I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves

We live in the most annoying of all possible worlds. So why is it so hard to talk about it?

Before we knew what the internet was, we knew it was annoying. One of the first pieces of genuine internet culture, the first meme, the first viral sensation, was something called Hampsterdance: an HTML page full of rows of dancing cartoon rodents, and a sped-up sample from a Disney song on an endless nine-second loop. For what felt like years, this was…