emo

An animated film about a girl group who fight demons between shows, which became the most-watched thing on Netflix and the source of a summer's worth of memes: 'Golden' as an anthem, the Saja Boys as the villains people fancied, and a tiger with a face nobody could explain.

Stripped of advertising revenue by YouTube's automated systems — demonetized — as the word that entered the creator vocabulary in 2016 and became, with a yellow dollar-sign icon, the platform's standard punishment for saying an unlicensed word. The record notes the term is now also a joke: a creator who swears may add 'demonetized' as a caption, which is a small act of defiance and also free.

🌽 — 'porn', for a platform that would not let you say it, which then became a joke in itself when a child's video about actual corn went viral in 2022. The record's entry for the emoji that had two meanings in the same summer.

The evening in October 2024 when Tesla's Optimus humanoid robots served drinks, danced and chatted to guests at a product launch, and the days after, when it emerged that people offstage were operating them in real time. The robots had been presented as the future of labour; guests' videos showed them answering questions in different human voices. The record files it as the demo in which the robot was a costume.

A ceremony on the Seine in the rain, with a headless Marie Antoinette, a metal band, a mysterious torchbearer and a tableau that half the internet read as the Last Supper. The record's entry for four hours of television that produced a fortnight of arguments and one very good meme about the torchbearer.

The in-game ideology of Helldivers 2 — 'for democracy!', 'a cup of liber-tea' — chanted by players with a straightness that made the satire indistinguishable from the fandom. The spring of 2024's game and its most-quoted phrase, recited at players' desks and, briefly, at a real protest about a PSN login.

👀 — 'I'm watching', 'this is interesting', 'say more' — as the reaction to gossip, a hint, or a photo that deserves attention, and the record's entry for the two eyes that have looked at everything on the internet without a word.

YouTube's decision, announced on 10 November 2021, to hide public dislike counts on all videos while keeping the button, framed as protecting small creators from 'dislike attacks' and received as protecting large corporations from honest feedback. The record notes the platform's own 2018 Rewind was, at the time, the most-disliked video on the site, and that the connection was drawn by everyone.