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How Memes Control Everything
This is hardly a profound observation. It has been clear for many years that the Internet made it possible for new communities to form, sometimes with astonishing speed. The problem, as Zeynep Tufekci explained in [Twitter and Tear Gas](https://www.twitterandteargas.org/), is that the ease of network formation made these communities more fragi... See more
Stratechery • Mistakes and Memes
Therefore, a new idea or invention is not automatically passed on to the next generation. Instructions for how to use fire, or the wheel, or atomic energy are not built into the nervous system of the children born after such discoveries. Each child has to learn them again from the start. The analogy to genes in the evolution of culture are memes, o
... See moreMihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
Memes may dominate how we communicate online, but in the last few years, their rapid spread has also necessitated the birth of a parallel, shadow ecosystem, where the best ideas are paradoxically harder to find. Not everyone wants their ideas to go viral anymore. One friend writes a newsletter that he asks people not to share around. Another publis... See more
Introducing: Antimemetics (my new book!)
“For me ideas are coherent patterns of information that can be used for particular forms of action; either embodied action or to realize a particular form. This is the reason why I take the view that ideas are not memes. The meme originally defined by Richard Dawkins is a unit that competes with other memes in the same way that organ
... See moreI’ve started to think of “cultural artifacts” and “memes” as particles in a chaotic pressure chamber of social forces. I want to introduce the concept of the meme as “radioactive cultural product” – radioactive because of two properties: radiation and half-life .
MSCHF's Red Boots and Digital Legibility — 13101401 Inc.
To be a meme, an idea has to contain quite sophisticated knowledge of how to cause humans to do at least two independent things: assimilate the meme faithfully, and enact it. That some memes can replicate themselves with great fidelity for many generations is a token of how much knowledge they contain.