Two years ago there was a meme that burned through the internet and then vanished. You might remember it. “Laughing Women Eating Salad” was exactly what it sounded like — people were collecting and comparing images of laughing women eating salad. But wait — why are these women eating salad and laughing? They’re doing so because of the clip-art industrial complex. In my mind, I see clip-art models being herded into clip-art-making facilities that possibly resemble KFC battery farms. They’re dressed in neutral garments and handed hundreds of objects and props, and with each of these objects they’re given a list of emotions and physical postures, and they cycle through the options one by one, and then move on to the next object. Honestly, after this, these poor models must be dead inside. And later on, online art directors in need of salad images realised that lettuce is the most boring vegetable on earth, and they overcompensate for this by overusing laughing salad women in salad-based articles. And they got busted for it. A meme was born — and then we moved on to the next meme. Memes are basically our species’ new food group. Our species is sick.
