The unbearable meaninglessness of weird Facebook memeing

No, it’s not just you: Facebook memes have gotten really weird. I mean, they’ve always been — at least in some circles — but it feels as if 2016 has witnessed the mainstreaming of something spectacular.

Dozens of absurdist pages have sprung up this year, devoted to “jokes” (can they be called jokes?) about everything from plastic chairs to deceased apes. A network of hyperactive Bernie Sanders supporters has made his name synonymous with the adjective “dank.”

Facebook memes have gotten so weird, in fact that a bot can create them just by pairing images at random. The bot is the creation of a 19-year-old Australian who has been memeing since his early teens. Recently he realized that his coding skills had advanced enough that he could code a bot to make his memes. The bot, which was first flagged by the Daily Dot, recombines user-submitted images, templates and/or captions to generate a new meme every half hour. Those get posted to its Facebook page, which more than 215,000 people are currently following. This is not a trivial number of people, and they’re not consuming these memes passively: Some posts have hundreds of comments and dozens of shares.

The guy behind the bot has set up a Patreon and hopes to get enough donations to run the page professionally.

(We aren’t posting his name because he says he’s been doxxed over his previous meme-making.)

“The appeal is that there’s no person behind them,” he said. “And nobody is trying to be funny.”