6-7 Isn't Meaningless

You're just culturally illiterate

One hugely retarded take you often hear is that the 6-7 meme so explosively popular among Gen Alpha kids (and intolerable to their self-serious Millennial schoolmarms) is totally devoid of semantic content, and that it’s all just them being dumb kids.

That perhaps suffices as an exoteric reading for dumdum normies and old people, but I tend to suspect there’s something quite a lot deeper going on here.

Note for instance how 6-7 feels a bit unsettling to older generations—I suspect that’s at least partially due to how the clipped ametric staccato in which it’s often delivered (most notably in the original video) phenomenologically entwines the numbers into just one thing—indeed, when young people discuss the meme they tend to convey it textually as “67,” which feels ontologically disordered to oldpeepo like me who instead mostly opt for “6-7.” Without the dash our brains can’t parse the difference from the number sixty-seven and the whole thing collapses into undifferentiated semiotic gruel— precisely what iPad kids have been swimming in their entire existence.

There’s also the numerological angle—even today 6 codes as demonic and 7 holy in popular consciousness, which lends a certain mythopoetic sizzle to the phrase (a lot less consciously for normie types) that’s bound to amplify its virality. And if you think I’m being schizo with that just ask yourself: would people be reacting half as strongly to the meme if it were “3-4” or “8-9” or literally any other combination of numbers?

Taken together the phonological compression and mythopoesis feel uncanny to anyone raised in a textual culture because it speaks to a pervasive and deeply-felt contempt for legible boundaries, persistent meaning, basic ontological stability, and anything else that might enable someone to reliably discern between heaven and hell.

But discernment isn’t an especially useful concept in a frictionless vibesy oral culture where The Feed is lived reality and Trvth whatever your solipsistic narc cult says it is; if anything it makes you kind of a retarded walking target who’ll in practice either rot on Discord marinating in incel rage until you climb on a roof and obliterate some guy’s face or nonchalantly get her heart broke / puss passed around by smirking cockroachy Pete Davidson types until at last deciding to become a dyke or hooker or functionally asexual arts and crafts biddy. Most of the time it’s a lot more adaptive to not have any real standards besides always being chill and coo so you don’t incur any cognitive load vibing with sloptimism—which of course means the most socially adroit Alphas will also be the ones most inclined to write it “67,” marking that as high status.

The same phenomenon is also present in the latter half of Gen Z—think the cohort born after 9/11 dubbed “Low Zoomers” in my recent taxonomy—but the extent of it is only partially legible to older generations unless they regularly interact with Zoomers given that A) most of these kids are decent at masking / code switching in situations that warrant it; and B) a significant portion of Zoomers themselves abhor oral culture perfidy and will wholly organically fall into a much less floating quasi-textualist register with their no-nonsense Gen X parents and especially near-peer managers / subcultural oldheads / earnest age gap boyfriends, around whom they can get away with not acting like a gleefully dissociative condottieri all the time which means that in the best cases such folx actually can groom a fair bit of sentience into them.

Whereas Gen Alpha was raised by faggoty wholesome chungus Elder Millennials, who despite being entirely Concerned about how retarded late modernity has made their kids are also infinitely too soft a cohort not to indulge that retardation. While Gen X parents generally roll their eyes at Zoomer theatrics and do their best to deprive them of oxygen the instinct among Avocado Toastians is to drench them in gasoline—which conjoined to coming up in not just an oral culture but a mature congealed normatively opaque oral culture that minimizes obligate interchange with cheugy long-testicled textualists has resulted in a Generation Alpha that’s nothing short of feral, adopting a register Gen Z reserves for group chats in its dealings with the entire world.

And “6-7” is their battle cry—in a sense what “Okay Boomer” was for Gen Z.

The main difference being that Zoomers were (pretty brilliantly imo) trying to convey a frustration with the tendency of oldpeepo to misunderstand them and approach the world with stale priors from a monoculture that croaked decades ago, and to that end some degree of legibility to said oldpeepo was crucial to the meme’s virality. Zoomers longed to be understood by their elders because code switching between oral and textualist registers has always been an inescapable part of life for them—hence the meme’s ironic / exasperated / vaguely homosexual tone. Gen Alpha, meanwhile, seems to be adopting more a form is content approach by embracing absurdity qua absurdity with a swaggering tard vigor one can’t help but admire by compulsively barking out a phrase that’s ostensibly just a semiotic black hole—which of course is the entire point, particularly when most of the teachers clamping down on it have sort of the opposite problem being theatrically self-important nineties kids who as girlypops never really had to come to terms with the Disney Renaissance / Harry Potter not being especially accurate models of reality and so haven’t the faintest idea how to handle boys growing up in a world that’s ackshully honest about life being kind of a cruel Shaggy Dog Story.

By filling auditoriums with cacophonies of “6-7” Gen Alpha is forcing the world to metabolize the absurdity of subjecting them to institutional morality and ossified textualist discursive norms when their inescapable social incentive structure runs utterly contrary to that and for them the Cool Older Kids (and eventually managers and oldheads and age gap bee effs) generally aren’t late stage textualists prompting them to code switch so much as code switchers themselves—anyone native to the textual register inherently codes as quaint and vaguely parental in the unsexy way.

Dramaturgically the video tracks with this almost perfectly, beginning in medias res during a lively portion of a middle school basketball game. The crowd is chanting and tensions high as the ball is handed off to a somewhat prevaricating fellow exquisitely positioned to make a three point shot, which naturally he takes—and then misses on the rim, the ball bouncing into the crowd and presumably colliding with someone’s grandma. Then the shot wheels into the cameraman’s more immediate vicinity and onto two thickly melanated gents, one of whom makes a cooning-adjacent exasperated black dude expression as the other gives us a dead-eyed stare and also makes a pretty badass crossbones gesture with his arms (mayhaps a good fit for Tortuga?).

And then the shot wheels on over to our protagonist—a cherubic preteen boy who draws the camera’s attention by bellowing “eyyyyyyy” whilst making an aggressive handjob motion, and then as the camera advances mimes out another more opaque gesture that might be called ‘muted juggling’ and appears to convey an unbothered subaltern moxie sort of evocative of an Old World produce merchant, which suggests a genesis in cultural interchange between the lad and his assorted dusky schoolmates and anywho that’s when he yells “6-7.”

The video begins as a perfectly absurd Shaggy Dog Story for the Age of Scrolling, then terminates with a game theoretically ideal reaction of apathy gilded in tweenage rizz.

Because among Generation Alpha the fellers most broadly perceived as Winners are the ones who haven’t any need to metabolize disappointment because they never put themselves in a position to meaningfully fail in the first place and have a neurotype suited for turning life’s various lemons into viral content. One feels a bit badly for the lumbering lad who missed his jump-shot—not because his failure was immortalized for posterity, but because even if he HAD made it it STILL wouldn’t have mattered half as much as his classmate’s facility with signal hacking in a world where especially for boys smoke has grown significantly more important than fire thanks to all of life’s arenas of consequence rewarding spectacle a hell of a lot more than substance.

It’s a culture of perfumed barbarism “6-7” pretty overtly frolics in—a curdled relic of the theatricality and frustrated optimism of these kids’ Millennial parents, exactly like how “Okay Boomer” alchemized a legacy of Gen X irony and detachment into a kind of epistemic jiu-jitsu against grandpa’s hegemonic out-of-touch pigheadedness.

But in much the same way a generation of pantsuit-clad riot grrrls ended up rearing a cohort of softgirls drawn to prostitute-adjacency, Generation Alpha has little need for Millennial rationalism and civicmindedness and confessional essay legibility and other last gasps of textualism that if we’re lucky might just save the world and if we’re not will probably be remembered as sort of Carradine-coded.

There’s something really bestial in there.

And while it’s too early to make any hard prognostications about their adult behavior given how contingent that is (consider how different Zoomers may have been without Covid—or Millennials sans Great Recession), I can’t help but consider the deeply-felt alienation and casual amorality often bleeding into sociopathy you tend to see among the less successful quartile or so of Low Zoomer boys thanks to the huge asymmetries of modern life and structurally inevitable perfidy of hypermodern oral culture and it kind of occurs to me that’s maybe not the best solvent in the world for a generation brought up primarily by indulgent and cloyingly earnest Millennial boymoms.

Because their breed of stochastic terrorism almost certainly won’t manifest as lone wolf sniper attacks on public figures a la Zoomer boys, which are clearly rooted in a desire to embody the gnarly cowboyist masculinity of detached Nirvana dads and a childhood spent internalizing Stealth Archer values. Alpha Boys will be a lot more theatrical with it I suspect, and also more communitarian—think Clockwork Orange gangs except instead of appropriating Russian slang they talk kind of like niggers.

Want to avoid that outcome? Maybe take a good hard look at the incentive structure boys are coming up in these days instead of just fucking sneering at them 24/7.

Because chances are you’ll long for the days of Chunking Charlie once you’re tied up with a sock in your mouth watching helplessly as the Rizzler shreds your wife’s cunt.