But taken as a whole, this swarm of cultural mayflies represents a meaningful shift in our culture. Joke-making, a sometimes cruel enterprise, has been mechanized and democratized. Humor now emerges from the ether, authorless or, more accurate, authored and improved upon by everyone. Jokes are communal now, and constant. Online, everything that happens all day — in politics, in culture, in the news — is rapidly repurposed for laughs, by everyone, all at once.

For the most part, this is harmless. After all, what could possibly go wrong in a culture where all anyone wants is to be perpetually amused?

Before Trump’s border wall was the cause of a government shutdown, it was a mnemonic device — less a policy proposal than a string tied around the finger. According to a recent article in The Times, the wall was a “memory trick for an undisciplined candidate.” Trump’s advisers Sam Nunberg and Roger Stone knew that getting tough on immigration would play well to a right-wing audience, but they also knew the man they were dealing with. He has a mind for the tactile, so they gave him something gigantic to hang onto: an 1,800-mile-long slab of concrete.

But Trump’s talking points were never just talking points. They were more like bits. His campaign rallies were rambling, unscripted affairs, almost like an open-mic comedy set: Not a fearsome Nuremberg rally, but an aging showman road-testing material, seeing what caught the audience’s attention. Early on, his speeches were “all over the place,” the NBC reporter Katy Tur told “Frontline,” but as time passed, “he started to really hone his message, and he started to remember what lines worked.” In the same episode, the writer Marc Fisher said Trump told him that he would simply wait to see the red lights on the TV cameras in the press box turn on, indicating he was live, and then he would say “whatever it took to keep the red light on.”

The border wall kept the lights on. At a 2016 rally in Burlington, Vt., Trump mentioned the wall to tremendous, wonderful applause, then paused and asked his audience, “And who’s gonna pay for the wall?” The crowd roared back, “MEXICO!” They — he and his crowd — did this two more times together, then Trump laughed. “I’ve never done it before, I swear,” he said, throwing his arms up as if surprised it had worked. “That was pretty cool. We’re gonna have to use that.”

This incentive structure, in which an easily distracted person says a bunch of stuff he kind of means to an assembled audience, slowly learning what generates a reaction and what doesn’t, is familiar: It’s like posting online. This is the process that nudged the wall ever closer to reality, despite the fact that it was only ever supposed to be a metaphor, a shorthand, a catchphrase. It is an idea with no real owner or creator, passed from person to person, from lectern to grandstand to TV and Twitter and back again, copying itself and growing and mutating until it became big, beautiful and tipped with spikes forged from American steel. The border wall is, in the truest sense, a meme: an idea that persists not because it will benefit us but simply because it thrives in our environment. It was so effective at doing whatever it did that it couldn’t be contained, spilling out of the president’s brain and spreading throughout our entire body politic, cooling and hardening like bacon grease, until it finally brought everything to a standstill. And I hate to admit it, but that is a little funny.