Pandemic, TikTok & Short-Form

Lockdown: When the World Went Online

In March 2020, as COVID-19 spread across the globe and governments began implementing lockdowns, something unprecedented happened to internet culture: essentially everyone became an internet person. People who had previously spent a few hours a day online were now spending nearly all their waking hours connected. Screen time exploded. Social media usage surged. And meme production went into overdrive.

The lockdown era produced memes at a volume and velocity that dwarfed anything that had come before. Billions of people were stuck at home, anxious, bored, and desperate for connection. Memes provided all three things that people needed: entertainment to combat boredom, catharsis to manage anxiety, and shared references to maintain social bonds when physical contact was impossible. The meme was no longer just a form of humor. It was a lifeline.

The earliest pandemic memes dealt with the immediate, practical absurdities of lockdown life. Toilet paper hoarding became the first great meme of the pandemic era -- the sheer irrationality of stockpiling bathroom tissue in response to a respiratory virus was a gift to comedians. Zoom call disasters (unmuted microphones, forgotten camera angles, children and pets interrupting meetings) became an instant genre. The banana bread phenomenon -- seemingly everyone in lockdown decided to bake banana bread simultaneously -- was meme-ified within days.

But beneath the surface-level humor, pandemic memes served a deeper function. They were how people processed grief, fear, and uncertainty in real time. Memes about death, about the collapse of normalcy, about the terrifying randomness of a global pandemic -- these were not just jokes. They were a form of collective emotional processing, a way of saying "I am scared and confused" without the vulnerability of saying it directly. The cheerful nihilism of late 2010s meme culture had found its ultimate subject.

TikTok Becomes Dominant

TikTok had been growing steadily since its merger with Musical.ly in 2018, but the pandemic was its inflection point. With billions of people stuck at home and looking for entertainment, TikTok's infinite scroll of short videos was perfectly positioned. The platform's downloads surged. Its daily active users passed 1 billion. By 2021, TikTok had surpassed Google as the most visited website in the world.

TikTok's dominance fundamentally restructured meme culture. The platform's algorithm -- the most sophisticated content recommendation system ever built -- changed how memes were discovered and distributed. On older platforms, memes spread through sharing: someone saw something funny and actively chose to send it to their friends or post it on their timeline. On TikTok, the algorithm did the distribution. If your video caught the algorithm's attention, it would be shown to thousands, then millions, of people who had never heard of you and had not asked to see your content. Discovery was passive and algorithmic rather than active and social.

This algorithmic distribution had profound implications. It made virality more accessible -- anyone could blow up on TikTok, regardless of their follower count or social network. But it also made virality more unpredictable and harder to sustain. A creator could have one video reach 10 million views and the next reach 200. The algorithm was king, and no one fully understood how it worked.

Sound-Based Memes

TikTok's most revolutionary contribution to meme culture was the centrality of audio. On TikTok, sounds were the templates. A snippet of a song, a spoken phrase, a sound effect -- these became the building blocks around which users constructed their videos. The "original sound" credit system meant that each sound could be traced back to its origin, and users could browse all videos using a particular sound. This created a new kind of meme lineage: not visual templates with text variations, but audio templates with visual and performative variations.

Sound-based memes operated on different principles than image-based memes. They relied on rhythm, timing, and musical logic. They often required performance -- lip-syncing, dancing, acting. They were inherently multimedia, combining audio, video, text overlays, and visual effects. And they were often more emotionally resonant than text-based memes, because music and voice carry emotional weight in ways that Impact font does not.

Coffin Dance: The Perfect Pandemic Meme

In early 2020, a 2017 BBC documentary clip of Ghanaian pallbearers performing an elaborate dancing funeral procession was set to the EDM track "Astronomia" and began circulating as a meme. The format was simple: show something going wrong (a failed stunt, a cooking disaster, a bad decision), then cut to the dancing pallbearers. The implication was clear: this mistake is going to kill you.

The Coffin Dance meme was the perfect pandemic artifact. It took the thing everyone was afraid of -- death -- and made it danceable. It transformed existential dread into comedy by presenting death not as a solemn tragedy but as a party. The juxtaposition was funny, but it was also cathartic. In a time when death was a daily headline, the Coffin Dance offered a way to acknowledge mortality without being crushed by it. The meme was gallows humor in its purest, most joyful form.

Bernie Mittens: The Last Wholesome Meme?

On January 20, 2021, at the inauguration of President Joe Biden, Senator Bernie Sanders was photographed sitting alone in a folding chair, wearing a brown winter jacket and oversized hand-knitted mittens, arms crossed, looking vaguely uncomfortable. The image was meme-ified within minutes. Sanders was Photoshopped into every conceivable context: sitting on the Iron Throne, on the moon, at the Last Supper, on a park bench with Forrest Gump.

The Bernie Mittens meme was notable for its near-universal positivity. Unlike most memes involving politicians, it was not partisan. Both Sanders' supporters and detractors found the image funny, because the humor was about the universal human experience of sitting through a boring outdoor event in winter while trying to stay warm. Sanders himself embraced the meme, selling merchandise featuring the image and donating the proceeds to charity.

Bernie Mittens was one of the last memes to achieve something close to universal, non-controversial viral success. In an increasingly fragmented meme landscape, where different political and cultural groups occupied separate memetic universes, the image of an old man in mittens proved that some things were still funny to everyone.

Sea Shanty TikTok: The Algorithm Creates a Genre

In December 2020 and January 2021, TikTok experienced an unlikely cultural phenomenon: sea shanties. A Scottish postal worker named Nathan Evans posted a video of himself singing "Wellerman," a 19th-century New Zealand whaling song, and the video went viral. Other users added harmonies, instruments, and layers using TikTok's duet feature. Within weeks, sea shanties were dominating the platform, charting on Spotify, and being covered by mainstream media.

Sea Shanty TikTok was a perfect demonstration of TikTok's unique cultural mechanics. The duet feature allowed collaborative creativity at scale -- hundreds of people could contribute to a single musical performance without ever being in the same room. The algorithm's ability to surface niche content to massive audiences turned a genre that had been dormant for over a century into a global trend. And the participatory nature of TikTok culture meant that the audience was also the performer -- the line between creator and consumer was erased.

Among Us and "Sus" Culture

Among Us, a multiplayer social deduction game released in 2018, experienced a sudden explosion in popularity in 2020 as lockdown-bound players searched for social gaming experiences. The game's simple premise -- identify the impostor among your crewmates -- and its distinctive visual style (colorful bean-shaped astronauts) made it extremely meme-able. The word "sus" (short for "suspicious") migrated from the game into general internet vocabulary and eventually into spoken English.

Among Us memes were significant because they demonstrated how gaming culture and meme culture had become inseparable. The game's visual language -- the crew members, the emergency meetings, the ejection animations -- became meme templates in their own right. "When the impostor is sus" became a catchphrase that outlived the game's peak popularity by years. The Among Us crewmate became a visual motif that appeared in contexts far removed from gaming, a free-floating symbol that meant something like "suspicious" or "out of place" or simply "this reminds me of Among Us."

The Will Smith Slap: Real-Time Meme Processing

On March 27, 2022, at the Academy Awards ceremony, actor Will Smith walked onto the stage and slapped presenter Chris Rock for making a joke about Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. The incident was broadcast live to millions of viewers and immediately became the most memed event of the year.

The speed at which the internet processed the Will Smith Slap was remarkable even by 2022 standards. Within minutes, the moment had been screenshotted, GIF-ified, remixed, Photoshopped, and distributed across every platform. Within an hour, established meme formats had been adapted to incorporate the slap. Within a day, the discourse had passed through several complete cycles: shock, humor, moral debate, backlash against the humor, meta-commentary on the discourse, and exhaustion.

The Will Smith Slap was a case study in how meme culture processes live events. The internet had become so fast, so practiced at turning reality into content, that the gap between event and meme had collapsed to nearly zero. There was no processing time, no reflection period. The event was simultaneously experienced and memed, lived and content-ified. This real-time memification raised questions about whether the internet's instinct to immediately joke about everything was healthy or desirable -- questions that had no good answers.

Memes as Collective Coping

The pandemic era crystallized something that had been true for years but never so visible: memes were how people coped. Not just with boredom or social isolation, but with genuine trauma, grief, and existential fear. COVID memes, climate change memes, economic anxiety memes, political crisis memes -- the internet responded to every source of collective stress with humor. The meme was the coping mechanism of a generation that had been raised online and had no other language for processing shared experience.

This coping function was genuinely valuable. Research in psychology suggests that humor can be an effective coping mechanism, helping people process difficult emotions and maintain social connections during stressful times. Pandemic memes created shared experiences among people who were physically separated. They provided a sense of community when community was impossible. They offered the comfort of knowing that other people were scared, too, and that fear could be funny.

But the coping function also had a darker side. The relentless humor could function as avoidance -- a way of never fully confronting difficult emotions. The instinct to meme everything could trivialize genuine suffering. And the pace of meme culture meant that serious issues were often processed through humor and then discarded before any meaningful engagement had occurred. The internet would crack jokes about a crisis for three days, then move on to the next crisis, having processed nothing and resolved nothing.

NFTs, Crypto, and Meme Finance

In 2021, the collision of meme culture and cryptocurrency produced some of the era's most surreal phenomena. Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency created in 2013 as a joke based on the Doge meme, surged to a market capitalization of over $80 billion, driven partly by Elon Musk's tweets. The NFT (non-fungible token) craze led to meme images being sold as digital collectibles for astonishing prices -- the original Nyan Cat GIF sold for $600,000, and the Doge photo sold for $4 million.

The meme-finance intersection was equal parts fascinating and alarming. On one hand, it represented the ultimate validation of meme culture's economic significance -- these silly internet images were worth real money, sometimes enormous amounts of it. On the other hand, the NFT and crypto boom was characterized by extraordinary hype, widespread fraud, and eventual collapse that left many investors with worthless assets. Meme culture, which had always existed outside the logic of the market, was being absorbed into it -- and the results were not always pretty.

Wordle: The Wholesome Phenomenon

In late 2021 and early 2022, Wordle -- a simple word-guessing game created by Josh Wardle for his partner -- became a global phenomenon. Players had one puzzle per day, six attempts to guess a five-letter word, and a grid of colored squares that showed their progress. That grid became a meme format in itself. People shared their Wordle results on social media as colored emoji squares, creating a shared daily ritual that millions participated in.

Wordle's memetic power came from its constraints. One puzzle per day meant that everyone was solving the same puzzle. The colored grid was shareable without spoiling the answer. The game was simple enough for anyone and challenging enough to feel satisfying. In a meme landscape dominated by irony, absurdism, and pessimism, Wordle was refreshingly sincere -- a genuine shared pleasure in an era of manufactured outrage.

"It's Morbin' Time" and Ironic Fandom

When Sony's Morbius (2022), a poorly received superhero film starring Jared Leto, became the subject of ironic celebration online, the phrase "It's Morbin' Time" (never actually spoken in the film) became a rallying cry. Internet users pretended that Morbius was a masterpiece, claimed it had earned "1 morbillion dollars," and demanded that Sony re-release the film. Sony, apparently taking the ironic enthusiasm at face value, actually did re-release Morbius in theaters -- where it bombed spectacularly.

The Morbius phenomenon was a perfect illustration of the post-ironic condition of meme culture. Nobody actually liked the movie. But the pretense of liking it -- the collective, coordinated, obviously fake enthusiasm -- was itself the entertainment. The joke was not about Morbius; it was about the ability of internet culture to create consensus out of nothing, to will a reality into existence through sheer repetitive commitment. When Sony fell for it, the joke achieved its fullest expression: meme culture had tricked a major corporation into making a business decision based on ironic shitposting.

Goblin Mode: The Word of the Year

In December 2022, the Oxford English Dictionary selected "goblin mode" as its Word of the Year, based on a public vote. The term described a state of unapologetic self-indulgence and laziness -- eating in bed, wearing pajamas all day, rejecting social expectations. It was a pandemic-era concept that perfectly captured how many people felt after two years of collective trauma: tired of trying to be productive, ready to embrace their most feral instincts.

"Goblin mode" entering the dictionary was symbolic of meme culture's complete integration into mainstream language. Internet slang was no longer confined to the internet. It was shaping how people thought and talked about their lives. The meme had become the dominant mode of cultural expression -- not just for young people, not just online, but for everyone, everywhere. The pandemic had completed the mainstreaming that the golden age had begun, and there was no going back.