debatable to what degree meme culture has become more repetitive but I think there's probably something to it. Mark Fisher borrowed the term Hauntology from Der

debatable to what degree meme culture has become more repetitive but I think there's probably something to it. Mark Fisher borrowed the term Hauntology from Derrida to describe this kind of media consumption/production. He thought that one key aspect of the way we communicate was that we're essentially trapped in a sort of self-referential loop that cannot escape old aesthetics, ideas or forms and that we had in a sense cancelled the future or anything genuinely new. It seems like that's the sort of thing the OP feels about memes, and people have often observed it about retro-pop fiction like Ready Player One, the intensity with which fashion is recycled, the never-ending superhero movies that now comprise most of mainstream cinema, and so forth. Subjectively kind of like you're stuck in some 2000s videogame where nobody bothered to turn the servers off. I think that's a sort of feeling many people have about large parts of the media today in some form or another.