Infrapink

joined 5 months ago
[–] Infrapink@thebrainbin.org -2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The whole point of the Internet has always been to spread memes.

Because the Internet is a communication medium, and communication is made of memes. I'm not joking. Words, language, music, and art are all memes. (The concept of memes is also a meme). Before the Internet, there was ARPAnet, email, IRC, and BBS boards; all about communication, and thus memes.

Before that, there was the phone network. Before that, the post office. Before that, books, pamphlets, and people telling stories down the pub or around the campfire. All memes.

In fact, this very post is made of memes. The previous sentence contains at least nine memes – the words In, fact, this, very, post, is, made, of, and memes. But there are more memes in there. The phrase in fact combines the words in and fact to make a new meme – in this case, when those two words combine, it asserts more forcefully that the overall statement is true. There's also the spaces between the words, which makes reading the sentence much easier. Yes, believe it or not, spaces between words is a meme. Before the 8th century AD, WORDSWEREWRITTENINALLCAPSWITHNOSPACESBETWEENTHEM. Alcuin of York, a scribe and poet at the court of Emperor Charlemagne, came up with the ideas of lowercase letters and spaces between words to make reading easier, and his ideas were so popular that they spread across most of Christendom. Those memes were so successful that people think of them as natural and obvious parts of (alphabetic) writing, but they aren't. They aren't even a millennium old.

Writing is another meme, going way back to the Stone Age, and it has evolved and developed into numerous other memes, such as the Roman alphabet (which I am using right now), Arabic script, Chinese characters, the Cyrillic alphabet, Brahmic script, Ge'ez alphabet, the Greek alphabet, Cherokee script, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and many others.

Asking for social media without memes is like asking for food without proteins, fats, or carbohydrates. It's like asking for sunlight without electromagnetic radiation.

[–] Infrapink@thebrainbin.org 1 points 1 week ago

“Whites” today now comprise literally every fair skinned ethnic background that isn’t east Asian. I shit you not, I think Hispanics who are fair skinned will be the next group subsumed into the white category

Funny story. Before the 1980s, Hispanic people were considered white. (Modern people praise I Love Lucy for including an "interracial" marriage, but people in the 1950s just saw a white couple). But since Hispanic people in America tend to be a bit culturally distinct from the ruling class, other white people wanted to be racist against them, and so the meme arose and spread that people of Spanish and Portuguese descent are a race distinct from all other people of European descent.

[–] Infrapink@thebrainbin.org 2 points 1 week ago

There's also ladies, which has been popular for a while. Chicas has some currency in places with large Hispanic populations.

We also had dames and broads in the 1930s, but those have fallen out of favour.