Mimetic Collapse, Our Destiny

I’m not gonna bother with the substance of this. I wrote everything I needed to say about the David-Foster-Wallace-as-perpetual-hate-object phenomenon here, two and a half years ago. That I published that piece two and a half years ago, and remarked on the fact that the bizarre negative fixation on Infinite Jest was incredibly old and tired at the time, is more my concern here. As many commenters on social media have said in response to this Rolling Stone article… what year is this? How are we still doing this? The “litbro” was a tired trope when people were buying their first iPhones; that Dana Schwartz kept her college-era resentments burning for a half-decade never actually amounted to proof that such a character ever existed. (I always found it a very 21st-century piece of tragicomedy that Schwartz was annoyed by the perceived culture of a handful of guys in her undergrad classes, and so… voluntarily marinated in that imaginary culture for years after she graduated.) How has this meme - which is what the litbro is, a meme - survived for so long, when the nature of memes is to die off over time?