In my senior year of college, I received as a birthday gift a short book called The Holy Meme Bible, which contained a recap of the biggest memes of the year 2018. After flipping through it and having a chuckle or two, I put it on my bookshelf, where it lay undisturbed for six years, until a few weeks ago when I rediscovered it while doing some organizing. This made me curious: meme culture on the internet, especially in recent years, has had such a short half-life that trends will die only a few days or weeks after they start. Would any of the memes in this book from that long ago hold up today? Are any of them still in regular use? Let’s explore the highlights of this artifact together in this post.
We’ve Updated Our Privacy Policy 🔗
Right off the bat we come across a meme that could only have come from 2018. I think what this is referring to is the GDPR, which went into effect in May of that year. As a result, nearly every online service had to push updates to their privacy policy in a short time frame. This annoyed people enough to joke about it online. Aside from a historical note, this meme hasn’t been used at all in recent memory.
Rating: EXPIRED
Tokyo Drift 🔗
Next up we have a classic. I didn’t know for the longest time that this meme is actually a composite; no such exit sign exists in the original video of the drifting car. The meme has just the right property to last a long time on the internet. Namely, it’s generic enough to be used for a lot of different things (after all, comparing two different things is the basis for a large majority of meme edits), but it’s also not so generic as to be boring to use. Two text boxes and a greater-than sign can accomplish the same goal of stating a preference between two options, but you don’t see many people sharing images like that, do you?
Overall, this meme is great, and it’s still being used today.
Rating: FRESH
Shortened Names 🔗
This one is an interesting case. I remember it being very big back in college. After all, it’s a creative exercise with prompts literally everywhere. Anything that has a name can be a source of inspiration. It’s definitely fallen off since its peak, but I still see references to it occasionally.
Rating: STALE
Moth 🔗
This one was also huge in my social circle, but if you asked me to explain why, I would not be able to tell you. Something about moths, and saying the word “LAMP” (with or without an umlaut) was infinitely funny for a few months. KnowYourMeme groups this one with other classics like “bröther may i have some öats” and “give me the lööps, brøther”. I think I agree. Funny looking animals, with simple words and a preponderance of diacritics made for an unbeatable combination.
That being said, I don’t think I’ve seen any references to this meme, or even any memes of the same general class, being posted on the internet today.
Rating: EXPIRED
Thank You Kanye, Very Cool 🔗
Remember when Donald Trump was still posting on Twitter? Forget that, remember when Twitter was still officially called “Twitter”? It’s been a long and rough couple of years for this social media platform in particular.
This meme is one of those instances where the text was by itself so funny that it started getting repeated, completely divorced of the context in which it was created. The original tweet being quoted (I had to look this up) was some sort of endorsement, but the phrase “Thank you Kanye, very cool” was just so funny people started saying it over and over again. Another notable examples of this trend is the phrase “many such cases”, also tweeted first by Trump.
People online still say “thank you XXX, very cool”, even if usage may not be as high as its peak.
Rating: FRESH
My FBI Agent 🔗
This one is also pretty specific to 2018, but unlike the privacy policy meme, I can’t find any specific inciting incident that led to the spike in popularity of FBI memes. It’s probably a slow burn from people learning more and more that the government was spying on their online activity. It is a bit depressing that instead of trying to stop it, we just made memes about it, but I guess what could we do?
In any case, FBI memes are nowhere near as popular as they were during this period, but they still get used intermittently.
Rating: STALE
Uganda Knuckles 🔗
Oof, this one is a real stinker. Uganda Knuckles started getting popular after a few VRChat videos with people using the Knuckles model speaking in heavy accents went viral. I never really got why it was funny, and am glad that this meme is completely dead in 2024.
Rating: EXPIRED
Predator Handshake 🔗
This one is another classic. Like the Tokyo Drift one, this still image of a handshake from the movie Predator is a meme that has great staying power, for the same reasons. Where the Tokyo Drift meme was a way of contrasting two options, this one is a way of saying what two things have in common. Even the caption in the image says as much: it’s a glorified Venn diagram.
This one is also still in common use today.
Rating: FRESH
Elon Musk 🔗
This one isn’t necessarily a meme, but I threw it in here because it mentions Elon Musk. Before he bought Twitter (and when this book came out), Musk was still at the fringes of the public eye, maintaining his eccentric billionaire inventor persona. Things were great. The Cybertruck reveal didn’t happen until 2019, and he didn’t start going crazy until around when he bought Twitter in 2022.
Considering the drastic change in public opinion, I doubt this would have been included if the book was published this year.
Rating: EXPIRED
Tide Pods 🔗
This one was from early in the year. There was a fake viral “challenge” going around the internet for people to eat one of those laundry detergent pods. Please do not do this, you should not be eating household chemicals! The best guess is that only a few dozen teenagers were misguided enough to actually try, thankfully.
This meme is also pretty dead in the current day.
Rating: EXPIRED
Ligma 🔗
We’re capping off this review with yet another classic. This ancient meme had a resurfacing in 2018. The joke is, of course, to say a word, hope the person you’re talking to asks what it is, and then you say a naughty phrase with the original word as the start. It’s childish, but hey, it still makes me laugh. My absolute favorite version of this meme has to be the video below.
Rating: FRESH
Summary 🔗
And that’s it! I skipped over most of the pages in the book, because they weren’t all as interesting as the ones I mentioned here. Overall I’m surprised at how many are still relevant today. I would have expected almost none to have survived.
Anyway, that’s it for this post. I’m still working on some other posts, but they won’t be ready for a while. Until then, peace out!