A Guide to Children’s Culture for Out-of-Touch Adults: Generation Alpha Memes
This week we’re talking about generation gap! Gen Z and millennials are fighting over Eminem (sort of), a YouTuber has been elected to the European Parliament, and the gaming industry continues to remake games for dads. The one thing we can all agree on is that Generation Alpha consumes disturbing memes.
Outside the Skibidi Toilet: Meaningless Generation Alpha Memes
Generation Alpha – children aged one to 10 – are too young to have a fully formed generational identity, but the growing popularity of Gen A memes gives an idea of what they’re about, and it’s all nonsense. While older generations (like 16-year-olds) may gravitate toward art that is meant to express something, Gen A seems fascinated by consuming, distributing, and creating meaninglessness.
The most famous example of Gen A gibberish is Skibidi Toilet , a YouTube animated series that has racked up hundreds of millions of Gen A views. Skibidi resists attempts at explanation . But Skibidi is ancient , more than a year old, and the new memes are even more mysterious.
There’s EE-EI, a short video of a piece of meat singing “Vacation” by the Dirty Heads, with lyrics translated to “E e ei, Imon vagayxon, Evrizingou dei, Cus ailov mawackupaxien.” Although the original video has been removed from TikTok, responses and remixes have flooded the Gen-A space . They make no sense , but there have been over 11,000 videos posted on TikTok alone using the song, including videos like this one, which is like an avant-garde experimental film, except it’s been viewed 1.7 million times, which has never happened before real films. avant-garde film.
The current king of bullshit is TikToker Razi, who has nearly eight million followers on an account that is simply videos of crazy covers of popular songs. Their video Gegagedigedagedago (a cover of “Cotton Eye Joe”) alone has racked up over 30 million streams, giving the original track an estimated three billion listens , as well as many, many videos like this RoBlox chicken nugget singing the song .
My initial thought about these memes was, “What’s the big deal? Everyone loves funny sounds,” but today I spent several hours watching Gene Alpha’s bullshit videos and it felt like I had witnessed humanity’s collective unconscious go haywire. “Brain rot” is too mild a term: it’s what you’ll see on your monitor right before a terminal error state is reached and the entire mainframe is hard rebooted. I’m not usually into the “What about the kids ?” camp, but the thought of a five year old spending hours every day eating this is just depressing. I hope I feel this way just because I’m old and don’t understand it.
Is Gen Z canceling Eminem?
Rapper and NFT fan Eminem has released a new video in which his past self travels through time and confronts the world in 2024. In the video, Eminem discovers what the current world is lacking.
The song is the latest salvo in a long-running imagined war between Gen Z and millennials over the rapper. Many millennials seem to believe that Gen Z is trying to cancel Em because of his controversial decisions. I asked my teenage son about this and he said, “Nobody is trying to cancel Eminem; we just think it’s corny.”
He is right. Even a generation like me can see that Eminem is so damn corny. I can only think of one thing more banal than Eminem: Millennials talking about Gen Z canceling Eminem.
What do the words “brilliant” and “fax, no printer” mean?
The ever-changing slang of youth has given rise to two interesting new slang words:
Glizzy: Glizzy means hot dog. This word was originally slang for “pistol” or “Glock”, but its meaning appears to have changed. The theory is that the extended magazine for a Glock looks like a hot dog, hence glizzy = hot dog. (Better than Weiner, anyway.)
Fax, no printer . It’s a colorful way of saying, “I’m telling the truth.” Since the words “facts” and “fax” are pronounced the same, you can say “fax, no printer” instead of “facts, no header.”
YouTuber elected to the European Parliament
Fidias Panayiotou has 2.6 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, where he posts videos about spending 10 days buried alive . The 24-year-old’s latest stunt was to run for the European Union Parliament as an independent candidate for Cyprus. He says he didn’t actually try to win the election and doesn’t even know how parliament works, but Panayiotou received almost 20% of the vote, enough to take the post.
“Perhaps this means the world has come to a point where a new chapter in the book of democracy begins,” Panayiotou said.
Whether true or not, Panayiotou is not the first joke candidate to win a seat in the EU parliament. That honor goes to Di Partie (“The Party”), a satirical political party founded by the editors of the German humor magazine Titanic . The party, whose slogans include “Education starts with an E” and “A Unicorn for All,” won its first parliamentary seat in 2014 and won its second seat this year.
What is a “hot rodent guy”?
Guys who wonder what women are really looking for may be surprised by the new type of guy they say they want. The trend is for “hot rodent” men—guys who resemble mice, rats, voles, and/or chinchillas, both physically and mentally. Frequently cited pop culture examples include Timothée Chalamet, Jeremy Allen White, Barry Keoghan and Matty Healy. However, the two original human rodents are actors Mike Feist and Josh O’Connor, stars of Challengers . As X/Twitter user Francesca Fedele points out below , they really do look like cute little mice.
From this post, the entire genre of rodent people gradually took shape. Male rodents are, generally speaking, slender rather than muscular, with angular faces and a certain unconventional appeal. Personally, rodent men tend to favor sensitivity, wit, and intelligence over strength. Unlike the loyal but stupid boyfriends of golden retrievers , hot rodent boys are good at finding cheese no matter where it is in the maze.
Viral Video of the Week: This Game is Eggcellent
Microsoft held its annual Xbox Games Showcase this week, detailing the games it will be selling this Christmas. Trailers were presented for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 , Dragon Age: The Veilguard , Doom: The Dark Ages and many others.
These are games for people’s dads. The first Doom came out 30 years ago, and the Call of Duty franchise is old enough to be an Eminem fan. So I started looking for games that kids liked . It turns out they like games about chickens.
YouTube channel SMii7Y posted a Let’s Play video about a game called Eggstraction , “a game where you play as a chicken and try to steal the golden eggs from the farmer”, and it was viewed by over a million people in the first half day. Sure, more people clicked on the COD trailer, but playing a chicken game seems like it would be about 1000 times more fun than X-TREME’s tedious guns-and-guts game in another damn Call of Duty game.