I thought I knew a lot about Internet culture, but maybe not? I'm still not sure why New Balance is the incel/ 4chan shoe; what makes the Neutral Milk Hotel album funny and "meme-able"; and why Joker (2019) was so singularly influential for the culture. Does anyone feel like they can't keep up? Should we want to keep up? This makes me wonder if there's an Internet savant out there who sits in the Aleph, the Jorge Borges invention where you can see everything in the universe, but in this case it's a couple decades of Internet drama. Maybe that would be KnowYourMeme, although whenever I've gone there it's riddled with so many ads that it's unreadable.
I'm not a big believer in "human nature," but I remember seeing studies showing that a majority of people hate the feeling of being out of the loop. Of being on the outside and not knowing something. I sympathize with this a lot