CHAPTER FOUR

CRACKING THE MEMETIC CODE

How Ideas Spread Like Viruses

 

IF SOMEONE asked you to explain what the word “Watergate” refers to, what would you say?

The majority of people would likely cite the political scandal that forced Richard Nixon from office in 1974. A smaller number would explain that the name attached to those tumultuous political events derives from the Washington hotel and office complex, where the Nixon-ordered 1972 break-in and burglary of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters took place. Only the biggest historical trivia junkies will know that the hotel’s name itself refers to a nineteenth-century water gate that regulated the nearby Potomac River and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.

The rather functional historical origins of the term “Watergate” allow us to appreciate the interesting journey it has had at various junctures in the ensuing century, as it struck off on different paths of meaning. Then consider the powerful semiotic role that the suffix “-gate” has assumed since the Nixon scandal. When attached to a chosen noun, “-gate” now functions as a catchall signifier for anything possessing a whiff of scandal, conspiracy, or cover-up. I’d hazard a guess that plenty of political history-challenged Generation Z-ers recognize that “-gate” carries this meaning, but know nothing about the 1974 scandal. A Wikipedia entry on the topic lists 128 different scandals that have been given the “-gate” tag. Some of the better known ones: “Billygate” (President Jimmy Carter’s failure to control his erratic brother), “Nipplegate” (for which Janet Jackson might be better known than her music), “Monicagate” (White House, cigar, etc.), and “Deflategate” (Tom Brady, football air pressure). What’s most noteworthy is that only seventeen events on that list predate the Netscape browser (1995) and only a further twenty-one occurred between then and 2004, when Facebook was launched. The Internet did wonders for the “-gate” signifier. Now, social media has taken it into overdrive.

The “-gate” suffix is a great example of a meme—a unit or packet of information that conveys an idea and which, when shared with others, is mimicked, copied, and replicated and then, quite often, applied in new and creative ways to help forge culture. Memes aren’t limited to words and language but are manifest in all manner of modes of expression—in pictures and other art forms, in photos, in songs or even parts of songs, in forms of dress, in body language, in inventions for new products, parts of products, or work processes. Infinitesimal in number—or at least approaching infinity—these conceptual packets are the basic building blocks of our culture, our social DNA. It’s critical that we get our heads around this idea if we are to understand the Social Organism.

A meme, to quote Richard Dawkins, the zoologist, evolutionary theorist, and social commentator who brought us the idea, is “a unit of cultural transmission,” which propagates by passing from brain to brain through a process of imitation. In coming up with the term, Dawkins borrowed from the Greek word “mememe,” meaning “an imitated thing,” and deliberately shortened it to something that sounded more like “gene.” When he introduced the idea in a later chapter of his 1976 classic of evolutionary theory, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins highlighted the similarity between memes and genes: They are both entities whose essence lies in the fact that they self-replicate. Rejecting the popular “survival of the species” explanation for reproduction and evolution, The Selfish Gene argued that both processes reflect genes competing with each other to replicate themselves into the future. (The idea was that each gene dictates attributes to its host organism that give it a better chance at surviving until it can reproduce—Dawkins called human bodies “survival machines” for genes—which, by extension, gives the resident gene better odds of being replicated inside that organism’s offspring.) Memes, Dawkins now said, functioned with this same innate need to replicate. And if genes were the basic autonomous replicators whose interactions drive the evolution of biological life, memes, he decided, were the auto-replicators determining the evolution of human culture.

It’s a brilliant theory, one that’s helped me forge a career around comprehending social media. The concept of memes gave me the framework I needed to comprehend how the Social Organism grows and evolves and to understand how the power of a popular (contagious) idea can be boiled down to a core memetic essence that facilitates its transmission from one person to another. I came to recognize how memes forge our complex thoughts into a digestible form so that others can absorb them, rework them, retransmit them, and broaden their reach. The further you dig into this idea, and compare it to what we know about genes, the more compelling it becomes.

We know that genes link up with each other to form strands of DNA, that beautiful double helix containing all the instructions that make each of us who we are, otherwise known as our genetic code. They also transcribe the proteins from which our complex bodies are built, both our hardware and our software. Well, memes do something similar. They come together to build ideas on top of other ideas—forming a series of holonic foundations. The process follows that of the successful watchmaker’s modular assembly method, whose story Koestler used to explain his hierarchy of autonomous/dependent duality—as per the account in chapter 3. These tiny building blocks are the layers upon which bodies of knowledge and modes of understanding are constructed. They comprise a memetic code, one that the Social Organism, through the interconnections of its component “cells”—our brains—is constantly decoding in an ongoing process of cultural production.

We “inherit” this code from others as culture. And because its transmission occurs between people who share the same base cultural code—a necessary prerequisite to interpret and incorporate each new meme—this process of cultural adoption will create differences in the ways that groups of people see and comprehend the world. Aspects of the code might define one American as a fan of country music and another as a lover of seventies disco. Yet both are codified to prefer music in the polyphonic format of chord progressions that dominate the Western world, rather than, say, the monophonic Eastern form in which the structure hinges on the singular notes of melody. Our memetic code determines our nature as distinct agents of free thought with individual tastes, preferences, and worldviews. But it also establishes all the subjectivities we hold in common with others, thus forging broader cultures and subcultures. This is consistent with the role played by our genetic code, which both defines who we are as individuals and identifies and determines that we belong to wider groups of biological classification: human, mammal, animal, and so forth. Our memetic codes place our individuality into the wider context of cultural belonging.

Before we delve into what this means for social media, let’s examine how the Social Organism determines what goes into the memetic code and what doesn’t. Here Dawkins’s broader evolutionary theory is useful. Just as genes, by his account, are constantly competing to survive and replicate, so, too, are memes competing with each other. In the memes’ case, the competition is for the limited “computing” resources with which each brain is imbued: memory, information-processing capacity, and time. As we’ll discuss later, successful memes are those that latch on to receptors in our brains—much as viruses parasitize a biological cell. And the memes that emerge as the most popular are those that can attach to receptors over and over again, jumping from brain to brain. Some do so with such lasting persistence that they grant an almost eternal cultural power to the owner of the first human brain in which they took root, a power that can long outlive the body in which the brain resided. (Beethoven’s musical compositions gave his “memeplex” an immortality that the composer could never have.) Yet even those that are less resonant and long-lasting will play some role, however small, in forging the culture of the Social Organism.

Memes can be described as contagious ideas, another reason why it’s extremely useful to view their expansion through the lens of biological contagion. Without that contagion, knowledge would not spread, information would remain static and unused, and cultures would not evolve. “The world around you is built from memes,” writes social media marketing adviser Dan Zarrella. “Everything you see, touch or do is a contagious idea. The chair you sit in, the computer you’re reading this on and the job that pays your bills all would not exist if someone did not have the idea to create it and that idea caught on and spread. This is true for the good things, as well as the bad things. The history of mankind is the history of contagious ideas.”

So, ideas that catch on are pretty damn important. But what about those that don’t? What about those packets of information that arise within someone’s thought processes but are never successfully transmitted—and thus don’t graduate to meme status—or those that fail to get beyond a few rounds of replication. Beethoven himself discarded countless bars of potentially moving music before the surviving memes found the right combination to cohabit his Ninth Symphony. Those lost musical segments were but a few of the overwhelming number of wannabe memes that our culture’s evolutionary algorithm—the self-programmed director of an eternal movie that gives meaning to human existence—has left on the cutting-room floor over the millennia. It’s mind-blowing to think of how different our sense of who we are would be if these lost memes had made it into the movie.

Just like biological evolution, there is nothing inherently purposeful or progressive about the selection process for memes. A meme need not be a practically good idea to catch on. The world is full of them—bacon doughnuts; stilettos; fascism. Likewise, lots of really good, useful memes never make it. It is worth keeping this in mind when we explore both the positive and negative cultural effects of social media.

Memes, like genes, also undergo mutation-like transformations every time they are transmitted or shared. Sometimes the change is minuscule, other times significant, but overall the rate of memetic mutation is generally much faster than the biological equivalent in genes. These alterations and adaptations help memes survive and adapt to alterations in their “environment,” in this case the historical context in which they exist. In this way, old memes beget new memes and so on. As a result, our culture changes and evolves. For the Social Organism, this process of propagation and change reflects numbers six and seven of our biological rule book: respectively, that living things reproduce and that they adapt and evolve.

Let’s return to Watergate for a moment. If we apply this evolutionary concept to our opening example, we can see how “Watergate” survived, adapted, and perpetuated itself as a meme. Much like biological evolution, it went through various changes because of accidents and coincidences, rather than by some grand design. In early nineteenth-century Washington, the words “water” and “gate” were merely conjoined descriptors of a common technology for controlling water. As city dwellers found it necessary to give a name to a geographic location in which that technology was deployed, the word combination won the competition for their limited mindshare. And so “water gate” the thing-meme became “Watergate” the place-meme. Then, in 1960, “The Watergate” successfully attached itself to receptors in the brains of some Italian property developers, who saw it as a fitting name for the hotel they planned to build in D.C., partly because it had an attractive ring to it but mainly because it matched the site of the development. Fourteen years later, “The Watergate” meme mutated into “The Watergate scandal” as the name of the hotel, the site of the break-in that prompted the legendary Washington Post investigation, lodged itself in the minds of the paper’s reporters, editors, and readers. From there, “The Watergate scandal” would give birth to the “-gate” meme, in part because New York Times columnist William Safire kept affixing it to other words, such as “Vietnam,” to describe new scandals.* His columns were effective in propagating this new meme partly because he was so widely read—think of him as a pre–social media “influencer”—and partly because the recent scandal resonated so strongly in the minds of his readers. At that time, the “Watergate” meme was not so deeply embedded in Americans’ collective consciousness that a single syllable from it contained enormous semiotic power.

In the forty years since Dawkins gave us the idea—more or less as an afterthought tacked on to the broader thesis of The Selfish Gene—it has spawned an entire field of study within the realm of cultural evolution. Naturally enough, it’s called memetics. The idea is that by studying memes as genetic scientists study genes, we crack the code of culture.

Despite some serious consideration by sociologists and anthropologists, memetics has largely struggled to attain the unquestioned legitimacy that its adherents seek. Elegant as Dawkins’s theory might be, the concept of a meme is not a clear-cut one. Unlike genes, which can be identified and isolated within strands of physical DNA, memes lack physical properties. They lack precision. There’s simply no proof they exist. The ability to objectify a gene—to clearly identify it as a “thing”—made it easier to embrace the main, radical idea in The Selfish Gene: that genes, preprogrammed to pursue the single goal of replication, are the driving force in the evolution of life. But it’s harder to think of memes, these self-contained nuggets of information, having the same kind of autonomous agency outside of the human brains from which they spring.

It might be, though, that Dawkins, like Darwin, was ahead of his time. It wasn’t until the twentieth century, when microscopes improved and scientists could study how DNA moved and subtly changed from organism to organism over time, that the great botanist was fully vindicated. (Even now, Creationists and Intelligent Design theorists try their darnedest to discredit him.) By the same token, what will happen when—possibly very soon—the capacity to view changes in neurological chemistry reaches a point that scientists can pinpoint the passage of thoughts and ideas from one person’s brain to another? New developments in neuroimaging are pointing in this direction. In 2015, a team of researchers from Indiana University and Switzerland’s University Hospital Lausanne unveiled a study showing how social network–generated information sets off unique responses within the human brain. We may be getting closer to a scientific definition of a meme.

I don’t have that high-tech brainwave monitor at the ready, but we do have powerful tools to study how ideas are shared among humans. I’m talking about the billions of computers through which social media networks are connected and which are constantly accumulating data on how they interact. This giant pool of information can give rise to charts and graphic representations of how ideas, represented as packages of digital content, are replicated and shared among communities of interacting brains. These new data maps show memes functioning very much as Dawkins said they would.

Social media software platforms have been designed to facilitate this idea-sharing function in the smoothest fashion possible. The so-called “frictionless sharing” tools—the “share,” “retweet,” and “reblog” buttons—simply make meme replication that much easier and instinctive. Those additions seem like a natural response to market demand. Data suggest that people really like sharing meme-like packages of content. Every second, 7,000 new tweets are posted to Twitter, 1,000 new images are uploaded to Instagram, and 700 new blog items are posted to Tumblr.

It’s no coincidence that the word “meme” has taken on new meaning in the social media age. Millennials and Generation Z-ers have embraced it to describe the humorous meldings of images and words that, when the formula is right, unleash an almost addictive effect on users to reproduce and share them. Some have become as iconic in our age as any movie or pop stars were in the pre-Internet era. Sometimes they come in standardized format with text typically added above and below a certain photo—for examples, see “Grumpy Cat,” “Success Kid,” or “Bad Luck Brian.” I view such meme-making as the first real mass collaborative art form, with the organism driving their evolution as the underlying memetic code mutates.

These memes are new life forms defined by the particular environment in which they live, which in this case are the rules of the particular medium—from GIF, to picture, to YouTube videos. Other times there are pure text memes, such as that which arose from the revival of the World War II–era British poster “Keep Calm and Carry On” to spawn countless knockoff jokes. Some take the form of either static or moving (GIF) images—Pepe the Frog or, the original Internet meme sensation, the Dancing Baby. Still more defy categorization—case in point: The image of a Shiba Inu dog that someone labeled “Doge” in an homage to an episode of the Web puppet show Homestar Runner and to which a community of fans attach incongruous but upbeat sayings with purposefully bad grammar, Photoshopped Twinkie images, and the iconography of a bitcoin-like cryptocurrency, dogecoin. What’s that about?*

As pointless as these exercises in communal mirth might seem, there’s something undeniably impressive about the global flood of human creativity they unleash. And because of the trail of history that the Internet provides, a new field of pop science has emerged. The site Knowyourmeme contains detailed analyses of the history of different Internet memes; Tumblr employs its own meme librarian. The focus is typically on the kinds of memes that start after some jokester somewhere feels inspired by a certain photo or image and decides to devise a witty saying to accompany it. He or she then posts the combination onto a social media platform and from there it takes off. The most successful go beyond simple sharing to inspire new sayings that riff off the base memetic concept. It’s crowdsourced humor, aided by an entire industry of apps, including those of QuickMeme and MemeGenerator that allow users to quickly “memify” a photo.

In nearly all cases, there is a core artistic form that functions as the standardized foundation upon which the ongoing process of creative imagination is based. It can be viewed as the essence of the meme. In what’s become known as the classic “advice animal” structure, a stage-setting line of text appears above a photo followed by the punch line underneath. Like a haiku or sonnet, or—for a social media comparative—a 140-character Tweet or a six-second Vine, this confining structure has given rise to a specific art form that becomes an avenue for creativity. But even when there’s no such strict text-and-picture format, the idea of repetition and iteration of a core motif are central elements of the Internet meme phenomenon. New jokes often become the reference points for subsequent jokes, such that the process starts to look a little bit like the mutating of genes that leads to different lines of species and biodiversity in biological evolution.

To illustrate, let’s look at the lifecycle of one of our favorites: the Ermahgerd meme, also known as Gersberms or Berks, which began in a Reddit post in 2012. The meme started with a decade-old photo of a preteen girl—later identified by Vanity Fair as Maggie Goldenberger, now a nurse in Phoenix—holding three books from R. L. Stines’s Goosebumps series, her excitedly agape mouth showing a full set of braces. A Reddit user responded with a Quickmeme-generated take, adding the words “GERSBERMS...MAH FRAVRIT BERKS” to the picture (translation: “Goosebumps...my favorite books”), establishing what would become the meme’s core motif: the notion of a speech impediment presumably brought on by the orthodontic work on the girl’s teeth.

The gag took off, transitioning through multiple forms and morphing with other memes, almost like a mutating virus leaping from host to host. The line “ERMAHGERD” (Oh My God) was especially fertile, generating multiple new jokes as the meme jumped from its original “host” (the photo of Maggie) to photos of cats, dogs, babies, and athletes in identifiable contexts, each bearing a seemingly startled expression: “Ermahgerd...shertpert (shotput)”; “Ermahgerd...merlkbehrns (Milk-bones)”; “Ermahgerd...brehst merlk (breast milk).” Other jokes took their inspiration from the word itself: the image of a thumbs-up Jesus saying “Ermahgerd...Gerd!!!” and, naturally, “Ermahgerdden,” signified by placing Maggie’s face over that of Bruce Willis in the promotional poster for an apocalyptic film of (almost) the same name. The replication of this gag was amplified by the Web designer J. Miller’s online ermahgerd translator app, which allowed the user to convert any phrase into ermahgerd speech. So mercurial was the meme that it fostered commercial ventures. There was a T-shirt showing Maggie’s likeness inside the Starbucks logo encircled by the words “Sterberks Kerfer.” The Nerdist YouTube channel produced a music video by Hard ’n Phirm singing, with total speech impediment, “Gerl, yer girven mah gersberms.” Gersberms Halloween costumes were made in the same style that Maggie had worn in that now legendary photo. Below, our own artistic rendering of Ermahgerd’s evolutionary process, shows how it fostered new forks of creative thought. I think it looks a bit like those taxonomy charts that illustrate how, over millennia, biological evolution has created new lineages of evolved life, with different species sharing common traits with others that belong to the same genus, these in turn being part of a common family that belongs to a wider order and so forth.

Unlocking all this crowdsourced creation and artistic output could, in theory, pose a problem for people who’ve made a living from this stuff—the elite few we’ve traditionally called “artists.” They’re no longer just competing with each other for attention—and for the financial patronage and advertising dollars that attention generates. They’re competing with the entire world. Moreover, it can seem like we’re all getting dragged down to the lowest common denominator—a society obsessed with cat videos and embarrassing “nip slip” photos. There’s no shortage of experts telling us that art and creativity are being destroyed by the distractions of social media, that we’re all being dumbed down by constant notifications and bleeping alerts telling us to look at some must-see banality that our preferred site’s algorithm has picked out for us. When Michael appeared on an NPR program to promote his last book, he was preceded by author Gary Shteyngart, who lamented to Leonard Lopate’s listeners how Twitter’s constant demands for instant gratification had killed his productivity. Ever since the Congressional hearings into the supposed threat posed by file-sharing renegade Napster, musicians like Sheryl Crow and the band members from Metallica have complained that file-sharing technology and unpaid replication of their work is killing the incentive system that encourages creativity in their industry.