Memes

November 23, 2024

tags: #culture, #memes, #books

I’m long on memes. At this point, almost every human on the planet knows what a meme is, and most have consumed thousands (if not tens-of-thousands) of them. Yet, I still think their influence is vastly underrated, and for anyone who wants to have an outsized influence on the world today, I recommend they learn the craft of meme-making.

Memes are also getting more complex. As meme-consumers (i.e. people who spend time on the internet and social media) get more familiar with memes and can draw on a larger knowledge-base of historical memes to make sense of new memes, meme-creators can invent increasingly advanced memes. It’s not uncommon for me to stumble on a new genre of meme that is so layered with interpretations, misdirections, references, satire, irony, and esoteric knowledge that it borders on high-art.

This is the golden age of memes, and we are barely beginning to understand how powerful they can be. It won’t surprise me at all if in the future there are entire fields of study dedicated to memes.

As a consequence, I had also come to believe that memes were becoming the best way of sharing ideas. There’s a lot of reasons why this makes sense.

For one, people in general spend way more time on social media now than ever before. If you had a new idea and wanted to disseminate it to the most people, you’re incentivized to publish it on one of these platforms in the form of a meme. This also comes with various monetary incentives (e.g., likes, followers, ad-sharing, etc.). In general, economics would favour the production of memes.

On top of that, I have this theory that memes are the most compressible format we’ve come up with (so far) for storing ideas, and that in some way made them superior. They use just enough pictures, colours, and words; they latch on to existing meme templates to facilitate analogies and pattern recognition; and they’re designed to be consumable within a second or less. In my mind, they’re the next stage of evolution for communication.

But as of very recently, while I still have a lot of respect for memes, and while I don’t think anything I’ve said above is theoretically wrong, in practice, they’re still not the best way of getting the best ideas. And the reason why is simple:

The people with the most interesting ideas care about two things: making their lives easier and creating something beautiful. If a meme is either too difficult for them to make or goes against their aesthetic sensibilities, they won’t make one.

Currently, books seem to meet both criteria quite well for these people.¹ So if you want to be on the bleeding edge of great ideas, you’re still more likely to find them in books than in memes (for now).