When you've spent many years engaging with internet memes, you can automatically tell if a meme is dated. I remember being a freshman in high school, scoffing at my less-online peers for still posting passé image macros like Bad Luck Brian. I saw screenshots of quirky 2012 Tumblr text posts on Instagram and bragged about seeing them three years before they were regurgitated for an audience of "basics" (a now-defunct term for normies). 10 years later, the regurgitative nature of the internet remains.
It has become increasingly clear that we are not only using today's internet but the internet of last year and ten years ago. As a wise woman once said, "We did not just fall out of the coconut tree." Memes exist in the context of all in which they live and what came before them. That's why the recent Hawk Tuah phenomenon feels dated, like a relic from the past while simultaneously emerging as a breakthrough in the on-the-street interview-as-meme format.
It has become increasingly clear that we are not only using today's internet but the internet of last year and ten years ago. As a wise woman once said, "We did not just fall out of the coconut tree." Memes exist in the context of all in which they live and what came before them. That's why the recent Hawk Tuah phenomenon feels dated, like a relic from the past while simultaneously emerging as a breakthrough in the on-the-street interview-as-meme format.
![[DK]](/data/avatars/s/57/57999.jpg?1720990206){kind=avatar}
