Remember when "epic bacon" was the height of comedy?
“Cringe” is a shortened form of “cringey,” which itself is a shortened form of “cringeworthy,” referring to the embarrassment (often the secondhand kind) of witnessing something that is awkward, uncomfortable, passé, or cliché. Cringe content — whether created in earnest or as parodies of earnest cringe content — makes up an astonishingly large portion of the social internet; it combines everything from hysterical Twitter scolds to Instagram thirst traps to the entirety of the TikTok Discover page. Cringe may only exist in the eye of the beholder, but the “epic bacon” extended universe that dominated from the mid-aughts to the mid-2010s is its inarguable emblem.
How did “epic bacon” go from a dominant mode of communicating online to a parody of washed 30- and 40-somethings who still talk about their Hogwarts houses? The answer is more complicated than “millennials got old.” The internet got bigger and easier to join; algorithms determined more of what we saw and did on it; groups of people learned how to wield irony as a weapon on a macro scale; the pace at which culture evolved sped up so that only those who spent all their time online could parse through the layers. The paradoxes inherent in the system got a lot trickier to navigate. “Bacon” simply couldn’t contain it all, no matter how epic.
