Drowning in Puffer Jackets: Life Inside Algorithmic Sameness

Meme Saturation

noun

Meme Saturation describes the cultural condition in which a trend, image, phrase, or style replicates so widely and rapidly that it exhausts its meaning and becomes unavoidable. What begins as novelty or wit hardens into background noise as algorithms amplify familiarity over freshness, flooding feeds with the same references until they lose all edge, surprise, or symbolic power. Under meme saturation, participation is no longer expressive but reflexive; people repeat the meme not because it says something, but because it is everywhere and opting out feels socially invisible. The result is a culture that appears hyperactive yet feels stagnant—loud with repetition, thin on substance, and increasingly numb to its own signals.

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Kyle Chayka’s diagnosis is blunt and hard to dodge: we have been algorithmically herded into looking, talking, and dressing alike. We live in a flattened culture where everything eventually becomes a meme—earnest or ironic, political or absurd, it hardly matters. Once a meme lodges in your head, it begins to steer your behavior. Chayka’s emblematic example is the “lumpy puffer jacket,” a garment that went viral not because it was beautiful or functional, but because it was visible. Everyone bought the same jacket, which made it omnipresent, which made it feel inevitable. Virality fed on itself, and suddenly the streets looked like a flock of inflatable marshmallows migrating south. This is algorithmic culture doing exactly what it was designed to do: compress difference into repetition. As Chayka puts it, Filterworld culture is homogenous, saturated with sameness even when its surface details vary. It doesn’t evolve; it replicates—until boredom sets in.

And boredom is the one variable algorithms cannot fully suppress. Humans tolerate sameness only briefly before it curdles into restlessness. A culture that perpetuates itself too efficiently eventually suffocates on its own success. My suspicion is that algorithmic culture will not be overthrown by critique so much as abandoned out of exhaustion. When every aesthetic feels pre-approved and every trend arrives already tired, something else will be forced into existence—if not genuine unpredictability, then at least its convincing illusion. Texture will return, or a counterfeit version of it. Spontaneity will reappear, even if it has to be staged. The algorithm may flatten everything it touches, but boredom remains stubbornly human—and it always demands a sequel.