🌀 The Folktales of the Feed

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You send your friend a meme. They send back a different one. Neither of you laughs out loud. Neither of you needs to explain. An entire feeling, a joke, a complaint, or a worldview gets compressed into a six-second video or a single image with three lines of text.

We tend to think of memes as throwaway content. Junk food. Brain rot. Something young people do on their phones when they should be doing something serious.

But what if memes are doing what folktales did for thousands of years? Carrying meaning that can't be said directly. Building belonging through shared inside jokes.

Today, let's see the feed not as noise but as a campfire.

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In Egypt's Western Desert, the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod spent nearly two years living among an Awlad Ali Bedouin community. She kept hearing a strange kind of poetry, short, two-line songs called ghinnāwas, or "little songs." Women slipped them into ordinary conversation. A line about a lover's neglect. A line about loss. A line about a husband's cruelty.

The catch: Bedouin life demands modesty and emotional restraint. You aren't supposed to express longing or sadness directly. But the ghinnāwa was a permitted exception, a small formal container in which forbidden feelings could surface. Below are some examples of that:

In her 1986 book Veiled Sentiments, Abu-Lughod showed that these weren't merely personal poems. They were a shared template. The same formulas recurred, slightly adapted to each speaker's situation. Anyone could fill them in. Everyone understood the code.

That's exactly how memes work now.

A meme template awaits your input to express your grievance. The shared frame is set, but the feeling is yours to own, often one you'd prefer not to articulate openly: anxiety, romantic frustration, or quiet contempt for your job.

Bedouin women composed two-line poems. We have screenshots and captions.

The media scholar Limor Shifman argues that internet memes are best understood as a form of "(post)modern folklore." In her 2014 book Memes in Digital Culture, she defines memes not as single objects but as groups of items that share common features and are reshaped by many users simultaneously.

Folklorists describe traditional folk tales the same way. There is no single original "Cinderella." There are hundreds of versions across hundreds of cultures. Each teller adds, subtracts, adapts. The story belongs to no one and to everyone.

Folklore was always about participation. Knowing the story meant you belonged to the group telling it.

Memes do this on a faster clock. The Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in his study In the Swarm, warns that digital communication produces hollow individuals who briefly focus on the same thing without ever forming a real "we".

He's partly right. But when someone drops a cursed image into a group chat, and three people instantly get it, something more than a swarm is happening. A small piece of folklore is being shared. Belonging is being confirmed in seven words and a JPEG.

Look at what took over TikTok in 2025: a wave of absurdity known as Italian brainrot. It began in January 2025 with an AI-generated shark wearing Nike trainers, narrated in fake Italian. The character, Tralalero Tralala, spawned a whole bestiary of bomber planes, crocodiles, ballerina cappuccinos, and anthropomorphic ninja cups.

No author, no script, only a basic template anyone could customize. By April 2026, Fortnite was marketing skins of these characters to children, whose parents had no understanding of their significance.

Meanwhile, "brain rot" itself was named Oxford's 2024 Word of the Year, with a 230% increase in usage over a single year. The phrase first appeared in Henry David Thoreau's 1854 book Walden, where he worried that people were losing the ability to think deeply. Gen Z and Gen Alpha picked it up, twisted it, and used it to describe and laugh at themselves.

That's a folkloric move: Take an old word. Hollow it out. Fill it with new meaning. Pass it around. The people in Eatonville, Florida, did it with biblical stories in the 1930s. The people in your group chat are doing it right now with crocodile bombers.

📜 Quote: Zora Neale Hurston wrote: "Folklore is the arts of the people, before they find out that there is any such thing as art."

📊 Study: Oxford University Press recorded a 230% increase in the use of "brain rot" between 2023 and 2024, a term Gen Alpha uses both to mock low-quality online content and to laugh at themselves for consuming it.

🎨 Artifact: The "deep-fried" meme is an image so heavily filtered, recompressed, and recaptioned that the original is unrecognizable. Folklore at maximum decay.

🤔 Prompt: What's a meme your group chat keeps sending, and what feeling are you all actually naming?

Pick one image, video, or phrase that lives rent-free in your friend group's chat. Now imagine: what does it really mean to you? Is it really that funny?

Every generation invents a new way to say what it can't say in plain words. Bedouin women had ghinnāwas. Hurston's neighbors had "lies" told on the porch. Your group chat has a single screenshot of a confused-looking cartoon dog.

The medium changes, but the function doesn't.

When critics call memes a sign of cultural collapse, they're missing what people have always done: take a shared template, fill it with private feeling, pass it on, and belong. You might think that folklore is dying. It’s still alive and just buffering.

If this resonated, forward it to someone who keeps sending you cursed images. They'll understand.

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