Tomorrow, We Will All Be Memes

Make the internet uncool again

Sometime last year, I tried converting my girlfriend to Girls.¹ Towards the end of the series, we came upon that scene where Hannah (Lena Dunham) and Adam (Adam Driver) are at Kellogg’s Diner in Williamsburg. They’ve just spent the day sort of getting back together because Adam, despite being in a relationship with Jessa (Hannah’s ex-friend), told Hannah he wants to help her raise her baby. Suddenly, it’s like old times again, except they also go shopping for baby supplies.

At the diner, they talk about moving in together, and Adam floats the idea of applying for an artists’ residence, which favours married couples. So he suggests they get married, which leads to a half-serious conversation about finally joining a food co-op. Then they both stop talking and Hannah tries not to cry but fails. Adam doesn’t freak out. Without saying anything, both of them can now admit that their day of make-believe was fun, but it was all a fantasy and they are not going to work out as a couple. It’s one of the saddest and best-acted scenes in the series, bookended by Adam taking a slurp from his spoon and saying, “Good soup!”

Then my girlfriend shrieked with laughter. And that’s how I learned about the Good Soup meme.

In a promo interview he did for House of Gucci, Adam Driver was asked about the meme and he called it “bizarre” and out of his control. He seemed more confused than upset by it all. But I do wonder if he is rankled that a difficult and painful scene for him is now probably more widely known as a joke. And it’s not as if the line became memefied because it was poorly delivered, which would at least follow some kind of logic.

More recently, I finally learned what that ubiquitous Chinese animated beaver clip is all about. I’d only seen it silently on Twitter with just subtitles, so I figured it was some scene from a low-budget Chinese animated movie. But it’s actually some internet animator’s rendition of a Chow Yun-Fat monologue from A Better Tomorrow. I watched the full (animated) clip with sound on Youtube, and this was the top comment:

I’m sure Chow Yun-Fat isn’t losing sleep over this and probably gets a kick out his old movies getting re-introduced into contemporary pop culture. But as with Adam Driver, I do wonder if some part of him doesn’t like his work being taken out of context and played for laughs.

The twist these days, of course, is that many people do want to become memes. The meme is the dream. And sure, there are the fame-hungry wannabe influencers who are all now racing to make their fetch happen. But there are also many skilled artists that do this too. It’s well-known by now that many, maybe even most, musicians are no longer seeking to make hit singles, but instead, viral TikTok hooks.

Jessa Crispin

’s The Culture We Deserve podcast recently had a good episode on this. Movies and TV too are scripting and filming in ways to become memes.

This must sound all very doomy. To make things more dire,

Erik Hoel

recently published a piece about how AI has already polluted the internet. I don’t doubt he’s right. But one glimmer of hope I have is in people’s insatiable need for prestige and status. An internet that’s been too AI-ified no longer has as much social value as one that is perceived to be teeming with real people.

The Dead Internet Theory says that most online people are already bots. A friend of mine has often told me that people already behave like bots, so the “real vs. bot” distinction doesn’t even matter that much anymore. Whether or not any of this is true, what’s more important is whether people believe this online botverse to be true. Perception is king. Why else would people buy followers? The purchasers can’t help but know that their following is fake, unless they ingest certain chemical compounds. But truth is not what matters. It’s what others believe that counts. And if we get to a point where we are all resigned to the likely fact that every like, comment, follower, subscriber, or even supportive email we and others get is not real, I hope we’d all just wean ourselves off the internet as a source of our identity and self-esteem.

Just imagine a dating app that’s known to be infested with bots. Any guy or girl who boasts about getting matches on that app would be tuned out or mocked.

Internet prestige is a funny thing. In the 90s and 2000s, there was barely any of it. Few things were more disgraceful than being some computer nerd who spent too much time in cyberspace. Then things totally flipped in the 2010s, where online was the frontline in everything, whether in politics, fashion, literature, or whatever. Everyone rushed into the cyber ether to stake the biggest territory possible. But since online space is infinite, one’s borders were determined by level of attention, not finite square footage, which explains why some of the worst and most cringeworthy online writing happened in this time. It’s no coincidence that much of the cancel-worthy Twitter activity all happened around 2012-2014.

Also, PSA: with Vice and other Millennial publications threatening to self-delete forever, make sure to save your favourite pieces as PDFs for posterity’s sake. That George Santayana quote.

I’m guessing that type of online culture peaked around 2020, mostly because we had nowhere else to be. Now, there are some signs of online exhaustion. Will AI ruin the internet once and for all, for our sake? Hopefully yes.

Go out more. Go to bars and try talking to strangers, just for the hell of it. Go to live shows and other local arts events. This past Saturday, I went to see Aces Wild, a series of one-person plays put on by the Spade Collective. They’re doing cool things and you should them check them out.

1. Her verdict was that she likes the show and what it was trying to do, but she does not like most of the characters.