News alerts are irrelevant. Turn off CNN. The best way to get breaking news is with an overly lewd text calling you a slut, filled with eggplant emojis.
The text is called a “copypasta,” and if you’re one of the more online-savvy Americans, you might have received one when President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race. This is definitely NSFW, but here’s a screenshot of what it might look like:
How nice!
Image source: Screenshot
When you receive a copypasta, you should copy and paste it (hence the name) and send it to more of your contacts. It’s designed like a chain email, and we first saw it on 4chan around 2006. Added to the dictionary in May 2021.
Many people remember these texts from middle school (“Send this to 10 people or you’ll never get kissed”), and of course there are all kinds of other ways to use this fun text format (during the COVID-19 pandemic error message during propagation), for example). We saw a modern resurgence of these chain messages in 2018, but they seem more relevant to the text messages you might have received in middle school. Eventually, they get into holiday territory and get hornier (e.g. Santa is about to slide down your hot 🔥 hot 🔥 chimney tonight). They have become more political and explicit than ever before. Today, they are synonymous with breaking news alerts.
Popular stories that can be mixed and matched
There are many reasons for this evolution. The people who write them care less about accuracy so they can quickly process breaking news. Our political world continues to fail us in new and scarier ways, and plagiarism is a way to add some levity to a system that tires us. As several Copypasta writers told CT Jones rolling stones 2018. “The meme format is more than just a laugh track, it’s a way for people to use humor to cope with an increasingly dystopian world.”
But I have something worried for fans of replica pasta: Its death may be imminent.
There’s one recurring meme that often falls victim to, unlike anything else in pop culture. It looks like this: origin, niche spread, virality, peak popularity, adaptation and mutation, decline, obsolescence, and optional revival. We are in the second life of Copypasta – in the “adaptation and mutation” phase. These newsletters have gone from holiday newsletters and messages for middle schoolers to some of the sexiest NSFW newsletters you’ll ever receive. On the anniversary of the insurrection, the conviction of former President Trump, the attempted assassination of former President Trump, and a lot of talk about Biden’s exit, we got a hungry copypasta.
Tweet may have been deleted
Tweet may have been deleted
Tweaking a meme by adding libido keeps it relevant longer, but it can’t stave off decline forever. Eventually, we will get tired of it because plagiarism is mainstream. Its shock value has been replaced by predictability—a sign of doom for anything that has any hope of retaining comedic value. As comedian and After Midnight staff writer Skyler Higley posted on X: “Everything is the same now. Joe Biden is out. You’ll get a tape Long text messages with emoticons.
We’re reaching peak copypasta—what I call it. We only had a few months before we decided that copycat pasta was actually lame all along and we experienced a new meme renaissance. Start preparing your obituary.
