The Emptiness at the Centre: A Study of Meaninglessness in Digital Culture (Extended Version)

An examination of how internet humour evolved from wit to noise, and what this reveals about the erosion of meaning in algorithmic environments

Part One: The Phenomenon

The Emptiness at the Centre: "Six-Seven" and the Erosion of Meaning

In October 2025, Dictionary.com made an unusual announcement. Their Word of the Year was "6-7", pronounced "six-seven", a phrase that, by their own admission, has no fixed meaning. This was not a case of adults failing to understand youth slang. The teenagers using it cannot explain what it means either. The rapper who coined it, Skrilla, explicitly stated he never intended any meaning and actively refuses to assign one. Even LaMelo Ball, the basketball player whose height of 6 feet 7 inches became associated with the meme, could only offer: "It's really nothing though, for real. Just six seven."

This is not simply another incomprehensible youth trend. It represents something qualitatively different from previous generational slang, and that difference is worth examining closely.

The Architecture of Meaning in Traditional Slang

Language serves multiple functions simultaneously. It communicates information, establishes group identity, and carries cultural values. Youth slang has always operated within this framework, creating coded vocabularies that exclude adults whilst expressing shared experiences within peer groups.

Consider the evolution of approval terms across generations. "Cool" emerged from jazz culture, carrying connotations of emotional restraint and sophistication. "Groovy" reflected 1960s psychedelic aesthetics. "Rad" condensed "radical" into an expression of extreme approval. Even seemingly nonsensical recent coinages like "yeet" convey semantic content. It expresses forceful action, usually accompanied by throwing something. The word sounds like what it means.

These terms served dual purposes. They marked in-group membership whilst simultaneously communicating ideas. They were exclusionary and meaningful. An adult might not understand "yeet", but the teenagers using it were actually saying something to each other.

"Six-seven" does neither. Or rather, it does the first whilst deliberately abandoning the second.

The Mechanics of Meaninglessness

The phrase originated in December 2024 from Skrilla's drill rap track "Doot Doot (6 7)". It gained traction through TikTok and Instagram Reels, particularly in video edits of basketball players. By March 2025, a boy nicknamed "67 Kid" went viral for shouting the phrase at a basketball game whilst performing an accompanying hand gesture, palms up, moving up and down as though weighing options. From there it exploded into schools across America and eventually worldwide.

Linguists and social scientists have struggled to categorise it. Taylor Jones, a linguist studying the phenomenon, noted that "the point is that it makes no sense." Gail Fairhurst, a professor of leadership communication at the University of Cincinnati, suggested it might be "a benign symptom of our 'post-truth' society, where the meaning and specificity of communication matters less than people's interpretation of it."

But what happens when there is nothing to interpret?

Dictionary.com itself acknowledged this tension in their announcement, describing "6-7" as "the logical endpoint of being perpetually online, scrolling endlessly, consuming content fed to users by algorithms trained by other algorithms." They recognised they were documenting something pathological. Yet they celebrated it anyway because data showed it had spread rapidly. Usage had increased sixfold in October 2025 compared to the average monthly usage in 2024.

This reveals the underlying logic. Virality has replaced meaning as the measure of linguistic significance.

Algorithmic Training and Cognitive Atrophy

The children repeating "six-seven" have been raised in a fundamentally different media environment than previous generations. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts do not reward depth, craft, or insight. They reward engagement metrics. Content succeeds by keeping users scrolling, not by communicating anything substantial.

This creates a perverse incentive structure. Meaningful content requires cognitive effort to process. You must understand context, recognise patterns, make connections. This creates friction. Meaningless content slides past these barriers entirely. You need not understand "six-seven" to repeat it. You need only have seen it enough times.

The psychological implications deserve attention. Traditional humour requires multiple cognitive systems working in concert. You must recognise the setup, understand the cultural context, anticipate one outcome, and then process the subversion when the punchline delivers something else. This is why good comedy is cognitively demanding. It exercises pattern recognition, cultural literacy, timing, and the ability to hold multiple possibilities simultaneously.

"Six-seven" exercises nothing. It is pure memetic transmission without cognitive engagement.

Parenting expert Becky Kennedy attempted to frame this positively: "67 is meaningless in content, but it's not meaningless in feeling. Think about when you were a kid. What's more powerful than feeling like you belong?" This is true but incomplete. Yes, belonging matters to adolescents. But historically, the mechanisms of belonging also transmitted cultural knowledge, values, and ways of thinking. If the mechanism becomes entirely empty, what gets transmitted?

The Erosion of Humour

The comparison to earlier moral panics about youth culture is obvious and must be addressed. Socrates complained that writing would destroy memory. Victorians feared novels would corrupt young women. Every generation believes the next is going to ruin everything.

But those earlier forms, however alarming to contemporary adults, still operated within the domain of meaning. Rock and roll expressed rebellion, sexual liberation, racial integration. The content was objectionable to some precisely because it had content. When parents banned certain music, they were responding to what that music communicated.

What does one ban about "six-seven"? There is nothing to object to because there is nothing there.

This matters particularly for humour. Wit has always required intelligence. Oscar Wilde's epigrams demanded facility with language and understanding of social mores. P.G. Wodehouse's comedy required intricate plotting and precise timing. Even the absurdist tradition, from Lewis Carroll through Monty Python, was deliberately crafted. The absurdity was the point, carefully constructed to subvert expectations.

Contemporary viral humour increasingly lacks any constructive element. It simply is. And increasingly, it is empty.

One might argue that children have always enjoyed nonsense. This is true. But traditional nonsense verse, from Edward Lear to Dr. Seuss, played with language itself. It bent grammar, invented words, created sonic patterns. The meaninglessness was in the service of exploring how language works. "Six-seven" explores nothing. It simply replicates.

Cultural Literacy and Shared Frameworks

The broader concern extends beyond language itself. We are watching the erosion of what might be called cultural literacy in its deepest sense. Not merely knowing literary references or historical facts, but possessing shared frameworks for making meaning.

When communication becomes increasingly empty, we lose the ability to distinguish substance from performance, signal from noise. If nothing means anything in particular, then everything is equally valid or equally meaningless, which amounts to the same thing.

This has profound implications for how we think collectively. Democracy requires citizens who can evaluate arguments, distinguish evidence from assertion, recognise manipulation. Scientific progress requires researchers who can build on previous work, which demands shared understanding of concepts and methods. Art requires audiences capable of engaging with complexity.

All of these depend on language that carries meaning and minds trained to process that meaning.

What happens to a generation trained from childhood that communication need not communicate? That content is something to be passively consumed rather than actively engaged? That belonging comes from repetition rather than understanding?

An Indicator, Not Yet a Diagnosis

I do not believe we are witnessing civilisation's collapse. Human societies are remarkably resilient. We have survived much worse than viral slang.

But we would be foolish to dismiss this as merely another incomprehensible youth trend. Something important is shifting. The capacity for sustained attention, for complex thought, for distinguishing performance from authenticity. These things do not vanish overnight. They erode gradually, each generation slightly less capable than the last, until the loss becomes irreversible.

The children shouting "six-seven" in their classrooms are not to blame. They are doing what their environment trained them to do. The algorithms that raised them optimised for engagement, not development. The platforms that shaped their consciousness were designed to be addictive, not educational.

But we, who are older and ostensibly wiser, have a responsibility to recognise what we are watching. Not to panic, but to think clearly about what we are allowing to happen.

Dictionary.com called "6-7" a "burst of energy that spreads and connects people long before anyone agrees on what it actually means." This is a remarkably optimistic framing of something quite disturbing. Energy that goes nowhere is not vitality. It is merely noise. Connection without content is not community. It is merely proximity.

The phrase will likely fade. Already there are reports of competitors, "41" attempting to dethrone it. But the underlying conditions that produced it remain. The algorithmic infrastructure continues to reward empty engagement over meaningful communication. The next "six-seven" is already germinating somewhere in the digital ecosystem.

We might ask ourselves: at what point does the accumulation of meaningless indicators become a meaningful diagnosis? How many symptoms must we observe before we acknowledge the disease?

I do not have answers to these questions. But I believe they are worth asking.

Part Two: The Architecture of Internet Humour

When Memes Required Intelligence

There was a time, not so long ago, when internet humour demanded something from you. Not much, perhaps, but something. You had to read, understand context, recognise the reference, appreciate the subversion. The humour lived in the gap between expectation and delivery.

Consider the Rickroll. On the surface, it was simple: someone promised you one link, delivered another, and you found yourself staring at Rick Astley's 1987 music video for "Never Gonna Give You Up." The joke seemed straightforward enough.

But the layers were there if you looked. The Rickroll was a commentary on trust in the early internet, when downloading files from dodgy websites felt like Russian roulette. You clicked a link promising the new Radiohead album and got three viruses and a video of a dancing hamster instead. The Rickroll codified this experience into a cultural ritual. It said: the internet lies, we all know it lies, and we're going to turn that lying into a game.

More than that, it became a form of performance art. The best Rickrolls were elaborate. Someone would craft an entire Reddit post analysing the political situation in Myanmar, drop a "source" link that looked legitimate, and hundreds of people would click through to Rick Astley. The humour wasn't just in the bait-and-switch. It was in the effort, the craft, the understanding that your audience was smart enough to appreciate being fooled well.

This required what we might call comedic infrastructure. You needed to know what a Rickroll was to avoid it or to deploy it effectively. You needed to understand internet culture circa 2007. You needed to have experienced the chaos of early file-sharing. The meme carried history, context, and community knowledge. It was funny because it was true, and you knew it was true because you'd lived it.

Philosoraptor and the Socratic Internet

Then there was Philosoraptor. A velociraptor, rendered in that distinctive Jurassic Park style, with text posing philosophical conundrums.

"If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?"

"If a man speaks in the forest and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"

"If money doesn't grow on trees, why do banks have branches?"

This was clever, and it knew it was clever. But it wasn't smug about it. The dinosaur looked thoughtful, almost worried, as though genuinely troubled by these paradoxes. The format invited participation. You could make your own Philosoraptor, and the community would judge whether your wordplay was worthy.

The humour operated on multiple levels. There was the surface joke, usually a pun or logical paradox. Then there was the absurdity of a dinosaur contemplating modern idioms. Then there was the self-aware commentary on internet "philosophy" and how forums were full of people who thought they'd discovered profound truths that were, upon examination, just clever word games.

But here's the thing: even if the philosophy was shallow, the thinking wasn't. You had to construct the wordplay. You had to find the linguistic loophole. You had to understand why "If nothing is impossible, is it possible for something to be impossible?" was funny. This was linguistic gymnastics, and it exercised your brain whether you intended it to or not.

The Subversive Art of Demotivational Posters

Despair.com pioneered this format, but Very Demotivational perfected it for the internet age. Take the corporate motivational poster: mountain peak at sunset, inspirational word in large text, uplifting caption beneath. Now invert it completely.

A picture of a sinking ship. MISTAKES "It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others."

A photograph of a packed motorway at standstill. AMBITION "The journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly."

A kitten dangling from a branch. DETERMINATION "That which does not kill me postpones the inevitable."

This was satire with teeth. It mocked corporate culture's relentless positivity, the empty platitudes plastered on office walls. It understood that "synergy" was meaningless, that "thought leadership" was rubbish, that motivational posters were psychological manipulation dressed up as inspiration.

But it also required you to understand what was being mocked. You needed to have seen real motivational posters. You needed to have worked in, or at least observed, corporate environments. You needed to recognise the genre before you could appreciate its subversion. This was humour for adults who'd been disappointed by the world and found that disappointment funny.

The format spread because it was remixable. Anyone could find an ironic image and pair it with cynical text. But the good ones required wit. You had to find the perfect image, craft the perfect caption, nail the tone of corporate-speak whilst undermining it completely. Bad demotivational posters were just pessimistic. Good ones were surgical strikes against specific kinds of hollow optimism.

I Can Has Cheezburger and the Innocence That Couldn't Last

In 2007, someone posted a photograph of a fat British Shorthair with an oddly hopeful expression. The caption read: "I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?"

The grammar was wrong. The spelling was wrong. But the cat looked so earnest, so desperate for that cheeseburger, that it didn't matter. More than that, the broken English somehow made it funnier. It suggested the cat had learned human language imperfectly, was trying its best, and was now politely requesting cheese-based food products.

This spawned an entire linguistic genre: LOLcat speak. "Oh hai," "I'm in ur base, killin ur d00dz," "Invisible [noun]," and dozens more. It was play. Silly, harmless, creative play with language. You could spend hours looking at cats with funny captions and feel no guilt because it was 2007 and the internet still felt like a place for fun rather than anxiety.

The Fail Blog emerged from the same ecosystem. People doing stupid things, captured on camera or video, with the word FAIL stamped across it. Someone tries to jump a fence, catches their foot, face-plants. FAIL. Someone attempts to parallel park, somehow ends up on top of another car. FAIL. A wedding ceremony where the groom drops the ring and it rolls down a drain. FAIL.

This was slapstick for the digital age. The humour was obvious, accessible, and required no context beyond understanding that people sometimes do stupid things. A six-year-old could laugh at Fail Blog. So could a sixty-year-old. It was the comedy equivalent of comfort food.

But even this simple format had community standards. A good Fail was unexpected but not cruel. Someone getting hurt badly wasn't funny. Someone doing something idiotic and suffering minor, humorous consequences was. The community policed this boundary. If you posted something too mean-spirited, you'd be told it wasn't really a Fail, it was just sad.

The Cognitive Architecture of Classic Memes

What united all these formats was a basic requirement: you had to pay attention.

Reading a demotivational poster took ten seconds. Understanding a Philosoraptor required that you process the wordplay. Appreciating a Rickroll meant you understood internet culture and the history of dodgy downloads. Even LOLcats required linguistic flexibility, the ability to understand corrupted grammar and find it amusing rather than irritating.

These memes rewarded literacy. Not formal literacy necessarily, but cultural literacy. You needed to be conversant with certain shared references. You needed to understand the formats and their histories. You needed, in short, to be in on the joke.

This created communities. People who understood Rickrolls found each other. People who appreciated demotivational posters formed groups. The memes were shibboleths, markers of belonging. But they were also conversations. You could riff on them, remix them, improve them. The best new meme was often a clever variation on an existing format.

And crucially, these memes were jokes. They had setups and punchlines. They had structure. Even the simplest LOLcat image was a small narrative: cat wants cheeseburger, cat asks politely using imperfect English, humour emerges from the gap between cat nature and human behavior.

Compare this to "six-seven." There is no setup. There is no punchline. There is no narrative. There is nothing to understand because there is nothing there.

Part Three: The Taxonomies of Humour

What Makes Something Funny?

Humour theory (yes, academics study this) identifies several core mechanisms. Not all humour uses all mechanisms, but most use at least one.

Incongruity: Something appears that doesn't fit expectations. A philosopher velociraptor, a demotivational poster that demotivates, a cat requesting cheeseburgers in broken English. The humour comes from the gap between what should be and what is.

Superiority: We laugh at others' misfortunes or mistakes. The Fail Blog trades entirely on this. Someone does something stupid, we feel momentarily superior, we laugh. This is old humour. Aristotle wrote about it, and it is probably our most primitive comic impulse.

Relief: Humour releases tension or addresses taboo topics. Dark humour often works this way. The demotivational posters about futility and meaninglessness were funny partly because they said what corporate culture forbade you to say.

Wordplay: Linguistic humour, puns, double meanings. Philosoraptor lived here. This requires language facility and rewards cleverness.

Reference: Humour that depends on recognising allusions to other cultural artifacts. Most internet humour included this. You needed to understand what was being referenced to get the joke.

The Spectrum of Irony

This is where it gets complicated.

Literal humour means what it says. A man slips on a banana peel. This is funny because banana peels are slippery and he didn't notice. No hidden meaning. Direct cause and effect. Slapstick operates here.

Simple irony means the opposite of what it says. "Oh brilliant, another rainy day," you say, whilst staring at grey skies. You don't mean brilliant at all. The humour comes from the inversion.

Meta-irony is irony about irony. The Rickroll was meta-ironic. It was a joke about internet deception, performed through actual deception, acknowledged by everyone involved as deceptive. You clicked the link knowing you might get Rickrolled, got Rickrolled anyway, and somehow this was still funny because everyone understood the game.

Post-irony is where meaning collapses entirely. You say something ironic so many times that it circles back to seeming sincere, except it isn't sincere, except maybe it is? Post-irony is exhausting to explain because explanation is part of what it rejects.

The early internet operated mostly in the first three categories. LOLcats were literal (cats are funny). Demotivational posters were ironically inverted (optimism becomes pessimism). Rickrolls were meta-ironic (deception acknowledged as deception).

The modern internet lives in post-irony. "Six-seven" isn't ironic. It's not subverting anything because there's nothing to subvert. It's not referencing anything because references require meaning. It simply is. And the humour, such as it exists, comes from the shared acknowledgment that this makes no sense and we're all going to say it anyway.

The Humour Matrix: Then and Now

Let's be systematic about this.

Classic Internet Humour (2005-2015)

Primary mechanism: Incongruity, wordplay, reference Irony level: Literal to meta-ironic
Cognitive demand: Medium to high
Payoff: Specific joke or insight
Repeatability: Moderate; humour fades with repetition
Community role: Active remixing and variation
Intelligence required: Cultural literacy, context understanding, linguistic facility

Modern Internet Humour (2020-2025)

Primary mechanism: Participation, recognition Irony level: Post-ironic to meaningless
Cognitive demand: Minimal
Payoff: Belonging, tribal signalling
Repeatability: Infinite; meaning-through-repetition
Community role: Passive amplification
Intelligence required: Exposure, nothing more

The shift is from comedy that engages the mind to comedy that bypasses it entirely.

Part Four: What Dies When Humour Flattens

The Loss of Linguistic Play

LOLcat speak was stupid. Let's be clear about that. "I can has cheezburger" is not high art. But it was linguistic play. It required you to understand English well enough to break it in specific, funny ways. You needed to know the rules before you could violate them entertainingly.

This kind of play develops language facility. Children who grew up making LOLcat memes were, inadvertently, learning about grammar through transgression. They understood subject-verb agreement precisely because they were violating it for comic effect.

"Six-seven" develops nothing. There is no grammar to subvert because there is no grammar. There are no rules to understand because there is no structure. You don't need to know anything to say "six-seven." You just need to have heard it.

The Erosion of Context

Every classic meme carried context. The Rickroll encoded the chaos of early file-sharing. Demotivational posters encoded corporate culture critique. Even simple formats like Success Kid or Bad Luck Brian were narrative structures: something happened, something unexpected, here is the humorous result.

Context creates depth. When you understood the context, the meme became richer. When you didn't, you asked, and someone explained, and you learned something about either internet history or the broader culture. The memes were tiny capsules of shared knowledge.

"Six-seven" has no context because it deliberately rejects context. The emptiness is the point. There is nothing to explain because there is nothing there. This means nothing is learned. No cultural knowledge is transmitted. No history is encoded. The meme is a perfect void.

The Collapse of Standards

Good classic memes were identifiable. The community knew the difference between a good demotivational poster and a bad one. A good Rickroll was elaborately concealed. A good Philosoraptor had genuinely clever wordplay. A good Fail was funny without being cruel.

These standards emerged organically through community consensus. You posted your meme attempt, and the community judged it. If it was clever, it spread. If it was derivative or lazy, it sank. This created selection pressure toward quality. You improved your meme game or you got ignored.

"Six-seven" has no standards because standards require criteria, and criteria require meaning. How do you judge whether someone said "six-seven" well? You can't. There is no well. There is only saying it. The act itself is the entirety of the performance.

This eliminates quality as a concept. If everything is equally valid because nothing means anything, then excellence becomes impossible. You cannot be good at meaninglessness. You can only participate in it.

The Death of Remix Culture

Classic memes evolved. Someone made the first LOLcat, then others made variations, then someone made a LOLcat Bible, then someone made LOLcode (a real programming language), then the whole thing spiralled into elaborate creative expressions. The format was a foundation for building.

Demotivational posters spawned thousands of variations. Each person found new images, new captions, new ways to subvert corporate optimism. The best ones were genuinely creative. They found the perfect pairing of image and text that made you laugh and think simultaneously.

Even Rickrolls evolved. The classic Rick Astley video became a starting point. People Rick-rolled their wedding guests, their students, their audiences at professional conferences. Some Rickrolls were so elaborate they became performance pieces. There was creativity in the deployment.

"Six-seven" doesn't evolve because there is nothing to evolve. You say it. That's all. There are no variations worth making because the format is the whole thing. You cannot improve on emptiness because improvement requires direction, and emptiness has no direction.

Part Five: Why This Matters More Than You Think

Humour as Cultural Training

We don't think of comedy as educational, but it is. Humour teaches cultural norms, acceptable boundaries, shared references. When a child learns what's funny, they're learning what their culture values.

Classic internet humour taught literacy. It taught attention. It taught that clever was better than obvious. It taught that effort mattered; a well-crafted meme spread further than a lazy one. It taught that comedy had structure, that jokes needed setups, that payoffs required patience.

What does "six-seven" teach? That noise spreads. That meaning is optional. That participation matters more than understanding. That going viral is the goal, and content is irrelevant.

These are not neutral lessons. They shape how a generation approaches communication, community, and culture itself.

The Flattening of Discourse

If humour loses structure, conversation follows. We're already seeing it. Online discourse increasingly resembles "six-seven" culture. People repeat phrases not because they mean anything but because repetition signals belonging. "Touch grass." "OK boomer." "It's giving..." "Not me..." These started as meaningful critiques or observations. Through repetition, they became reflexive responses, sounds people make instead of arguments.

This is catastrophic for dialogue. If language becomes performative noise rather than meaning-making tool, we lose the ability to discuss complex topics. You cannot debate policy by shouting "six-seven" at each other. You cannot negotiate meaning if meaning has been abandoned.

And yes, every generation has had its meaningless catchphrases. But those were additions to language, not replacements for it. You could say "groovy" and also construct complex sentences. The modern trend is toward replacing complex sentences with catchphrases entirely.

The Algorithmic Acceleration

Classic memes spread because humans chose to spread them. You saw something funny, you shared it. If enough people agreed it was funny, it reached critical mass. This was slow, but it was filtered. Bad memes mostly died. Good memes survived.

The algorithm doesn't care about quality. It cares about engagement velocity. Content that makes people stop scrolling for even a second wins. "Six-seven" is algorithmically perfect. It's weird enough to catch attention, meaningless enough to generate confused engagement, and short enough to repeat endlessly.

The algorithm trains us to produce and consume content like "six-seven." It rewards empty engagement. And because algorithms now mediate most human communication, we're all being trained to prefer noise over meaning.

This isn't conspiracy. It's emergent behaviour. The system optimises for engagement. Meaningless content generates engagement through confusion and repetition. Therefore, the system amplifies meaninglessness. And we, trapped in the system, adapt to its incentives.

Part Six: What Can Be Saved

The Resilience of Good Humour

Here's the strange thing: the old memes are still funny.

Rickrolls still work. If someone disguises a link cleverly and you click through to Rick Astley, you still laugh. The structure holds. The joke hasn't degraded.

Philosoraptor's best hits are still clever. "If nothing is impossible, is it possible for something to be impossible?" hasn't stopped being a good wordplay paradox just because it's old.

Even demotivational posters land. Show someone a good one, and they laugh. The satire still works because corporate culture hasn't improved. If anything, it's gotten worse, which makes the old posters even more relevant.

This suggests that good humour is durable. It survives trends because it's built on solid foundations. Incongruity doesn't stop being funny. Clever wordplay doesn't expire. Cultural satire remains effective as long as the culture it satirises persists.

"Six-seven" will fade. It must, because it has no foundation. There's nothing to remember. No joke to recall. No structure to preserve. It's already started fading. Teachers report that some students find it cringe now, that cool kids have moved on to "41" or whatever's next.

But the Rickroll? That's eternal.

This is not to claim that all classic memes were sophisticated or that no modern memes show wit. Stupid content has always existed online, and clever creators still produce thoughtful work today. But the ratio has inverted completely.

In 2010, a dumb meme was notable because most memes had structure. You could spot lazy content because it stood out against a baseline of effort. In 2025, a clever meme is notable because most content is algorithmically optimised noise. Wit stands out because emptiness is now the default.

The shift is not from perfection to catastrophe. It is from 'mostly signal with some noise' to 'mostly noise with occasional signal.' And that inversion matters more than the existence of exceptions on either side.

Teaching Structure to a Generation Raised on Noise

If you're a parent, teacher, or anyone who works with young people: teach them about jokes with structure. Show them classic memes. Explain why Philosoraptor is funny. Walk them through a demotivational poster. Make them explain the Rickroll.

This isn't nostalgia. It's education. It's teaching that humour can have layers, that comedy can make you think, that entertainment doesn't have to be empty.

They won't love this at first. Classic memes are slow compared to TikTok. But if you can make them understand what makes the old formats work (the setup, the reference, the subversion), you've given them tools for thinking about all communication, not just humour.

The Importance of Curation

We cannot escape algorithms entirely. But we can choose what we expose ourselves to. We can actively seek out humour with structure. We can refuse to engage with meaningless content. We can, individually, reject the race to the bottom.

This sounds quaint. It is quaint. But the alternative is accepting that all humour becomes "six-seven" eventually, that meaning is optional, that empty engagement is sufficient.

If enough people choose quality over velocity, if enough people demand jokes that actually mean something, the incentive structure shifts slightly. Not much. Not enough to change the platforms. But enough to create pockets of resistance.

And in those pockets, humour survives as something more than tribal noise. It survives as wit, as craft, as a mirror that shows us something true about the world, even if that truth is just "corporate motivational posters are rubbish and everyone knows it."

Closing Thought

There was a website called StumbleUpon. You pressed a button, and it took you to a random interesting page somewhere on the internet. You might find a blog about obscure historical events. You might find a collection of unusual photographs. You might find a page full of demotivational posters or LOLcats or philosophical raptors.

The point was discovery. The internet was huge and strange, and you never knew what you'd find. Some of it was brilliant. Some of it was rubbish. But it was varied, and that variety meant you encountered things that surprised you, challenged you, made you think.

StumbleUpon died in 2018. Not coincidentally, that's around when the algorithmic feeds took over completely. Now you don't stumble upon anything. The algorithm decides what you see, and the algorithm has determined that you want more of what you just watched, slightly faster, slightly stupider, forever.

The old memes came from a weirder internet. An internet where human curation mattered more than algorithmic optimisation. An internet where people made things because they were funny, not because they might go viral.

You cannot revive that internet. It's gone. But you can remember what it taught us: that humour requires structure, that jokes can be clever, that meaning matters.

And when someone asks you what "six-seven" means, you can say: nothing, and that's exactly the problem.

Then you can show them a Philosoraptor and explain why a dinosaur wondering about logical paradoxes is funnier than two numbers repeated infinitely into the void.

Because it is. And it always will be.

About the Data Sources

The information in this essay is drawn from multiple news sources covering the "6-7" phenomenon in late 2024 and 2025, including Dictionary.com's official announcement, CNN's cultural analysis, NPR's linguistic coverage, and academic commentary from linguists Taylor Jones and Gail Fairhurst. The "67 Kid" viral moment refers to Maverick Trevillian's March 2025 appearance in a YouTube video by Cam Wilder. Historical information about internet memes comes from documented sources including Know Your Meme archives, Despair.com (demotivational posters), I Can Has Cheezburger network history, and academic research on digital culture. All quoted statements have been verified against original sources.