(Congratulations on your sanity.) An apolitical, amoral stand-in equally for lol, fuck you, and thank you, used for both schadenfreude and firgun, “The internet remains undefeated†is the internet of phrases about the internet, existing everywhere and nowhere, meaning everything and nothing.
The true terror of “The internet remains undefeated†is that it’s most often used in lighthearted contexts, yet exposes the deepest darkness of our lives online, a darkness that we’ve become either blind to or numb to.
On the morning of August 12, 2013, he posted on Instagram a meme of a scowling Russell Westbrook, the mercurial NBA dynamo, photoshopped into a character selection screen from the arcade classic Mortal Combat, with the caption “The internet remains undefeated.†It’s a textbook usage, the kind Hall says he’s been deploying on social media and in group chats in the years since.
To a wide-ranging group of social media users like Hall, “The internet remains undefeated†is, on its face, a simple expression of joy, or nostalgia for a more joyous era of the internet.Ryan Milner, a professor of internet culture at the College of Charleston and author of The World Made Meme, says the phrase harkens back to a time, between roughly 2003 and 2013, when the internet was “still kind of this other place that didn’t operate by and could maybe transcend real-world rules.†This was the heyday of early YouTube and message boards like Something Awful, 4chan, and Reddit, “when you saw a flurry of subcultural activity and content creation that became kind of a tone setter for people who are still extremely online.†So in 2021, people comment “The internet remains undefeated†to a flourishing of memes about Bernie Sanders and his mittens or the discord between your fall plans and the Delta variant, because it recalls when life online seemed less about livestreamed mass murders and the algorithmically driven death of democracy and more about rickrolling and lolcats.
“The internet remains undefeated†glorifies the removal of context, nuance, and thought.For one thing, “The internet remains undefeated†is also a symptom of what Milner and fellow internet culture scholar Whitney Phillips call fetishistic flattening.
(The “Hide your kids, hide your wife†song, which belittles the man in the original clip, and deepfaked drunk Nancy Pelosi are all standard examples of fetishization.) In this way, “The internet remains undefeated†glorifies the removal of context, nuance, and thought.
Meek Doge, so and so “woke up and chose violence.†But whereas those all celebrate the defeat of a single common enemy or idea lampooned in the meme itself, what makes “The internet remains undefeated†so deflating is that it celebrates our own collective defeat of ourselves.
That is the horrifying economy of Those Four Words: There is no more haunting a distillation of the unstoppable seepage of technology into every fabric of our being than “The internet remains undefeated.†These words are a glaring reminder that the internet, of which I am a part, is defeating me.The subtext of “The internet remains undefeated†is a vaguely Zen koan: “We remain undefeated against ourselves.†Yes, it speaks to humanity’s ability to harness the internet to conquer individuals with collective humor.It’s telling that we often use these words in the silliest of circumstances—that even when we can all seem to set aside our many polarized differences and come together to laugh about someone hiding a testicle-swelling STD with fake symptoms of the Covid vaccine, someone still says “The internet remains undefeated†as a reminder that we are constantly fraying our humanity online.
In that sense, the act of saying that “the internet remains undefeated†is an act of condemning what the saying itself celebrates.
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