This was the decade some online memes became tangible offline disruptors, and the decade some were taken so seriously that they ceased being online fantasies and morphed into narrowly averted tragedies. They became right-wing recruitment tools, weapons of harassment, and tools of offline political resistance movements from Washington, DC, to Hong Kong. With increasing frequency, memes stood in for political arguments and ideological positions. But the memes with humor fit for the whole family, or at least for people who weren’t that active online but checked their feeds once in a while, were the ones that really filtered into the mainstream through social media. On niche forums from 4chan to closed Facebook groups, memes peddling subversive or insular humor - e.g. The rapid rise of mobile internet use and the increasing domination of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social platforms helped shift the overall nature of memes from edgy and esoteric to warm and wholesome.
This was the decade the meme became far more than a fun piece of internet humor: Memes evolved to encompass everything from hashtags to viral videos, becoming their own language with their own communities. Perhaps no single cultural artifact did more heavy lifting in the 2010s than the meme. Part of the Decade Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.