A friend told me a story recently about her son. He’s about 9 years old and doesn’t have much access to social media. One day this past fall, he came home from school and told his mom that kids there were saying “6-7.” He wanted to know what it meant. So she pulled out her phone and looked up an explainer video that tells, for those who have been similarly perplexed, a familiar story: A rapper named Skrilla said it on a song called “Doot Doot”; audio from the song started being used in TikToks about LaMelo Ball (who is 6-foot-7); some goofy kid yelled it at a high school basketball game, which became another TikTok; and it went from there, aided no doubt by the fact that six and seven are statistically quite likely to appear in that particular order.
“But what does it mean?” my friend’s son asked.
“Well,” she told him, “it doesn’t really mean anything.”
This did not go over well. He was so upset that he couldn’t get to sleep that night. The realization that this thing — this thing everyone was saying — could be meaningless genuinely rattled him. His heart and mind, still innocent of the internet, were simply unprepared for the possibility that it could do this to people.
My heart and mind are — respectfully — different, having been ravaged by decades of exposure to this stuff. But I had roughly the same experience learning about “6-7,” and like my friend’s son, I had a hard time shaking the discomfort. To me, what was unsettling about it is that it wasn’t all that unusual. It was just an extreme instance of something that happens all the time: People in general, and children in particular, are constantly repeating phrases and concepts they learn from their phones; typically they’re under the impression that what they’re saying means something. Because, no matter how inane, these phrases refer back to things that could be said to exist outside the phone: chopped uncs, rizzlers, gyats, things of this nature. That’s all real stuff — or real enough, anyway.
The “6-7” meme was revelatory because of the immense gap between its symbolic payload — essentially nonexistent — and its cultural penetration. It worked like tracer dye running through our information ecosystem, revealing its functions and dysfunctions. And the strange thing about this meme, or slang, or whatever you want to call it, is that our shared world of people, places, things and events didn’t factor into it. It simply flowed out from social media platforms into that world — with an extraordinary degree of success, and for no real reason at all, a secret message to us from the world within the phone.
Or perhaps a demonstration of force: This is how things are going to go from now on.
Maybe a decade ago, it still felt as if there were a wild expanse within your phone, a portal to a vast and sometimes terrifying alternate dimension. If the sensation resembled anything in the real world, it was vertigo: There was a bottomless pit in the palm of your hand. And since the mass isolation of the pandemic, that feeling has been replaced by a growing sense of claustrophobia. You can leave it in the other room if you want, but your phone still closes in on you. Even if you spend very little time online, there’s little you can do outside the logic of the internet. It is a force that warps our reality, a cosmic background noise that is everywhere and nowhere — something inhuman that’s subtly reshaping our language, our politics, even our minds.
Here’s something that’s almost too obvious to say: Most of what people do on social media is copy other people. This is particularly apparent if you flip over to a highly algorithmic feed — “For You” on X; Instagram Reels; the entirety of TikTok. Catchy phrases, joke formats, funny audio clips — these repeat over and over and over again. This is obvious to the point of being tautological: The algorithm surfaces what people seem to like; memes are memes only because people like them. And that’s all true, but it also obscures something about their production and maintenance. This work is done by hordes of people who are jostling to be heard. To them the meme is not just an idea, or (more likely) a joke, but also a tool — one that offers legibility and reach, a way to cut through the noise. They are not simply creating it; they are in a symbiotic relationship with it — or possibly a parasitic one.
In a 2021 survey, Pew Research Center showed that lurkers on Twitter outnumbered the posting class by enormous margins; even among users who did post, just 25 percent of accounts generated nearly all the activity on the platform. The same seemed to hold true on TikTok, according to another Pew report from 2024. One-third of American adults said they used the app, but among them only 40 percent had ever posted a video publicly. The top quartile of adult users produced 98 percent of the publicly available content on the platform — a ratio nearly identical to what Pew discovered on Twitter.
Pew may have found an iron law of social media use, a new mathematical constant, one that’s essential to understanding the dynamics of these platforms. The culture of any given network is generated by a small minority of people with some trait (or, more likely, deficiency) that makes them desire this novel form of social competition more than others. And one way to ensure you’ll at least be in the conversation is to stay legible — to talk about what others are talking about, or at least to speak how they’re speaking. So these people subordinate themselves to the logic of the platform, and reshape their thoughts to suit it, in the process pushing these memes, slang, whatever, up the food chain.
In this sense, the success of any given word or phrase is less interesting than the success of internet slang as a whole. The incentive structure of the platforms can now produce new units of culture practically without the need for human will, or more precisely by warping our will to suit its needs. The slang term itself is but a grain of sand around which copycat posting behavior collects, until it becomes large enough to pass through to the offline world. It’s just like how slang used to work, only completely different — shaped not by the needs or wants of a particular scene, place or subculture, but by the incentives and logic of scaled digital networks.
If you haven’t become addicted to a social media platform, you may not be aware of what, exactly, goes on inside the head of someone hunched over a phone. It’s not clear that addicts are aware of it either. Jonah Weiner, a contributing writer for this magazine, wrote about this phenomenon on Substack, in a way I found alarmingly accurate. He described the experience of thinking in tweets, rather than normal thoughts, even when he was far from his phone, in this case washing the dishes and finding he was low on soap. His first thought was to water it down to make the bottle last longer. But then, everything that followed was deranged by the internet. Instead of having normal thoughts, Weiner wrote, “Thanks to Twitter, I’d think something exponentially more inane and annoying, such as, ‘The masculine urge to water down the dish soap … ’ or ‘The two genders [picture of brand-new dish soap vs. picture of old diluted dish soap].’” It goes on from there: “Men will dilute the last millimeter of dish soap rather than go to therapy”; “No but the way I just diluted the dish soap.”
Every one of these joke structures is immediately recognizable to anyone who has spent a lot of time on X: What Weiner is describing is the imitative behavior that sustains and nurtures memes. But more important, he’s describing what this behavior requires, which is the hijacking of your frontal lobe by the incentives of the platform. Disappear into your phone for long enough, and your phone will disappear into you, putting you to work for the platforms even in your downtime. People have taken to calling this “brain rot,” which isn’t a bad term for it at all, not just because phone slang is stupid and annoying — though it is — but because it really does rework your gray matter.
In 2024, “brain rot” was selected as the Word of the Year by Oxford University Press, beating out other meme words like “lore,” “demure” and “slop.” Last year, it was “rage bait” — another term for another kind of online distraction — which beat out “aura farming,” another meme. In 2023, it was “rizz,” which beat out “beige flag” — something from TikTok. Since 2021’s “vax,” Oxford has consistently given the W.O.T.Y. to some sort of internet meme. Maybe it’s because the public votes on it, but maybe it’s because this is what our culture produces now. It almost seems like a direct challenge to the idea that language evolves to describe ever more of our world. What if it can instead degrade, or become caught in the gears of a more powerful meaning-making engine?
Around the time that “6-7” was corrupting our youth, something happened that I hadn’t seen happen in a long time: A magazine article went viral. This used to happen a lot, before Elon Musk acquired Twitter and made it more difficult to share links, further trapping its users in its increasingly right-wing hothouse. But this article seemed to speak to a culturewide anxiety — one shared even, or especially, by the platform’s power users. It was about something called gooning.
You should probably read the article for yourself if you haven’t, as it will prevent me from having to describe in great detail what gooning is. (In short: It is a subculture of pornography addicts who masturbate for hours on end, often while livestreaming footage of themselves to other pornography addicts.) Practitioners refer to the spaces where they do this as “gooncaves” — a particularly evocative term, not just because of the damp darkness it conjures, but also because it calls to mind the famous cave from the other terminus of Western civilization, the allegorical one. As in Plato’s cave, in the gooncave reality is replaced by representation, which in turn supplants reality for its prisoners. And just as in the allegory, even the knowledge of the outside world does not diminish the preference for the cave. One of the “gooners” confesses to the article’s author, Daniel Kolitz, that his fear of the complexity of human sexual encounters is why he turned pornography into the direct object of his sexuality. It’s a bit like becoming addicted to a smoking-cessation aid — but then again, that’s something a lot of people do now, too.
In fact, Kolitz’s point is that whether we’re gooners or not — I’d like to believe that most of us aren’t — we’re all doing something like this, all the time: wasting hours watching internet videos, becoming obsessed with microcelebrities and replacing real relationships with these synthetic substitutes. “Does any of this sound familiar?” Kolitz asks. “Do you maybe know some folks who get up to stuff like this?”
It’s not hard to find other online subcultures with some of these hallmarks, that misdirect our impulses into a downward spiral: Twitch, which turns an interest in playing video games into the experience of watching someone else play video games; the podcast fan subreddit that inevitably turns on the hosts of the podcast. And then there are others that are almost entirely consonant with gooning, in their total inversion of means and ends. Think of a phenomenon like “looksmaxxing,” in which men — inspired by an incel-message-board memeplex — alter their bodies, sometimes violently, in pursuit of a hyperspecific set of ratios thought to be most attractive. The foremost practitioner, a livestreamer known as Clavicular, has said he may have sterilized himself by taking testosterone, which would be a slightly comical outcome for someone so singularly interested in how he is perceived by the opposite sex. But of course the real object of his desire is something else, something alien and hidden within the works of the platforms — and in his virality, he has at last become worthy of its love.
But you, too, may be gooning reality just by using your phone. Consider that TikTok is arguably the main vector for all youth culture, and anyone curious enough to keep up with it will get whatever it doles out. And even if you think you aren’t keeping up with it, you may be anyway. My peers in the media like to joke that TikTok is the assigning editor of most trend pieces, so even if you’re reading the newspaper, your view of contemporary culture will be shaped by it, by the few entrepreneurial types who tend to its perpetual stew of memes. It is at once a paper-thin phantasmagoria and basically the only thing we get. Whether we like it or not, we are all in the cave now. Perhaps that’s all that’s left.
One of the big fears about artificial intelligence is that as it digests the entire corpus of human culture, it will eventually surpass us, revealing the hidden logic that guides our creative output, or at least prove more economical in comparison, good enough, if hard to control — infinite monkeys on typewriters, grinding away at no marginal cost. The concern is that we’ll lose some essential human quality to the culture we consume, that it would be stolen from us, either by robots more clever than we are or executives who never cared about culture anyway. But hasn’t something like that already happened?
Many memes we consider authorless really have a human origin point that has been lost under layers of accretion and mutation. But what’s further fascinating about “6-7” is it had no author. Skrilla, for his part, claims to have recorded “Doot Doot” in 10 minutes immediately after crashing his car, and seems to have been pulling in sonic references almost at random. The song interpolates music for children (“Baby Shark”) and rap songs that came out when Skrilla was a child (“White Tee,” “A Bay Bay”) in free associative fashion, which also seems to be how Skrilla wound up saying “6-7” — it’s something a different Philadelphia rapper often ad-libs on his songs, in reference to his street (67th), which is all the way across town from Skrilla’s neighborhood. Skrilla doesn’t like to give straight answers about why he said it, but would it matter if he did? The people making edits to the song on TikTok were referencing LaMelo Ball; the kid at the basketball game was referencing the TikToks. Whoever wrote it in fresh snow on my Subaru Forester back in December was referencing all of this, I guess. No matter where you look for a human author, you can’t find one.
Had there been one, though, I’d love to shake his hand. Because there’s nothing stupid or inane about “6-7”; on the contrary, there’s something ingenious about making a meaningless inside joke out of two consecutive integers, at least if your goal is to see how far it can spread among 12-year-olds. It’s too weird for a human intelligence to have come up with. Instead it was conjured into being by something else, some entity we’ve created by disappearing into our phones for several hours a day.
Maybe we could live peacefully with such an entity were its influence confined to the realm of jokes, slang and pop culture. But it seems capable of influencing just about everything, even the government of the most powerful country in the world.
It’s no secret that the Trump administration adores its memes. Staffers have repeatedly made headlines with their gleefully nasty deployment of them. What’s most striking is how fluent they appear to be, and how widespread the habit is. Here’s the Energy Department posting Simpsons memes native to X; here’s the Labor Department making sly references to QAnon; here’s the gutted Education Department posting a Franklin the Turtle meme about its own uselessness. But no agency has been willing to demonstrate its online bona fides quite like the Department of Homeland Security, which repeatedly makes posts drenched in imagery borrowed from the online right. Gigachad (a meme from 4chan), Agartha (an absurd joke about an Aryan paradise beneath Earth’s crust), trapping people in crystals (something from a video game) — all of it can be found on the social account of the law enforcement agency created to prevent the next Sept. 11.
This sensibility also flows into a $100 million recruitment effort for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, targeting people in right-wing spaces. According to The Washington Post, the digital recruitment ads are aimed at U.F.C. and NASCAR fans, conservative podcast listeners, people interested in guns and “tactical gear.” On one hand, using data like this is a perfectly sensible way of recruiting or running any sort of ad campaign in 2026. On the other, it seems guaranteed to bring in ideologically selected recruits, plucked from niche online communities and summoned by winking right-wing imagery. Surely a law enforcement agency recruiting in this fashion might also find itself operating in ways consistent with the memes — “America After 100 Million Deportations,” as one infamous D.H.S. post went — and counter to most Americans’ sense of fair play. But these are the risks of replacing democratic feedback mechanisms with the pleasures of the cave.
With so much of our world being so rapidly reshaped for such stupid reasons, it’s hard not to feel as if we’re living in one of the canonical A.I. doom scenarios without even noticing it. I’m thinking about the “paper clip maximizer,” a thought experiment laid out in the early 2000s by the philosopher Nick Bostrom. In Bostrom’s scenario, an advanced A.I. tasked with making paper clips is unleashed into the real world without proper guardrails, prompting it to use up all available resources to meet its lone objective, possibly even deciding to turn us into paper clips. It’s a parable in which slightly miscalibrated incentives lead to unimaginable destruction and catastrophe, as everything is reworked to fit the needs of the machine.
And this is — not to sound too dire — more or less what happened to everything since the advent of social media. It took only about a decade, but now, every day, our phones churn out these paper clips. “Lowkenuinely,” “coastal grandma,” “6-7” — paper clips. That thing about the Roman Empire from a few years back? Paper clip. Small, disposable, extruded and shaped to fit the needs of the platform that spits them out. You can unfold them, try to twist them into new shapes, but they never quite lose their old form. Of course you can pop ’em right back where they came from — and they ought to work. Hell, if you’re lucky, sometimes two more come out.
This is the informational ecosystem we’ve made, without really intending to: one that has reshaped all of culture by privileging the outlook of those who bend their will to the masses; one powerful enough to make a whole generation of kids shout random numbers for a few months; one whose totality is impossible to take in because little can be said to exist outside of it. Everything and everyone is plugged into it so completely that we can’t know if it was a good idea or not.
But it’s fun — everyone’s having fun. And in the end, that’s what’s really important. Right?
Willy Staley is a story editor for the magazine. He last wrote about the re-creation of a Philadelphia skate spot in Sweden.
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