We call catchy songs “ear worms” but instead of calling catchy ideas “brain worms” we went with Richard Dawkins’s coinage “meme” and I think that’s a pity. Normies find it simple to grasp the term brain work while meme remains coldly academic.
According to this synopsis from Perplexity, Dawkins proposed memes as the cultural parallel to genes, acting as self-replicating units that spread ideas, behaviors, or styles from person to person within a culture.
Thankfully, the extremely online regularly use the term “brain worms” to describe people infected by any number of ideas ranging from the political to the aesthetic. They aren’t good or bad ideas necessarily. I’d include Trump Derangement Syndrome, girls with septum piercings, the uptick in jhanna meditation as flavors of memes that infect different types of minds.
I’m sure I’m infected with at least half a dozen brain worms (hopefully the memetic variety unlike RFK Jr) despite good informational immunity. There are benefits in having hippie parents and media literacy but the occasional infection is inevitable.
Our minds, our bodies, our computers and our networks can get infected with parasitic diseases and carry viral loads. From Covid to e/acc to the Goatse Singularity (safe to click) we’ve had a lot of novel pathogens recently and some of them are even good things.
Programmers and early Internet citizens have probably have more exposure to the modern theory of memetics than most.
Dawkin’s original coinage, while still a helpful theory, has been surpassed by the colloquial understanding of meme as popular cultural detritus that spreads online.
Given Internet network density, smart phone ubiquity, and algorithmic driven feeds, we’ve never been able to spread memes more readily. The topic is particularly interesting where it intersects with artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies. Make something worth sharing and it has value.
Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash has a neuro-linguistic virus derived from Sumerian mythology where natural language programs the human mind like we now program computers. It gets used in nefarious ways.
This of course makes you wonder if it’s so easy to make people share ideas how hard is it to make people forget them? There is no anti-memetics division right?
An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.
I wonder if my brain worms have made me memory hole anything recently. Given that we have an election coming up seems worth considering.