meme archaeologist."
https://m.webtoons.com/en/comedy/immortal-nerd
@typhlosion hell you need people immersed in specific context right now to be able to explain whole classes on memes to people who aren't.
@starkatt the eternal curse of the injoke
@typhlosion just look at memes from ten years ago. They're short-term cognitive graffiti.