*	I’ve since pondered whether the best metaphor is that of a single organism, a group of interconnected organisms within a wider ecosystem, or some kind of super-organism. We’ve taken to calling it the singular “Social Organism” for consistency, but all those ideas fit within it. If that sounds like the definitions are a little fuzzy, it’s worth remembering that the natural world itself doesn’t always conform to the rules we draw for it. Viruses, for example, are especially difficult to pigeonhole. Scientists generally don’t consider viruses a life form as they have no cell structure, but they do have their own genetic information with instructions to change the host and then replicate. The intricacies of life itself are complex and not always easily classified; so too are those of the Social Organism.
*	Information here is defined more broadly than its colloquial usage around the idea of message content and communication. It can be thought of as a force defining the physical arrangement of matter, the embodiment of things. Information stands in opposition to the second law of thermodynamics, which tells us that the universe tends toward entropy. That means that information is the key anti-entropic element of existence. While molecules are driven toward diffuse, varied, and disconnected states from each other, information is doing the opposite: It is creating relationships that are structured, consistent and connected. Thermodynamic forces want to make matter a gas; information makes it a solid.
*	In case you’re wondering, we’re not going sequentially through the seven characteristics. As normally stated, the order of those rules doesn’t cooperate with our narrative structure. But over the course of the book, we’ll hit all of them.
*	Safire, who was formerly a Nixon speechwriter, has admitted that his discussion of a host of other “-gates” was partly motivated by his desire to dilute the attention on the Watergate scandal.
*	For the vast majority of these and many more of the Internet memes and other images mentioned in the book, simple Google searches will uncover them.
*	Gilad Lotan, chief data scientist of New York venture capital firm Betaworks, studied how much different BuzzFeed listicles were shared and found that the number 29 seemed, on average, to be the ideal “shareable” number of factoids.
*	It will be clear to most readers, but given the sensitivity of the subject, we feel compelled to say that in comparing #BlackLivesMatter to patterns of behavior shown by viruses we are in no way suggesting that the latter is some kind of harmful disease. On the contrary, we see this new civil rights movement as a powerful, progressive force for cultural change. The viral analogy deals solely with the mechanics of how an idea spreads, to illustrate how an agent of cultural change can, in certain circumstances, experience the same kind of impressive life cycle as a super-virus. In fact, it’s our hope that the #BlackLivesMatter meme infects the social fabric of America so deeply that it gets into people’s psyche and promotes a long-overdue awakening to the injustices that pervade it.
*	We prefer the Spivack’s spelling, “menome,” over that of the Center for Human Emergence’s “memome.”
*	Unfortunately, the collapse in June 2016 of a $150 million decentralized investment fund that chose to call itself “The DAO” will for some time create a branding problem for the broader, generic idea of a DAO. The episode, in which a rogue actor siphoned $50 million in tokens from the fund by exploiting a loophole in the system’s smart contracts, has emphasized the need for more development work around these ideas and for a robust system for auditing their underlying software. But it shouldn’t stop us from pondering the possible benefits to society that these radical new organizational structures might offer once the architecture is made more secure.