The Meme Is Over

The latest latest internet craze might be the last. At least, it should be according to Adrian Chen. In “Death to the Internet” on Gawker, Chen says the era of the web sensation has passed and the media should stop encouraging it. “It’s time for journalists to retire this dumb pop cultural crutch. Every goddamn thing that happens on the internet is not an internet craze.”

To illustrate her point, Chen points to horsemaning, an “internet craze” of fake decapitations that had Hoda and Kathy Lee laughing their heads off within three days of its creation by Buzzfeed (who’d engineered the meme, it seems, for that very purpose). “[As] of their segment, the horsemaning ‘craze’ was composed of a handful of BuzzFeed posts, a Facebook page with a few hundred likes, and a few desultory blog posts from other sites. If this is an internet craze, then anything that happens on the internet could be.”

Maybe Chen is right, but have you seen this video yet? Seriously? It’s amazing! There’s a cat and it’s eating all these pancakes, it’s crazy.

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 — Benjamin Samuel is the Online Editor of Electric Literature. He’s been Rickrolled once or twice.