What are copypastas — and is this the beginning of the end?

News alerts are irrelevant. Turn CNN off. The best way to get the breaking news is an overly horny text calling you a slut that's filled to the brim with eggplant emojis.

That text is called a copypasta, and if you're part of the more online sect of Americans, you likely received one when President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race. It's decidedly NSFW, but here's a screenshot of what it might have looked like:

How nice! Credit: Screenshot

When you receive a copypasta, you're supposed to copy and paste it — hence the name — and send it to more of your contacts. It's intended like a piece of chain mail, which we first started seeing around 2006 on 4chan. It was added the dictionary in May 2021.

Many people remember these texts from middle school ("send this to 10 ppl or you'll never get kissed"), and there are, of course, various other ways the fun text format is used (spreading misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance). We saw a modern resurgence of these chain messages in 2018, but they seemed more tied to the texts you might get in middle school. Eventually, they floated into holiday territory and got a lot hornier (e.g., Santa’s about to slide 🎅🏾😉 down your hot 🔥 hot 🔥chimney tonight). They became more political and more sexually explicit than ever before. And today, they're synonymous for the breaking news alert.

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There's plenty of reasons for this evolution. The people who write them aren't terribly concerned with accuracy, so they can move quickly with breaking news. Our political world is continuously disappointing us in new and more horrifying ways, and copypastas are one way to add some levity to a system that has left us jaded. As several copypasta writers told CT Jones in Rolling Stonein 2018, "the meme format isn’t just a good laugh— it’s a way for people to use humor to address a world that has become increasingly dystopian."

But I fear something for fans of the copypasta: its death may be approaching.

There's a cycle memes often fall victim to, not one unlike anything else embedded in popular culture. It looks like this: origin, niche spread, viral spread, peak popularity, adaptation and mutation, decline, obsolescence, and an optional resurgence. We're solidly in copypasta's second life — in the "adaptation and mutation" phase. The texts have moved from holiday texts and messages suited for middle schoolers to some of the horniest NSFW texts you'll receive. We got horny copypastas on the anniversary of the insurrection anniversary, when former President Trump was convicted, when someone attempted to assassinate former President Trump, and plenty about Biden dropping out.

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Adapting the meme by adding the horniness has kept it relevant for longer, but it can't stave off a decline forever. Eventually, we'll get bored of it, because the copypasta is mainstream. Its shock quality has been replaced with predictability — a sign of doom for anything that has any hope of maintaining comedic value. As Skyler Higley, a comedian and staff writer at After Midnight, posted on X: "it’s all the same now. Joe Biden drops out. You get one of those long texts with the emojis. Someone posts the future meme 'biden dropping out reminds me of how I quit you'. people post fake texts between them and Biden. Et cetera. I feel empty."

We're reaching peak copypasta — and I'm calling it. We only have a few months before we all decide that copypastas have actually been lame all along and we experience a new meme renaissance. Start preparing your obituaries.