Internet Culture
Memes, laws and folklore of the online world.
A skateboard, a bottle of juice, and a 43-year-old hit
In 2020 a man skateboarded to work drinking cranberry juice and lip-syncing Fleetwood Mac. The video sent “Dreams”, released in 1977, back into the US Top 20.
How trends spread, from royal courts to TikTok
For a century, the theory was that fashion trickled down from the rich. Then it started bubbling up from the street, and now it moves sideways through algorithms in weeks.
Julius Caesar’s secret code (and why it failed)
Caesar hid messages by shifting each letter three places. It worked until a 9th-century scholar invented a way to break any cipher like it.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is not what the internet says
It started with a bank robber who thought lemon juice made him invisible. The famous “Mount Stupid” chart was never in the paper.
The scream that has been in hundreds of films
One man’s scream, recorded for a 1951 western, turns up in Star Wars and Indiana Jones. It is named after a character who barely appears.
The Streisand effect
A photo of Barbra Streisand’s house had been downloaded six times. Then she sued to suppress it, and hundreds of thousands of people looked.