Art & Culture

Notes and explorations in the history of art — and the culture of the internet: its slang, memes, behaviours and phenomena.

72 entries

  • Sockpuppeting — a reader's summary

    The early-Usenet term for a second identity used to talk to yourself, the 2006 episode in which a New Republic critic was caught praising his own blog under a fake name, the 2012 crime novelist who reviewed his own books, Wikipedia's formal sockpuppet investigations, and why a crowd of apparent strangers persuades better than one voice repeating itself.

  • The Smiley — a reader's summary

    The September 19, 1982 Carnegie Mellon bulletin-board post in which Scott Fahlman proposed :-) to mark a joke, Nabokov's 1969 wish for a typographic smile, Shigetaka Kurita's 1999 emoji set, the 2005 study showing writers overrate how well their tone comes across, and why text still needs a marker for "I'm kidding."

  • Main Character of the Day — a reader's summary

    The December 2019 tweet that said every day on Twitter has one main character and the goal is never to be it, the 2013 Justine Sacco pile-on that preceded it, Jon Ronson's 2015 book on public shaming, and why the daily pile-on is a feature of feed design rather than a fault of its targets.

  • Rickrolling — a reader's summary

    The bait-and-switch link that sends you to Rick Astley's 1987 "Never Gonna Give You Up," its 2007 rise from the duckroll prank on 4chan, YouTube's April Fools' 2008 joke, the Macy's parade appearance, and why a prank with no victim outlived most memes of its year.

  • Link Rot — a reader's summary

    Tim Berners-Lee's 1998 note that cool URIs don't change, the Wayback Machine opened in 2001, the 2014 Harvard study that found most links in law journals and half of those in Supreme Court opinions dead, Pew's May 2024 finding that 38% of 2013 webpages were gone ten years later, and why the web forgets by default.

  • Meme — a reader's summary

    Richard Dawkins's 1976 coinage in The Selfish Gene for a unit of cultural imitation, how the word was captured by internet image macros, Limor Shifman's account of memes as remixed, imitated content, and why the biological analogy is both useful and contested.

  • Catfishing — a reader's summary

    The 2010 documentary Catfish and the cod-and-catfish anecdote that named the practice of building a false online identity to court someone, the 2012 MTV series that made it a genre, the 2013 Manti Te'o hoax, and why a profile photo and a few well-timed messages are enough to build trust.

  • Shitposting — a reader's summary

    The forum-and-imageboard term for deliberately worthless, absurd or provocative posting, the surreal Twitter voice of @dril, the 2016 "meme war" that pulled the style into politics, and why a joke built on irony is so hard to tell from sincerity.

  • Flame War — a reader's summary

    The hacker-slang “flame” of the early networks, the 1984 study that found computer-mediated groups swearing and insulting more freely, the smiley proposed in 1982 so jokes would not be read as attacks, and why the online disinhibition research says the screen matters less than people assume.

  • Lurking — a reader's summary

    The old Usenet advice to read a group before posting, the 1990s-2000s research that counted the silent majority of online communities, why people lurk, and why a reader who never posts is not the same as a reader who contributes nothing.

  • Eternal September — a reader's summary

    The September 1993 month when AOL opened Usenet to its subscribers, the 1994 post by Dave Fischer that called it the September that never ended, the yearly university-freshman wave it was measured against, and why every community that grows fast still reaches for the phrase.

  • Trolling — a reader's summary

    The fishing sense of the word behind 1990s Usenet "trolling for newbies," the unrelated Scandinavian bridge monster that got merged into the image, the 4chan-era "for the lulz" ethos, the later spread to paid troll farms and organized abuse, and why one word for a prank now also covers harassment.

  • Copypasta — a reader's summary

    The internet habit of passing a block of text around verbatim: its ancestors in chain letters and Usenet spam, the 4chan-era “Navy Seal” and Bee Movie script pastas, the Twitch-chat version where a whole channel posts the same line at once, and why a text nobody wrote for you becomes a shared in-joke precisely because everyone recognizes it.

  • Fanum Tax — a reader's summary

    The much older schoolyard slang "taxing" behind the joke, the Twitch streamer Fanum whose habit of eating his castmates' food on camera gave the phrase its name, the early-2023 subathon at Kai Cenat's content house that put the bit in front of a record audience, the 2024 slide into Gen Alpha slang alongside “rizz,” “skibidi” and “sigma,” and how a joke about one specific person's stream habit drifted into a general word for anything skimmed off the top.

  • Jimi Hendrix — the electric guitar reinvented in four years

    From Seattle and the chitlin' circuit to London, Monterey and Woodstock: the left-handed guitarist who turned feedback and effects into a language, treated the studio as an instrument and rewired the blues before dying at 27. His life, main ideas, critiques, and impact.

  • 6-7 — a reader's summary

    The December 1, 2024 Skrilla drill track whose repeated lyric became a basketball-edit fixture once fans noticed it matched LaMelo Ball's 6'7" height, the March 31, 2025 YouTube clip of a boy yelling “six-seven” that made him the internet's “67 Kid,” the classroom bans teachers reported that October, and the October 29, 2025 day Dictionary.com named a phrase it admits may mean nothing its Word of the Year.

  • No Cap — a reader's summary

    The 1940s dictionary record of “cap” meaning to top a rival's boast, the ritualized African American insult game — capping, one name among sounding, woofing and signifying — studied through the 1960s, the 1989 Geto Boys lyric “high-cappin'” that kept the word alive in hip-hop for decades, the early-2010s Atlanta rap circles that coined the negated phrase, and the October 20, 2017 Future and Young Thug mixtape track that carried “no cap” into mainstream slang.

  • Nepo Baby — a reader's summary

    The December 9, 2020 tweet that first shortened “nepotism baby” to “nepo baby” to describe Jack Quaid, the February 20, 2022 tweet about Maude Apatow and Euphoria that made it spread, the December 19, 2022 New York Magazine cover story that turned a year of scattered discourse into one artifact, the 2023 Collins Dictionary shortlisting, and the November 2024 sociology study coding what the coverage it produced actually defends.

  • Brat — a reader's summary

    The June 7, 2024 Charli XCX album whose flat lime-green cover flipped a five-centuries-old insult for a spoiled child into shorthand for confident, hedonistic self-possession, the July 21, 2024 post — “kamala IS brat” — that pulled a US presidential campaign into the meme within about a day, and the November 2024 week Collins Dictionary made it Word of the Year while three other dictionaries each crowned something else entirely.

  • Cringe — a reader's summary

    The word's leap from an old verb for shrinking in fear to a freestanding internet adjective, the November 4, 2002 Star Wars Kid tape that became cringe content before the word existed, the May 2010 news segment that gave Reddit's r/cringe its 2012 origin story, the 4chan-born “based and cringe” binary, the anti-cringe-culture backlash that followed, and the September 7, 2022 day Merriam-Webster made “cringe” an adjective.

  • Skibidi — a reader's summary

    The February 7, 2023 eleven-second video — a head singing from inside a toilet over a mash-up of Timbaland's “Give It to Me” and a Biser King track — that grew into a serialized war between toilet-headed creatures and camera-headed “Titans,” Oxford's December 2, 2024 Word of the Year citation of “skibidi” as an example of “brain rot language,” the August 18, 2025 Cambridge Dictionary entry defining it as a word that can mean “cool,” “bad,” or nothing at all, and the live-action film franchise a Hollywood studio put into development around it.

  • Ghosting — a reader's summary

    The 2004 dictionary-tracked “disappear” sense behind the verb “ghost,” the March 2014 YouTube parody credited with coining “ghosting” for dating, the June 2015 Charlize Theron–Sean Penn split that made it tabloid vocabulary even though Theron denied it, Collins Dictionary's 2015 word-of-the-year shortlisting, Merriam-Webster's February 2017 entry, and the 2019 study tying who does it to a belief about soulmates and destiny rather than to cruelty.

  • Chronically Online — a reader's summary

    The mid-2010s siblings “extremely online” and “terminally online” that named the idea first, the June 2021 Urban Dictionary entries that fixed the “chronically online” wording, the August 2021 TikTok trend that turned it into a screenshot genre, the July 31, 2022 Kurtis Conner tweet that kept the cycle running, and why — unlike touch grass, rizz and brain rot — no major dictionary has added it.

  • The Ick — a reader's summary

    The May 4, 1995 Friends episode and the 1998 Ally McBeal episode that each coined the term for a sudden loss of attraction without it sticking, the January 11, 2004 Sex and the City episode that tried again, the 2017 Love Island season that finally made it ordinary vocabulary, the mid-2020 TikTok trend that turned it into a listicle genre, and the July 26, 2024 Cambridge Dictionary entry that landed seven months before the first peer-reviewed study of who gets it and why.

  • Beige Flag — a reader's summary

    The May 8, 2022 TikTok video that coined the phrase to mean “signs you're probably very boring,” the early-2023 inversion that flipped it into an affectionate label for harmless quirks, the October 16, 2023 Cambridge Dictionary entry, and the Oxford Word of the Year shortlist where it lost its head-to-head vote to the eventual winner, “rizz.”

  • Goblin Mode — a reader's summary

    The February 10, 2009 tweet that used the phrase first, the February 2022 fabricated Julia Fox breakup quote that made it go viral, the June 2022 Dictionary.com entry, and the December 5, 2022 Oxford vote — the first ever thrown open to the public — that crowned it Word of the Year with 93 percent support over “metaverse” and “#IStandWith.”

  • Situationship — a reader's summary

    The April 5, 2014 Urban Dictionary entry for a relationship that won't call itself one, Cosmopolitan's 2017 definition of it as “a hookup with emotional benefits,” and the September 2023 Merriam-Webster entry that landed the same year Oxford's shortlist picked “rizz” over it.

  • Delulu — a reader's summary

    The April 6, 2014 K-pop forum post that named an unhealthy belief in an imagined bond with an idol, the November 2022 TikTok breakout that flipped it into a self-manifestation mantra — “delulu is the solulu” — the March 2025 dare that put the phrase in the mouth of Australia's Prime Minister on the floor of Parliament, and the August 18, 2025 Cambridge Dictionary entry that arrived the same year the dictionary crowned a different word, “parasocial,” as its word of the year.

  • Vagueposting — a reader's summary

    The February 19, 2009 Urban Dictionary entry that named “vaguebooking,” the 2018 study tying it to suicidal ideation where general social media use showed no such link, and the January 2026 TikTok exchange — “365 buttons” — that turned it into a boundary-setting life philosophy.

  • Gatekeeping — a reader's summary

    Kurt Lewin's 1947 concept for whoever controls a channel of group life, the July 2012 CNN post that ignited the “fake geek girl” fight over who counts as a real fan, and the January 2021 Tumblr joke that flipped the accusation into an ironic virtue.

  • Ren — Hi Ren, Sick Boi, and turning illness into an argument

    The Welsh singer-songwriter dropped by Sony, lost for more than a decade to undiagnosed Lyme disease, who returned in December 2022 with “Hi Ren” — a viral duel with his own inner demon — before Sick Boi reached number one with no major label behind it.

  • Simp — a reader's summary

    A 1980s hip-hop antonym for “pimp,” its December 2019 TikTok revival, Twitch's January 2021 harassment policy that only made the word spread faster, and why Merriam-Webster's 2023 dictionary entry landed the same year as “rizz.”

  • Deepfakes — a reader's summary

    The December 2017 Reddit user who named synthetic face-swap video, the January 2024 robocall that cloned a sitting president's voice, and the federal law Congress passed within the same year to catch up with it.

  • The SCP Foundation — a reader's summary

    How a single 2007 4chan post about a killer statue grew into one of the internet's largest works of collaborative fiction: a Creative-Commons wiki of thousands of clinical “containment reports” for a fictional secret agency that Secures, Contains and Protects the world from the anomalous — the format, the object classes, and why the licence made it explode.

  • Clanker — a reader's summary

    The Star Wars battle-droid slur — coined in a 2005 video game, popularized by The Clone Wars — that jumped into everyday anti-AI internet slang after a July 2025 TikTok, and the debate over whether it's venting or slur rehearsal.

  • Karma Farming — a reader's summary

    How an anti-spam rule turned Reddit's reputation score into a black-market commodity, and what the University of Zurich's secret 2025 persuasion-bot experiment revealed about what farmed credibility actually buys.

  • Doxxing — a reader's summary

    The early-1990s hacker-culture term for “dropping dox” on a pseudonymous rival — its Usenet-era spread, the 2014 Gamergate campaign that made it a household word, New Jersey's 2020 Daniel's Law, and why the accusation keeps blurring into ordinary public-records reporting.

  • Concern Trolling — a reader's summary

    The mid-2000s forum-and-blog term for someone who poses as a sympathizer to sap a cause's morale — its feminist-blog taxonomy, Daily Kos's 2008 explainer, and why the accusation depends on a read of sincerity no one can verify.

  • Brigading — a reader's summary

    The term for coordinated online pile-ons, born on Reddit around 2010 to describe vote manipulation between subreddits — the 2011 ShitRedditSays downvote controversy, Reddit's 2015 quarantine policy, and why the accusation is as contested as the behavior itself.

  • Rizz — a reader's summary

    A Bronx Twitch circle's 2021 in-group word, the disputed “charisma” etymology Oxford attached to it, the June 2023 Tom Holland clip that made it spike, and the December 2023 Word of the Year that beat out “prompt.”

  • Touch Grass — a reader's summary

    The gaming-forum insult for marathon screen time, its pandemic-era jump to an all-purpose comeback, Merriam-Webster's October 2024 dictionary entry, and the July 2023 Elon Musk tweet that turned it back on his own platform.

  • Glazing — a reader's summary

    The Discord-and-Twitch slang for excessive flattery, its 2024 dictionary entries, and the April 2025 week Sam Altman admitted GPT-4o “glazes too much” — turning a meme word into a named AI training failure.

  • Sanewashing — a reader's summary

    The 2024 media-criticism term for coverage that renders an extreme or incoherent statement more reasonable than what was actually said, and why it's nearly indistinguishable from ordinary editorial compression in any single case.

  • MPB artists & their key songs

    Every artist from the MPB map, with their main stylistic contributions and key songs or albums — one card per idea.

  • MPB map

    The artists of Música Popular Brasileira placed on two axes — time and influence — from choro and samba roots through Bossa Nova and Tropicália to today.

  • Slacktivism — a reader's summary

    The 1995 coinage that started with a hopeful meaning, its pivot to an insult for likes and hashtags, the Kony 2012 case study, and the split research verdict on whether it helps or replaces real engagement.

  • Virtue Signaling — a reader's summary

    James Bartholomew's April 2015 Spectator column that named cheap public moral display, Collins Dictionary's 2016 shortlisting, and the academic pushback that says the label presumes insincerity it can't actually prove.

  • Clickbait — a reader's summary

    The 1994 psychology paper behind the curiosity-gap headline, the Upworthy-era formula that made it a genre, and the 2014 Facebook algorithm change built specifically to suppress it.

  • Algospeak — a reader's summary

    The coded creator vocabulary — “unalive,” “seggs,” “le dollar bean” — built to slip past automated moderation, and the April 2022 press coverage that carried it into mainstream use.

  • Rage Bait — a reader's summary

    Oxford's 2025 Word of the Year: content engineered to make you angry enough to engage, its unglamorous 2002 origin, and why Facebook's 2017 crackdown only ever caught the crudest version of the tactic.

  • Sealioning — a reader's summary

    The 2014 Wondermark comic that gave bad-faith “just asking questions” harassment a name, and why the accusation can be turned against sincere questions as easily as the tactic it describes.

  • Shadowbanning — a reader's summary

    Quietly limiting a user's reach without telling them — from early forum moderation to Reddit's admitted anti-spam use and the 2018 Twitter controversy.

  • Culinary world map

    The world divided into 182 culinary regions — Brittany, Oaxaca, Sichuan, not countries — each with a card on its particularities, signature dishes, defining ingredients and chefs.

  • Dishes of the world

    The signature dishes of every culinary region — one card per dish, with what it is and why it matters.

  • Ingredients of the world

    The defining ingredients of every culinary region — one card per ingredient, with the role it plays in its region's cooking.

  • Reading — the facts

    Is reading up or down? What about book sales? How concentrated is it, and what does reading provably do to cognition? The numbers, with sources and their caveats.

  • Cancel Culture — a reader's summary

    From a jokey personal put-down to a #MeToo-era term for organized public consequence, the 2020 Harper's letter, and why the same events read as accountability to one side and a mob to the other.

  • NPC — a reader's summary

    A video-game term for a scripted background character, repurposed in 2018 as a political insult — and the Twitter suspensions for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” that followed almost immediately.

  • The Ratio — a reader's summary

    The Twitter-native folk metric for a bad post — replies swamping likes — how it became the insult “L + ratio,” and why platform changes since 2022 broke the signal it was named for.

  • Artistic map

    Some 500 artists placed on two axes — time and influence — linked by known lines of influence, from Phidias to the present.

  • Artists & their ideas

    Every artist from the map, with their main ideas and key works — one card per idea.

  • Astroturfing — a reader's summary

    Lloyd Bentsen's 1985 term for a faked grassroots campaign — how it migrated online to sockpuppets and state-run bot networks, and why the accusation is as easy to weaponize as the tactic.

  • Brain Rot — a reader's summary

    Oxford's 2024 Word of the Year: the claimed cognitive cost of short-form content, its surprisingly 19th-century pedigree, and why the panic keeps recurring.

  • Chefs & their signature dishes

    Every chef from the culinary map, with their main concepts and signature dishes — one card per idea.

  • Context Collapse — a reader's summary

    danah boyd and Michael Wesch's term for what happens when a platform flattens every audience you'd normally address separately into one.

  • Culinary map

    The great chefs and gastronomes placed on two axes — time and influence — linked by lines of teaching and reaction, from Apicius to the New Nordic kitchen.

  • Dead Internet Theory — a reader's summary

    The forum theory that most of the internet is now bots talking to bots — its murky origins, and why generative AI made it feel less like paranoia.

  • Doomscrolling — a reader's summary

    The compulsive habit of scrolling bad news past the point it informs or comforts — its 2018 coinage, the 2020 dictionary entries, and why willpower alone doesn't stop it.

  • Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles — a reader's summary

    Sunstein's echo chamber and Pariser's filter bubble — and what the empirical record says about how much algorithms are really to blame for online polarization.

  • Main Character Energy — a reader's summary

    A pejorative role-playing term inverted by a May 2020 TikTok trend — and the “main character syndrome” backlash that followed it back to critical use.

  • Movements & schools

    The movements and schools of art history — what each one claimed, the artists who carried it, and the works that define it.

  • The Streisand Effect — a reader's summary

    Mike Masnick's 2005 term for how trying to suppress information guarantees its spread — the 2003 case that gave it a name, and why it keeps recatching people who know the term.