That doesn't seem to be the thesis of the linked article at all. All it says is that memes with dated references are increasingly considered uncool. (I had little to no familiarity with the discussed memes, so it seems that the author's Internet bubble does not intersect much with mine--so I have no particular opinion on whether that thesis is well-supported.)

Dated memes are uncool, therefore memes are alive.

My kids had a good laugh when I saw Zero Wing in the Switch's Genesis emulator and made them watch the opening for the first time.

Some memes are timeless.

I believe you don't know the definition of a meme, if that is your take. They are by definition widespread, and can be pretty much any editable electronic media type.

Yeah, memes aren't necessarily those images with the top and bottom text in Impact font anymore, y'all.

Not every picture with text is a meme. To become a meme it requires a certain level of distribution.

The real ones are difficult to spot and may completely be lost among the wannabe-meme-pictures.

> To become a meme it requires a certain level of distribution.

By that logic, there's no such thing as a rare [joke/insult/song], because all real [jokes/insults/songs] are already popular by definition.

> The real ones are difficult to spot and may completely be lost

Hold up, that contradicts the sentence before it: Any meme that has that "certain level of distribution" shouldn't be so "difficult to spot."

By definition, a meme is memetic. It "self-replicates" from one person's mind to another's in an anologous way to how genes propagate.

A meme that fails to attain some sort of popularity doesn't meet the criteria. Like a gene that fails to propagate itself. An evolutionary dead-end.

Wasn't a gene that failed to propagate itself still a gene?

Shit. Yeah, I guess it is. Let me try again, rephrasing the grandparent comment:

> Not every picture with text is a meme. To become a meme it requires a certain level of distribution.

becomes

"Not every sequence of amino acids is a gene. To become a gene it requires a certain level of self-replication."

Okay, so that's still a bit shaky, but I what I'm trying to get at is that a "meme" is something that includes its popularity in the definition. It's impossible for me to make a meme that only I see. That's just a photo or whatever.

Jokes, music, and insults can be inside jokes, or a Wu-Tang album, or a dig I only share with one other person. A meme is any of those things that's also popular in the viral sense. It encapsulates a maybe-complexish idea in a simple image.

If I asked you for a meme that demonstrates "wanting what I don't have, even though I have more than enough" you might give me that classic ::guy-looking-over-his-shoulder-at-pretty-girl-walking-by-while-his-girlfriend-gives-him-dagger-eyes:: one.

viruses have DNA/RNA genes but they do not self-replicate. They need our cell machinery.

I think you could say that about our own genes as well. They don't physically pull the levers and whatnot to make their own copies. They rely on external cell machinery to pull the strands apart and start transcription and so on.

A gene "self-replicates" in an "emergent property" kind of way, in that it encodes the information necessary for its own future proliferation. A viral strand of DNA/RNA does the same thing, encoding the behaviors and structure of the virus such that it'll proliferate.

You know, like a spicy meme :)

When Charles Darwin (1880ish) created memes I doubt he thought they would die off in 2021...

he was the first shitposter

> Young people aren’t rejecting capitalism entirely, of course, but more a version of it which places them at the bottom of the ladder.

i love this article. "young people aren't rejecting capitalism entirely, they're just outcompeting everyone else at it."