S3,E2: Requiem for a Meme
Series 3: Misinformation and Manipulation - by Their Works You Shall Know Them
Recently I overheard my wife talking to our dog Hazel. ‘Are you having a relax-a-vu?’ She said.
It gave me a start.
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It was early 1980’s in England and I was dating a psychiatric nurse. One of the beloved patients at the hospital was a lady who was very jolly, regularly announcing that she was going for a ‘relax-a-vu’, which was understood to mean a nap or a cigarette. It became a bit of an in-joke amongst the staff and being on the periphery of that group and partly-residential at the student nurses accommodation, I got in the swing of using it myself. I don’t remember it ever catching on with any of my engineering and sports friends, but then again having just turned 20, relaxing was never on the agenda.
I’ve no idea when it last out of my mouth but have managed to narrow it down to sometime the last 25 years. For the best part of half a century that little phrase kept itself alive somewhere and now it’s here, 3000 miles to the West. This is a meme in the sense originally conceived by Richard Dawkins. It’s the turn of phrase, the musical hook or earworm that is not only memorable but transmissible.
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The Dawkinsian Meme
Dawkins’ original point in The Selfish Gene, Chapter 11 Memes The New Replicators was that genes were not the only replicators that would reproduce for their own sake. He coined the term ‘meme’ to label pieces of information that are held in memory, transmitted and replicated inside other brains. I won’t regurgitate the explanation of how the term came about, except to say, it is by his design that ‘meme’ sounds like ‘gene’.
Genes are not physical measures of genetic material. They are not comprised of standard number of base pairs, because what makes them notionally definable are the phenotypic characteristics they produce i.e., the impact they have on biology.
A meme is a piece of information be it artistic, technical or philosophical and it is not just analogous to a gene, in many ways it’s operationally identical. This made me think about the sort of effects memes might produce - and yes for that I will be applying the word ‘phenotype’ to things that are not biological. I sympathise if that is jarring but please just go with it for the time it takes to read this episode.
Now of course, most people will think of a ‘meme’ as being something that is shared online. This is still in keeping with Dawkins’ original meaning since these pieces of information really do reproduce for their own sake. However, it is also true that the way we think of memes have changed considerably - our perception has mutated, via memes. Will we ever get out of this loop alive?
With age comes an appreciation for the remains of what has gone, a nostalgia arising from the remnants of how things once were, such as a song or an evocative smell. I just read (and highly recommend) The Phantom Pain Puzzle by , and it occurred to me that the past is a little like a phantom limb; a lot of confused sensations from a time and place that no longer exists.
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A Detour Through the English Language
The meaning of words change because they are also memes and susceptible to mutation. This is enriching, but sometimes the original more important definitions become obsolete or too archaic to convey the original meanings. This was the anxiety behind A Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue, an epistle by Jonathan Swift where he made the case for ridding the English language of what he saw as degradations.
He wanted English to be locked down and cleaned up by academics which is what happened with the French language.
Journeys in English by Bill Bryson explains how the English language benefitted from it’s adaptability and ability to subsume the vocabulary and even grammar of foreign languages. Robust enough to survive invasions by Scandinavians, it was able to metabolise some useful Norse words and conventions and spat out the rest. After the Norman Conquest, the conquering elites and their administrators were almost exclusively French-speaking, only to have their language pillaged for useful words that could be absorbed by the native vernacular. So English survived and these invader languages got slowly dismembered during long periods of linguistic cannibalism.
Like genetics, the memetic changes to language had an impact on human beings, long before we had the word to describe it. In a way it is quite fitting that ‘meme’ would be subjected to such rapid catachresis in it’s online incarnation.
It’s futile to suppose we can save words from being ‘misused’ in the future, so perhaps what we must focus on is how we preserve certain concepts and luckily, English is well suited to that. We have so many words for the same or similar things, which serves as a scaffold to keep certain meanings supported. This is precisely why when writing Nineteen-Eighty-Four, George Orwell recognised that an all powerful state would need to control and limit the language.
Perhaps it should be unsurprising that post-modernism set out to attack the language and frame ‘narratives’ as being instruments of power. These themes persist in identity politics and ‘wokeness’. It is also understandable that the first post-modernists would emerge in France where academics already had a foothold in dictating aspects of the language. It was as if they got to the Newspeak Appendix in Nineteen-Eighty-Four, and thought, “c’est possible”.
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Online memes effectively replicate for their own sake, because although there is an informational payload that the creator wanted to discharge, it’s not of primary importance to those that share them. In way they are like RNA but instead of proteins they manufacture validation.
The building blocks of online cellular life are made of validation. I recently saw someone on Substack complain about not getting enough ‘hearts’, because even though her posts were getting plenty of engagement with comments and restacks, she somehow managed to feel unappreciated. The issue seemed to be that she did not think those who engaged with the content had personally thanked her.
If nothing else it demonstrates what a powerful engine the hunger for gratitude is and also why public discourse is becoming dominated by the neurotically needy. Online memes therefore become a quick fix.
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Physical and Intangible Phenotypic Effects
First I need to issue a caveat. What follows seems so obvious to me that I feel sure somebody else must have made similar observations. I don’t take any comfort in being unable to find them.
So what is this idea I’m putting forward?
If like genes, memes are vectors for the survival of information, they should have something analogous to phenotypic effects too.
I want to address this by tacking two questions about memes relating to their nature, which according to context, can be either physical or intangible.
What are their physical effects on biology and artificial mediums?
What are their effects on intangible information and abstraction?
1: Physicality
The first one is the easiest. Our thoughts not only run on the substrate of the brain, they must modify the physical neuronal connections. I think it is valid to say that the meme, like the gene, carries information that becomes physically embodied in biology.
Imagine that you wrote a poem and then decided to learn it by rote so you can recite it. Wouldn’t that entail you in creating a new neuronal substructure in your brain using energy and information. Wouldn’t that be a physical change created by the process of thought? I think so.
Online memes exist in cyberspace and also mutate there, but it’s easy to forget that the information is stored, takes up temporary residency in silicon memory and moves between blades on server farms i.e., it is also physically encoded. Regardless of whether they are originated by biological or artificial intelligence, the information is fungible, because it can be exchanged between both human and artificial substrate. Of course, it’s during its occupation of biological cognition, that most of the short-term mutation takes place.
I summarise this general idea by saying that the meme is ‘substrate independent’ but not ‘substrate indifferent’.
2: Intangibility
But what about the effects of memes within complex societally-borne structures?
First, think about how technologists are replicated, by which I mean any kind of professional or vocational discipline requiring specialist skills and knowledge. Certainly the information is available in books but it is not possible to become a barrister or solicitor (using the UK definitions I am familiar with) by getting a law degree. There are legal practice courses and a requirement to get a training contract, to make someone ready to deploy that knowledge, autonomously in real situations.
You can learn about the operation of a lathe but to become skilled takes practice and it is only when the knowledge of how to translate a drawing into a finished product, that something like cutting a screw thread becomes integrated into the muscle memory.
It is by performance that we can ever hope to be able to demonstrate competence. That is what exams and academic assignments aim to determine, or at least, that used to be the purpose.
Establishing competencies and assuring them is a long process. Retention, recall and the application of pertinent information has to be tested, so successful replication is not a foregone conclusion, because people can fail. Acquiring a skill set involves the acquisition of discrete pieces of information, stacked up into an edifice of mutually dependent competences, encoded by practice.
This is going to seem ridiculous to read, but it’s obviously easier to reproduce a catchy phrase than a brain surgeon’s competency, yet both involve the replication of information. When you break it down, for a person to be able to successfully perform surgery on a brain, their own brain has to be incrementally changed. It must be equipped with a corpus of knowledge and conditioned to support extreme dexterity and spatial awareness, all of which are extremely difficult and time consuming to transmit and assimilate.
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Biological Analogies for Technical Innovation
Like biological evolution, technical development can be achieved by making small modifications and testing them empirically which may lead to limited improvement or a technological cul-de-sac (the equivalent of extinction).
In engineering we often speak about evolution versus revolution, although I am not claiming exclusivity over that dichotomy, on behalf of engineers. If innovators are not tethered to an existing solution they can create a new revolutionary design. Yet there is another way in which design can be said to evolve quite literally in the biological sense. We know, albeit with incomplete understanding, that concepts are physically imprinted on our neuronal substrates. So no matter how original the physical instantiation turns out to be, it is to no small degree, a mentally constructed concept first.
Now I hope to show you how this might fit together. A lot of books have been written about memes (many of them are on my wish list) but am not well-read enough on the subject to tell you how original these thoughts are. I’m guessing ‘not very’, because I can’t get away from the feeling that I must be stating the obvious. My main fear is that I may not do a good job of explaining myself. Nevertheless here goes.
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Extending Genetic Analogies
Genes are the components (or ingredients) of the genotype where the genotype is the trait complex recipe for a phenotype. However, what constitutes a gene is not a fixed number of base pairs, so it is best understood as a unit of phenotypic effect.
Memes, Memotypes and their Phenotypes
This also means that like genes (that also replicate for their own purpose) memes must also produce something like a phenotypic effect to survive. If memes are the components (or ingredients) of the memotype, each contributing a phenotypic effect, then the memotype is the trait complex recipe for a meme-vehicle or ‘phenotype’.
I am going to explore three operational levels of memotypes and their phenotypes. I don’t claim these to be sufficiently defined and don’t exclude the possibility that there might be many others. My objective is to show that these conjectured relationships really do bear up in practice.
The three levels of memotype I offer for consideration are, ideologies, informational corpuses and structured knowledge frameworks.
1: Ideological knowledge bases (memotypes) such as belief systems, custom and practice, traditions, culture, identity etc.
are embodied in ingroup (familial) vehicles (phenotypes) such as, political parties, religions, philosophies, professions, trades, special interest coteries etc.
each of which are encompass a broad range of phenotypic effects (characteristics) that result from commonly held constructs and beliefs (memes).
2: Vocational corpuses of knowledge (memotypes) such as law, medicine, engineering, theology etc.
embodied in functional vehicles or roles (i.e. phenotypes) such as lawyer, doctor, engineer, construction worker, laboratory assistant, priest etc.,
each of which encompass a broad range of relevant competencies built from informational component parts (memes).
So for example, the law (a memotype) is a corpus of knowledge that can be accessed by legal professionals, law enforcement and the general citizenry from different perspectives. Staying with the legal example, all those role-groupings (phenotypes) have an influence on how legislators develop statutes. They provide the competitive-environmental-context for the evolution of law, just as the genepool does for genes or society does for the development of the individual.
3: Structural knowledge frameworks (memotypes) such as formal and informal hierarchies, social constructs, culture etc.
embodied in individual societal systems (phenotypes) such as legislative, executive and judicial branches of government, legal systems, religious organisations etc.,
each of which encompasses a broad range of structural elements in the form of relevant processes (memes), so for example the law (a memotype) is common across different functional roles (phenotypes) such as police officer, Judge, prosecutor, etc. Each role (phenotype) has a required set of competences (memes) pertaining to their duties.
In this construct, educational systems are memotypes comprised of informational-units (memes). The memes produce phenotypic effects that contribute to the memotype’s construction of informational vehicles or phenotypes.
The more general point is that ideologies, vocations and governance are manifestations of information that has replicated, mutated and amassed within individual memotypes. The memotypes produce vehicles or phenotypes, that are characterised by the recipe of phenotypic effects.
In fact the phenotypes are, in each example I give, the vehicles for large scale reproduction.
Online memes are propagated but it is the social media platforms that provide the environment. The individual accounts are analogous to the phenotype - in fact those accounts are cyber-space proxies; the point of presence (POP) for biological phenotypes (mainly humans, dogs and cats).
This is a reboot and the pilot episode posted over a year ago can be found here: