There's a strange phenomena that occurs in the inner-workings of my mind. Surreal images, symbols, and text from a scattered past are surfaced by my subconscious; anything from staring out the window to being mid-conversation can prompt it.

What are these alien thoughts? Are they signs of something I need to know? Why do they insist on repeating?

I don’t have all the answers, I do however know one thing for certain: I have an exceptional ability to recall memes.

My status as a niche referential jester/connoisseur of timely memes is beknownst to all my friends, coworkers, groupchats, and single ladies who have ever had the misfortune coming into contact with me.

It's common for people to have deep knowledge of specific artists, genres of music, or team sports; rarer intellects have the capacity to recall passages from great American novels, historical accounts of philosophers from the roman empire, or warfare tactics from the 20th century. For me it's memes. Just memes. I don't know why.

So I decided to investigate. What is it about certain memes that is so unforgettable? Why do they stick? And what does it tell us about the nature of this type of information?

In This Post

• Theory of Memes: An evolutionary hypothesis.

• The Meme-Industrial Complex: How memes run the internet.

• Thinking in Memes: Is everything meme?

Theory of Memes

Evolutionary Biologist Richard Dawkins is the author of the famous 1976 book The Selfish Gene. His main hypothesis states that natural selection operates at the level of genes, not individuals or species. His theories broaden to other types of information in our known universe, where he first coins the term ‘meme’.

He defines a ‘meme’ as a unit of cultural information. His insight is revealed through applying evolutionary concepts to “the soup of human culture” to identify the replicator— a meme is similar to a gene in a sense. Memes can be anything from tunes, phrases, behaviors, styles, images, and ideas; they all ‘compete’ for finite attention/memory in a selective process within the human brain and survive by imitation, propagating from brain to brain.

Memes have varying success in the overall pool for survival. Psychological appeal, societal constructs, and cultural norms all test the overall fitness of any given idea. Memes can have flaming short-term success only to quickly die out, others can survive generations. Longstanding memes must be viable enough to continuously mutate from person to person (everyone chooses their own retelling) and adaptive enough to maintain broader cultural relevance over time.

The biggest meme to date? Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ who bore the cross and died for our sins. The ‘God’ meme has compelled the masses (by way of fear) throughout history in nearly every culture; Christianity today is the world’s largest religion with over 2.3 billion people.

Memes as we know them today typically take form in a mutated series of images on the internet. But the image of Jesus crucified has actually been a meme for quite some time. It wasn't until the advent of the internet yielded democratized information flow that the exceptional relevance of memes came to be widely known.

Dawkins’ conjecture is logical but not falsifiable. We can’t know for certain whether his hypothesis of memes is true because it’s not a hard science. Regardless, it’s still a useful framework for understanding how information may instill itself in our minds and how new ideas spread.

The Meme-Industrial Complex

Much of what is consumed on the internet is quickly forgotten. The majority of humanity’s knowledge creation/spread is now hosted online, yet the rate at which webpage content is lost to the ether is astounding.

This raises the question: what survives on the internet? Well, it’s hard to know— there has never been such an abundance of information in history. And we’re all obsessed with whatever the current ‘new thing’ is, so much so that we hardly ever think to look back.

Modern society has yet to develop the proper mechanisms for filtering through the ocean of content on the internet to surface that which is deemed valuable and enduring knowledge for the greater collective. Most of the content made today is designed to exploit attention rather than deliver lasting value, in large part due to the short-sighted nature of social media platform ad incentives.

In spite of the flood of content online, the meme endures. The meme is self-replicating in nature, able to reproduce itself across a variety of contexts, mediums, platforms, and cultures. It’s replication is carried out selectively by agents who deem the meme valuable in one way or another.

Well-written blog posts like this are forgotten a day after being published and my tweets may be remembered for all but 30 seconds— that is unless the expressed ideas are wrapped in some sort of meme. For example: One of the most famous blog posts on the internet is written by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Though his arguments resonated and accurately foretold what would later come of the world, it’s only remembered today because he coined the phrase “software is eating the world.”

Memes are compelling to us because they’re easily-distilled heuristics with psychological and/or cultural appeal. If I were to repeat to you the phrase, “software is eating the world”, the entire pre-existing notion of the idea is abstracted yet still able to be effectively communicated such that 1) you know exactly what I mean and 2) it will likely catch on and spread to others because it’s fun to say. We allow memes like this to program themselves into our minds simply because they’re catchy, emblematic, amusing, or maybe a friend sent them to us.

That instance of an internet-native meme maintaining cultural relevance over a long time horizon (14 years!) is rare. In fact, I can only think of one other that’s outlived it. Memes more often that not go viral for some time before quickly dying out.

For an idea to spread online, velocity is the key variable. Increasing the rate at which information is reproduced amongst many individual actors is the most effective way to reach a critical mass. Here’s a good tweet I had illustrating this:

Taylor Swift, Drake, Kanye, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, etc. all have incredibly robust networks of fans/agents willing to ravenously spread their likeness and image through memes. It’s one of the primary reasons they’ve all maintained exceptional relevance in media over the course of many years— attention markets follow power laws and the established winners continue to leverage their meme-industrial complex to win out more shares.

The written contents of a post, transcript of what a politician said, factual evidence of what actually occurred will all soon be left to die in the archives the internet: only the resulting meme has a chance at long-term survival.

Thinking in Memes

Back to what I introduced earlier— I think in memes. Mental models, heuristics, catchphrases, call them whatever. Oftentimes when I am engaged in conversation, new prompts from my counterparty invite images of niche tweets, expired memes, or famous quips to pop into my mind. Everything’s just memes.

I spent my adolescence seeking the best memes, sending ‘em back and forth in various groupchats, even making my own memes for some time while running a meme page. It’s no wonder so many of these images have ingrained themselves in my mind given my high exposure to these potent replicators. Maybe I should’ve been reading books instead.

Regardless, with a newfound biological basis for understanding how information spreads as well as countless examples of timestamped internet evidence to cite, what are we to make of the prominence of memes?

Here are some jotted implications (in the form of memes, of course):

• the memelord has never had more influence on society.

• amusement clowns seriousness.

• brands: the masses want memes.

  • ie. Wendy’s, duolingo, even Anduril? the private arms manufacturer Anduril?

• algorithms organize our present and dictate our future.

• “the most entertaining outcome is the most likely.” (unfortunately)

Here are some practical applications for you, dear reader:

• signal competence by fitness of your memes.

• build and sell your personal database of memes.

• your best ideas will endure if and only if there’s a meme attached.

  • ie. think of Naval (his bio is literally “incompressible”) to become better at memes you need to study poetry, songwriting, philosophy, physics, microeconomics, game theory, … xD

• memos must be compressible to memes.

• “information wants to be free. information also wants to be expensive.” (real thinker)

What’s funny about all this is that my Dad is similar in a lot of ways— he has an incredible subconscious archive of movie one-liners. And he'll be sure as hell let you know too, through his constant barrage of quotes he can't help but blurt out in the middle of iconic scenes, always preceding his delivery 2 seconds before the characters on screen get the chance (don't watch any 80s flicks with him)

We all think in memes. It’s what makes us human. Try observing the memes within your mind, it’s a useful exercise. I hope you enjoyed my writing on this topic, I plan to explore it more in future posts on Ball Knowledge. So just in case you were wondering…

I’ll be back.