The Internet is fed up with cake.
For the past two weeks, the internet has been saturated with videos of seemingly hyper-realistic everyday objects: a Croc shoe, a pickle, a bulldog, which trick the eyes into revealing a cake underneath. As soon as these surreal cakes became ubiquitous, detractors came begging for the phenomenon to end.
In other words: a viral meme has now gone stale, reaching the end of its popularity.
“There are many different life cycles that memes can have. Some memes will explode and disappear in a week, ”says Don Caldwell, editor-in-chief of the Know Your Meme meme database. “Some memes will stick around for 10 years, and it’s really weird to see all the different ways it can happen.” It is not uncommon for a meme to see a resurgence of months, or even years, after it has lost popularity.
Cake memes became the newest craze on the Internet after several viral videos of ordinary objects were sliced open to reveal the sweet interior. Sweets that are too realistic to be cakes take the sense of awe that comes from reality TV shows like “Cake Wars,” and narrow them down to just revelation: a miracle of fondant or buttercream or edible vanilla paper and wit. . The result? A viral meme.
Shane Tilton, an associate professor of multimedia journalism at Northern Ohio University, attributed some of the pie’s virality to the coronavirus quarantine. In the early quarantine, an organic trend to make sourdough bread took over the Internet, and Tilton said the cake meme appears to be the natural progression of that trend.
“We are not having as many experiences in the real world, so what the meme does for us is take these objects that we normally see in the real world … and reinterpret them,” Tilton said. Memes like this and others are “taking the mundane and making it magical”.
The recent viral cake memes started when BuzzFeed’s “Tasty” posted a video on Twitter, titled, “These are all cakes,” on July 8 with the work of Istanbul-based master cake artist Tuba Geçkil. for Red Rose Cake & Tuba Geçkil. Since then, Tasty’s video has been viewed more than 31.6 million times.
Natalie Sideserf of Sideserf Cake Studio in Texas specializes in hyper-realistic cakes and posted her own viral video montage a day later, which has been viewed more than 17 million times. One of Sideserf’s fascinating cakes includes an onion (again, fully pastel) with realistic skin made from vanilla paper that came off when she cut it.
“Some people think I literally removed the onion skin from an onion and put it around a cake to make my onion cake,” said Sideserf.
Since then, other bakers have come on board, including baker Ben Cullen, who posted an image of him cutting off his heavily tattooed hand, which was actually just a cake.
As the videos gathered followers, the mainstream media also came. Then the New York Times described the pie phenomenon in the Style section of the newspaper on July 14. Or, Oprah magazine grabbed a psychologist to ponder why the meme is so disturbing the same day, and Eater joined him, too. Even John Oliver referred to the cake meme during a segment on HBO’s “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.” The list of fascinated publications continues.
But as soon as the Internet becomes supersaturated with a meme, the trend often begins to slow.
“The cake meme, in my opinion, is definitely about to disappear,” said Caldwell, the publisher of Know Your Meme. “There are a number of things that are telltale signs that a meme is in its final stages.” Some of the things that people like to point out as signs of this are when brand accounts on Twitter and social media use the meme. “
Since the cake trend went viral, accounts such as the Midwestern convenience store “Kum & Go” and the Playstation account in the UK have used or retweeted the meme. This kind of conventional attention may indicate that the popularity of a meme will soon come to an end, Caldwell explained.
“I think the basic feeling is that if your parents know what the meme is, it is dead,” Caldwell said.
On the other hand, sometimes it is not.
Caldwell pointed to “Rickrolling,” one of the most unusually long-lasting memes in Internet history. The “Rickroll” is a bait-and-switch meme, according to Know Your Meme, in which a user thinks they are going to click or see something, only to be received by singer Rick Astley “Never Gonna Give You Up”. “Know Your Meme dates” Rickrolling “in mid-2007 and the meme is still used to this day.
A meme with a cake-like lifespan is the 2015 “dress,” according to Caldwell. “The Dress” was an online debate about a garment image that some people saw as white and gold, while others saw it as black and blue. The dress seemed to suddenly dominate the conversation on the Internet, it was covered by the mainstream media and shared by brands, but in a matter of days that Internet went ahead.
And yet the idea of the dress has staying power: every time an online debate breaks out about the color perceptions of an item, the dress, and it’s hard to pin down the look, the surfaces like a touchstone.
Perhaps when people refer to quarantine for years to come, they will be reminded of this meme as a symbol of the surrealism of the moment. Ceci n’est passed a pipe.
