Internet "runs out of new memes"

INTERNET — A controversial new study which incorporated all the data of the internet over the course of the last decade, graciously provided by the NSA, has led Dr. Angstrom H. Troubador to make a startling conclusion. According to Troubador, no new culture has been created in two years, and any art which appears ‘new’ was created before what he calls the “cultural peak” two years ago.

Dr. Troubador told reporters, “Starting with just the corpus of text out there, we quickly found that two years ago there was a ‘tipping point’ where every possible song, poem, or novel had already been written. Then we looked at music, and saw that all the melodies had been mapped out at that same time. We looked at videos and images and found the same thing again. Even all the possible intergenre mashups and recombinations were exhausted. We even found our own study, written word for word by spam bots.”

However, Dr. Cecilia Darwin criticized Dr. Troubador’s methods, saying, “This collection of data only confirms what we already suspected, and the premise of Angstrom’s analysis is faulty. Sure, there is a multitude of information so vast that every imaginable combination of symbols has already been set down somewhere on the internet, by spam bots as much as by humans, but to presume that this has somehow exhausted ‘novelty’ is only true in the narrowest sense. The symbols have to be interpreted or inscribed with meaning, and this is an ongoing and never ending genesis.”