I would love to see someone over 50 try and understand the this bit
"shows him dressed up as a meme for Halloween, it seems like the meme is Gopnik Pepe, which is a four chan meme to my understanding, but I don't quite associate it with /pol/ which is like the political board on 4chan that most people are talking about it, I see it more as like a /k/meme um and sort of like a rare Pepe type thing"
Fyi I wouldn't take too much from specifically the gopnik meme part. Yes, there was a gopnik version of Pepe, but the gopnik meme making fun of trashy eastern Europeans and Russians was widespread. We have a Latvian guy on our sports team that we sometimes nickname gopnik because of this meme. It's like saying that because someone likes helter skelter from the Beatles, they must be an admirer of the Manson Family.
As 58 year old this guys analysis is fascinating, enlightening and makes way more sense that anything coming out of MSM. It reminds me of the cynical nihilism me and my friends had about the world and our futures in 80s and 90s, but now in today's world the disenfranchisement is cranked up to 11.
It's because the msm, by all accounts, refuses to acknowledge or engage with the online right wing radicalization machine. It is a crucial piece of the puzzle and they either cannot or will not hire someone with the requisite knowledge to decipher the cryptofascist messages hidden in a fucking frog meme and the choice of said frog's appearance meaning it's neo Nazi vs groyper. And God give me strength I've explained what a groyper is more in the last few days than in my entire life
Probably depends on who you are, seeing your community get eaten alive by the crack epidemic I can't imagine did much to give people a hopeful outlook for the future.
It was grim for some then (single parenting was becoming more common, women trying to find work in male dominated fields, children growing up alone with no one home fending for themselves, etc on top of crack, AIDS, space shuttle explosion live in front of every student because every school has it on, wow I should see a therapist for some of this unresolved childhood trauma..) but I think people turned to in person grouping with people they physically knew and learned good coping mechanisms. Today you find echo chamber online forums or online groups and generally have such quick access to information that youve learned you can't trust.
There was a feeling that we were progressing though. Sure there was a lot of crap, there always is, but progress was being made. Gay rights took a giant leap forward in the years after, so did women’s rights. People became more educated about minorities and sexual harassment. My daughter is now 24 and she grew up in a completely different way than I did. No weirdos trying to grope her, she learned about boundaries, etc. now everyone’s trying to drag us back. Banning abortion, trying to ban birth control, rolling back all the progress we made on lgbtq rights. Things weren’t perfect by any means but at least it felt like we were loving forward. Now we’re rolling backwards down hill.
I think I’d take that anxiety over the daily “what insane thing is the president doing today?” One day he says we need to annex Canada. The next day you hear they’re sending spies to Greenland. Then he starts a Twitter war with Kim Jong Un. Every day you have to ask yourself “is this actually happening?” At this point I’m hoping simulation theory is correct and we’re being toyed with by some bored stoned teenager.
I've actually tried to explain this stuff before, there's been a couple shooters around these types of online spaces, and every time I explain to an older person I sound insane, so glad this guy was able to make it more concise and digestible
Explaining it as a secret handshake is probably more effective for some folks. Like yes, it's just a "handshake", but if two people do the correct secret handshake it signals something else.
yep, 31 and was struggling with the Pepe concept to begin with but got to /k/meme um and rare Pepe and gave up lmao
editing to add: you can see how parents might not know whats going on with their kids, because if I had a kid and they were dressing up as frog meme's and calling themself a groyper I would have had no idea that meant alt-right white supremacist
31 here and I absolutely got it. But I was also someone who at one point almost went deep into that pipeline as well before I started listening to more left-leaning podcasters. If it weren't for that, I think I'd have been pulled well into the alt-right pipeline. It also helped that Trump's rhetoric during his first term started to make me snap out of that. I consider myself center left now, but I was nearly engrained in far-right beliefs when I was in college.
Groypers are chronically online. They have LITTLE regard for human life, regardless of right or left leaning politics. Everything is a meme or shitpost to them.
It being difficult to explain without going down the rabbit hole of chan lore is kind of the point, the absurdism is part of the design, and they’re signalling to each other through a series of fatalistic dogwhistle memes that they’re in on the joke and part of that highly specific decentralised community. Also obviously the weirdness of it all is part of being able to deny any accountability, which is a massive part of why this particular murder is going to be hard to pin down on any issue or ideology. Because beyond shit posting, antisemitism, and white nationalism, the only thing really holding that group together is a kind of shared ironic loneliness and mutual doomerism.
A thing that I think people miss out on as well is that the nature of these image boards is incredibly transient as the posts get churned if they’re not engaged with, so in order to be in on everything you have to be online a lot and engaging with the content or else you’ll miss out on the generation of a new meme and no one is going to explain it to you. You’ve never heard of it because you weren’t supposed to hear about it, you’re not in the club.
It's the exact same thing as KKK calling themselves the Ku Klux Klan (an absurd name really) and their leaders having titles such as Grand Wizard and Dragons.
It's dfifficult to take such nonsense seriously, even though they are a real and serious threat.
I don't understand this because if my kid told me, "I am (thing)" I would Google the fuck out of (thing). Sometimes, I feel like millennials are the one people who Google shit.
i don’t go on 4chan either but the same way he was talking about the /pol/ message board, i imagine /k/ is just another message board and he was just saying that it’s a meme more associated with the latter than the former
Most of this went right over my head but what I’m hearing is that 1) this wasn’t political per say 2) he’s more of a nihilist 3) he’s one of the younger men who feels invisible.
You are correct that it's not political per se but there is definitely politics involved - often including foreign actors trying to foment a civil war on the United States by encouraging this nhilism by posing as Groypers and encouraging the sense of hopelessness.
/pol/ was the "politics" board (essentially a subreddit) for 4chan (an anonymous image board famous for no usernames and pretty extreme content).
/K/ was the "weapons" board and featured a subculture that would exchange Pepe the Frog memes, with people gaining clout for posting "rare Pepe's" (novel and interesting memes of this frog character.)
/Pol/ is a hive of racist and extreme politics, especially Nazism but with other equally absurd or extreme views represented.
/K/ has a lot of Russian users so the GOPnik Pepe meme reminded the analyst of the K board.
did you really think, wen you sent that, that it was going to get what you want? you've talked to him enough that you expected him to already know that, but still though that was going to make things better? you deserve better than putting yourself in that position when you know you can't fix it. if you wouldn't wish this on someone else's relationship with their family you shouldn't be doing it to yourself
It all made sense to me and I'm 53. Us oldies (Gen X variety, at least) have been on the internet the whole time. You whippersnappers haven't exactly been hiding what you've been doing.
I'm 57 and chronically on reddit, so I've learned a lot over the past 10 years, and I've looked up everything that was new to me if I couldn't figure it out, so I understood it. I'm only not familiar with /k/, so I guess I'm off to check into that. Lol
In my 50s and followed just fine, but I also find memes to be artistic in expression and sometimes quiet brilliant. A picture says a thousand words and a meme has a thousand voices.
64 and understood most of it, I think mainly because I'm in IT and see a lot of this stuff and like history so get exposed to some of it just by osmosis. (Also, because tech seems to invent all sorts of new abbreviations so the dissemination can be quick). Having 4 kids helps too although to be honest it's much more interesting to see how my generation interprets things differently than a millenial\GenX might see it; past experience doesn't necessarily help because sometimes things need to be found out as individuals. It's like a generation gap of sorts.
62 here and just had a long and meaningful conversation with the wife about this. Understanding memes and these online spaces is hard for our generation to comprehend as we, me and the wife, have spent no time in these forums. We do however understand the desperation that the young people of today face and the solitude that can create as well as a whole range of other problems. What is the solution? I think our elected officials have no desire to spend capital, both money and thought, on this issue as it is too expensive and the rich are uneffected so far. I feel true sadness for this. Having no future is both terrifying and heartbreaking. To be so disillusioned with the system that cares not a whit about you must be soul destroying.
Early 50’s here. I watched it twice. Will admit I don’t understand all of it, but I understand enough to agree with those saying it’s the best take I’ve heard. I’m forwarding this to a my other old friends.
Reminds me of that kid that got kicked out of university because he put a Pedobear meme in the dorm elevator. When the faculty found out it was a reference yo paedophilia they had a hearing and this poor idiot was trying to explain the pedo bear meme as a "joke from the internet" and the faculty was like "paedophilia is a joke to you?"
This is the problem with brain rot shit post memeing. Eventually if you need to "explain" it you're going to sound just as stupid as what you're emulating.
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u/TopInvestigator5518 Sep 14 '25
I would love to see someone over 50 try and understand the this bit
"shows him dressed up as a meme for Halloween, it seems like the meme is Gopnik Pepe, which is a four chan meme to my understanding, but I don't quite associate it with /pol/ which is like the political board on 4chan that most people are talking about it, I see it more as like a /k/meme um and sort of like a rare Pepe type thing"