In particular, it’s a very East Coast thing. While we have the mom-and-pop pizzerias on the West Coast, there aren’t styles of pizza named for West Coast cities and we just don’t have that pizza rivalry that the other coast has. There’s California-style pizza, but that’s named for a state rather than a city, and as soon as you leave California it’s easier to find almost any other kind of pizza.
Beginning of internet memes? Maybe. I’d have to look up when that happened. Beginning of memes as a whole? That would be off by several thousand years at a minimum, just going by ones archaeologists have already found.