“What do you meme?”

I was thinking about how everyone says we all have groupthink, but what about group talk or group speak—where we all sound the same? And I’m not talking about ChatGPT; it’s more like therapy-speak meets social-justice-speak, where the same slogans and words get repeated in an ever-expanding bubble where everyone thinks they’re clever and saying the right thing, but actually they just sound like everyone else.

It’s not exactly semantic satiation (but it's close), which is the psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds, like repeating a word so much it starts sounding like gibberish. It’s more like a meme that loses its initial meaning down the line through endless repetition and remixing: it becomes Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra and simulation. He argued that in postmodern culture, signs and symbols instead start referring only to themselves. This is sort of what’s happening to us and the slogans and catch phrases we use. The same thing happens with our cultural language. Take hipster. It once meant a silly Williamsburg moustache, transparent wayfarers, a buttoned-up lumberjack shirt, a microbrewery, and a fixie bike. Over time, it came to mean almost anyone, until it meant nothing at all. The word had lost all meaning entirely. I don’t see this bubble bursting any time soon.

Now I am become Meme, the destroyer of words.