6-7 and the First World War: How Internet absurdism became Dada's unlikely heir

Exploring Internet memes as a cultural off-shoot of Dadaism During a time when boundaries had not been drawn onto maps, when man still looked liked beast instead of only acting like one, our ancestors developed speech. Over millennia, language emerged, empires rose and fell over it, wars were fought over single words and whose god had the right one — all so that, in the 21st century, we could use this ancient tool to say '6-7'.Finding meaning in the memes that come out of the internet in this day and age is nothing short of the 13th Herculean task. What can you attribute to a shark that wears sneakers on the beach? Or a high society cup of cappuccino that can break into ballet?It is easy to dismiss this as childish, ‘Gen Z’, brainrot humour that doesn’t serve a purpose. But what if its very purpose is that it does not serve one? What if its lack of meaning is its entire meaning?Long before the internet was reigned by the likes of a grotesque talking toilet, there was Cabaret Voltaire.In 1916, in a small performance space in Zurich, a handful of artists and poets gathered nightly to read poems built from invented syllables, paste together newspaper scraps into collages, and generall...