Source

when i look at things on the internet now, it's hard for me to tell where they are from.

In other words, usually things are presented without context.

i look at any given piece of content, say, on youtube. maybe its a meme.

theres a song in the video. there are various people, images, etc.

I have no idea if this is original material, if its remixed, etc. At some point, you can't know.

The meme has become so abstracted from it's original form, that the only possible way to know what the original source is by scrubbing thru the comment section, hoping the internet collective conscious has the answer.

On tik tok, it seems like it doesn't care who made the song. usually it's not even apparent. the song itself has been commodified to serve one purpose.

it's these layers of abstraction.

its only going to increase, right?

the source material no longer matters, but its how it changes thru time. there will be no history books on memes, because each mean would require a history book.

Where is the meme version tracker? the github for memes?

humans can only hold a finite amount of information in their heads, let alone the original sources and context of any given piece of information