Wen Gao at The Common Reader:
A few months ago, I was babysitting two kids, one eight and the other five years old. We were in the middle of a board game when the numbers six and seven happened to come up together. Suddenly, as if they had been struck by something. They giggled hysterically, chanting “Six-seven!” with their hands up and down. I was so confused.
Once I finally tucked the kids into bed, I found that I could not get over it, and I asked ChatGPT. It said that six and seven are merely two natural numbers whose meaning depends on context. When I typed “67” into Google, the entire screen began to shake up and down, mimicking the kids’ arm motions. Apparently, Google’s software engineers are in on the joke. I sank into the rabbit hole of YouTube. My homepage was instantly flooded with Gen Alpha1 prank videos. Some of them were quite dismissive, grounded in religious belief, or even cult-related. None of them did anything to quiet my curiosity. Finally, I found a New York Times article. It traced the whole phenomenon back to a song called “Doot Doot (6 7)” by the rapper Skrilla. Basically, as I understood it, the article discussed that Gen Alpha is using absurd memes to reclaim their own space and identity where they are constantly surrounded and monitored by the digital environment.
More here.
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