“A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.”

-Balaji Srinivasan, 1729

How many memes do you see in a day? 50? 100? 1,000? What’s your relationship with these memes? What’s your commitment level?

Most memes you don’t even clock. You “know” they’re not for you.

Some make you pause, skim, confirm your disinterest, scroll past.

Another level up gets a smirk out of you. *Sensible chuckle*, “Internet remains undefeated,” etc. At this point, the less stingy among us might hit the Like button. A bold new step in the relationship, but hey they earned it. What’d they earn? A notification, a dopamine shot, and an entry into Facebook/Tik-Tok’s back-end that tells the attention-advertising matrix: “this plays.”

One step further: after Liking a meme you dig into the comments. What are people saying about this? Are they thinking what I’m thinking? Can they riff on it? Argue over it? Check the account it came from. Should you Follow? Your therapist advised you to be more deliberate with your phone. Does this meme fit into a healthy “information diet”?

You’ve now lent >5 minutes of your attention to this word-sound-image and its cultural run-off.

That’s something, that’s substantive—no longer a casual encounter, but you can do more. You know someone. A dear friend or maybe your favorite group chat. These people would “get” this. Their silliness aligns with this meme’s chaotic energy, and they’re gonna love it. They’re gonna love you. You Share—add a witty aside or just drop it naked into your forever-conversation.

If you’re brave, you might send this meme to your entire Following: friends, almost-friends, rivals, lovers, exes, siblings, distant cousins, creative aunts, maybe even your future partner if the meme hits right. Post-to-Story as your own cultural superspreader event. “Everyone I know should know this.”

Most people don’t make it past the Share stage. They have a life. They have houseplants to water. But there are more levels to the game, for those with the time, ambition, and errant adderall abuse. Maybe a meme speaks to you in such a way you think, “oh this reminds me of…” and you do it, you try your own rendition. Or you combine that meme to another meme. You add a new flavor—or the flavor of the hour, if you’re savvy. You take the main character and replace it with Johnny Depp’s face, juxtapose it against Amber Heard. Current. Clever. An evolution. The Likes and Reposts flood in to feed the next cycle, or they don’t, it falls flat, and the meme’s path dries up or flows elsewhere, towards more nutrient-rich soil.

The past few years of our collective fever dream have invented another level, if you can believe it. Which—most can’t. And they don’t. Most deny that this top layer should exist at all. But here it is: you see a meme so good you buy it. You take money you earned with real work and you trade it for this… what? Joke, idea, ~vibe~, a key to a club, token to an arcade, a symbol of protest, internet status symbol—a fashionable statement piece for the too-online. Ifykyk.

What would it take for you to buy a meme? And what decides the price? Would you buy the creator a cup of coffee? Do you want to meet other people who, like you, fell in love with this meme? Maybe you could team up and discover other cool stuff online together. Do you think this meme is compelling enough that it will grow over time? Can you capitalize on being a meme tastemaker? Or idk, maybe you just like the way it makes you feel.

It’s one thing to like a meme, another to tell Facebook engineers you Like it, another to spread the meme to friends, quite another to mutate it, and then yet another step to invest in its growth. There’s something evolutionary about all this.

“Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment .... The gene has its cultural analog, too: the meme. In cultural evolution, a meme is a replicator and propagator — an idea, a fashion, a chain letter, or a conspiracy theory. On a bad day, a meme is a virus.”

-James Gleick, The Information

Our genes construct us like a mech suit: our bodies, brains, and egos are tools built by our genes to try and find other “fit” (strong, sexy, smart, funny) genes to procreate with, and thus interweave the chains onwards and upwards towards clarified immortality. This is what the gene “wants” in Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. To replicate and grow as far as it can into space and time. And as the environment changes, different genes reveal themselves as more or less suitable for this purpose.

And it’s a messy, random, trial-and-error marketplace, the gene business. Most mutations fail, but some disrupt everything forever. For example: at some point, a group of genes came together that slowed the growth rate of human babies. It made them physically helpless for a longer period of time, thereby increasing their brain’s incubation stage. This longer development time gave them bigger, more malleable frontal lobes. Weaker babies, looked after by more caring parents, enabled a slower but more adaptable on-ramp to adolescence, which allowed each new generation to achieve higher levels of social complexity than the ones before. This mutation also marked one of the first (but not last) shift in priorities: Brains over brawn. Memes over genes. Imagination over reality.

Memes are the genes of culture. They both behave like viral microorganisms, using human brains in the same way that our genes use human bodies—i.e. to keep themselves alive by replication and mutation. Memetic organisms use tricks like rhyme, rhythm, and humor to make themselves stronger. Everyone knows the meme of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, but we also remember the commercial jingles that played between our favorite childhood cartoons on Saturday mornings. Memes charm our senses, hook into our attention, mutate in our minds, and spread through our media networks.

Examples of Memes:

• Hand-shakes

• “Treat others how you wish to be treated”

• Beethoven’s 9th

• Baby Shark

• Racist tropes

• “Carbon footprint”

• Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby raising a champagne glass

• Diets with breezy wholesome names like South Beach, Whole 30, etc.

• Supreme

• “Chad” and “Karen”

• Copycat suicides

• Birdsong

Humanity is the medium through which proteins and ideas flow, reproduce, and grow. We are the soil. It’s the information—genetic and memetic—that is reaching for the stars.

“When I muse about memes, I often find myself picturing an ephemeral flickering pattern of sparks leaping from brain to brain, screaming “Me, me!”

-Douglas Hofstadter

Ideas learn new tricks to increase their fitness. In the last few years they learned how to monetize themselves at a granular level. They’ve done this before, and it’s always changed society in big ways. For instance, before the printing press, there was hardly any idea of authorship— the scholars were all working together on a shared cultural record of stories. There was no way to individualize contributions, distribute, or profit off them, so these verbal memes remained gated and static. Scholarship was holy work, reserved for the select few who were rich and leisurely enough to learn their codes of ink. The printing press didn’t just invent books, it invented the incentive for people to read, write, publish their ideas. Once the professions of “author” and “publisher” were made viable, people chased those dreams, and verbal memes grew much stronger and faster as a result.

Music followed a similar path from ownership to growth. It used to be an amorphous chain of live performances (folk songs) until these sound-memes gained the ability to be mechanically copy->pasted->broadcast→purchased. The ability to own and sell music is new in the scope of history. Extravagant dreams of musical success, made economically lucrative for the chosen few, created more incentive to become a musician. The first musical recordings were fiercely protested. And our ancestors might look at our technocratic music industry as an off-putting grift that turned art into something mercenary and industrialized. The truth is that it led to more music than ever.

To monetize a meme is to make it more durable. If you paid $100 for an inside joke that eventually turned into a $100,000 mainstream joke, you’re gonna be tempted to keep laughing at that joke. You might even catch feelings for it. You might create an entire online persona whose sole purpose is to keep this meme afloat. And hey, since your internet identity is this meme, for all intents and purposes, divorced from any other identity, you’re now freer than ever to speak pseudonymously, an unbound version of yourself masked-by-meme. Free of race, gender, social status. To the world you are only your choice of cultural unit and the content which flows from that.

Is it any wonder that the culture of NFT PFPs sprang from the depths of 4chan and reddit? They’re not just early adopters of tech. These guys threw off their gawky, unfashionable white-bro-incel identity and donned something sillier, more abstract, more nimble in metaphysical space. Anon internet culture, covered in warts as it is, serves a trollish idealism—it’s a place where the identity of a user “adds nothing to the conversation.” And a bathroom stall is, if not the truest, at least the starkest stage for ideas. It’s a place where memes play without the bounds of human shame. And it’s possible the rise in identity politics caused some of the more rambunctious memes to emigrate from Web 2 in search of a place with looser border controls. A meme is harder to cancel than a human.

“In the night when I cannot sleep, thoughts crowd into my mind….whence and how do they come? I do not know and I have nothing to do with it. Those which please me I keep in my head and hum them.”

-Mozart (misattributed)

For better or worse, blockchains make memes stickier. They do this by borrowing the design principles of their spiritual ancestor, the gene. Like DNA, blockchains create links of information. Generative art mimics the recombination of gene sequences. And if we look at NFTs for what they are — own-able bits of information — it becomes non-trivial to see what memes get funded.

Let’s say the current crop of NFTs are buying into a “vibe.” The BoredApes are hypebeast Chads, Cryptopunks are introverts-in-the-know, and Goblins spawned from the type of twee nihilism you get from a meme-stock bear market. These crowd-funded vibes will live or die by the dedication of their followings, who are now financial stakeholders/employees/customers/brand ambassadors/foot-soldiers/???

Recently a battle sparked in the crypto meme ecosystem: a coordinated attack against the top NFT project, the Bored Ape Yacht Club. It came on multiple fronts. A punchy blog post, an intense conspiracy video, and, most interestingly, the blockchain itself. The core of the argument is that the BAYC is full of hidden Nazi symbolism. The logo shares similarities with Nazi aesthetics (/any punk rock group), the creators hail from Q-infected 4chan, the art direction appropriates from various ethnic groups, and of course any time monkeys are anthropomorphized, people shift in their seats.

Ryder Ripps, himself an artist who courts controversy, released an exact copy of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, “RR BAYC,” with the only difference being that it’s pointing to a different blockspace on the Ethereum chain. Everything else—all aspects of the NFTs that this attacker calls racist, Fascist—is the same. It’s as if he made copies of Mein Kampf to re-publish for himself, fund his reactionary party, and take away funding from Hitler.

I won’t get into the ethics, because it’s not in the scope of this essay. The simple takeaway is that a meme can now attack another meme through direct economic warfare. Here we have a well-produced conspiracy video, it’s sparknotes blog post, and the #burnbayc hashtag all serving as sales funnels to profit this shadow NFT project, which sold ~7,000 items and made around $5 million in a single week. It’s the first critique against crypto that itself used crypto. And it’s likely that many of the RRBAYC buyers were just BAYC holders trying to turn a profit on the internet’s hatred of them.

Weird? Yes. Cynical? Yes. A colossal waste of time? Maybe. But the smart memes will take notes and use strategies like this in the future.

“Given the right conditions, replicators automatically band together to create systems, or machines, that carry them around and work to favor their continued replication.”

-Richard Dawkins

Most people see NFTs as a dorky, useless, planet-incinerating grift. The first three terms in that description are true but temporary, because there’s too much incentive for some tech-savvy, brand-savvy global citizens to make versions of these things which don’t have those defects. “Problems are opportunities.” And the last term, grift, is a harsh but not untrue buzz-word for what this all feels like: performance art with human incentives. Social engineering. And no matter how high-concept you make your casino cult, it’s an art form that smells foul quickly if done wrong. Most people don’t want their personality and livelihood co-opted by a meme. But some do.

Charismatic influencers will use blockchains to build crowd-funded meme-cults. Imagine a subreddit with a bank account. A Twitch channel with an investment fund. A video game whose assets work in the real world. An activist hashtag, but financially-aligned. Network states will arise, and barring severe government action, it’s too provocative of a system to ever disappear. To grow a meme outside of MSM, Zuckerberg, and Xi Jinping’s walled gardens is too tempting a prize. And 7 billion people can take a shot at it. Anonymously, if they want.

The scary part is that memes themselves don’t have a moral agenda, even though they form the building blocks of our morals. The Ouroboros ring of humans and tools is a maddening feedback loop, but we do, still, probably, have the final say. We can still point the ship in the right direction.

It all gets a bit hazy and semantic, but the main point is these new memetic durability tools shouldn’t be taken lightly. In either the negative or positive direction. Moral people shouldn’t ignore them, because amoral people will not ignore them. Blockchains, ZK-proofs, and NFTs are heady concepts, but they’re also elegant and eerily organic in structure. In the next 20 years they will become an invaluable toolset for someone, some group, or something with a deeper understanding of their power.