What's a Meme, to a Community?
Girard. Dawkins. Memecoins. DAOs. Epidemic of loneliness. It's all here.
Sometime in the past, a person first pointed at a rock and said "rock." Other people around them saw and heard, and perhaps later found it useful to again point at a rock and say "rock" so that they could reference the rock later without having one around.
Eventually, you could just say "rock" and people around you would know what you were talking about without having to point. The pairing of the mouthsound "rock" with the thing that was pointed at became uploaded into shared consciousness.
Words are memes.
A community is a group of people with anywhere from a handful to a few thousand instances of this, where "everyone knows what you mean well enough that you can plan some rock-related project together without an example being physically present." You might not all picture the exact same rock, but good enough.
Maybe on the other side of the world someone said "mwamba" when they pointed to the thing that you called "rock." For you and that person, the sound, the meme, is not enough to collaborate from. You would have to resort to pointing again until you had a word you both knew.
Far enough in the past, you'd have no chance during your life of encountering someone with such a different word for something than you had. Now, you go online and have to try to understand what it means to "YOLO GameStop."
A meme today is like a word, but more. Meme scholar Luke Burgis describes memes this way:
"A meme captures a large amount of cultural information in a single, memorable representation. It’s like short-hand or code for a host of complex ideas."
Like saying "the smell of cinnamon in hot apple cider, now that's Fall."
With words, you may be able to point back to a concrete object as you say them, to achieve the closest possible understanding between you and whoever you're communicating with. With a meme, there's nothing concrete to point to. You just have to believe the other person shares enough cultural meaning with you that you can work together.
Memes are the building blocks of shared reality between people -- the foundation of community.
The Spectrum of Meme-ness
Burgis also says that memes and mimicry are not the same and are often confused. He cites Richard Dawkins and Rene Girard as the two big meme theorists, and says their perspectives on how memes work and how they interact with culture are opposite. Dawkins says memes move through humanity like a virus, without intentional participation from the hosts (us). Girard says propagating memes is an expression of our desires - how we express ourselves and achieve both belonging and differentiation in our identities. (Burgis wrote a whole book about this called “Wanting,” which I recommend!)
I think there's room for synthesis between the Dawkins view and the Girard view. We learn to walk by watching and mimicking, before we have the capacity for thought and agency. The core behavior of walking stays unchanged throughout our lives, unless we join the Ministry of Silly Walks. But we choose where to walk, and when. Our choices around walking become a vital tool in our establishment of identity.
Mimicry precedes and underpins the propagation of Memes in today's sense.
What Is A Community?
Here are a few ways of describing communities that I think are incomplete but true enough and useful enough for this context:
A community is a group of people who believe that the others in the community share the same interests enough to work together. The map is not the territory, but members of a community agree to work from the same map.
A community is a group of people that interacts enough that ideas and behaviors can spread through it and be shared within it.
A community is a group of people within which each individual's response to certain words, memes, or stimuli is the same, or close enough to be compatible, or complementary in a way that reinforces the connection between them rather than degrading it.
A community is a group of people whose interactions generate a sense of belonging in the individuals, and a sense of coherence to an outside observer.
Memes Are The Unit of Interaction From Which Communities Emerge
If atoms are the basic unit of which all things are made, memes are the basic unit from which culture is made. Communities are like molecules or even cells that make up culture.
Memes as a foundation for community grow in importance as physical obstacles to community building evaporate, and as the amount of cultural information any individual needs to master in order to continue participating increases.
Our shared realities, and therefore our communities, used to be defined by where we lived. The people that were near you were the source of your knowledge, and were the examples of behaviors for you to mimic. They were the foils for you to differentiate yourself from, and the heroes you emulated.
When you can talk to anyone online, and travel across the globe to meet anyone you want, how do communities form? What behaviors do you mimic? Many people participate in a broad cross section of different communities with many attendant behaviors. There's a lot of information to manage, and you need a dense format to hold on to it all.
Meme-ing is Believing
By propagating a meme you subscribe to a shared reality, and express something about your own position within it. By mimicking a pattern and adding your own twist you say"I see what you have done, and we are the same enough that I can do it too, but I’m my own person and I can also do it differently if I want."
So a community is a group of people with enough shared understanding of meaning that they can rely on mutual mimicry to move the group as a whole, and each individual within it, toward their shared benefit. This works even though no two individuals within the group are likely to be considering the whole meme as they move forward together.
Meme-ing is easy, Information Architecture Is Hard
Visakan Veerasamy wrote that "thinking is easy, information architecture is hard." Memes, in the "image macro with words on it" sense, give people a readymade information architecture to express their thoughts. Different people are attracted to different structures. My sense is that the more someone creates instances of a meme, or uses it, the more likely they are to use the same one again. Memes within memes. Something that happens once is more likely to happen again.
A meme provides a container for people to express themselves so that they don't have to start from scratch. The tradeoff is that there are limitations on the meaning that be expressed. Some meaning is already attached to the meme, which limits the possibilities. A constraint that makes it easier for many to participate, even creatively, but which also inherently narrows the field of possible meanings.
For a community that wants a lot of members, it is good to make it easy to participate. Memes with a low bar for propagation are good for this. The tradeoff is that then the amount of investment it takes for any individual to claim belongingness is low. For a community to last, and be strong, you need true believers. There need to be other ways to get skin in the game.
The Market For A Memecoin To Believe In Is Infinite
Two ways people like to behave around their beliefs are to share them, and to spend money on them.
This whole post started as a reaction to something written by my friend Cody about memecoins -- cryptocurrencies named after internet memes. A memecoin's primary purpose is to take a meme you could only interact with by sharing it, and make it so you can also spend money on it. This gives people a new option for how to express their belief in that meme. Previously, they could only share it. Now, they can also spend money on it.
In writing this I came across various articles about Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Something I had heard about in passing but not really paid much attention to. It seems to me like people working on DAOs are investigating what the minimum amount of shared understanding is that can provide the basis for a community. Here’s a quote from an article about ‘higher dao’ that seems to be examining this question:
That article about ‘higher dao’ also referenced a current pattern of “overintellectualizing memecoins” and if that’s what I’m doing here, so it goes.
In my eyes, memecoins are a lot like carbon offsets or effective altruism contributions. They are a mechanism by which you can funnel excess capital into something you like without having to change your behavior or embody any aspect of the concrete root of the meme. You can buy carbon offsets without having to burn less gasoline.
Memecoins reduce the barrier to achieving symbolic belongingness in a meme community. All you have to do now is have money. Cody's article was specifically about how to do more than this. He asks the question "can you orient a memecoin to expand a meme?" I think that is the fundamental question being asked in that ‘higher dao’ article too.
That requires some exploration of what is meant by "expand a meme," but the way I read it is this: Is there a way to use memecoins to create or incentivize other behaviors besides sharing and spending as ways of engaging with and amplifying a social pattern?
Cody ended his article with this:
"With...so much of this tech becoming more accessible, a different kind of group coordination and reward system is possible. One where the upside is more balanced and more legible to creators, speculators and fans. And one that has the potential to do the hard thing. Help communities find their memes."
The words “accessible” and “legible” caught my eye in particular, because in reading broadly as I was writing this, I was increasingly feel like I had stumbled into something that fundamentally wasn’t ‘for me’. It felt this way even though the explicit shared vision of much of what I read seemed to be “to make * gestures wildly at all of crypto * more accessible, and more human, and more humane to people who just don’t know how to participate (me).
These new models for finding and participating in a community do not come naturally to everyone. There are many people out there experimenting, and searching desperately, for people with shared beliefs.
There’s a long and venerable history of people who felt isolated in the communities they were born into finding their tribe online. But now, people have more options for community participation than they know what to do with, and this glut is, via the paradox of choice, causing many people to drift into isolation and loneliness.
The people with enough agency and executive function to go find their people and build community with them online or IRL are doing that. The people that would have stayed in the community they were born in are finding that it has dried up, been plundered by other communities with stronger memes.
If memecoins, DAOs, and all manner of riffs on how individuals find and participate in communities turn out to be the mechanism that reverses the epidemic of loneliness spurred, in some ways, by the internet itself, then that seems good to me.
One thing I learned from writing this is that I have a lot to learn about memecoins, DAOs, and that whole memetic cluster in general. Highly possible I will edit this post going forward as I learn more. Living document etc etc.
Here are links to the articles I referenced:
Left Curving DAOs (the ‘higher dao’ article) https://lght.mirror.xyz/zgnQyci9HqYQ8KTRcomh2_CCDepcwqrigCFQZFQz5QA
Luke Burgis - Memes and Mimicry: https://luke.medium.com/the-difference-between-memes-and-mimicry-e9e05d1ef9a5
h/t Hugh MacLeod for the “market for something to believe in is infinite” memegenesis
Visakan Veerasamy: Thinking Is Easy, Information Architecture is Hard https://www.visakanv.com/blog/information-architecture/