Millennial X memes
We had memes first and all your memes are belong to us
As a geriatric millennial – an ‘81 baby on the cusp of Millennial and Gen X – I always feel a little slighted when Gen Z claim meme culture like it’s new. Now look, I’m not being an old fart here, but we are the original meme generation. WE WERE!
There, I said it. Come at me.
It was a glorious time in the late 90s and 00s when the internet was new and the 56k modem whirled into life to catapult us into a comparatively bare landscape restricted mainly to us nerdy folk. There were Yahoo chat rooms full of all the weird, IRC messaging, MySpace, X-rated images loading line by line, and forums – oh the forums! The internet forums where moderation was a suggestion and people were free to be their worst possible anonymous self (so, 4Chan and dark corners of Reddit) or partake in the most detailed back and forth argument about an insignificant detail of a movie over the course of weeks.
But there was beacon of light in memes galore!
We had basement cat
Ceiling cat
Monorail cat
The legendary I can haz cheezburger cat
Hover cat memes
And helpful cats
Okay, there were a lot of cats. But there was also,
LEEEEEROY JEEEENKINS
And OVER 9000
Chuck Norris everywhere
Pepe was born
And so many more magical moments!
LOL and ROFL (which launched the ASCII roflcopter) and O RLY and WTF and BRB and AFK was the language of online games and forums. It was the language of closeted and wonderful nerds and gamers everywhere.
And of course people were always happy to offer incredibly helpful links to invaluable resources, without anyone even needing to ask. Folk were good like that.
The point here, that I’m slowly getting to, is that memes are for everyone (but we started ‘em ;)). The gap between geriatric millennials like me and Gen Zers maybe missed out, but I feel like they’d still appreciate this most wonderful mode of expression. Let’s hope Gen Alpha keep them going.
Hit me up with your favourite memes!