Six-Seven, Memes and Movements

17 Dec

THE SHOCK ABSORBER

Two Numbers

You've likely heard it at some point even if it might sound like gibberish: six-seven.

That's it. Two numbers. No punchline. No context. Just... six-seven.

So what is it? Where did it come from? And what does it tell us about internet culture, postmodernism, and how Christians should respond?

The Origin Story

Like most viral internet phenomena, 6-7 has a traceable but increasingly odd story: rapper Skrilla's song, NBA player LaMelo Ball (who's 6'7"), basketball game chants and edits, and a high school kid on TikTok adding random hand gestures.

Is It Art?

Aiden Walker's analysis on Instagram frames the 6-7 meme as essentially abstract art, evidence that postmodernists won the culture war.

The meaning of the meme is that it has no meaning. It's about what 6-7 testifies to rather than what 6-7 is. It's just a number. But what it testifies to is the power of organised online publics to meme something into relevance, to meme it into the minds of actual 67-year-olds without actually needing it to refer to anything in the real world.
Because the thing being made viral is entirely arbitrary, the meme itself becomes a more pure experiment in illustrating the dynamics of social platforms. People want to figure out what the internet is doing to them, even little kids. And so hyping 6-7 to the moon becomes a way of illustrating that this whole apparatus we have is crazy. What are we going to do about that power?

The Shock Absorber crew wrestle with this interpretation. Is Walker onto something, or is he just an art critic making content that will get him views?

The pushback centers on Walker's definition of abstract art itself. Dadaist and abstract movements weren't about creating meaninglessness—they were about removing emphasis from recognizable form and shifting it to emotional response. A Jackson Pollock invites you to import your own meaning precisely because there's less recognizable form to constrain interpretation.

But 6-7 doesn't work that way. It's not creating space for meaning, it's simply lacking context. Many are using it to relate to one another and try to be funny, not to explore deeper truths about form and feeling.

That said, Walker's postmodernism claim does land. There's something significant happening here: stuff doesn't have to mean stuff anymore. Subjective truth is the water Gen Z swims in. So they can create and participate in something while being totally content with the fact that it doesn't mean anything, and that itself is a type of cultural statement.

The In-Group/Out-Group Dynamic

Here's what becomes clear: 6-7 started because it created an in-group and an out-group.

Part of the fun is that other people don't understand. We know that it doesn't mean anything, but the teacher at the front of the class who said something about the number six and now has a student shouting at them is confused. We're on the in and they're on the outer. Even if there is no meaning to actually understand.

It's classic adolescent behavior. Previous generations had "nek minute" (a reference from New Zealand), "that's sick" (skateboarding/surfing slang), and endless Simpsons or Anchorman quotes that meant nothing to people who hadn't watched those shows or movies.

It's part of growing up as a teenager, detaching from parents, forming your own identity, creating subcultures that adults don't understand. This has always happened. The internet has just accelerated and amplified it.

The Lifecycle of a Meme

Memes now have a predictable lifecycle, and it's shaped by generational dynamics.

It starts as something that's most likely in a teenager space. However, because of the internet, it’s picked up by younger generations far more quickly, and therefore it becomes uncool.

Teenagers create or discover something. It spreads among their peer group. Younger kids, Year 7s, primary schoolers, see it and adopt it. The original teenagers immediately abandon it. The younger kids hold onto it longer and the cycle repeats.

The result? Memes that used to last years now last weeks or months at most. The 6-7 meme won't have staying power precisely because younger kids latched onto it so quickly.

Consider the supposed top memes by year: 2025 has 100 men vs. one gorilla (though 6-7 is arguably bigger). 2024 had The Rizzler. 2023 brought Pedro Pascal eating the sandwich. 2022 gave us Will Smith slapping Chris Rock. 2021 had Bernie Sanders with his mittens. 2020 featured the Fleetwood Mac cranberry juice skateboarding video.

These rapid cycles mean that what feels like a massive cultural moment is often forgotten within months. But does that mean nothing meaningful is happening?

Can Movements Even Happen Anymore?

Previous generations had defining movements: grunge in the '90s, emo in the 2000s, hippies in the '60s. These were capital-M movements that swept across generations and had lasting cultural impact.

Can that happen anymore? When everyone's algorithm shows them different content and when culture is so splintered and individualized? There's skepticism that movements can still form when algorithms are changing in ways that show entirely different content. Some people get the 6-7 memes. Others get the videos explaining the 6-7 meme.

But there's a strong counterargument: movements do happen, they just look different now.

Movements Always Happen, and Christians Are There

One key insight is that within one recognisable movement, there are multiples. Social movements happen constantly online. When the worlds of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce collide, suddenly millions of people are engaged in something together. It's not organised like a march or a strike, but it's real cultural momentum.

6-7 is now a thing because the whole internet says "Oh, something's up. Let's do the thing together." It's short and silly, and the internet builds in automatic feedback loops. So if there's no information coming back into that feedback loop, it stops. But that doesn't mean movements don't happen.

Christianity, though, is a movement in itself. And Christians are often in the middle of every movement that's ever happened. And God does something through them and in them.

The Roman Empire:

Christian women changed the Roman Empire by looking after babies and others who didn't have families. And Christian men were looking after the women. The entire empire eventually became Christian because of acts like these.

The Hippie Movement:

The '70s was all about love, drugs, and free sex. Christians are really not keen on free sex and not keen on drugs. And yet Christians really like love, so they said “let's do that.”

Right Now:

On social media feeds right now, people are becoming Christians. The internet is helping people become Christians. There is a mini-revival happening in the UK, with many rocking up to churches because they saw Christian content online.

Whatever we're experiencing in culture, God works through that. He moves people to the gospel through His Spirit. Whatever is happening in the world, we can ask: how can we join what God is already doing? If there's a big movement happening, let's go. He's already moving in it.

What Are We Modelling?

The challenge for older Christians: when we say things, when society says through the recent social media ban that this aspect of the internet is bad for development, but then older Christians sit around on their phones, what are we modelling?

Are we banning kids from social media so we can use it more? Are we restricting their screen time while we're addicted to our own?

As Christians, we're told that just because we have the freedom to do something doesn't mean it's good for us. Paul writes in Romans that everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial. Older Christians have a great challenge to take the wisdom gained through years of living their out faith and modelling it to other Christians.

Young people aren’t required to copy exactly what older generations do, they bring their own experience and flexibility to situations. But we need to walk the walk if we're going to say that certain things aren't helpful.

The argument that kids make for having a phone is that they will otherwise be ostracised. They will be kept out of group conversations and plans and they see it as social exclusion. These are complex pastoral questions without easy answers. But the starting point has to be adults modelling what we're asking of kids.

The Generative Nature of Youth

Throughout these conversations, there's a consistent thread of optimism about young people's creativity and adaptability. This generative capacity is what makes youth ministry so exciting and so challenging. They figure out great and wonderful ways to follow Jesus that older generations would never think of. Young people get the gospel and immediately think about how to be Christian in the spaces they already inhabit. That's what's really powerful about this generation.

The older generation's struggle is different. There's a tendency to think about Christian faithfulness as something that happens outside digital spaces, in more traditional contexts. The challenge becomes helping young people figure out how to be faithful disciples in their actual cultural moment, not in some idealised past or imaginary future. Older Christians bring wisdom from years of trying to live out faith. Younger Christians bring innovation and adaptability. Together, something new emerges through partnership. This is what generative youth ministry looks like.

The Challenge of Declining Literacy

One sobering reality facing churches is that culturally, the internet has shifted a generation of people away from literacy. People are reading less and attention spans are shorter. This creates a genuine challenge for churches that value the Word of God. How do we encourage people to live in faith when a big part of that faith involves sitting and reading the Bible or sitting through a long sermon or participating in Bible study?

The direction forward isn't abandoning these practices just because they're countercultural. Reading Scripture and listening to teaching aren't going away because they're important. Just because something isn't culturally popular anymore doesn't mean it should be discarded. The question becomes: how do we model listening and reading, and then encourage younger people to help figure that out for themselves and take it on in ways that work for them?

It's a both/and approach. Adults bring wisdom and model what's important, while making space for young people to adapt and innovate. This is the generative partnership in action, not imposing solutions, but creating space for young disciples to figure out how to be faithful in their unique cultural moment.

The 6-7 generation isn't a problem to solve. They're God's people, generatively creating new expressions of ancient faith in a digital age. Our call is simple: bring wisdom, model faithfulness, make space for innovation, and trust that the same Spirit who hovered over the waters at creation is hovering over Gen Z right now.

Listen to the full conversation on the Shock Absorber podcast. For more on theology, strategy, and practice in ministry, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or email joel@shockabsorber.com.

Discussed on this episode:

aidanetcetera on Instagram
Doot Doot, by Skrilla
Lamelo Ball basketball edits
Social media ban
Lewis’s Chip Lunch episode on the internet
Richard Dawkins a cultural Christian