Welcome to Extra Garbage Day! These Thursday issues are typically paywalled interviews with people I think are on the forefront of tech and web culture.
On Monday, I wrote about the confusing layers of Gen Z nostalgia that led to a viral tweet about the soft grunge Tumblr subculture. In that post, I used the term "nostalgia onion" to describe the meta-contextual way that Gen Z internet users are expressing a longing for the past through various memes and internet trends. When a Twitter user in 2021 shares a photo from 2020 of an Instagram model cosplaying as a Tumblr model from 2014 cosplaying as a teenager from the 90s, it doesn't really diminish anything that's happening. Sure, it's as funny (and confusing), but, if anything, it just adds more complexity to the whole interaction.
A Gen Z TikToker, at height of the pandemic, wistfully flicking through cottagecore videos during their college Zoom class doesn't care if cottagecore is based on a fictitious (and likely racist) depiction of rural living. The use of an artificial aesthetic, in many ways, allows them to more specifically describe what it is that they're longing for. "I don't want student loans or have to wear a facemask when I go to the supermarket! I want to eat soup in a small hut and go for leisurely bike rides in the spring, god damnit!"
In many ways, Gen Z is the first real generation to have no memories of a world that didn't allow seamless and immediate visual communication. What I mean is, as a millennial, I didn't get my first cellphone until I was 14 and I didn't get my first smartphone until I was in college. I lived two thirds of my life without the ability to instantly message someone a picture or a video. I didn't even really have the ability to express myself with emojis, which used to be called emoticons and only lived inside of desktop computers, until I was a teenager.
But for Gen Z, they've pretty much always lived in a world of images and videos. They can communicate completely visually. And this is having a fascinating effect on how Gen Z uses memes.
Millennials understand viral content as trends. One of us shares a wojak, others start using it too. And, along the way, the memes get remixed and changed and the natural iterative process of the internet swings into effect. But for younger internet users, memes seem to be evolving beyond simple trends and are now turning into something more complex: their own visual languages.
“The way we communicate is filtered through more and more layers of secondary sources,” Adam Bumas, a former Know Your Meme researcher and current analyst for the site’s online magazine, Meme Insider, told me this week. “The way we both think about earlier periods that we lived in and that we didn't live in — because a lot of the people sharing [this content] were either were babies or not even born yet — is going to be done through memes.”
Bumas said he's on the cusp of both a millennial and Gen Z which he said gave him a good idea of how different both generations are about the internet culture they participate in. And, according to Bumas, this weird mix of nostalgia, absurdism, and visual remixing is only getting weird and more obtuse. He points to memes about Jimmy Neutron’s Carl Wheezer as an example of how this is evolving. I mean, to his point, what the fuck even is this?
(Though, this is actually how I learned how to set-up the Garbage Day Discord.)
“The ultimate expression of what I think is going to happen with memes going forward is Jimmy Neutron,” Bumas said. “It definitely has a really sizable meme presence, but I would say it's never coalesced around a single thing that we would define as a meme. Instead, it’s been, kind of, a reconstruction of the in-joke in someways.”
Bumas said that Jimmy Neutron hasn’t really produced specific memes, per se, especially compared to other shows of that era, like Spongebob Squarepants. But instead, Jimmy Neutron functions as a sort of visual language for Gen Z internet users. And he sees this trend happening with all kinds of memes.
“Taking things from 20-ish years ago that are — that were at the time — universally regarded as worthless and dumb and stupid and bad,” he said. “And using those things for memes in a way that makes them feel like they have greater value.”
The best example of this Gen Z-memes-as-language idea is probably r/PrequelMemes. It’s a subreddit dedicated to the Star Wars prequel trilogy. It launched in 2016, but it didn’t really breakthrough into the online mainstream until 2017, when it declared war on a subreddit for memes about the Star Wars sequels (r/SequelMemes, duh).
In the four years since, the subreddit has ballooned to almost 2 million subscribers and birthed a galaxy of similar subreddits, like r/raimimemes, a subreddit dedicated to the films of director Sam Raimi, but, most often, Raimi’s Spider-Man films.
These subreddits, which seem to be overwhelmingly frequented by straight male-identifying Gen Z boys and men, are a really interesting departure from millennial meme culture. Gen Z don’t seem to find anything embarrassing about calling a meme and a meme, nor are they shy about loudly saying that they enjoy them as memes. Even at the peak of something like rage comics, millennials always seemed very self-conscious about genuinely admitting they liked memes, let alone ones that identified as such.
To give you a sense of how sprawling the r/[blank]memes world is, here’s a list of the subreddits connected to just r/raimimemes.
r/PrequelMemes, and the communities like it, aren’t just subreddits. They feel like language. They pull intellectual properties apart completely and then reconstruct them in ways that both rely on the context of the original movie, but also have nothing to do with it. At this point, there isn’t a single frame from the Star Wars prequels (and the films’ DVD bonus features) that hasn’t been turned into some kind of viral content.
Bumas actually compares all of this to Shrek, which, off the back of the movie's 20th anniversary this year, was subject to a bevy of pieces about its decades-long journey from children’s film to surreal meme to misunderstood masterpiece. Older critics that scratched their heads at the film's weirdly pervasive legacy couldn't seem to understand that yes, Shrek is a movie franchise, and, yes, Shrek is a meme, too, but, also, Shrek is an entire form of online expression. Explaining why the green ogre also means Smash Mouth's "All Star" is like trying to explain why the letters "gh" in English can be pronounced "fuh" at the end of a word, as in "laugh," or "guh" at the front of a word, as in "ghost". The answer is history, probably, but more simply, because it just does.
"Memes used to be just one image and text (to drastically over-generalize) and, now, more and more memes depict discourse and conversation. For me, the big bellwether was, a few years ago, the twin vanguards of the American Chopper argument and the galaxy brain," Bumas said. "I think all this shows that things are developing a greater degree of sophistication in both people's tastes and people's ability."
I mean, once again, what even is this?
If you’ve been forwarded this email, welcome! You can check out a full list of the previous Extra Garbage Days here. And here’s a short list of who I’ve interviewed recently:
The band glass beach
Apagão da Twitch, a group of Brazilian streamers striking against Twitch
Brennan Williams, WWE wrestler and VTuber
DinoTendies, the infamous chef of 4chan
A guy who lied about creating the Chad meme
Mike Benner, the guy behind the Worst Tweet Ever Championship
And, lastly, here’s a good tweet about memes and language.
***Typos in this email aren’t on purpose, but sometimes they happen***
