Metamemes are their own muses
We live in an increasingly meta-mimetic time. By this don’t just I mean that our information environment is increasingly good at quickly copying and spreading memes across huge populations of humans and computers, though this is certainly true. I mean that the idea of memetics itself is increasingly integrated into memes themselves.
The word “meme” is supposed to evoke Darwinian selection pressures - it was coined to be a pun on “gene”. However the phenomenon of meta-mememitcs is just as much Lamarckian as Darwinian. While it turns out to be a myth that Lamarck’s giraffe stretching its neck as it strives for higher fruit, is what leads to longer necks in its offspring, the same is not true in the world of memes. A meme can mutate intelligently as well as randomly in response to its environment before it gets copied.
And so, I posit that we should soon expect to see many more meta-memetic memes. Memes which inspire in their hosts an increased awareness of this meta-memetic zeitgeist, and, in doing so, strive to incorporate elements of the idea of memetic environment itself into their Lamarckian striving for further evolution.
This is a strange kind of thing to study - because any theory of memes itself is subject to these same memetic pressures. One can try to avoid any such strangeness - by trying to place themselves and their theories somehow “outside-of” or transcendent to the the world of memes, however I claim this is futile, as whenever you are studying self aware agents, the the mere possibility of a theory describing their behaviour can effect their behaviour.
The other option is to try to embrace an approach of study where you concede that your theories themselves have causal power over their subjects - where the goal of theorising is not to seek static descriptions, but rather dynamic fixpoints in the theory/subject relationship. Doing this well remains an open problem in social science and neo-cybernetics.
To the extent that I endorse something like the second approach, I should also make transparent that this idea is not my own. Not only did I steal this idea, but I also stole the idea of stealing this idea as performance art. I was exposed to it over dinner with a friend, who told me that a group of people we know are all writing on this vaguely similar topic. I only got a few sentences on what the topic was - something about meta-memes, and how the meta-meme itself wants to be stolen, and over the last few weeks this memetic genome (memome?) unpacked itself into this post.
This post then, itself, is just as much an instantiation of a particular kind of meta-memetic artefact, as it is a request for a theory of how those artefacts may behave.