the rise of internet-first culture
IRL; an abbreviation for the phrase "in real life", which indicates that we’re talking about our normal, everyday life and not the digital lives we lead online.
In October of last year, I was hanging out with a few good friends at my apartment in Brooklyn. One made fun of another, as friends have done for many thousands of years, and the other responded tongue in cheek, “Ight, imma head out.”
At this moment, it struck me that somehow a joke which originated as a viral meme made its way, seamlessly, into the banter among a few over-30-year-old pals.
Of course, people have been making jokes referencing shared cultural understanding for a long time. Maybe in the 90s, you were making jokes about Britney Spears.
The difference is that Britney Spears actually exists in reality, and “Ight imma head out” only exists online... that is, until the shared understanding made the jump from being a meme in multiple contexts on Instagram to being a joke among my friends IRL. Sponge Bob Squarepants and this string of text made its way from the internet to reality, instead of reality to the internet.
Welcome to internet-first culture.
In 2007, a group of choreographers and creatives conceived of Souja Boy's now-famous dance. It was deliberately created to go hand and hand with the lyrics and was popularized by the accompanying music video which was distributed on MTV (remember them?) and on youtube. Classic IRL cultural creation being mapped onto the internet.
In 2019, Kyle Exum posted The TikTok Song. The lyrics are dedicated entirely to the TikTok zeitgeist. Several hours after he posted it, people were choreographing dances overlayed on top of his soundtrack. In the following days, the most viral of those videos made their way to the top of the sound's page and were being emulated by thousands of highschoolers all over the country.
Yesterday, I was eating a burrito bowl at Chipotle and saw a kid practicing the TikTok song's series of dance moves for his friends. I have no doubt school dances have been filled with the same cultural understanding I witnessed, much like we were "cranking that," circa 2008.
As I continued to observe the kid, I found it interesting that the dance cannot be reproduced as well IRL. TikTok creators will often slow down sound in order to better execute on dance moves, and then speed up the video when it's posted. This dance as seen online literally only exists online and is then mapped to reality.
The TikTok song evolved in a matter of days from sound to dance to cultural phenomena, through a series of iterations and contributors completely distributed online. That's not "just a difference in the medium", it's a complete paradigm shift in culture.
Earlier this week I shared my predictions for the Plentiful 20s. One aspect of our acceleration towards abundance will be the transition from a culture augmented by the internet, to a culture driven by the internet.
As shown by Kyle Exum's song, this culture moves quickly.
Turns out SpongeBob and it’s cultural meaning originated as something entirely different and went through the same rapid evolution:
Internet culture is always on and always changing.
It was October when my friend got up to leave my apartment in jest. The joke was irrelevant two weeks later:
Historically, culture changes slowly. I wonder if our primitive wetware is equipped to handle a new world where it's always-evolving and quickly.
I had two distinct feelings when I began using TikTok. First, I am old. Second, there's a tribe on TikTok and I'm definitely not a member. I had a visceral and instinctual desire to jump on board. Naturally, I want to belong.
If I am having that feeling at 25 years old, with no reasonable justification to actually create viral videos, I can't help but think how many 13-year-olds feel excluded for not having become TikTok famous yet.
Comparing our private lives to other peoples’ highlight reels, being always-on and always reachable, and being excluded from only-now-visible tribes has created palpable stress among Gen Z & Millennials. Many point to these societal changes as accountable for the rise in teenage suicides, anxiety and depression.
Already, brands are cashing in on the zeitgeist. In late 2018 Recess launched it's "Antidote to Modern Times." "We all have too many tabs in our browsers and our minds," and their $8 hemp-infused seltzer will keep you calm amidst the internet angst.
Recess found remarkable product-zeitgeist fit, raised $50M and was arguably the most successful new consumer brand of 2019.
Interestingly enough, Recess is an internet-first company. It doesn't take but a few minutes of scrolling through their Instagram feed to understand what that means.
A friend of mine recently described his experience consuming the product as akin to “drinking a meme.”
A few months after launching Recess, they took their brand, designed for creative millennial internet culture, and manifested it into “Recess IRL.”
Now you can actually enter the meme.
I'm not sure there's a better indicator of the rise of internet-first culture than this place existing and this acronym being an increasingly necessary part of our lexicon.
How long until internet culture is just culture? Will our physical spaces be more reflective of our digital-lives than they are of our real ones?
Till next week,
Dan