One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Six. Seven.
Two numbers that provoke a primal response within the confines of the adolescent brain. The victim: an unsuspecting math teacher. The perpetrators: the doomscrolling teenagers of the classroom.
On the first day of school, junior Colin Santiago was sitting in his AP Precalc class when the teacher introduced himself and began talking about his children.
“He was talking about how one of his kids graduated in 2006 or 2007 and it took me a little bit to process it, but then I said out loud, ‘six seven?’” Santiago recounts.
“Its kind of just like a trigger word for me.”
This simple sequence of numbers is a deadly sound-borne virus in the ever-evolving meme landscape – so potent that other strains, such as “six-sendy,” have mutated and spread through millions of the infected population.
Even those seeking to escape six-seven by turning off their phones and avoiding algebra can seldom find peace; During the halftime show at LTHS’s home football game Friday, Lockport’s varsity cheerleading team made a six-seven joke, much to the dismay of anyone over the age of 18.
Only one question remains: Is this the downfall of society?
…
Meme culture is, arguably, built on randomness. Early memes were spread through forums, discussion sites populated primarily by computer nerds and gamers – outcasts. The rejection of these individuals by mainstream society, in turn, created the individuals’ rejection of mainstream society’s humor.
Absurdist humor flourished, weirder than a sitcom and less pretentious than a New Yorker cartoon. Dancing baby GIF’s, cat images with superimposed text and dancing hamsters were some of the earliest internet memes to exist.
Over time, as the internet became a larger part of mainstream culture, so did memes. Obama’s 2008 election campaign infamously adopted the “Hope” poster after social media popularized the image.
But slowly, memes started becoming even more absurd than they already were.
Starting with Vine, the defunct video platform famous for its six (seven) second video format, humor became less grounded. Look up any compilation of Vine videos and you’ll find people singing the lyric “Netflix and Pop Tarts” to Pitbull. What does it MEAN?!
With the dawn of the 2020s, this trend was exacerbated. “Brainrot” has become the catch-all term for internet memes that have no inherent comedic value aside from being well-known on the web. This is when all the hip kids started rizzing up their skibidi friends.
Which brings us back, after only six or seven paragraphs, to today.
…
According to the meme encyclopedia Know Your Meme, “six seven” refers to the song Doot Doot by hip-hop artist Skrilla, with the line “six-seven, I just bipped right on the highway” being the originator of this pandemic. To “bip” is to break into a car, according to Urban Dictionary.
While “six-seven” supposedly refers to 67th Street in Philadelphia, basketball fans have used the song to reference Charlotte Hornets player LaMelo Ball, who, yes, stands at 6’7.
And everyone else just thinks of it as the “funny number sequence of the month.”
Inevitably, this meme will become dated and tired, relegated to the same slang status as “yass queen” and “sus.” And while humor has always been a cycle of relevance and irrelevance, the sheer speed at which these jokes become outdated is mind boggling. Think of “Barbenheimer” or “brat,” two prior cultural juggernauts that aren’t even three years old that have long been forgotten, pushed to the back of the internet’s closet until they’re inevitably rediscovered by nostalgic members of Gen Z.
And this short cultural attention span doesn’t just apply to humor, either. Ultra-fast fashion popularized by Shein and Temu has become the dominant way Americans buy clothing. Food has been “TikTok-ified,” with Crumbl Cookies’ strategy of weekly dessert drops allowing it to remain a cultural mainstay for years. American politics seemingly moves at breakneck speed nowadays, with long-established norms abandoned and policies quickly introduced and struck down every other day.
Of course, this is a large extrapolation from what is very obviously a dumb fad. But with the real world becoming ever-more entwined with the digital world, these “dumb fads” have real power to spur change within our cultural and political systems. Two numbers can say a lot – “the 99 percent” has become a rallying cry for those opposing ultra-wealthy billionaires.
But for now, “six seven” remains a weird cultural byproduct of the goldfish-attention-span economy.
