How Hyper-Local Meme Accounts Took Over the World

You would have noticed your Instagram experience this year was punctuated by accounts commentating on specific localities and the types of people found in them. 2023 saw the explosion of hyper-local accounts like Real Housewives of Clapton (RHOC), Socks House Meeting and Nolita Dirtbag – IG profiles skewering subtypes of archetypes with ever more precision. 

Some of these accounts have been around for years. Some of them only came to prominence in 2023. But one thing’s for sure: They prove that society has flattened into a monoculture. Subcultures no longer form the way they did pre-internet as communities are online and globalised. You can pick and choose bits of everything to form your visual identity, but most young people end up liking varying versions of the same thing. So what you get is styles and tastes repeating in city after city across the West, and a few hyper-local archetypes like Scouse brow girls, downtown coquettes and Tulum spiritual seekers.

As someone who’s lived in Clapton for five years, and before that, visited for like, three, it’s jarring seeing your area and, perhaps yourself, parodied. There’s a surreal sense of performance in the people and products that live up to the RHOC aesthetic. You wonder if the cliched memes brought them here to begin with, or if their consumption has been impacted by said memes. 

But then maybe I’ve just lived here long enough to see the place change, and obviously, what is slated as typical Clapton is really just typical of a creative and/or fashionably switched-on middle class. The fits are happening everywhere; gentrification is happening everywhere. (Anxious sighthounds are maybe quite specific to the area? I don’t get out of Hackney enough to be sure.)

And fashion itself is contagious. I know that, because VICE seemed to think I was a fashion writer for a time, and so my opinions are enshrined in internet formaldehyde, and there are takes that I sorely regret on articles of clothing I’ve since warmed to and coveted intensely. 

That’s one side of it. But then there was also a faint, guilty buzz stirring within me to see my world caricatured and pedastooled; to feel part of a community of ridiculous gorpy consumers. To perceive and be perceived in Lower Clapton by a cohort of like-minded peers on a regular basis is akin to truly living, if being banished to some forgotten London hinterland feels like actually dying. This is the cultural death I face now as I move to the borders of Stepney Green and Limehouse. What will the London meme accounts mean to me then? Will I understand them any less, or, perhaps see through them any clearer? Maybe the same types walk around there too. 

That brings me to accounts like Sock House Meeting, a more stylised and prescriptive meme account, ran by the pseudonymous Little Lengy. Its USP is its ultra-specificity, which is at once quite impenetrable – even to someone who lives in Hackney, vapes continuously, wears little beanies and regularly listens to the man in the shop explain how complex a natty orange is – and yet somehow legible due to its own internal logic and world of archetypal characters. 

Socks is ultimately a more art school, high-fashion offering, IMO, than your RHOC or what have you in London. Both are interesting from a creative writing perspective – you’ll always get people pissed off with shit like this – but I respect both for what they’ve done for themselves. In the US there’s Nolita Dirtbag, which is more like RHOC in style and patter, except with American and NY-specific takes and captions like “broke ass!!!!”, and less established accounts like Starter Packs of NYC and West LA Memes.

These accounts essentially portray a modern hipsterdom in its splintering forms, though no one, certainly not me, really cares to think of it like that. All of them excel in their ability to concertina their nicheness to portray relatability or in-group mystery, depending on the vibe. Their popularity speaks to the infinitesimal possibilities in meme-based humour, but, in their need for exactness, also the relative flattening of meaningful IRL subcultural identities. 

2023 was the year hyper-local IG meme accounts blurred the line between reality and meme, in the process archiving our humour and our fink like nah yh yh lives. Here’s to another year of feeling very seen. 

@niche_t_