There’s always this duality of human culture at play where clever and funny people are doing something new, whether it’s a new platform, a new medium, or new ways of speaking or joking around.

But sooner or later, everyone else shows up and starts doing it badly. People look at the rise and fall of the new thing and describe a “trend” that has died, and the whole process of trying to find out what the cool people are doing starts all over again. Influencers exist, but not in the self-aware way some of them have tried to claim. We chase social cache wherever it leads us, as social creatures.

On the internet, this happens in a really swingy way, slowly then all at once, owing largely to the nature of this form of media. Instead of movements, we began to talk about things in terms of pathogens. “Virality” and memes. Töpffer taught us to put funny words on pictures hundreds of years ago, what we call memes just adapted to the medium.

I think the speed at which new memes (in the Dawkins sense) are new developing and adapting is increasing in an interesting but startling way; is there a hard limit on how compelling an idea (trend) can be? Is there a sweet candy on the mountain top, or is it a tide pod?

Sorry to write a wall of extemporaneous blather at you, just got me thinking.