The Internet-Sized Generational Divide
by Mia Bisono
Do you ever check in on that old hack fraud paper The New York Times? Recently, they’ve really been fixated on explaining the crown jewel of comedy that is the 6-7 meme; specifically on attempting to understand what it could possibly mean. The writers at the prestigious New York Times are falling into a moral panic in their attempts to understand a meaningless phrase, proudly asserting that they don’t “understand all the hoopla around this 6-7 business.” It’s a situation as absurd as the situation that cultivated it in the first place, and we are left to muse about how these circumstances even exist.
There have been other funny number memes before, but there is a distinctly different progression of comedic value this time around. 420 has the association of weed, 69 has the association of sex, 21 is itself a punchline. Sure, all three eventually progressed to self-referentiality, like 6-7. The difference is that 6-7 began with self-referentiality and has maintained it. The connections start with the Skrilla song “Doot Doot (6 7)” and end with the blonde kid. It’s sort of fascinating the sort of staying power it’s had, especially in the modern internet. I am here to posit a theory, but bear with me here: In order to understand 6-7, we must first understand 18th century Italian art theatre.
For our streamlined purposes, Commedia Dell’arte was an Italian style of early professional theatre that operated upon a handful of stock characters that would serve as shorthand for certain traits and personalities. The most famous group of stock characters were low class servants known as Zanni. These characters—Pulcinella the Fool, Harlequin the Servant, and Pierrot the Sad Clown—are understood to be the early archetypes of modern clowns. Zanni often found themselves in circumstances that would mirror the lives of the commonfolk, aggressively inviting the observers to laugh or become the joke themselves; the self-awareness baked into the fabric of the stage forced the audience to look inwards. Modern comedy too relies on this self-awareness, with 6-7 being no exception.
Cultural trends, obviously, will illuminate the desires or faults with a society, no matter what medium of diffusion. 2000s torture porn horror movies reflected the Millennial desire to feel anything. 6-7 is modern clownery. It’s perceived as funny due to its total absurd referencelessness, a sort of post-post-post irony, a parody of a parody of a parody; it offers nothing to glean or understand other than a statement of its existence. It’s a joke so meaningless that it can only be understood as a mirror of the society that it is cultivated within. In nihilistic terms, it’s a younger generation’s coping mechanism at the unfolding technofeudalist dystopia they’ll be shoved into in a few years’ time. This is precisely why some older folks can’t seem to grasp it. It’s a concept they’ve never experienced, and they’re desperate to understand.
This phenomenon is deeply frightening. It points to modern adults growing unable to sympathize with their children. It points to a disconnect between pre-internet and post-internet youth culture. Most frighteningly, it points to a coming age of extremism built through the type of echo chambers only found in online spaces.
We are reaching a point in which what is currently understood to be “political extremism” is not at all extreme. In unmonitored social groups, simple reason and the most basic of truths can be distorted into ideologies so extreme that they are almost impossible to comprehend. We live in a system where absurd, incongruent hate speech such as “trans rights are white rights” is unironically written in political Discord servers. Nonsense is taking the wheel in both comedy and politics, and we are sorely underprepared. How can the standard person understand the incoming political absurdity if they can’t understand comedic absurdity? What are we supposed to do at this point?
It’s almost certainly a memetic stretch to equate 6-7’s prolonged popularity with an coming age of absurdist anti-semiotic extremism, but I have to make sense of it somehow. To see a modern form of self-referential clownery inspire such panic in older and more “mature” writers in nationally-read publications is so uncanny I have to pinch myself. It feels like watching a skyscraper lean farther and farther askew over the course of a few months, awaiting the day it topples onto civilians. Even if I had some magical panacea, nobody would listen. Bridging such a large cultural divide is a problem we’ve simply never dealt with before. The best you can do as an individual is mind the fallout.
