It can be so difficult keeping up with “The Current Thing”:
Occupy Wall Street
I’m with Her
I Can’t Breathe
Black Lives Matter
Defund the Police
Refugees Welcome
Decolonize the Curriculum
Bathroom Equality
Climate Emergency
No Wall, No USA at All
Remove Oppressive Statues
Green New Deal
Respect My Pronouns
Masks Save Lives
Vaccinate and Boost
Defend Ukraine
It’s hard keeping it all straight, and can be expensive to stay current, what with the price of Chinese baseball caps and T-shirts these days. Some have given up and opted for the generic approach:
but you don’t have to settle for a cheap cap-out any longer, because Fourmilab announces The Current Thing Connected Hat.
Wireless 3G/4G/5G mobile connectivity
Bright 16×2 LED character display for the longest slogans
Receives free updates via SMS from Narrative Central whenever the Current Thing changes
No charger needed—recharges kinetically from rapid head nodding
Back strap adjustable for hat sizes 00 through 2
“Blend in” feature automatically senses slogans of nearby wearers over Bluetooth and conforms to the majority
Stay with the Narrative! — Conform to the Crowd! — Demonstrate your Individuality!
Order Fourmilab Current Thing Wireless Connected Hat today!
Most versions of this meme do not have a blue mask. Thanks for posting that version because it captures the idiocy with greater fidelity than the one found on Know Your Meme. My nonexistent photoshop skills are not up to the task of inserting a mask.
This is brilliant! This is exactly the right cutting-edge technology that I was looking for long time. Finally is available. Where I can order one?
Also can there be also some upgrade which would added some blockchain or fin-tech into that head? Something like money to everyone via contract-derivate based scheme which will make so big profit and gain value indefinitely so I don’t have to work anymore and can retire without any real work done.
A vacuous meme? A sly insult? The secret key to the Discourse?
⋮
As is often the case with the memes adopted by the would-be intellectuals of the tech right, Andreessen and his ilk have been treating this silly bit as a grand key to understanding American politics and discourse. Richard Hanania—one of those weird right-wing randos who appear on the scene out of nowhere every few months, suddenly raised to Twitter prominence for some occult algorithmic/dark-money reason that we will never get a good answer about—wrote a long newsletter in which he endorses opposing The Current Thing as a “heuristic”: “I would argue that a probabilistic approach suggests that we should be anti-current thing.” Andreessen, meanwhile, is captivated by it as a description of processes that he sees everywhere:
“[W]ould-be intellectual of the tech right, [Marc] Andreessen” co-authored the first graphical Web browser, Mosaic, founded Netscape, and later co-founded legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Slate columnist “Max Read is the author of Read Max, a newsletter about technology and culture, and is a former Gawker and New York magazine editor.”
John the hat should be able to automatically update what the next thing is as the newsfeed on Twitter updates. That way all Fourmilab patrons are always on the cutting edge of virtue signaling.
