In 2016, the internet was blessed with CCTV footage of a Malaysian man leaning out of his car window, yelling at a security guard. Bullying cases were nothing new, but this particular one stood out for its hilarity: the man was seen yelling, “Apa l*njiao? Apa l*njiaooooo?” to the security guard. The video was only a few seconds long, but its impact lasted long after. Even today, a decade later, Malaysians would quote that signature line, and the other person would instantly know its context. This man became a meme.
Approximately five years after the incident, a local YouTuber released a music video and sampled clips from this viral meme, thus renewing its meme status. The video became so viral that the man featured in it had to ask the YouTuber to remove it, as he was being doxxed and facing ongoing trouble as a result. Somehow, the screenshot was shared to the rest of the internet, and the internet responded to, well, sharing the video even more.
From a full CCTV footage spanning several minutes, short, few-second clips of the video began circulating. At that point, even I could already recognise the reference point without needing to watch the full video. What does this moment teach us? First, anything can be a meme. Second, you cannot control what becomes a meme. Third and finally—everyone loves a good meme.
When Memes Become Our New Language
While we’ve been fervently sharing memes across social media for years, it really was the rise of TikTok usage that contributed to the language of memes. How else can you explain that earworm people parrot out every other week? We really went from “very demure, very mindful” to “nothing beats a Jet2 holiday” within the same year—with many other memes in between.
Beyond the soundbites, we’ve seen meme-speak infiltrate our language cadences in everyday conversations. We have YouTube, Vine, and TikTok to thank for this in recent years. For example, I can’t help but say “A-A-Ron” each time someone introduces themselves to me as “Aaron” or comment “Body is teaaaa” each time a friend with a good physique shows it off on social media. What does that line even mean, anyway? It’s the same way 6-7 has no literal meaning or how “skibidi” came from a long line of niche references that eventually made no sense in its final form.
Language used to be a beautiful thing, evolving slowly and precisely with new words entering the dictionary every few years. When “bootylicious” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2004, the news caused an uproar. The English language was being tainted this very second by pop culture! Yet memes today evolve at breakneck speeds. Sometimes, they disappear just as quickly as they are created. We are currently living through the fastest linguistic evolution in human history, and most of us don’t even register it as language. Oh, but we’re speaking it all the time. You’re so funny don’t go bald.
That said, there are also memes that withstand the test of time and social media—as well as memes that were memes before they were known as memes. Stay with us.
“Kilroy Was Here”
In the 1940s, during World War II, a specific piece of graffiti kept popping up everywhere American soldiers went: a cartoon of a man’s bald head with a comically long nose peering over a wall, hands gripping the top of the wall. Beside it were the words, “Kilroy was here”. Who is Kilroy, and who was the first person who drew it, leading other American soldiers to do the same wherever they were deployed?
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While there were several theories as to who Kilroy was, some theorised it was a certain James J. Kilroy, an American shipyard inspector who served on the Boston City Council and represented the Roxbury district in the Massachusetts Legislature during the 1930s. The Oxford English Dictionary said it was the name of a mythical person. Wherever—or whomever—coined the first one, “Kilroy was here” became a meme in the 1940s, etched across the world from bathrooms to bunkers, bridges, the Arc de Triomphe, the Statue of Liberty’s torch, and more. The mystery of who Kilroy was became part of the appeal—the meme’s power was in its ubiquity and anonymity.
Now, let’s take it even further back to the past—medieval times, to be precise. The term we are looking at here is “medieval marginalia”. Marginalia refers to marks made in the margins of a book or document and can range from scribbles to comments, doodles, and more. In the meme sense, people from medieval times have been known to indulge in the occasional joke doodle on books, and well-meaning—but unknowing—scribes have continually included these doodles into copies of books. Even people in medieval times were known to have some form of childish humour. One of the more popular doodles that kept coming up in medieval manuscripts was the Knight v Snail—doodles of knights engaging snails in battles.
Scholars have still been unable to ascertain the meaning of the knights and snails. It could mean something, or it could simply mean nothing (Re: 6-7 and Skibidi). This early form of memes shows that even back then, in serious, religious contexts, humans were still playing. If you think about it, it’s quite beautiful how we’ve evolved so much, yet are fundamentally still the same.
When Did We Start Recognising Memes As Memes?
So, we’ve established that memes have existed throughout most of humanity—but when did we start using the term widely? For the sake of relevance, we’ll begin with the 2000s and this iconic website: 4chan. It was the birthplace of Lolcats: cute pictures of cats headlined with large captions in broken English—they were even the ones who created the term “Caturday”. Eventually, icanhascheezburger.com was created to monetise Lolcats. Users would submit their own Lolcats images to be uploaded to the site, and in a scene that reflects today’s social media age, people could upvote those pictures, and the popular ones would go on to have meme status. The most iconic one was, of course, the fluffy grey cat meowing the words, “I can has cheezburger?” It struck the holy trinity of meme popularity: cute, has a cat, and was funny—at the time.
Eventually, this paved the way for 9gag and the prevalence of rage comics. Rage comics were incredibly basic, yet they got the job done for meme work. We’re talking MS Paint stick figures with standardised emotional faces like the FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU, Trollface, Forever Alone, and Me Gusta. It was crude, yet it was precisely the use of these standardised emotional faces that became a shared visual language on the internet for what each of them represented. FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU, or Rage Guy, represented the explosive frustration one feels at minor issues; Trollface was a mischievous prankster; Forever Alone represented a depressed, lonely guy; and Me Gusta represented pleasure or satisfaction—particularly in embarrassing contexts.
What made Rage Comics particularly significant was their collaborative, open-source nature: the faces themselves were communal property, free for anyone to use, remix, and incorporate into their own stories. This democratised meme creation in a way that previous formats hadn’t—you didn’t need Photoshop skills or artistic ability, only a willingness to arrange pre-existing emotional shorthand into new combinations. These rage comics became a way of documenting the texture of everyday life in the late 2000s and early 2010s, capturing everything from the triumph of a perfectly timed comeback to the crushing awkwardness of a failed social interaction.
One particular version of a rage comic I remembered was this guy attempting to seem relatable: his comic told a story of him getting a stomachache while showering. Instead of going to the toilet bowl like any normal person would, he did the deed in his hands and attempted to throw the faecal matter into the toilet bowl while still in the shower. He (obviously) missed and flew into a rage. He thought it would be a relatable situation. The internet disagreed. I didn’t think much of it till a few years later when someone on social media asked, “Do you remember that one guy on 9gag with the poop story?” Chat, everyone remembered.
However, rage comics also carried the seeds of something darker: Trollface culture, which began as harmless mischief, would gradually evolve into more malicious forms of online behaviour, presaging some of the toxicity that would later characterise internet discourse. It has evolved to become the trolls you now see hiding in the comments section of any post, ready to pounce at any typos or grammatical errors. By 2012, the format had begun to decline, killed partly by oversaturation and partly by the inevitable cycle where what starts as subversive becomes mainstream, and what becomes mainstream becomes cringe. However, their impact cannot be denied—they persisted in teaching an entire generation to think about emotions as discrete, shareable units rather than ineffable internal experiences. It’s probably why we’re all so emotionally charged online these days. The genesis wasn’t one moment, but particularly between 2007 and 2012, when memes moved from “weird nerd thing” to “how the internet communicates”.
Memes as a Means for Socio-Political Movements
For most of meme history, they were dismissed as trivial—internet jokes for basement-dwelling nerds that serious people didn’t need to pay attention to. But over the past decade, memes have moved into offline reality in ways that can no longer be ignored. They’ve influenced elections, moved stock markets, provided organisational infrastructure for social movements, and in some cases literally changed the course of history. The 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement crystallised around “We Are the 99%”—a simple phrase paired with handwritten signs and photos of people explaining their economic struggles that spread across Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, becoming both a rallying cry and a participation mechanism. The meme compressed complex economic inequality into a simple fraction, shifted American political discourse permanently, and influenced Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign rhetoric in ways that traditional policy papers never could.
The genesis wasn’t one moment, but particularly between 2007 and 2012, when memes moved from ‘weird nerd thing’ to ‘how the internet communicates’.
Kony 2012 demonstrated both the promise and peril of viral activism when Invisible Children’s 30-minute documentary about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony became the fastest-spreading video in history at the time, reaching 100 million views in six days. However, the campaign ultimately crashed under scrutiny of the organisation’s finances, white saviour narratives, and oversimplification of complex conflict, solidifying the critique of “slacktivism” while simultaneously proving that memes could generate massive attention even if attention didn’t equal understanding or effective action.
Perhaps no single meme journey better illustrates the weaponisation of internet culture than Pepe the Frog’s transformation into an ironic mascot, ultimately appearing in Donald Trump retweets and being denounced by Hillary Clinton’s campaign as a hate symbol—a trajectory that revealed how symbols’ meanings shift through collective use and how memes aren’t politically neutral but can be deliberately weaponised. The same image can mean completely different things in different contexts, as evidenced when Hong Kong protesters later reclaimed Pepe as a pro-democracy symbol in 2019.
Not all impactful memes were divisive, though. Bernie Sanders’ mittens at Biden’s 2021 inauguration became a wholesome moment, with the photo of him sitting alone, arms crossed, wearing handmade mittens and looking perpetually unimpressed being photoshopped into every context imaginable, raising over US$1.8 million for charity. Closer to home, even our prime minister, Dato’ Seri Anwar Ibrahim, has rallied a social media team adept at wielding memes and trends to keep his Instagram profile relevant to the youth while still staying professional. Memes are now levers of culture, and increasingly, political and economic actors understand this, which means the age of dismissing memes as trivial is definitively over.
Where Do We Go From Here?
It’s hard to even know where memes would go from here. Barely 10 years ago, we wouldn’t have anticipated a pandemic that would eventually shut the world down, leading to people downloading TikTok by the masses, growing the platform to evolve meme culture by the second. But we can try to guess.
For starters, meme literacy will become more economically valuable than traditional literacy. The ability to create viral content, understand cultural codes, and build an audience through memes will be worth more than the ability to write a five-paragraph essay. This is already happening as we speak—influencers without degrees out-earn people with PhDs, and brand partnerships go to influencers and creators rather than journalists (boo). However, we see an imminent backlash. Early signs are already visible in Gen Z’s nostalgia for “when the internet was good” and deleting social media as a status symbol. In less than a decade, meme abstinence will be luxury signalling—the rich will brag about not being online while tech executives send their kids to screen-free schools and make fortunes from addictive apps.
Next, memes will fully merge with language. Phrases like “it’s giving x”, “understood the assignment”, and “main character energy” started as memes but are now just how people talk. No cap. In 20 years, dictionaries will have entries for phrases that originated as image macros. Our final prediction: governments will regulate memes. Within 10 years, meme creation will face regulations around misinformation, deepfakes, hate speech, and copyright. How will you regulate without destroying the spontaneous creativity that makes memes work? That is the challenge.
The central question is: are memes making us smarter or dumber? We are indeed increasing our visual literacy, expanding cultural fluency, and democratising creativity. But we are also erasing nuance, shortening attention spans, and collapsing the distinction between reality and satire. Two things can be true at once. We’re not getting smarter or dumber—we’re evolving into something completely different altogether.
What memes reveal is that they’re humanity’s id made visible. Before the internet, your weird thoughts stayed in your head, and your dark jokes stayed in your friend group. Now there’s a meme for every forbidden thought, and discovering that a million other people had the same weird thought changes something fundamental. There is no original experience. Memes show us we’re more similar than we thought (same anxieties, same jokes), more different than we thought (niche communities for everything), and lonelier than we thought—why else would we need these communities? They create a paradox where memes simultaneously make us feel less alone through shared experience while also making us feel more alone through the performance of connection versus actual connection.
Despite my waxing lyrical about memes, they remain ephemeral. Nobody, in 100 years, will know what “Apa l*njiao? Apa l*njiaooooo?” meant. We learnt a new language without realising we were learning it. That language is faster, funnier, and more emotionally precise than what came before. The question isn’t “where do memes go next?” but rather “what do we become when we think in memes?” Welcome to the future. It’s weird here, but at least we have memes about it. If you know, you know.
This article first appeared on the GRAZIA Malaysia March 2026 print issue.
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