The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: The Socrates and Skeleton Meme

As usual, this week's collection of youth culture flotsam is all over the map. We got the surprising appearance of ancient Greek philosopher Socrates in AI-generated brainrot videos; a meme about winning at gambling that's becoming a meme about hypocrisy; an emoji that probably means something different than you think; and truly creative videos that, whew, don't use AI.

Viral video of the week: Socrates and skeleton

The breakout star of viral videos this week is foundational Athenian philosopher Socrates, with his co-star, a living skeleton. In these AI -generated videos, the skeleton represents the viewer, and the idea is to illustrated hypothetical scenarios like "What if you and Socrates opened a Chick-fil-A in ancient Greece?"

or "what if you ended up dating Socrates in Ancient Rome?"

The trend started with this Instagram video:

View this post on Instagram

They then spread to TikTok, where anyone can generate one by posting a dumb prompt to an AI video generation app.

Maybe it's good that kids are incorporating Socrates into their internal hierarchy of meme characters, but Socrates is portrayed as the most annoying person imaginable, who goes around pestering strangers with pseudo-philosophical questions. This isn't that far from actual descriptions of the philosopher, who was so confrontational and condescending that his fellow Athenians voted to make him drink poison. But it wasn't because his questions were annoying; it was because they revealed unpleasant contradictions at the center of people's beings. The Socratic Method is about arriving at truth through fearless self-assessment, not about being a jerk.

Also, Socrates was from Greece, not Rome. Socratic Irony is using feigned ignorance to reveal the truth, while Internet Irony is using AI to imagine modern people are superior to ancient philosophers when they don't even know the difference between Greece and Rome.

The story behind the "I just hit the jackpot" meme

It might be impossible to really know why Socrates has become popular now, so let's take a look at an easier-to-explain trend. "I just hit the jackpot" is a meme format where a clip of rapper GameboyJones singing the chorus to his song "HIT THE JACKPOT! (Hakari Dance)" is overlaid with text about a situation in which someone has hit a metaphorical jackpot. Like when there's a substitute teacher:

or when a test you haven't studied for is delayed:

GameboyJones originally posted the song to accompany an edit of the anime series Jujutsu Kaisen. The song and meme are tied to the character Kinji Hakari, whose superpower is themed around gambling and "hitting the jackpot."

The anime connection means many of the memes made from the clip go deep into corners of the anime world that only the hardest of hardcore understand. Your guess is as good as mine with clips like this:

Also, many of these memes refer to "love over lust mfers," so let's get into that, shall we?

What does "love over lust mfers" mean?

The mfers part means "motherfuckers," but "love over lust" is a little harder to explain. On the surface, it's self-explanatory and refers to people who say they're into love over lust. Videos like these have been cropping up on TikTok lately:

The self-conscious, performative sincerity in these videos is so thick, a backlash is inevitable. It's come in the form of videos where the joke is that anyone who says they're into love over lust is secretly a huge freak, a joke that happens to pair perfectly with the "I just hit the jackpot" meme:

What does 🪫, the low battery emoji, mean?

Among young people, 🪫, the low battery emoji, is not saying "I need to find a charger, right away." It means something like "I am experiencing emotional depletion, heartbreak, or a general feeling of 'I can't anymore.'" It's a more general version of 🥀, the wilted rose emoji, but unlike the rose, it doesn't only refer to heartbreak.

(If you can't get enough definitions of Gen Z and Gen A slang, check out Lifehacker's glossary.)

These cartoon chase videos are inspired

Here's something young people are doing that's original, creative, clever, and doesn't use AI. Cartoon chase videos employ old-fashioned sound effects, video editing, and cleverness to recreate iconic cartoon moments, like so:

I'm sure Socrates would have some serious questions about reenacting old Looney Tunes cartoons, like "When a coyote runs off a cliff, does it fall because of gravity or because it looks down and holds up a sign that reads, 'Yipes'?" and "When Bugs Bunny dresses as a sexy female rabbit to trick his enemy, is it Bugs or Elmer who is deceived?" But that annoying prick's been dead since 399 bc, so screw him. Six-Seven!

View the full article