The Meme Fossil Record

Content sometimes dreams about itself

Last weekend, someone we were hanging out with mentioned Hawk Tuah, the meme that refuses to die, and my wife asked, “what’s that?”—revealing that she, enviably, had somehow missed the whole thing. She had no idea what it was. A day or two prior, while sending a text, I’d noticed that iMessage tried to correct “today” to “tuah,” suggesting that the meme has been fully integrated into the collective unconscious as well as the marshy information sediment that serves as a base layer of our culture, even if it’s still reaching new people. Please trust that I never expected to write a word about Hawk Tuah but, six months later (!), I’m morbidly fascinated by its longevity, as illustrated by these two anecdotes. Back in June, when the meme first went viral, many of us waited for it to fade away after the usual 4-6 days, but for unknown reasons that many internet culture Substack writers tried in vain to pinpoint, it slowly gathered steam, through a series of escalations that aren’t worth listing here. Even a month into its run (and certainly by now), Hawk Tuah’s failure to vanish on schedule was a bad sign—evidence of a void or vacuum, the symptom of an unwell culture that can no longer properly metabolize its ephemera, and a possible death rattle for the ZIRP era, set against the backdrop of a material world that feels increasingly volatile and serious. Social media as we know it may be dying, but it is still leaching its poison into our soil as it sputters out. And here I am, making it worse.

In Robert McFarlane’s 2019 book about the Earth’s subterranean geology, Underland, he describes the emergence of a new kind of mineral called plastiglomerate: stone veined with plastic, formed by oceanic trash washing onto shores and melting into the sand, solidifying as it cools and congealing into a novel substance that blurs the distinction between natural and manmade (a distinction that is artificial itself, of course). “Plastiglomerate—neither natural nor fabricated, exactly—may represent the most direct conduit between our current consumer society and the far-flung future,” Rebecca Giggs wrote in a review of the book. “This is how shopping enters the fossil record.” My phone suggesting “tuah” as an autocorrection evoked this compression of plastic under high heat to form a new element of the natural world. Our information landscape is full of such transformations, with yesterday’s memes broken down into their component parts and then reassembled as the building blocks of our present and future self-expression. As this landscape is shaped increasingly by AI, all content will contain trace elements of everything that came before it. Humans have the gift of forgetting but the models don’t. Occasionally, that bygone content will reappear in recognizable form—iMessage telling me to type “tuah”—but more often it will be subliminal.

If a simplistic description of AI is computers learning to be more human, then the persistence of Hawk Tuah for six months and counting is the inverse: Humans learning how it feels to be a computer—forced to remember, unable to move on, endlessly consuming and regurgitating our past output in slightly different formats—a video here, a podcast there, a shitcoin, the first pitch at a Mets game, etc, etc. “Brain rot” was just announced as the 2024 Oxford Word of the Year. Why now, and not any of the last ten years or so? I prefer “brain poisoning,” as the preceding discussion should support—it feels more precise. We are not decaying online so much as being incrementally loaded up with heavy metals like tuna in the ocean over the course of a lifetime, carrying this accumulation inside of us wherever we go. The “slop” phenomenon suggests that AI could help to euthanize the version of the internet we’ve lived with for decades, turning social media and Google into the wastelands they’ve already started to feel like. At best, this will turn it all into something that runs in the background while we engage in more worthwhile pursuits, away from our screens. But even if that happens, most of us will still effectively be online. We already have too much internet inside of us.

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