XVII. Gamers, Memes, and the Ascension of Extremely Online Brains
The next phase of civilization was not philosophical enlightenment.
It was memes.
Images acquired captions, captions acquired mutation, and mutation acquired the velocity of a shopping cart full of fireworks rolling downhill.
Gamers shouted across headsets with the sincerity of medieval warlords and the vocabulary of caffeinated raccoons.
Forums built tribes, clans, fandoms, and one million opinions about whether a banana taped to a sword counts as balance.
Everything became irony until irony became sincerity in a fake mustache and then circled back around to being sad.
Meanwhile someone, somewhere, was always making a tier list that would ruin Thanksgiving.
A dancing hamster could unify millions.
A typo could become doctrine.
The internet had stopped being a place and become a weather system.