Being a writer and all I enjoy keeping up on memes but pickings have become slim. Can’t find any lists of verbal memes among those being shared and ranked. Almost all involve captioned photos of white people or domestic animals. Every one is either offensive, stupid, or vapid, offered up as clickbait by losers looking for immorvirality, so to speak. Skip over to meme.com or reddit to see what I mean. It’s pretty forgettable stuff. I’m sure some of them are the products of “intelligent” agents. More about that later.
Internet memes are a far cry from the word’s original coinage by biologist Richard Dawkins in 1979: an elemental unit of linguistic exchange and reproduction, spread from person to person in a culture through imitation, analogous to biological genes. Before that, the field of mimetics, (from the Greek word Mimesis (μίμησις)), has long studied the representation of aspects of the real world, especially human actions as depicted in literature and art. It’s been a philosophical discipline since the Greeks invented it. I’m no Mimnist, but I’m sure Internet memes would give the likes of Aristotle conniptions.
Unsurprisingly, for everything in the culture eventually gets gamified, we now have the Meme of the Year. It comes courtesy of the “Shorty Awards,” assembled by polling social media. These of course are visual internet memes that turn out to be pretty low-octane and not even quasi-philosophical. Look at this crap.
Before you call me a purist or a snob I want you to know that stupid memes do get stuck in my head. One comes to mind whenever I hear the word “cheeseburger.” I suppress a giggle, remembering this classic sketch from season 3 of SNL (original cast plus guest host Kevin Klein), where nobody at the Olympia Diner is allowed to order anything other than “chizzbugger, Pepsi, cheeps.” Click to see if you giggle too.
But I digress. For me, the best memes are verbal and pithy — just a word or two. Some are captured in words-of-the-year lists from sources like Oxford, Cambridge, Merriam-Webster, dictionary.com for English words. Some are compound words. Here are some picks for 2025:
| Source | Oxford | Cambridge | dictionary.com | Merriam-Webster |
| Word | rage bait | parasocial | 67 | Slop |
These pronouncements come from self-styled authorities, but given they’re crowdsourced they point to trends in online culture. Still, 67 is a stupid kid meme with no fixed meaning. Rage bait‘s descriptive of a class of utterances that’s become a thing. The two that resonate with me are, of course, slop but also one I hadn’t heard of, parasocial. Cambridge notes:
Lookups of parasocial on the Cambridge Dictionary spiked on June 30, 2025, when the YouTube streamer IShowSpeed blocked a fan who identified as his “number 1 parasocial” … By September of 2025, the Cambridge Dictionary definition of parasocial was updated to include the possibility of a relationship with an artificial intelligence.
Jeez. Is this what it takes to launch a meaningful meme? Then what happened?
My favorite former word of the year is enshittification, (also known as platform decay), popularized by tech critic Corey Doctorow in 2022. It means deliberate degradation of a product or service by its provider, something that used to be called planned obsolescence, but now covers much more ground.
Let me nominate a similarly-constituted word: Mamdanification — adeptly deploying social media to support progressive agendas in electoral races around the country. Wikipedia says it was coined in January 2026 by Jack Stanton in an article for the Orlando Times that defines Mamdanification as “a political phenomenon defined by visual populism, high-engagement digital media, anti-establishment rhetoric, and progressive platforms centered on affordability.” This shows a person can become a meme.
A nascent GOTV political movement boasting 800 members calls itself Mamdanification. It asks members to campaign for local candidates, saying “Vote together, and swing elections” . Several South Asian and Middle Eastern political candidates have started making short Mamdani-style video clips. I’m not sure they’ll be able to charm voters as much as Zohran‘s have. It’s his twinkly eyes and big, friendly smile, I think.
The two -fication words somehow resonate. While one describes corporate conduct and the other political movements, they both gain traction via social media and other forms of online engagement: Enshittification highlights how high tech interests keep their customers dependent on their agendas; Progressive movements mamdanify to make people aware of how the system thwarts their desires for change.
Whether or not we mamdanify, let’s face up to it, we’ve done some enshittification ourselves. Since the invention of private property human beings have enshittified the natural environment, turning farmland into energy farms, wetlands into malls, woodlands into subdivisions, and parks into parking lots, starting well before there was concrete and asphalt. Goods and services mother nature provides to flora and fauna become diminished wherever human beings plop themselves down. From their point of view management — i.e. us — has let them down.
Regardless, we too struggle against pollution and grandiosity, both in real life and virtually on our screens. Methinks we need a word for how artificial intelligence is being deployed that’s a little more pointed than enshittification — a portmanteau for the intellectual property theft, job usurpation, mass surveillance, social distancing, brain rot, and environmental exploitation that AI has occasioned under capitalism.
I’ve already come up with “artificial stupidity.” What are your candidates?
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