6-7, the Death of Meaning, and the Rise of Anti-meaning
The 6-7 meme evidences the birth of anti-meaning, content that is meaningful because it is meaningless, degrading our ability to distinguish sense from nonsense and create shared worldviews.
“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” — Jean Baudrillard
The viral 6-7 trend, playfully adopted by teens, tweens, and even his Holiness Pope Leo, has baffled many cultural commentators on account of its lack of any inherent or intended meaning. Indeed, Merriam-Webster online defines ‘six seven’ as a “nonsensical expression,” making it categorically different from other viral memes and slang terminology that came before it, which typically represent something. 6-7, I submit, is even distinct from the deluge of brain rot content plaguing online media. Brain rot may be low quality and of little to no value—save its ability to evaporate time—but it at least has some quality, often humorous or satirical. 6-7 has no quality because it has no qualitas, no nature, essence, or characteristics other than its lack of meaning. While seemingly harmless, the emergence and popularity of 6-7 and the increase in brain rot collectively point to a more concerning trend that has implications far beyond a one-off youth culture phenomenon—a trend that may very well contribute to the degradation of human cognition and human civilization after it.
If taken to their extremes, the rise of nonsensical and thoughtless content pushes us toward a society in which media no longer carries meaning, where content no longer contains anything. Marshall McLuhan’s famous 1964 observation that “the medium is the message”—by which he meant that the channel through which a message is conveyed is as formative and informative as the message itself—fails to capture the profundity of the current trend. Today, the proliferation of media channels has rendered the medium largely irrelevant, or at least less relevant than ever before. Moreover, I doubt that McLuhan could have imagined substance disappearing altogether. The medium is no longer the message. There is no message at all. There is merely media transmitted through various mediums that themselves contain no meaning and convey none, other than a deluge of increasingly meaningless content.
McLuhan’s underlying insight that meaning can be conveyed apart from the message itself, however, remains accurate. The “meaning” of 6-7, if any can be assigned to it, comes not from the substance of the meme but from the shared fascination with and usage of it. Its meaning emerges as a secondary or derivative property of its virality, rather than from its message itself. In this scenario, adoption and proliferation is the measure of meaning not the substance or content itself. In this way, such memes behave more like viruses or cancers than constructive ideas that replicate thoughtfully or intentionally. They do not proliferate for the benefit of their senders or receivers, but for their own sake. Content no longer contains a point. The propagation of the content is the point. Content no longer requires substance. Media no longer has to mediate anything. The existence and survival of the meme, irrespective of its inherent meaning, is the end itself.
In this irony and dissonance we find evidence of French philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, where the symbols, signs, and constructs we use to represent reality become more real than the reality they signify. What might start as a reflection of reality quickly becomes a distortion of it, a distortion which quickly pretends to represent reality but has already become decoupled from it. In the end, a simulacrum emerges which takes on its own reality, its own meaning, entirely alienated from its origin. When the representation of reality becomes the reality, a simulacrum is born, a simulation that is no longer anchored to a physical or intellectual reality but now exists independently as its own reality, untethered from its now-forgotten or now-ignored original meaning. The shadows in Plato’s cave are not merely imperfect projections of reality. They are now more real than the figures that cast them.
Trends like the 6-7 meme and the spread of brain rot point to the hyperreal. Content, irrespective of its substance or value, is now more meaningful than the reality it contains. No longer does “content” have to contain a point, a fact, or an idea. Content can be an empty container and still mean as much, if not more, than content containing meaning. The content in and of itself is the real, not the meaning it was intended to convey.
But it gets even worse. Baudrillard’s simulacra still have meaning. That meaning may be entirely decoupled from the originating reality, but the simulacra still means something. 6-7, however, means nothing! That which seems meaningless has become meaningful, perhaps—as some pundits have surmised—precisely because it is meaningless. While 6-7 and the growing deluge of nonsensical content may seem like hyperreal simulacra that have self-referential meaning, they are also acknowledged to be meaningless. These are not strictly simulacra that have come to mean something in and of themselves, these are realities that were meaningless at birth. They never meant anything and weren’t intended to. Their very point is that they have no point.
Beyond McLuhan and Baudrillard, memes like 6-7 seem to be a form of what I will call anti-meaning, content that derives its meaning from the fact that it has no meaning. Similar to how antimatter is not matter-less, anti-meaning is not meaningless. Antimatter is the mirrored or inverse of normal matter, but it is not the absence of matter (it even has mass). Likewise, anti-meaning isn’t the absence of meaning, it is meaning derived from meaninglessness. In his seminal work Simulacra and Simulations, Baudrillard smartly observed that “we live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” Yet, in anti-meaning we find a perverse increase in meaning. There is not, perhaps, less meaning but more meaning, albeit meaning predicated on no meaning at all.
The emergence of anti-meaning is certainly in keeping with an increase in general ontological skepticism. The rise in conspiracy theories, fake news, deep fakes, rejection of scientific evidence, etc. all point to a devaluation of truth, creating an opening for alternative realities. Anti-meaning goes a step further, not in its rejection of meaning, but in its embrace of meaninglessness. In finding meaning in that which has no meaning, anti-meaning creates a new form of meaning. Meaning is not actually absent, but becomes present in its own obsolescence. Conspiracy theories, for instance, still believe in a substantive point, even if that point contradicts the prevailing consensus. Anti-meaning, on the other hand, is pointless and in its pointlessness achieves perilous meaning and pernicious value.
This desire to celebrate and proliferate nonsense is surely a reaction to chaos, unpredictability, volatility, uncertainty, and doubt that pervades our times. If real life isn’t making sense, then why not find sense in nonsense? If nothing has meaning, then why can’t nothing be meaningful? This moment is in some ways reminiscent of the Dadaist artistic movement that arose in the wake of the First World War. Dadaism championed the power of absurdity and nonsense as a means to respond to the horrors of global conflict. Viewed as a similar historical response, anti-meaning can be understood as a very rational and justified collective social response to the discontents of our age.
While this may be the case, Dadaism, even in its absurdity, had meaning. It had an agenda. It had a point. It was a reaction to the institutional dynamics that gave rise to destructive political and economic realities of the early 20th century. This rejection of the status quo is patently evident in Dadaist commentaries from the period.
Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn’t I find it? Why can’t a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. —Hugo Ball, Dada Manifesto 1916
Here, Ball suggests a nonsensical linguistic modification as protest against the rigidity and arbitrariness of the bourgeois values that many saw as fomenting the conditions for WWI.
“Freedom: Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.” —Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto 1918
Here too Tzara’s inane musings declare the purpose of Dadaism: freedom, the freedom to celebrate aspects and expressions of life that were disfavored and condemned by the bourgeoisie.
The anti-meaning evident in 2026, however, is quite different. There is no intentional social, political, economic, or technological point to 6-7. Even if it is a reaction against the absurdity and uncertainty of our own times, it is one that is instinctual rather than intentional or conscious. Regardless of its origins, the emergence of anti-meaning could have far reaching and hard-to-measure impact on human cognition. Cultivating a society where cultural mantras have no meaning, where content is increasingly thoughtless and purposeless, might gradually erode our collective capacity to make meaning at all. Meaning-making is not a passive pastime but a conscious capacity, a muscle strengthened through practice and atrophied through neglect. If we train successive generations to find satisfaction in contentless content, we risk degrading the cognitive capabilities that humans for millennia have used to construct our worldviews, identities, and communities.
The danger is not that we will be entertained by nonsense—humans have always delighted in the absurdity of play—but that we will lose the ability, and eventually the desire, to distinguish sense from nonsense, to demand that our symbols represent something real. A civilization that forgets how to make meaning is a civilization that quickly thereafter forgets how to think, and one that forgets how to think cannot long sustain the institutions, relationships, and social contracts and constructs upon which civilization depends.
None of this is to indict a schoolyard chant or to mistake a passing fad for the fall of Rome. 6-7 will fade, as all memes do, displaced by some equally vapid successor. The concern is not the meme but its implications. Anti-meaning thrives because it asks nothing of us: no interpretation, no understanding, no reflection, no judgment, no discernment, no decision. In an age that increasingly outsources cognition itself to machines, the temptation to surrender meaning-making along with it grows ever stronger.
The appropriate response is neither moral panic nor social luddism, but institutional commitment to insist on substance, on content that contains something meaningful, on signs that still bother to signify something substantive. If the medium is no longer the message and even the simulacra is preferable because at least it means something, then the task before us is to reclaim the meaning of the message itself: to keep filling our content with something worth containing. The alternative is a world that is louder but emptier, where the last human artifice is the art of saying nothing to everyone and thinking nothing at all.