Smart Threads and Dumb Memes | Trung Phan on Infinite Loops with Jim O’Shaughnessy • Podcast Notes

Social media virality increasingly positions the human user as a relay stations for memes rather than a source of original material—a disembodied avatar with a countable pair of eyeballs and a hand for clicking, for whom sharing is less and less distinguishable from creating.

Avery Trufelman compares this to the “random” humor of the ‘00s internet a... See more

- complicated ideas take more energy to transmit than simple ones

- for every complex idea there are a large number of stupid copies

- people can often understand things without being able to articulate them, so when a person is helped by a complex meme, they will often reproduce and transmit a simpler variant of the original complex meme

- for some p... See more