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What Was the Current Thing in 2022?

A Data Analysis of the Year’s top Memes

Michael Tauberg
3 min readDec 19, 2022
A wordcloud of the most popular media things in 2020

For those in a rush, here were the current things of 2022.

2022 was a year of stories, and around each story was a war. I recall the collective consciousness beginning to recover from the partisan battles of Covid — the disease, the lockdowns, the vaccines. Then, just as soon as the pandemic died down, new stories emerged or were thrust upon us. I and others noticed this as war broke out in Ukraine. Instead of a mask, it suddenly became de rigeur to sport a blue and yellow flag.

The tweet above shows a meme that Marc Andreesen and Elon Musk popularized. Musk himself would become the “current thing” later in the year, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The point of this article isn’t to argue for or against any position. It’s just to notice and appreciate this singular phenomenon. This “current thing”. First we must ask ourselves, what…

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Michael Tauberg
Michael Tauberg

Written by Michael Tauberg

Engineer in San Francisco. Interested in words, networks, and human abstractions. Opinions expressed are solely my own.

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