Nonsense/acc: Why ‘chronically online’ memes will destroy the internet

There’s a genre of post that’s been circulating online for a while now. It features a borderline-nonsensical meme, like… the lime-green album cover for Charli XCX’s Brat, modified to read: “97-year-old willy wonka immersive chocolate experience where oompa loompas still serve PUSSYINBIO the old-fashioned way but they start playing julie ragbeer.” Then, in the comments and quote tweets, the viewer is asked to imagine explaining the meme to “someone who isn’t chronically online”. Other times, the comments mourn the growing illegibility of “dying apps” like X, resulting in culture that will prove indecipherable to the archaeologists of the future.

The legibility of internet memes has declined all the way through the 2010s and the first half of the 2020s. Today, the content in our feeds is far removed from the formulaic rage comics and recurring characters – Pepe, Salad Fingers, Doge (RIP) – that seemed to dominate the meme landscape 10 or 15 years ago. Layers upon layers of references are stacked together in a single post, while the posts themselves fly by faster than ever in our feeds. To someone who isn’t “chronically online” a few dislocated images or words may trigger a flash of recognition – a member of the royal family, a beloved cartoon character – but their relationship with each other is impossible to unpick. Add the absurdist language of online culture and the impenetrable algorithms that decide what we see in our feeds, and it seems like all hope is lost when it comes to making sense of the internet.

How did this happen? When did our digital communication get so difficult to decode? And what do our impenetrable memes say about our desire (or lack of desire) to make and maintain relationships with other humans in 2024?

To be “chronically online” in the 2020s is a damning diagnosis and a point of pride at the same time. On the one hand, the label implies a degree of detachment from reality, a retreat into a post-truth fantasyland of algorithmically curated content and dopamine-fuelled distraction. On the other, it signals a basic literacy in internet memes (a dominant form of discourse in a world where everything is online) and a sense of belonging among the communities that surround them. 

Internet communities have worked this way for a long time. Since the earliest days of the World Wide Web, memes have been a way for users to signal their in-group. Caroline Busta, writer and co-founder of the podcast New Models, compares sharing these charged images to a mating call. “There’s a very human instinct to find one’s social group,” she says. “And this is a way of doing that online.” But as memes take an increasingly complex turn, the nature of these groups seems to be changing. With the addition of every ciphered phrase or not-quite-pop-culture reference, the barriers to entry get higher. Those who do want to maintain ‘membership’ need to be plugged in 24/7 to stay up to date with a rapidly evolving vernacular, an ever-accelerating news cycle, and whoever X has declared Main Character that day.

In this feverish ecosystem, a meme can bloom and wither over 24 hours. Willy Wonka? The 97-year-old NYC diner that still serves their Coke the old-fashioned way? These references, which dominated social media platforms just a couple of months ago, have long since rotted back into the earth. Far from growing the herd, today’s esoteric memes seem designed to keep new members out. This could seem like a symptom of an antisocial society, making a conscious choice to splinter off into smaller and smaller factions, secluded – rather than brought together – by the media we consume, and create, in the form of memes. As far back as 1964, however, the “father of media studies” Marshall McLuhan offered a different point of view.

Technology, McLuhan suggested, creates a “totally new human environment” that shapes how people interact, organise, and relate to the wider world. Could this explain the fracturing of online communities today? Were illegibility and alienation built into the structures and incentives of social media from the start?

Many kids in the UK of the 90s and 2000s ate dinner at around 6.30pm, purely because The Simpsons aired at 6pm. Families organised their evening routine around the cartoon, and kids could be confident that their friends had the same jokes and catchphrases rattling around their heads at school the next morning. Later in the evening, Coronation Street and Eastenders took over the living room. These soaps were watched on such a massive scale that during ad breaks, as the nation got up to put the kettle on, electricity providers had to brace against the sudden surge in demand and the local grid would sometimes trip, a phenomenon known as ‘TV pickup’. It was a golden era of what writer K Allado-McDowell calls broadcast media – narratives, produced by centralised studios and corporations, beamed into environments where “all participants experience[d] the same broadcast” simultaneously. Now, it feels like a relic from a lost age.

Alfie Bown, a lecturer in digital culture and editor of the essay collection Post Memes, was one of those kids whose dinner was organised around timetabled media like The Simpsons, and recalls the stories of power cuts that coincided with particularly compelling soap opera storylines. These phenomena “point to a world where people were sharing the same pattern of everyday life,” he says. Contrast that with today: “No two people are watching or doing the same thing at the same time any more.” In an age of on-demand streaming services and AI-powered personal feeds, we can consume what we want, where we want, when we want, and with whoever we want. As McLuhan predicted, our new technology has affected how humans organise and relate to one another, for better or for worse.

Arguably, there are some positive aspects to this new media landscape. In theory, we get to see more of what we like, and less of what we don’t. In theory, we’re pointed toward communities that share our niche obsessions, creating more opportunities for meaningful connection. But it often doesn’t feel that way. Instead of catching up over last night’s episode of the Simpsons, or making small talk about a soap opera plotline, we find ourselves listing the titles of shows we haven’t watched at each other, or disconnecting over videos we believed to be omnipresent, but which didn’t actually make it beyond the bounds of our content bubble. At its worst, Bown adds, this atomisation could lead to the erosion of all common ground: “We become communities of 10, and then five, and eventually a community of one.”

“Memes are us crying out for some sense of social cohesion and community in a fragmented world” – Alfie Bown

Against this backdrop, today’s memes could be interpreted as “an attempt to reinscribe some of that collectivity” that we’ve lost, he suggests – a method to bridge the gaps in space and time that have separated us since the demise of broadcast media, which plays on the decentralised, hyper-accelerated aesthetics of the networks that replaced it. “The [memes] are us crying out for some sense of social cohesion and community in a fragmented world.” But how effective can this call for community be when it’s ultimately based on exclusionary aesthetics, which aim to divide and classify users – the shrinking population of people who get the reference, vs. those who don’t – rather than bring them together in a unified whole? (See also: the rise of political compass memes, a very literal illustration of this desire to categorise.) Sharing a picture of a “leg-related fetish respectability diagram” that’s been edited to include an illustration of Saddam Hussein’s hiding place from a BBC report in 2003 doesn’t seem like the best way to diversify your friend group.

That said, maybe the contents of a meme don’t necessarily have to make sense. Often it’s not the literal meaning, but an intangible “vibe” – a “shape and feeling” – that users grab onto as the meme whistles past in the endless scroll. Maybe you don’t fully get the meaning of a post that shows Shakira staggering through a sparkly pink cave, labelled: “kate middleton in trisha paytas womb.” Or you might not recognise the specific reference a user is making when they talk about “GALVANIZED SQUARE STEEL and ECO-FRIENDLY VENEERS”. But there’s something in the grammar of these posts that tells you there’s something there to get. In a recent essay for Document, Busta describes this intuition as a “survival skill” we’ve evolved to navigate our chronically online lives.

It helps, of course, that the niche references and absurd linguistic mutations are typically anchored around an icon of the dying mainstream, whether that’s a pop star, a Simpsons character, or a member of the British royal family. These grab our attention as we scroll, but also act as a kind of “public commons,” says Busta. “You can have super schizzed-out memes, but […] you need this bedrock in order to create interesting architecture on top of it.” Plus, there’s a “thrill” in seeing how far you can push these common reference points until they break. “If you push something that was already pretty abstracted, it would be less rich than pushing something which is so embedded in the cultural imaginary.”

The question remains, though: what do we do with the illegible social networks we’re left with once all our shared reference points are contorted and recontextualised beyond recognition? Log off for good? K Allado McDowell offers one alternative path. A new form of media – ‘neural media’, or media that “senses back”– has been evolving since the introduction of algorithmic social feeds in the 2010s, and has recently manifested in the likes of AI chatbots and text-to-image generators. A whole new landscape is emerging that enables a two-way exchange between the viewer and media itself. Already, we can see people exiting the communal spaces of social media to enter into this dialogue, via apps like ChatGPT, Midjourney, or Suno.

“What we see as splintering and an inability to coordinate [on social media] needs to be tempered by the knowledge that all our activity is currently training large language models,” suggests Busta, following this line of thought. “[These] are going to be coordinating us on a higher level [and] allowing us to think in a different context.” We can’t know what this will look like yet, of course – how newly-emerging tech might change our perception of reality, or what fresh “survival skills” we might need – but the sooner we figure it out, “the better positioned we’ll be to flourish”.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a group of controversial philosophers, grouped around the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) at Warwick University, popularised a loose set of philosophical ideas that would come to be known as Accelerationism. This describes a process by which technological, political, social and cultural changes, generally propelled by unbridled capitalism, escalate to a point of structural collapse and “institutional paralysis”. In this process, capitalism intensifies and destroys itself at the same time. The two processes become essentially indistinguishable. Today, the same terms are used to describe the destructive and transcendental potential of AI. Could the same also be said for digital communication? 

Scrolling through reams of near-gibberish on X, TikTok, and Meta, it certainly feels like the bloated body of the memosphere is growing and eating itself at the same time. “Memes are pushing systems to the point where they’re just completely unusable,” Busta agrees. “The internet’s falling apart.” Where will this lead us? If the Accelerationist model is to be believed, we’re headed for a moment of singularity, or collapse. And what then? In part, the self-destruction of social networks could lead us back to older forms, like the top-down, human-curated channels of the broadcast era. In part, it would propel us into the future, toward new ways of understanding the world and organising ourselves within it, guided by forms of media that lie just beyond our comprehension. Are we saying that “schizzed-out” Willy Wonka memes could be the key that unlocks the door to what comes next? Sure, why not.