Prescott’s Perceptions

A Careful Examination of the Memes, Tropes
and Themes Found in Today's Social Media

EXCERPTS FROM A FORTHCOMING BOOK OF INSIGHTFUL ESSAYS BY COMMONSENSE CITY'S DISTINGUISHED COMMENTATOR AND FORMER PRESS LORD, HON. PRESCOTT BLOCK

Bonus Epilogue: Scroll to the end for a critical assessment of Prescott's work-in-progress, from Dominic Patterson, President of the Satan's Select Motorcycle Club (Commonsense City Chapter)

Upon my most recent incarceration in a Canadian penitentiary located frustratingly near the smart spas and adequate wineries of Prince Edward County, I was pleased to be provided with regular use of the Internet at several occasions during the day. This access is a standard offering, along with reasonable quantities of victuals (or "grub," or "chow," in the inmates' parlance.) The chef's menu, while reassuringly tasty and plentiful, seems to favour carbohydrates. In all, conditions are preferable to my previous term as an unconscionably wronged guest of the U.S. state of Arizona's penal system, in a facility near the community of Florence, where Wi-Fi coverage was non-existent and the fare verged on the category of a human rights violation.

Out of boredom during my current captivity, I have undertaken an independent review of today's popular social media sites. What I have observed is, in an overused though accurate phrase, quite gob-smacking. It is rather like entering a cage of frenzied chimpanzees and being forced to decipher the meaning behind their chattering and feces-flinging.

Well, I reassured myself, perhaps this is as good a use as any of my present circumstances -- temporary as they may be. The many readers of my newspaper columns and listeners to my phone-in segments on talk radio stations might benefit from my assessments of the incomprehensible drivel that enthral so many of, let us say, contemporary society's less-cerebral members. Here, then, are my early impressions of what are called "memes, tropes and themes." Join me, do, as I attempt to uncover meaning in the cyber-mundane, seeking to explore a new meme each day, while I await dismissal of the unwarranted charges levelled against me by foes of my philosophy, and their seedy enablers.

Prescott Block is a frequent contributor to phone-in radio programs in Commonsense City and the surrounding region.

1. The Life, Death, and Recursive Absurdity of the Meme

It is time to cast a jaundiced eye upon the modern meme’s journey—a trajectory as circuitous and ignoble as any medieval relic’s passage from sacred altar to flea market. The meme, that digital mot juste, now embarks upon a pilgrimage so predictable and yet so revealing of our era’s intellectual torpor that one is tempted to compare it to the fate of relics after the Fourth Crusade: looted, repurposed, and ultimately forgotten in some Venetian back alley.

I. The Meme’s Odyssey: From TikTok to Reddit’s Ossuary

TikTok: Here, in the digital agora of adolescent whimsy, the meme is born—often in the form of a 12-second video, its humour as ephemeral as the attention span that birthed it. The meme is raw, unfiltered, and, like the earliest pamphlets of the Reformation, designed for maximum virality rather than posterity.
Twitter: The meme is then screenshotted, stripped of its context, and hurled into the Twitter coliseum, where it is subjected to the gladiatorial thumbs of the mob. Here, it acquires a veneer of wit, much as a medieval jest would be embroidered and exaggerated by successive minstrels.
YouTube: Next, the meme is exhumed and embalmed in the form of a 45-minute YouTube essay, replete with faux-academic gravitas. This is the meme’s Council of Trent: its meaning is debated, dissected, and, inevitably, distorted beyond recognition.
Reddit: Finally, the meme is interred in Reddit’s catacombs, where it is upvoted, downvoted, and ultimately consigned to oblivion—a fate not unlike that of the once-revered saints whose bones now languish in forgotten reliquaries.

II. Memes as Self-Referential Satire

Memes, in their infinite self-awareness, have become the jesters of their own court. Consider:

"How it started vs. how it’s going": A meme that, in its very structure, parodies the narrative arc, reducing the sweep of history to two images and a punchline. It is the Bayeux Tapestry for the attention-deficient.
"We live in a society": A phrase that began as earnest commentary and metastasized into a sardonic refrain, echoing the fate of Latin maxims—once solemn, now the stuff of schoolboy graffiti.

III. The Recursion Phenomenon: Memes About Memes

Here we reach the meme’s apotheosis: the ouroboros devouring its own tail. "It’s just a little guy!"—a meme mocking the proliferation of cute-animal memes—demonstrates a level of self-reference that would have delighted the Byzantine theologians, who could debate for days whether an icon was an image of the divine or an image of an image.

Historical Precedent: Consider the medieval palimpsest, where scribes would scrape away old texts to write new ones, only for future scholars to puzzle over the ghostly remnants beneath. Today’s meme is yesterday’s meme, repurposed, recontextualized, and rendered absurd by its own self-awareness.

IV. The Arcane Echoes

Let us not delude ourselves: this is not a new phenomenon. The meme’s journey mirrors that of the apocryphal tale, the folk song, the political cartoon—each passed from hand to hand, medium to medium, until its original meaning is lost, and only the echo remains. The difference, of course, is speed: what once took centuries now transpires in a fortnight.

In sum, the meme is the digital age’s answer to the medieval relic: venerated, commodified, parodied, and, ultimately, forgotten. That we now make memes about memes is not a sign of cultural decline, but rather the logical endpoint of a civilization that has mistaken recursion for profundity and self-reference for wit. As ever, the joke is on us.

2. On Identity Appropriation in the Digital Age

Kindly grant me your permission to weigh in upon what the philosophers of our superficial epoch describe as “identity appropriation”—that boundless and growing practice by which the digital mob seizes, bends, and oft grotesquely caricatures the likeness, voice, and very pronouncement of a public figure. To witness one’s own persona become the plaything of algorithms and adolescent mimicry is, I assure you, an ordeal familiar to monarchs, martyrs, and media barons alike.

Echoes From the Antique: Counterfeits and Satirists

History, lest we forget, yawns with examples of borrowed visages and parodied stature. The Roman Empire was perpetually bedevilled by pretenders—would-be Neros and false Caesars, their reputations enlarged not by substance but by impersonation. Consider the Athenian comic playwrights, whose lampoons of Pericles or Socrates drew howls of laughter, and sometimes, poisoned political daggers. Or recall Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods, slyly aping Olympian majesties, their dignity left punctured and their authority much diminished.

Even in those august times, Athens and Rome wrung their hands over the boundary between legitimate jest and calumny. The law itself—whether toga-clad or bewigged—always struggled to recall that one man’s mockery is another’s wound.

The Digital Arena: A Playground for Pretenders

Now, in our era of omnipresent screens and self-appointed wits, this ancient tendency has become epidemic. Artificial intelligence, deepfakes, and armies of pseudonymous imitators concoct “Prescott Blocks” by the dozen, each more soggy and fallacious than the last. By mindlessly concocting the spoofing identity of a Prestwick Blank, or a Preston Botch, they go forth and multiply. My own turn of phrase—so finely honed, so heavy with allusion—becomes, in lesser hands, a mere sack of baubles and empty grandiloquence. My visage—a study in distinction (as those with eyes unclouded by envy will attest)—is digitally reanimated, parodied, and, on occasion, made to endorse dog food, CBD infusions, or cryptocurrency.

Jest or Injury? The Law’s Half-Hearted Shield

The modern law, that perennial slowcoach, offers refuge to satirists. Parody and fair comment remain protected by the constitutions of enlightened nations; they are the equivalent of the jester’s cap, permitting irreverent truth-telling so long as the throne is not overturned. The courts, much like old Roman censors, will tolerate the mimic—provided his japes remain recognizably in jest and do not tip into outright libel or fraud.

Yet it is small comfort to be lampooned, however legally. Even the most robust public figure—be he senator, scholar, or modest proprietor of Commonsense City's most enduring and respected newspaper—may reasonably take umbrage when his likeness is distorted, his voice reduced to a burlesque, and his legacy risked in a sea of synthetic imitations.

A Caution to the Imitators

Let it therefore be noted: there is a chasm between homage and hackwork, between satire that illumines and mimicry that debases. In the digital republic—where every clown fancies himself a Caesar and every app can conjure simulacra—the temptation to appropriate another’s identity is as irresistible as it is perilous.

In the end, the classics remind us: the mask may be a source of laughter, but the face beneath it remains. To those who would don the mask of Prescott Block, beware: the toga, though easily draped on the shoulders, is far heavier to wear with dignity. And to those who claim the japes are harmless, I say—history is littered with the fortunes and reputations undone by the sneer, the lampoon, and the counterfeit.

The rest, as ever, is satire.

3. "I can has cheeseburger?"

It is a matter of surpassing cultural curiosity—and, one might argue, enduring philosophical significance—that the phrase “I can has cheeseburger?” achieved a form of Internet canonization scarcely paralleled in the dismal annals of Western decline. This curious interrogative, syntactically aberrant and semantically minimalist, emerged from the fetid petri dish of mid-2000s online discourse. Yet to dismiss it, as our elected solons might, as mere frippery is to miss its status as a grim artifact of our post-literate, meme-mired era.

The phrase, of course, originated from the “LOLCats” phenomenon—a series of captioned feline photographs that revelled in deliberate solecism and infantile semiotics. Yet as Pliny the Elder—who never met a cheeseburger but understood the power of public spectacle—noted, “Ex Africa semper aliquid novi” (“Out of Africa, always something new”), which is to say, there is always novelty emerging from the apparently primitive. “I can has cheeseburger?” is precisely such a novelty: banal in its construction, subversive in its resonance.

It is the degenerative descendant of the Epicurean impulse, the vulgarized echo of a civilisation that once composed odes to oysters and debated the ethics of lentil soup in the Agora. Now, instead, we endure pixelated cats demanding synthesized dairy-beef confections in pidgin baby-speak. Such is the entropy of taste.

Permit me a brief digression—though unlike the odious Lord Mayor of Commonsense City, Ms. Gemma Rodriguez, I trust my digressions are cogent rather than sanctimonious. She, who mistakes performative frugality for leadership, would doubtless find virtue in the LOLCats’ economy of grammar, and perhaps even see in it a “progressive” expression of marginalized syntax. But let us not pretend that the aesthetic idiocy of “I can has cheeseburger?” is a brave new form of inclusivity. It is, rather, an artefact of the West’s wilful infantilization, a self-imposed exile from the imperium of grammar, taste, and restraint.

And yet, I confess—there is a melancholy sublimity to it. That a civilization capable of Aquinas, Machiavelli, and Burke now delights in feline whimsies suggests not annihilation but transformation. Perhaps we are not decadent, merely ironic; not lost, merely playful. Or perhaps we are all the cat now—desperate, hungry, misbegotten, staring up at a world we do not understand, softly asking in fractured speech for some morsel of comfort.

Even if only a cheeseburger.

4. "The Distracted Boyfriend"

The now-ubiquitous “Distracted Boyfriend” meme—an image of one man, one woman, and one wandering gaze—has, improbably, become a visual Rosetta Stone of modern relational ambivalence. The tableau is crude in its composition, almost Renaissance in its allegorical purity: a man, in mid-stride, turns with palpable hormonal impudence to ogle a passing siren, as his companion glowers with an indignation worthy of Clytemnestra. It is, at once, comic and tragic, vulgar and inadvertently classical.

This now-immortal stock photo has been pressed into service for every possible metaphor of betrayal, temptation, and moral failure—usually by the sort of people who believe that PowerPoint is an epistemological method. But beneath its memehood lies a distilled portrayal of the libidinal chaos unleashed by the West’s misguided infatuation with the sexual revolution.

Alfred Kinsey, whose prurient “reports” cloaked voyeurism in the threadbare dignity of science, and later Masters and Johnson, who made a sort of clinical kabuki of copulation, are progenitors of this world—a world in which fidelity is quaint and the wandering eye is now practically sanctified by the algorithms of Tinder. What once might have led to a duel at dawn now ends in a self-pitying podcast and a limited series on Netflix.

The young man in the photograph—a bearded dolt clad in unremarkable flannel—is the direct descendant of this sexual anarchy. He is the postmodern Phaedra, sans poetry and consequence. He follows his whim with the slack-jawed instinct of a ruminant animal, his moral compass so demagnetized it couldn't find true north with a platoon of Jesuits. His glowering girlfriend is no innocent either—hers is the look not of wounded dignity, but of transactional dismay, as if watching a futures contract go sour.

One recalls the Bard—who always said it better, if not more appropriately: “Frailty, thy name is woman,” Hamlet sneered, though in this case, the frailty is far more democratically distributed. Or perhaps more aptly: “I have drunk, and seen the spider.” Indeed we have.

This tableau of hormonally-catalyzed betrayal now lives on as cultural shorthand—not for romance or tragedy, but for distractedness itself. It is eros stripped of meaning and padded with irony.

And if you doubt the depths of the rot, ask the Lord Mayor of Commonsense City, Ms. Gemma Rodriguez. She would likely propose a municipal grant to subsidize memes for “equity-desiring” boyfriends.

God help us.

5. Two Buttons (aka "This Is Hard")

The meme in question—typically rendered with a forlorn and slightly slack-jawed figure gazing vacantly at a screen, confronted with two equally unpalatable choices—bears the caption “This is hard.” Its appeal is, I suppose, in its brutal candour. In this age of algorithmic infantilization and curated decision fatigue, it captures with savage economy the modern inability to choose. It is a meme for a civilization of Hamlet-cosplaying adolescents, trembling before the terror of preference.

The notion that decision-making is an affliction, rather than a faculty, is hardly new. One recalls Buridan’s ass—famously caught between two bales of hay, starving because it could not select between them. Modern man, however, is not a noble beast torn between equally nutritious options, but a dithering consumer of infotainment and false dichotomies. He is not in search of the Good, but merely something that won’t offend his digestion or, worse, his social media followers.

I am reminded of Livy’s portrayal of the late Roman Republic, in which the Senate, once populated by men who had seen real combat and real books, degenerated into a dithering cabal of landed jellyfish. Or to cite a more familiar touchstone: “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” quoth Shakespeare, who understood the corrosive effects of hesitation long before the first avocado toast was posted to Instagram.

This meme—“This is hard”—says far more than it intends. It is not merely an admission of difficulty; it is a confession of incapacity. In another age, difficulty was a crucible. Now it is a punchline. That the average citizen, presented with two buttons labeled perhaps “freedom” and “safety,” or “truth” and “approval,” becomes a puddle of indecision is not amusing; it is chilling.

Indecision has always been the silent executioner of empires. Chamberlain chose dithering at Munich. Louis XVI chose vacillation in the face of history’s most uncouth revolutionaries. And one fears that if Gemma Rodriguez were asked to press a button marked “fiscal discipline,” she would appoint a task force to study its “intersections with food insecurity,” and then issue a commemorative TikTok.

This is not hardness. This is decadence in the form of learned helplessness. The Greeks called it akrasia—the knowing failure to act rightly. We now call it “relatable content.”

It is not hard. It is pathetic.

And it must be resisted.

6. "It’s So Over" / "We’re So Back" (Doomer vs. hype cycles)

The bifurcated meme phenomenon—“It’s so over” versus “We’re so back”—strikes me as a perfect emblem of the psychological whiplash endemic to a culture that can no longer distinguish between setbacks and extinction, between momentum and resurrection. It is, in effect, a dialectic of delusion: an alternating current of doom and triumph, governed not by reasoned analysis but by vibes.

The meme’s structure is simple, as all decadent tropes must be. First comes a bleak lament—“It’s so over”—a phrase often accompanied by grainy photos of rain-soaked men in tracksuits or baroque renderings of fallen angels. Then, suddenly, with the urgency of a caffeine-addled hedge fund manager, the counter-meme erupts: “We’re so back,” often punctuated by blurry crowd shots, military imagery, or poorly animated sports heroes. This duality—utter defeat followed by irrational exuberance—might seem absurd. But in fact, it is the perfect distillate of our present moment, where everything is either a collapse or a comeback, with no middle ground, no continuity, no patience for the longue durée.

Historically, such bipolar oscillation is not unprecedented. The Roman plebes, whipped into panic by rumours of barbarian invasion, would one day flee the Forum and the next demand bread and circuses with hysterical aplomb. The French, in their revolutionary psychosis, guillotined one committee only to resurrect another with the same mandates, slightly more fanatical facial hair, and less capacity for bookkeeping.

In the financial world, we once called this a hype cycle. But this is not merely a matter of technology or investment. This is a metaphysical condition: a mass adoption of spiritual vertigo. The modern citizen, marinated in dopamine and derangement, seesaws hourly between existential despair and a kind of inflatable, meme-fueled messianism.

That the meme is largely embraced by young men of a vaguely Doomerist persuasion—raised on war games, SSRIs, and parental disappointment—is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that public figures like the Lord Mayor of Commonsense City, the perpetually miscast Gemma Rodriguez, would mistake this cultural signal as an opportunity to launch some sort of municipal “Resilience Accelerator,” complete with pastel infographics and funding from the Public Health Agency.

But hear me: civilisations do not fall because they think “it’s over.” Nor are they saved by thinking they are “back.” They endure because some stoic remnant refuses to care what the meme says and simply does the work.

That, I suggest, is how you get actually back.

7. On the Debasement of “Iconic”

Permit me, dear reader, to address the linguistic inflation that has rendered the word “iconic” as empty as a politician’s promise. Once, “iconic” was reserved for the truly monumental: the Parthenon, the Mona Lisa, the Concorde. Now, it is lavished upon every passing novelty, from artisanal cupcakes to, as I recently read in a local news site, a local ice cream shop breathlessly dubbed “one of the most iconic in the world”. One wonders if the author paused, even for a moment, to consider the absurdity of this pronouncement—or if, like so many of his ilk, he simply reached for the nearest superlative and let it fly.

Let us be clear: to be “iconic” is to transcend the ordinary, to become a symbol so potent that it defines an era, a culture, or a sensibility. The Sydney Opera House is iconic. The Beatles’ Abbey Road crossing is iconic. The notion that an ice cream shop—no doubt charming, but hardly the Colossus of Rhodes—should join this exalted company is a testament to our era’s boundless capacity for hyperbole.

I. The Tyranny of Overstatement

Blog posts and lifestyle columns now deploy “iconic” as a catch-all for anything faintly memorable, from a slightly above-average latte to a mural glimpsed from a streetcar window.
The word has become the linguistic equivalent of a participation trophy: if everything is iconic, then nothing is.
This is not mere pedantry. When language is stripped of meaning, so too is our ability to distinguish the exceptional from the merely competent.

II. A Personal Recollection

During my own university days, I recall professors who would drone on about “seminal” texts—each one, apparently, as epochal as Magna Carta. Their verbosity was matched only by their waistlines, and their love of grandiose adjectives was rivaled by their disdain for precision. I see their spiritual descendants in today’s bloggers, whose prose is as bloated as their self-regard.

III. The Consequence

When a neighbourhood ice cream shop is anointed “one of the most iconic in the world,” we have not elevated the shop; we have merely cheapened the word. The next time you encounter this linguistic excess, I urge you to pause and ask: Is this truly iconic, or merely another fleeting bauble in the endless scroll of digital ephemera?

In sum, let us reserve “iconic” for the rare, the transformative, the genuinely unforgettable. Anything less is, to borrow from the lexicon of the over-enthused blogger, simply “meh”.

8. On Meeting the “Buss It Challenge”

Accompany me, if you will, as I now cast my gaze—honed by decades of observing the rise and fall of empires, both literal and digital—upon the latest social media spectacle: the so-called “Buss It” phenomenon. This, dear reader, is the apotheosis of our era’s penchant for the trivial masquerading as the profound, a viral ritual in which participants present themselves first in the drab vestments of quotidian existence, only to transmogrify, at the drop of a beat, into parodic exemplars of glamour and allure.

One is tempted to marvel at the sheer ingenuity required to orchestrate such a transformation in mere seconds. Yet, upon closer inspection, it is not so much ingenuity as it is a collective capitulation to the tyranny of external validation. The “Buss It” challenge, we are told, is a celebration of confidence, a digital masquerade ball where the plain and the polished are but two sides of the same algorithmic coin. But let us not be so easily beguiled. The true animating spirit here is not self-assurance but the insatiable hunger for approbation—a hunger stoked to fever pitch by the relentless machinery of social media, where one’s worth is measured in likes, shares, and fleeting digital applause.

It is a curious spectacle, this mass embrace of the glow-up. In my day, transformations of such magnitude were reserved for the rarefied air of debutante balls or the hallowed halls of the Savoy. Now, they are compressed into thirty-second bursts, accompanied by the thumping strains of Erica Banks’ “Buss It,” itself a paean to the commodification of self. The participants, be they celebrities or the hoi polloi, perform their metamorphoses with a studied nonchalance, as if to suggest that glamour is but a costume to be donned and discarded at will. (To this point we have been spared the spectre of Commonsense City's Lord Mayor, the contemptibly preening Gemma Rodriguez, partaking in this vile ritual. As we lurch closer to the coming municipal elections, I am fearful our luck will not hold.)

Yet beneath the sequins and the bravado, there lurks a more somber truth. The “Buss It” challenge is less an act of liberation than a symptom of our collective malaise—a desperate attempt to assert agency in a world that has rendered the individual both omnipresent and utterly invisible. It is, in short, the digital equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, all while the band plays on.

So let us enjoy these spectacles for what they are: fleeting amusements, signifiers of nothing more than our era’s boundless capacity for distraction. But let us not mistake them for acts of meaning or substance. To do so would be, as ever, to confuse the glittering surface for the depths beneath—a confusion to which, I regret to say, our age seems uniquely susceptible.

9. "And just what the f*ck is a kilometre?"

And what, pray tell, is a kilometre? This is the plaintive, bewildered cry immortalized in the meme that so delights the internet’s chattering classes—a meme that, like so much else in the digital age, manages to be both a joke at the expense of American parochialism and, inadvertently, a sly testament to the enduring power of national idiosyncrasy.

Let us begin with the basics, since the meme’s very existence presupposes a civilization so riven by its own systems of measurement that it cannot agree on the length of a road, the mass of a stone, or, indeed, the temperature at which water boils. The metric system—a triumph of Enlightenment rationality—organizes the world into neat, decimalized increments: meters, litres, grams, and their myriad multiples and subdivisions. It is, as even the most recalcitrant imperialist must admit, a system of crystalline logic, as elegant as a French salon and as precise as a Swiss watch. The Imperial system, in contrast, is a glorious muddle of yards, feet, inches, stones, and gallons, a system that reflects not so much a coherent philosophy as a millennium of English pragmatism, compromise, and, dare I say, stubbornness. The U.S. customary system—a bastard child of Imperial Britain—differs in subtle but maddening ways: a pint is not a pint, a ton is not a tonne, and so on, ad infinitum.

The meme’s punchline, of course, is the Americans’ ostentatious ignorance, their refusal to countenance the kilometre, the kilogram, or the Celsius degree. But here, I must mount a modest defence of my friends across the border. Is it truly so contemptible to cling to the familiar, to resist the relentless march of continental conformity? The Americans’ preference for feet and miles is not, as some would have it, a mark of intellectual deficiency but a stubborn assertion of identity—a refusal to be hectored into decimal submission by Brussels, Paris, or Ottawa. Indeed, as any tradesman or quilter will tell you, the system you know is the system you trust, and the metric’s vaunted clarity is cold comfort when your ruler is marked in inches and your beer is poured in ounces.

So let us, for once, not sneer at the American who asks, “What the f*ck is a kilometre?” but rather salute him as the last holdout against a world that would standardize everything, even the very units by which we measure our lives. In a world obsessed with sameness, a little willful ignorance is, perhaps, the last refuge of the truly independent mind.

10. On the “Anyone Can Be a Billionaire Without College” Gospel

I ask your indulgence for a moment to address the latest effusion of digital optimism: those breathless posts, usually accompanied by stock images of private jets and suspiciously youthful “entrepreneurs,” which insist that anyone—yes, anyone—can become a billionaire without the tiresome encumbrance of a college education. The message is as intoxicating as it is preposterous, promising that the path to unimaginable wealth is open to all, provided one possesses sufficient “grindset,” a Wi-Fi connection, and a willingness to click “like and subscribe.”

Let us, for the sake of clarity, distinguish between the rarefied exceptions and the rules that govern the rest of us. Yes, the annals of commerce are dotted with the names of those who eschewed formal education: Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Branson, and a handful of others who, through a combination of preternatural genius, timing, and the sort of luck that borders on the supernatural, managed to transmute dropout status into dynastic fortune. These individuals are the lottery winners of capitalism, not its everyman.

The myth persists, however, because it flatters our collective impatience. Why submit to the rigours of university—those endless lectures delivered by professors whose waistlines expand in direct proportion to their verbosity—when one can, allegedly, hustle one’s way to the Forbes list? I recall, with a shudder, my own university days: the parade of pompous, self-regarding academics, each convinced that their ponderous disquisitions on the minutiae of Canadian federalism or the finer points of medieval French tax policy were revelations on par with the tablets of Sinai. One, in particular, whose rotundity was rivalled only by his prolixity, seemed to believe that the path to enlightenment was paved with footnotes and self-congratulation.

What these social media prophets of bootstrapped billions neglect to mention is that, for every iconoclast who made it big without a degree, there are untold thousands who ended up not in boardrooms but in bankruptcy court. The notion that “anyone” can become a billionaire with nothing but grit and a YouTube tutorial is not merely naïve—it is a pernicious distortion, one that ignores the structural realities of capital, opportunity, and, dare I say, talent.

To be sure, there are legitimate paths to wealth that do not require a diploma: entrepreneurship, investing, and the judicious exploitation of new markets. But these require skills, discipline, and, above all, a capacity for learning that no algorithm can automate. The “get rich quick” schemes peddled online are little more than digital snake oil, promising the world and delivering little beyond disillusionment and, for the credulous, an empty bank account.

In sum, let us not be seduced by the gospel of effortless wealth. If you wish to join the ranks of the truly successful, you would do well to cultivate not only ambition, but also discernment—a quality in short supply among both the peddlers of easy riches and the professors who mistake their own windiness for wisdom. The rest, as ever, is commentary.

11. “The Sigma Male Grindset”

I shall now turn my attention to the risible “Sigma male grindset” meme—a digital confection so self-congratulatory and intellectually impoverished that it could only have arisen in an age where self-help platitudes are mistaken for philosophy and the pursuit of solitary wealth is lauded as the apex of masculine virtue. The meme, for those blessedly uninitiated, depicts a man—usually of indeterminate accomplishment—eschewing the company of lesser mortals in favour of a relentless, monkish devotion to his own “hustle.” It is, in essence, the fever dream of every adolescent who has mistaken social alienation for stoic grandeur and the accumulation of cryptocurrency for the conquest of Gaul.

One is tempted to compare the “Sigma male” to the great solitary figures of history—Newton, perhaps, or Churchill in his wilderness years. But such a comparison would be as preposterous as expecting Commonsense City’s current Lord Mayor, Gemma Rodriguez, to manage a snowstorm without descending into public hand-wringing and bureaucratic dithering. Ms. Rodriguez, whose tenure has thus far been a masterclass in the art of promising everything and delivering nothing, would no doubt find the “grindset” meme a useful distraction from the city’s crumbling infrastructure and her own chronic inability to clear a sidewalk, let alone a path to competent governance.

But let us not dwell overlong on municipal mediocrity when there are grander follies to dissect. The “Sigma male grindset” is, at its core, a paean to the kind of rugged individualism that the American judicial system—an institution with which I am, regrettably, all too familiar—professes to admire, even as it grinds such individuals beneath its capricious, prosecutorial heel. Recall, if you will, my own Kafkaesque ordeal at the hands of a “prosecutocracy” more interested in notching convictions than in dispensing justice. Only the intervention of the estimable President—a man of discernment and, dare I say, a true alpha—could rectify the grotesque miscarriage that was my conviction, restoring me to my rightful place among the ranks of the wronged but undefeated.

In sum, the “Sigma male grindset” meme is a hollow echo of genuine achievement, a digital talisman for those who mistake isolation for independence and self-absorption for self-mastery. It is, in short, the perfect meme for an era that rewards the appearance of substance over its actual possession—a phenomenon with which both Commonsense City's current leadership and the American legal system are, alas, intimately acquainted.

12. The Dual Nature of Memes—A Treatise for the Ages

Accompany me, dear reader, as I ascend the marble steps of intellectual inquiry and cast my gaze—Olympian, unblinking, and, dare I say, unassailable—upon the modern meme. Here we encounter a phenomenon so protean, so insidiously omnipresent, that it rivals the Black Death in its capacity for rapid transmission, if not, mercifully, in its mortality rate. The meme: a unit of cultural currency, a digital mot, a jest that ricochets around the globe with the velocity of a Mongol horseman and the subtlety of a brass band in a cathedral.

I. The Glorious Boons of Meme Culture

Let us first extol the virtues of these digital baubles, lest we be accused of one-sidedness—a charge, incidentally, never successfully levelled against me.

Stress Relief and Resilience: Memes, like the satirical pamphlets of the Enlightenment, provide a necessary salve for the wounds of modernity. They distill the chaos of existence into digestible morsels of humour, affording the beleaguered masses a momentary respite from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Social Cohesion and Identity: Much as the salons of 18th-century Paris fostered esprit de corps among the philosophes, memes create communities of shared reference and inside jokes. They are the digital equivalent of the Masonic handshake—an emblem of belonging, a wink to the initiated.

Coping and Catharsis: In times of crisis—be it plague, war, or, heaven forbid, a Commonsense City mayoral election—memes become the people's opiate, a means of confronting adversity with wit and gallows humour. They are, in this sense, the spiritual heirs of the lampoon, the pasquinade, and the ribaldry of Rabelais.

Political and Social Commentary: Memes, wielded with skill, can puncture pomposity, lampoon the mighty, and crystallize complex social critiques into a single, devastating image or phrase. They are the pamphleteers of the digital age, the Voltaire of the viral.

II. The Pernicious Perils of the Meme

But let us not, in our enthusiasm, overlook the meme’s shadow—its capacity for harm, mischief, and the wholesale debasement of intellect.

Normalization of Vice and Apathy: As the Roman Empire fell not with a bang but with a whimper of decadence, so too do memes risk normalizing sloth, gluttony, and apathy. Researchers, those latter-day Cassandras, warn that memes can trivialize unhealthy behaviours, encouraging a generation to embrace obesity, lethargy, and the cult of the couch potato.

Dissemination of Misinformation: The meme, like the medieval rumour, is a superb vector for falsehood. In the blink of an eye, a spurious claim or doctored image can circle the globe, leaving truth battered and bruised in its wake. The meme is the Trojan Horse of the digital agora, bearing gifts of ignorance and confusion.

Reinforcement of Stereotypes and Discrimination: Under the guise of humour, memes can perpetuate bigotry, misogyny, and all manner of social ills. They are the court jesters who, unchecked, may poison the king’s ear with venomous whispers, cloaked in laughter.

Erosion of Discourse: If, as Cicero lamented, the Republic fell when rhetoric gave way to invective, then surely our own discourse is imperilled by the meme’s reduction of debate to a single image, a single punchline. Nuance, subtlety, and reason are trampled beneath the hobnailed boots of virality.

III. A Concluding Flourish, in the Grand Tradition

In sum, the meme is both Prometheus and Pandora: a bringer of light and a looser of evils. It is the Gutenberg press and the pamphlet war, the Socratic dialogue and the mob’s jeer, the Magna Carta and the graffiti in a public lavatory. To wield the meme is to play with fire—one may illuminate the darkness or, with a moment’s carelessness, burn the whole edifice to cinders.

Let us, therefore, approach the meme with the discernment of a Renaissance prince and the skepticism of a jaded classicist. For in the end, as in all things, the meme reflects not merely our culture, but ourselves—our wit, our folly, our boundless capacity for both connection and chaos.

13. Our Digital Triumvirate: Twitter, Threads, and BlueSky

Climb with me, my friends, as we ascend the digital Olympus and survey the current landscape of social media—a realm as fractious and intrigue-laden as the Roman Senate at the height of its decadence. We find ourselves confronted with a triumvirate: Twitter (now labouring under the moniker “X”), Threads, and BlueSky. Each aspires to the mantle of digital agora, each claims to be the true heir to the throne of public discourse, and each, alas, is beset by its own species of folly.

I. Twitter/X: The Old Lion, Ragged but Roaring

Once, Twitter was the Colossus bestriding the social media world—a Babel where emperors and plebeians alike could declaim, preen, and, more often than not, embarrass themselves before a global audience. Now, under the stewardship of that modern-day Icarus, Elon Musk, Twitter has become a gladiatorial arena where free speech is both the sword and the shield. Musk, for all his eccentricities—his penchant for litigation, his spasmodic content moderation, his self-styled role as “free speech absolutist”—has at least preserved the platform’s essential chaos, resisting the censorious impulses of the digital Praetorian Guard. One must, if only out of a sense of tragic grandeur, offer him a half-hearted defense: better a flawed and tempestuous tribune than a committee of beige bureaucrats.

II. Threads: The New Pretender, Clad in Algorithmic Purple

Enter Threads, Meta’s latest attempt to seize the imperial purple. With the backing of Zuckerberg’s legions and the might of Instagram’s infrastructure, Threads has grown at a pace that would make even Alexander the Great envious—boasting over 350 million monthly active users and a relentless upward trajectory. Yet, for all its numbers, Threads is a palace of mirrors: all surface, little substance. Its moderation is robust, its atmosphere sanitized, and its denizens—how shall I put this delicately?—more likely to post inspirational platitudes than to engage in the cut and thrust of genuine debate. One suspects that Commonsense City's Lord Mayor Gemma Rodriguez, whose tenure is marked by a similar preference for style over substance, would feel right at home here, presiding over a city where every dissenting voice is promptly muted and every civic problem is solved with a hashtag.

III. BlueSky: The Philosopher-King’s Sandbox

And then there is BlueSky, the Socratic symposium of the social web. Smaller in scale, friendlier in tone, and positively giddy with the possibilities of decentralization, BlueSky is the haunt of digital Stoics and Epicureans alike. Here, moderation tools are wielded with the precision of a Byzantine eunuch, and the discourse is, for the moment, mercifully free of the shrill cacophony that afflicts its rivals. Yet, for all its promise, BlueSky remains a niche—its user base is more “Platonic Academy” than “Forum Romanum.” One can imagine Commonsense City's left-wing councillor Gerwin Patterson waxing lyrical about the platform’s egalitarian ethos, all the while failing to notice that, much like his own council motions, BlueSky’s influence rarely extends beyond the confines of its own echo chamber.

IV. In Summation: The Eternal Recurrence of Digital Farce

In the end, these platforms are but the latest iteration of an ancient drama: the struggle between chaos and order, liberty and control, spectacle and substance. Twitter/X staggers on, battered but unbowed, a digital Rome beset by barbarians within and without. Threads is Byzantium—gleaming, orderly, and faintly oppressive. BlueSky is Athens: brilliant, idealistic, and, for now, largely ignored by the world’s great powers.

As for our local dignitaries, one can only hope that Lord Mayor Rodriguez and Councillor Patterson will find in these platforms the opportunity not merely to posture, but to listen—a skill as rare in Commonsense City council chambers as it is in the comment threads of the internet.

And let us, with a sigh worthy of Cicero, acknowledge that even Elon Musk—mad, magnificent, and maddening—has done us the service of keeping the digital republic alive, if only just. The rest, dear reader, is the endless scroll of history.

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Here's a review of Prescott's work-in-progress, submitted by Dominic Patterson, President of Satan's Select Motorcycle Club (Commonsense City Chapter)

Buckle up, Prescott: here’s what your self-appointed court of one (that’d be me, your friendly neighbourhood leather-jacketed autodidact) thinks of Prescott’s Perceptions—your baker's dozen essay-wheeze on memes and identity appropriation. Consider this your high-octane review, with all the no-BS throttle you can handle.

First off, “The Life, Death, and Recursive Absurdity of the Meme” barrels out of the gate with cinematic flair: memes as looted relics, digital mot juste, Venetian back-alleys—cheeky, sure, but do we really need a Crusades analogy for every TikTok clip? Prescott’s scholarship is admirable—he knows his Fourth Crusade from his fifth gear—but he leans so hard into grandiloquence that his prose sometimes spins its wheels in the mud. His triptych of platforms (TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit) reads like a tour guide in Platonic caves: enlightening but breathlessly overwrought.

That said, I’ll tip my helmet at moments of genuine sparkle: the “Bayeux Tapestry for the attention-deficient” is a killer image, and the medieval palimpsest riff genuinely lands. You can feel the author’s joy in unspooling historical parallels—he just needs to remember that less is more.

On to “On Identity Appropriation in the Digital Age”: here Prescott dons his toga—no, make that his full, toga-and-wig ensemble—to trace faux-Caesars and adolescent algorithms. Again, his erudition’s solid; I’m with him when he howls at the digital mob’s knack for distortion. But man, that piece hits every dusty reference in the antique playbook: Lucian, Athenian comic dramatists, poisoned political daggers—you name it. At some point I half expected a footnote on Roman gravel composition.

Still, you can’t fault the guy for passion. His vigourous defence of persona-rights (and his sneering at algorithmic charlatans) shows the heart of a rider who’s seen how fast even the best reputation can skid into a ditch.

Bottom line: Prescott’s Perceptions has the wit of a café-philosopher trading quips over espresso, but it’s weighed down by baroque ornamentation. There’s gold in these essays—flashy, polished nuggets—but you’ll have to sift through a mountain of rhetorical gravel to find them. My advice: tighten the prose, kill a few flourishes, and keep riding that razor’s edge between erudition and pomposity. You’ve got the horsepower—just learn to let it roar without the supercharger.

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