this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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Taking memes seriously and arguing about them on the internet is inherently problematic.
Allow me to elaborate.
I love taking memes seriously and arguing about them on the internet. Of all the myriad topics available for argument, art is my favorite, especially trivial art. The lower the stakes of the topic at hand, the easier it is to wax into the soaring heights of rhetoric for rhetoric's sake, and memes are the lowest-possible stakes art in the modern era. Untethered from the stakes of real life, meme arguments become less like a real fight and more a sparring match.
Like a martial art divorced from its original purpose of life-and-death struggle and fitted into a ceremonial safety harness, argument in the cocoon of low-stakes banter becomes increasingly stylized. Performances are evaluated not by the merits of the old way, but by the customs and traditions of the new way. Correctness in the primary qualia of the form gradually gives way, and is in time completely subsumed by, correctness in the self-referential and ever-increasing secondary qualia of the form's now-sanitized version, and soon even those secondary qualia are indistinguishable in the flood of tertiary and n-ary qualia. In-group references proliferate and metastasize into subgenres and become the bases by which future arguments are judged in their turn. Conversation becomes an impenetrable wall of tangled device and argument, each new argument a new body accreted into the mass of metadiscourse that slowly, but inexorably, drives meaningful information exchange asymptotically to zero.
Into this chaos steps the neophyte, the next generation, the young human learning something about the world for the first time. They don't know the devices, the references, the tools and style of this esoteric mode of argument. And why should they? Look into the deepest recesses of the deepest niches of the internet and tell me truly that you understand them at a glance. I think no mortal can. Where, then, can the neophyte find purchase, a single foothold in the cliff face of hubris before them? Must they slowly, arduously, with great pain and error, unravel each literal Gordian knot themselves? Must every human peel every onion, one layer at a time, with tears and suffering?
We must not heed the siren song of trivial argument. Each joke, each metameme, each niche reference is a caltrop in the path of future generations. And when an argument is impossible to understand, it is impossible to learn its significance. In other words, they start to take you seriously because they don't understand you, and taking nonsense seriously makes you dumber. Arguing about memes on the internet makes us dumber.
Is this really the world we want?
Or, because I can't decide which thunderous closer I like better,
Won't somebody think of the children?