Memes

What did you do this week? I spent it drenched in sweat, launching a vicious assault on Wall Street hedge funds which cost them $5 billion (£3.7 billion). And I didn’t even have to put my trousers on. Along with thousands of other degenerates, I bought shares in GameStop, a struggling US video game store whose value has soared by 2,000 per cent in the last four weeks. Behind the surge is a wild Reddit community called WallStreetBets, where bored young men gamble on barely researched stock tips and crack tasteless jokes. The community, whose tagline is ‘like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal’, has a long and hilarious history of

We need to talk about the ‘four lads’ meme. Specifically we need to talk about the undercurrent of prejudice, and on occasion outright class hatred, that propelled these four unsuspecting young men from Birmingham and Coventry into the internet spotlight. Anyone who has been online in the past year will know about the four lads. It’s a photograph of four young men looking hyper-preened for a night on the town. Their trousers are painfully tight, their tattooed arms are bulging out of their short-sleeved shirts. This is the fashion among the male youths of aspirant working-class communities. They take pride in their appearance. They look good, and they know they