About

This Is What A Collapsing Society Looks Like is a catchphrase used in a series of image caption memes made in parody of Twitter user @CollapseTalkPod which attempted to illustrate that society was in "collapse" by showing two pictures of the same area 10 years apart, with the second picture looking severely more dilapidated than the first. The tweet led to parodies where people copied the text of the original and showed more humorous examples of how things have changed over the years, similar to the Reject Modernity and We Used to Be a Country memes.

Origin

On May 9th, 2022, Twitter account @CollapseTalkPod^[1] tweeted two pictures of the same area from 2009 and 2019, illustrating how the area had grown dilapidated over the course of 10 years. They captioned the tweet, "This is what a collapsing society looks like," gaining over 5,000 retweets and 37,000 likes in two days (shown below).

Spread

Parodies of @CollapseTalkPod's tweet started appearing on social media shortly after their post. Later on May 9th, Twitter user lasergiant1^[2] posted a parody showing two different McDonald's restaurants, gaining over 7,900 retweets and 103,000 likes in two days (shown below).

The tweet kickstarted the creation of a meme around the caption "This Is What A Collapsing Society Looks Like." Over the following two days, many Twitter users posted similar parodies showing humorous comparisons between the same product or place in different periods of time. For example, user @shugaziworld^[3] posted a comparison between an old and a new Hot Topic storefront (shown below, left). User @AndrewHilaryUS^[4] posted a comparison between a Combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bell/KFC and separate versions of those three restaurants (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References