Exploring Internet Memes as a Cultural Offshoot of Dadaism

During a time when boundaries had not been drawn onto maps, when man still looked like beast instead of only acting like one, our ancestors developed speech. Over millennia, language emerged, empires rose and fell over it, wars were fought over single words and whose god had the right one — all so that, in the 21st century, we could use this ancient tool to say '6-7'. Finding meaning in the memes that come out of the internet in this day and age is nothing short of the 13th Herculean task. What can you attribute to a shark that wears sneakers on the beach? Or a high society cup of cappuccino that can break into ballet? It is easy to dismiss this as childish, ‘Gen Z’, brainrot humour that doesn’t serve a purpose. But what if its very purpose is that it does not serve one? What if its lack of meaning is its entire meaning? Long before the internet was reigned by the likes of a grotesque talking toilet, there was Cabaret Voltaire. In 1916, in a small performance space in Zurich, a handful of artists and poets gathered nightly to read poems built from invented syllables, paste together newspaper scraps into collages, and generally refuse to make sense — on purpose. Dadaism was born within these walls. In a time ravaged by senseless wars and irrational slaughter, why was art supposed to make sense? Tristan Tzara's 1918 Dada Manifesto stated: Dada does not mean anything – and the refusal to mean was itself the argument. Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal and called it Fountain, relocating the definition of art from the object to the choice. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven wore tomato cans as earrings and postage stamps as makeup, treating absurdity as something to be lived rather than merely exhibited.

Alfred Stieglitz photograph of the Fountain, 1917

Scholars who study the movement, have argued that Dada's chaos was never really chaotic — that beneath the nonsense sat a deliberate, coordinated set of tactics: abstraction, chance, contradiction, performance, all aimed at a specific target, namely the rational, bourgeois order that had just marched Europe into the trenches. Dada meant nothing, but it meant nothing at something.

Understanding Dadaism

Dada wasn't a one-off movement born out of the First World War. In it’s own unique way it has shaped dissent, emotion, rage and countless other emotions into meaningful nonsense. Whenever a society's confidence collapses faster than its ability to process the collapse, elements of Dadaism naturally grow out of our own need to cope. Post September 11th, American comedy went quiet – talk shows went dark, comedians unsure if irony had just become obscene. Then, on September 26th, The Onion returned from its own two-week silence with a special issue built entirely around the attacks, running headlines like "Hugging Up 76,000 Percent", "US Vows to Defeat Whoever It Is We're at War With" and "Hijackers Surprised To Find Selves In Hell". The last headline even featured one attacker who complained of being promised paradise and being fed honeyed cakes by 67 virgins, only to find himself in hell's lowest tier instead. The "end of the age of irony" lasted less than a month.

Excerpt from The Onion September 11th Issue

We are witnessing the loss of meaning once again as the world around us keeps changing. We have built an information environment so saturated, so algorithmically accelerated, and increasingly so AI-generated, that no single rational narrative can keep up with it. Jean Baudrillard's old warning that media could become more "real" than reality itself reads less like theory now and more like a weather report. Dada responded to a irrational world by making meaningless art inside it. The internet is responding to a world where you can no longer even verify what's real by making content that doesn't ask you to. "Vasteguna Huiya," a phrase with no dictionary meaning in any language, became a slogan to come out of the recent CJP protests. Protesters leaned into total nonsense partly because meaninglessness is hard to prosecute. It's a small, telling sign that the internet's nonsense-logic isn't sealed off in memes anymore; the same way Dada's absurdism eventually hardened into overt political photomontage in Berlin.

Ways to make nonsense

Not all internet absurdism is built the same way. Some of it is fully authored, in the old Dada sense. But most internet absurdism has increasingly lost traceability to a single author. ‘6-7’ itself started from a drill rap song used to make edits about a basketball player’s height. It then moved into a space of internet virality after a kid yelled the term at a basketball game, accompanying it with a hand gesture. For months, post-that, you would hear children and maybe even some adults say the phrase incessantly. Italian brainrot at its core started with a singular author who had an AI tool at his disposal. But the channel of AI-generated media distribution is extremely corrupted. Works immediately lose their origin as multiple hands with AI platforms as their tools start creating versions and interpretations of the origin. One unique aspect of Italian brainrot is its fascination with speed, machines, and mock-military hardware. This is not just Dada but Italian Futurism, a movement that glorified war and fed directly into fascist aesthetics a century ago, a reminder that formal absurdity doesn't come pre-loaded with good politics. The artist Daniel Keller has a useful term for the version of this that curdles: "sloptimism," low-effort content that exists purely to farm attention, as opposed to brainrot at its best, which still functions as something closer to a shared, if baffling, communal ritual. Another version of this is the bastardised AI-generation of a dating reality show where the participants become sexualised fruits. Here the direct author is not a human but these characters are built over the work of humans but no human is involved in its production. Characters looked different from episode to episode; animations glitched and broke; audiences treated the malfunctions as the content rather than the flaw. Nobody, including the model generating it, maintained continuity of intent from one episode to the next. If Surrealist automatic writing was about loosening the artist's conscious grip just enough to let chance speak, this is what happens when you remove the grip entirely. Hal Foster has argued that the twentieth-century avant-garde's meaning-resisting gestures have by now been almost completely absorbed by the very system they set out to resist. Irony turned into brand identity, humor turned into data. You can watch this happen in real time with mascots of language learning apps and burger joints turning absurdist humour into their brand’s most aggressively successful marketing technique. This is where the sincerity and the irony genuinely start to blur into each other. Some theorists studying the period after postmodernism call metamodernism, an oscillation where a post can be a joke and a real feeling at once, with no clean way to tell which is which. It's a condition George Orwell half-anticipated in 1984, though he got the mechanism backward: Orwell feared a Ministry of Truth deliberately engineering meaninglessness from the top down. What we have instead is meaninglessness with no engineer at all, until, occasionally, a brand comes along afterward to claim it.

Does this even count?

Not everyone accepts the comparison between Internet memetic culture and Dadaism. In a 2022 paper examining whether internet "shitposts" qualify as a Neo-Dada movement, the researcher Griffin Nordstrom argued they largely don't. His case rests on two points. First, Tzara's Dada explicitly rejected the audience, treating the work as something private and self-contained, while memes depend entirely on an audience recognising a shared reference to function at all. Second, and more damning: where the Fluxus artists who followed Dada were consciously building on its legacy, most people making brainrot or shitposts have never read a Dada manifesto and aren't citing one. Nordstrom's conclusion is that the internet's absurdist culture is developing on its own terms, and stretching "Dada" to cover it risks emptying the term of meaning altogether. He may be right that this isn't inheritance in any citational sense. But it might be something more interesting than a knockoff, a case of the same conditions producing the same aesthetic response twice.

Tralalero Tralala

Nobody making Tralalero Tralala needed to have read Tzara for the resemblance to be real; they just needed to be living through a comparable collapse of confidence in sense-making. There's also a middle position worth naming: internet absurdism isn't audience-rejecting like Dada, and it isn't fully audience-embracing. And unauthored absurdity carries its own risk. Pepe the Frog began as a freelance artist's comic character and was taken up, against his creator's wishes, as a symbol of the alt-right, a reminder that when meaning is made by no one in particular, it can be claimed by anyone in particular. Maybe the point of the Herculean task was never to decide whether brainrot is Dada 2.0 — never to ascribe meaning to it or make sense of it at all. We need to understand that when the world stops making sense, people start making nonsense. Perhaps the most Dada thing about internet absurdism is that it keeps happening despite itself. If our ancestors developed speech to make sense of the world, we've developed nonsense to survive its collapse.