First off, I don’t want people to immediately assume this is a hit-piece on Defender, and others in the space carefully researching the flows of information across the internet (and its niche communities) using opt-in quantifiable methods, publishing regular research and interesting things to GitHub, etc. I recommending subscribing to them to understand what I’m referencing here. This article, and my gripes, are more about the woo-AI meta-culture which is infecting everything from crypto to Instagram schizo-posters to X c. 2023.
Now that that’s out of the way, this is a .50 cal round against the pseud-armored primordial sludge which spawns people who build social influencer brands determined to convince the most insane people online that posting is magic. The memetics enthusiasts, as of yet, are the least memetic people alive. My antagonism isn’t to tell them to off themselves. It’s that I want them to understand the game and how to play it. I want them to grow. One of the most important people in my life was an audio engineer I worked under while at a studio in Nashville. When I walked into the large format console room, intently focused upon the last remaining Neve VR88 on Music Row, he broke my concentration by saying “If you can’t figure out how to wire up this patch bay, you are fucking useless to me.”
He was right. That’s the kind of impression I hope to leave on the Meme Wizards when I do this kind of stuff.
Self-styled memetics experts flooding post-rationalist Twitter/X and adjacent microinfluencer spaces have become obsessed with the concept that precisely diagnoses their own cultural impotence. The structural irony is almost performance art: communities devoted to understanding how ideas spread have optimized themselves to never spread at all. When their attempts to branch out into the wider scope of hypermedia falls flat, they claim “no, it’s actually anti-mimetic, it’s not supposed to be anything but microculture”.
They've built elaborate theoretical frameworks about cultural transmission while creating content that cannot, by design, escape their tiny bubble. They've done so while claiming expertise in the exact phenomenon they've made themselves incapable of participating in. It’s baffling to me and I’m allowed to think this.
You’re already thinking of some of these people in your head. I won’t name them. Naming a thing gives it power. Approaching the structure that spawns the thing in its native, well-mapped system, and attacking that instead — reduces power by degrading signal source. Cuts off the blood supply. Forced hypoxia. Anhedonia. That’s what I’m doing, because playing around in this arena for me is like LeBron James showing up to a pick-up game in the Bronx. It’s like asking Rich Piana if he can carry your groceries. If you walked into a gas station or H&M in 2019 to 2021 in Canada or the United States, there is a 99% chance that you heard the result of my very grunt-level and entirely assistive (but still important) handiwork plugging in cables to record Nir Z’s snare drum or Russ Pahl’s steel lap guitar. But I am not unique, special, or GOATed. I am just one of the many invisible hands who have played in Macroculture without realizing it at the time. I, like many people who involve themselves in things that involve a lot of people, give a shit (mainly because I had to, and at the time, my future depended on it).
Memetics died in 2005 and everyone forgot
Richard Dawkins introduced the “meme” concept in The Selfish Gene’s final chapter in 1976, explicitly calling it “speculative” and admitting “I do not know enough about the existing literature on human culture to make an authoritative contribution to it.”
The concept was meant entirely as an illustration, like a thought experiment to show how replicator dynamics might apply beyond biology. It was never intended as a rigorous framework for understanding cultural transmission.
Digital culture has increased the transmission rate of ideas rapidly. A lot of them seem to exist like biological forms, existing, thriving, mutating, evolving, transforming, dying. What followed Dawkins was a brief attempt to make memetics into actual science (and a comprehensive failure). The Journal of Memetics, launched in 1997 as the field's flagship academic venue, ceased publication in 2005 due to a lack of interest. I’ll admit that this was probably premature. Another decade and there would have been more interest, partially due to the ubiquitous rise of social media and its subsequent permeation of every facet of our lives, elections, etc.
Aaron Lynch, one of the field's key theorists, eventually "disowned the memetics community and the words 'meme' and 'memetics'" entirely, adopting "thought contagionist" instead. Susan Blackmore left academia to become a freelance science writer. Even Dawkins himself has "consistently warned us not to take the analogy between memes and genes too far.”
The academic consensus was brutal. Luis Benitez-Bribiesca called memetics "a pseudoscientific dogma... something akin to psychoanalysis with its wonderful intellectual construction but devoid of any objective proof." Stephen Jay Gould dismissed it as a "meaningless metaphor." A 2020 MIT Press analysis concluded definitively: "Although the theory of memetics appeared highly promising at the beginning, it is no longer considered a scientific theory among contemporary evolutionary scholars." The field failed because memes have no agreed-upon definition, no mechanism analogous to DNA, no predictive power (hyperstition is an unfalsifiable myth), and merely relabel existing concepts from anthropology and semiotics.
Enter the rationalist and post-rationalist communities, who revived this discredited framework not as science but as what Scott Alexander accurately called "less of a theory than an extended metaphor." They use a shared lexicon (memes, memeplex, viral spread, mutation, hyperstition) to analyze online discourse while operating as though they've discovered something real about how culture works. They've unfortunately built their identity around the mastery of a concept that actual researchers abandoned two decades ago.
Robert Anton Wilson & hyper-individual traps
The post-rationalist attraction to “reality tunnels” and meta-programming follows from Robert Anton Wilson’s work in Prometheus Rising and the Cosmic Trigger trilogy. Wilson proposed that each individual perceives reality through a subconscious set of filters formed from beliefs and conditioning and that through deliberate practice (meditation, psychedelics, General Semantics exercises) one could reprogram these filters and construct new reality tunnels at will.
(remix of paragraph to demonstrate an adjacent point)
The post-Christ attraction to “salvation” and abolition of sin follows from God’s work in The New Testament. Jesus proposed that each individual perceives reality through an insurmountable layer of sin formed from the mistakes of those in the Garden of Eden, and that through deliberate surrender (devotion to Christ, service, faith and works) one could reprogram their chains and construct eternal salvation in service of God’s will.
(back to the original message about memetics)
I get the appeal of RAW’s framework. I was a big fan of his in my early 20s before growing out of it and finding meaning and purpose elsewhere (the uncovering of the Universe’s mysteries through route empiricism). The wager is not unique to RAW, and goes a little something like this: if you're smart enough and committed enough, you can bootstrap yourself out of the conditioning that limits ordinary people. You can see the matrix. You can become, in Wilson's framing, the programmer rather than the programmed. In unison, a million 2016-era smoke shops across America sighed out in collective relief: learning does not take comprehension nor works, just seeing the system for what it is, man. The man. Everyone from Andrew Tate to the guy you know in your hometown who still works at that smoke shop believes some format of this. I can’t be wrong, it has to be literally anyone and everyone else.
The structural problem is equally obvious, though Wilson (and his disciples) rarely confront it: individual meta-programming occurs within and against systems that mass-produce reality tunnels at industrial scale. There’s a better line I remember from studying political science at UT Knoxville over a decade ago:
i. Pop culture affects and reflects culture, it’s a diffusive feedback process.
Ideology, advertising, religion, algorithmic recommendation systems, brother… sister… in-betweener… these are institutions that consolidate power by selling "off-the-shelf" reality tunnels to minds hungry for structure (most minds are hungry for structure). They take the complex task of sorting through near-infinite variability and do it for you, telling you what you should care about and what you can ignore. In lockstep with both organic and inorganic feedback systems like “stan” groups, these wizards have the power to serve something to up to 99% of the people you know depending on their own randomized chance of success. After all, what good is any magic without a dice roll?
RAW wrote in the pre-algorithmic age. His work is now borderline nonsensical. The contemporary reality is actually worse: platforms actively reinforce echo chambers through engagement-optimizing feeds, educational institutions pre-program filters before meta-awareness develops, and state and corporate actors deploy sophisticated memetic warfare. Like much of the DoD/Intelligence patterns, the use of terms here is less to mention that it is a practical science as much as it is to indicate it is a mass belief to be exploited deliberately. Research shows that "given a homogeneous population of people with highly coherent belief systems, society remains stable” meaning individual deviants face insurmountable reversion pressure. The tools Wilson championed for liberation have been adopted more effectively by those seeking to constrain consciousness than by those seeking to expand it, largely by people implicitly believing that practitioners of meme warfare have power over them. If you believe in the structure (magic is real), the spells have effects on you. That’s how it works. That’s why Penn and Teller are the inventors of the Anti-Magic Shield. The resources culture used to point towards gauche antitheism could be pointed again at The Secret and its less popular sister Memetics and it’s weird themby half-sibling Chaos Magick, if we are to be brave enough.
The post-rationalist community's embrace of RAW-adjacent thinking, while potentially valuable for individual development or gaining an audience of genuine victims, guru prey, and fools, faces the same limitations. It remains a relatively small community of self-selected individuals who had the privilege, time, and inclination to do the work, but not a scalable solution to anything other than the question of how to resolve their entitlement to control.
Speaking of entitlement to control,
Taylor Swift is a meme warlock
To understand the gap between claiming memetic expertise and possessing memetic power, consider Taylor Swift—”one of the last remaining monocultural figures of the 21st century.” Wikipedia
The Eras Tour generated over $10 billion in US economic impact according to the U.S. Travel Association. Cities renamed themselves for her: Glendale became “Swift City,” Stockholm renamed some of its streets, Gelsenkirchen renamed their stadium. The ground itself heaved at the mere presence of Taylor, much like the big bad of a World of Warcraft expansion appearing in the pre-release final patch of the prior expansion. Seismic activity was recorded in Edinburgh, Lisbon, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and Seattle from the total energy of thousands of people jumping up and down for Swift. When she posted on Instagram about voter registration, half a million users visited Vote.gov within 24 hours. A single National Voter Registration Day post drove 35,000+ new registrations in one day. 53% of American adults consider themselves Swift fans, higher approval than Biden or Trump combined. 62% to 68% of Americans say they are Christian. If framing things a bit differently, this would make her the second largest religion in America.
This is what a vulgar display of macrocultural memetic power looks like. It doesn’t look like optimizing engagement within a bounded community (ingroup), but creating cultural artifacts that cross network boundaries, introduce new frames to outgroup, and achieve genuine persuasion rather than identity signaling. Everyone within the ingroup knows about it. The outgroup for Taylor Swift are basically uncontacted tribes.
And posts alone are not cultural artifacts which stand up to the test of time. Generally speaking, they decay. My claim is that the behavior of digital cultural artifacts are more like unstable isotopes than biological processes. The internet, especially fast media like X, is ephemeral: things spawn and they go away and sometimes they come back in different, or peculiar ways. A handful of posts have become macroculture and a small percentage of those have become timeless. A poster can more readily become a cultural artifact than a post can. A group of people who also have some media output who post well is almost a hard requirement of being Pop if you use the general definition of a “post” to mean any hypermedia presence at any level on any social media platform. And we can consider, for the sake of this framing, that:
ii. Pop is always Macroculture (but macroculture is not always pop).
Critically, Swiftie culture is structurally designed for total expansion. It seeks to eliminate the existence of an outgroup by producing as large of a community as possible. Entry barriers are low: listen to literally any album. Everyone is doing it! Content scales from casual to parasocial engagement. Multiple "eras" provide varied entry points for different demographics and data which reinforces the strategy of certain demographic capture. Universal emotional themes like love, loss, growing up, and revenge translate cross-culturally and cross-linguistically. The Easter egg system creates collective engagement without requiring specialized knowledge to participate (ARG with no skill curve). Unlike niche communities that define themselves by gatekeeping, learning a lexicon, practicing its rituals and repeating its memes before having a conditional, revocable access to benefits, the Swiftie fandom continuously recruits across generations and backgrounds. It is for this reason that Taylor Swift isn’t an alternative to something like post-rationalism. It supersedes it entirely.
Taylor Swift is the second largest religion in America.
Ingroup optimization is structurally anti-memetic
The memetics enthusiast’s fundamental error is treating cultural influence as a function of understanding rather than structure (or medium). They believe that knowing “how memes work” or access to “advanced cognitive weapons” gives them power to propagate ideas, when in fact the opposite is true: the more content optimizes for insider recognition through jargon, references, and shibboleths, the less accessible it becomes to the broader population necessary for mesocultural, then macrocultural impact. The more it lends itself to psychedelia, the more it loses the seriousness of staking claims about universal rules for perception and understanding. It routinely falls into patterns of control.
Research on echo chambers reveals the dynamic precisely. Filter bubbles serve content that reinforces existing preferences, preventing exposure to broader audiences. Confirmation bias leads community members to preferentially share content that validates group identity. C. Thi Nguyen calls the result “pre-emptive distrust between members and non-members”. Outsider voices get dismissed due to failing arbitrary and opaque social rubrics instead of persuaded through operational transparency. The community becomes protective of its in-group identity, especially when it shrinks, “and can spot a disingenuous brand trying to be part of their world from a mile off,” but this same protective insularity prevents any outward spread. It’s not just about brands. It’s about keeping miners, foresters, and extractors out. But it’s symptomatic of a poorly designed culture that struggles with growth to the meso- and macrocultural planes.
iii. NICHE VIRALITY ≠ CULTURAL IMPACT
I know I’ve said this a lot before, but going “viral” within a small community differs fundamentally from cultural penetration. Dimes Square was exemplary of this: it barely managed to flywheel itself into more than mesocultural relevance (so far?) by becoming less of a place, and more of a conversation about who was part of it, who should be cancelled for participating, who is cancelling the people in Dimes Square, etc. until it got eaten by Polymarket or whatever.
Niche content spreads within bounded networks, reinforces existing beliefs, requires context to understand, optimizes for in-group recognition, and fades quickly unless you’re constantly piping new people in and educating them in the historical lexicon of the ingroup. Macrocultural content crosses network boundaries, introduces new frames, remains accessible to outsiders, optimizes for broad resonance, and achieves sustained presence. Networks need ties to other networks that are somewhat different if the meme is to influence actors and networks beyond those that already uphold” the same views. In this way I’ll admit that memes are kind of biological. If they survive and adapt to predators, they’ll live longer. This is overall healthy for the development of a timeless, or intergenerational culture. More optionality towards this leads humanity into better pastures.
The memetics enthusiast posting about “hyperstitions” to their thousands of followers is performing sophistication for an audience that already agrees with them and this is entirely a valid strategy if you want a cult following and aren’t actually serious about belief propagation, i.e., memetics. They’re playing the infinite game of ingroup status optimization but not the finite game of actually spreading ideas. I think this is because some people, I think, get stuck in their own head about pushing more ideas up to macroculture. The easiest way to do it (still tremendously difficult to succeed) is to optimize for quality according to the Pop standards: audience, appeal, lack of mistakes. Copying patterns of what worked last time while optimizing for what held it back from its true potential is the basis of all Pop manufacturing. And at the end of the day, it’s all still a gamble.
And at the end of the day I think this stuff comes less from Nick Land and more from what you get when you strip away the intellectual packaging of the “hyperstition” claim. It’s basically just “The Secret” or Law of Attraction thinking: the promise that specialized knowledge about reality’s hidden mechanisms gives practitioners the power to engineer outcomes through belief, intention, or symbolic manipulation. I understand the semantic link between these things and mental health (believing you’re in control of things is awesome at the risk of taking it too far and thinking you are Jesus Christ). I also understand that the processes behind media-making could be construed as say, intentional symbolic manipulation (hence the term ‘studio magic’).
The Law of Attraction claims thoughts emit frequencies that magnetically attract matching outcomes from “the Universe.” Meme magic claims that memes, repeated by enough people with sufficient belief, can “alter reality” through “the ability of mass human consciousness to form physical reality and cause events to happen.” Hyperstition theory holds that ideas “by their very existence as ideas function causally to bring about their own reality.” The intellectual vocabulary shifts from vibrations to egregores to selection pressure, but the core claim (belief creates reality) remains unchanged. I can admit that social reality is largely belief-dependent. Money, property rights, national borders, marriage, corporations, all exist because enough people act as if they exist. If everyone stopped believing in the US dollar tomorrow, it would completely cease to function normally. Searle's concept of "institutional facts" captures this well: they're real, consequential, but ontologically dependent on collective intentionality. What distinguishes these frameworks is generally their platform: New Thought for the spiritually-inclined mass market, manifesting for Gen-Z TikTok users, meme magic for 4chan users stuck in an endless 2015, and memetic engineering for X influencers stuck in the end of all history (anything after 2019).
Self-proclaimed meme wizards are memetically impotent because they’re signaling sophistication to small audiences rather than actually propagating ideas at scale (making Pop stuff, breaking into macroculture, etc). This is basically the inevitable but ironic outcome of their structural position. And if meme culture itself (dead, everything is meme) attempts to become Pop stuff it’s always people drawing from some old other material and it often feels like 9gag and that sucks. So basically we have to prevent Meme Wizardry from getting more popular because it will hit Dumb Witch TikTok like crack in the 1980s when they at long last discover ChatGPT.
True memetic power causes feet earthquakes. It is hierarchical diffusion through prestige nodes combined with grassroots spread, universal emotional hooks that translate across cultural boundaries, and structural openness that welcomes newcomers rather than gatekeeping based on tenure or clout on a single platform.
The brutal truth is that understanding how memes spread is not only useless for spreading memes because people aren’t even sure what qualifies something as a meme and even if they did, nobody knows how to get an idea to take off 100% of the time anyway. I made an Instagram page with my friend without any sort of cross promotion and it grew to like, millions of impressions a month from using Sora to make the characters of Family Guy say fucking “quomire” over and over until OpenAI themselves had to tighten their content control systems. Much like that page, it may be actively counterproductive. You cannot be both the ethnographer and the native. The position is called “Digital Marketing” which is what you’re describing. Shoe stores and the dentist’s office does it.
And if it were up to me, I would establish a new sort of like, Department of Veteran’s Affairs for people who work in Digital Marketing and lost their jobs from stuff like ChatGPT and Claude.
January 9, 2026: Small Correction
A member of our editorial board (yes, we have one!) made a revision to something I said earlier in this article:
RAW is definitely a better read than lavey, who is just a libertarian polycule type guy. not familar with his influence on post-ratatouille-ism so this should be a good read. on jesus tho, his message in the gospels doesn’t always comport with subsequent orthodox doctrine; original sin is first suggested by paul in romans but becomes church doctrine through the writings of st. augustine -- jesus doesn’t speak of it, nor is he interested in devotion to himself as such except for his apostles. he mostly wants people to repent and to follow god and the jewish law, though he seems to disagree with the strict adherence of the pharisees (they dislike him because of this). faith and works is also subsequent doctrine, because jesus is big on doing good things to be “saved,” whereas paul puts less emphasis on works. basically i would just caution on ascribing too much theology or christology to jesus himself, the books in the new testament also do not always agree with each other, so doctrine should be understood as coming from the church/church fathers until you hit the reformation
Apologies to anyone confused by the illegibility of my joke. Anyway, carry on.
I agree entirely! Great work