Part I: The Memeverse

“Man is split in two,” wrote Ernest Becker in The Denial Of Death.

Humans are the only animal that can imagine the future. And so, imagine the future in which they are no longer alive.

To deal with its mortality, the mind creates an immortal story about itself: the ego. Man is split between a body destined to die and a mind that imagines living forever.

Monkeys playing language games

Imagination works through language.

We use language to build mental models of the messy world around us, and share them with others as stories. Storytelling networks individual minds into a collectively imagined reality, better known as culture.

Culture is what happens in-between minds: the inter-subjective. It operates from intimate to epic levels.

Intimate culture is what comes naturally between family and friends. At epic scale, culture replaces personal trust with grand stories we all believe in. Narratives like capitalism, democracy and Christianity, but also human rights, money and Nike. They have no grounds in the natural world, but are products of mind — crafted and shared through language — that become real as we collectively believe in them.

"You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven." — Yuval Noah Harari

Collective consciousness

Imagining together is the mind’s triumph over bodily constraints. It mass-socialises us. No other animal can get millions of strangers to work together as a tribe.

While the first humans used imagination to outsmart prey and predators, our web of minds now programs the biosphere rather than vice-versa. Much like nature selects genes, culture selects ideas.

Ideas on what is good and bad program human behaviour through norms, values, religions and ideologies — encoded in laws and institutions.

Ideas on how to achieve more with less program the environment through technology — embodied in objects and structures.

Banks, courts, presidents, books, paintings, rubik’s cubes, cars, computers, and spaceships are language games made real.

Daydreams come true

The mind fantasises about life beyond the body. Fantasies network together into a new layer of reality: culture.

At first, the body drives the mind. Nature shapes culture. Over time, the axis shifts. Collective consciousness designs the world to fit its fantasy. New minds are born into the mind-made world and keep the daydream going.

The fantasy is real. It just doesn't start out as matter and atoms — but as perceptions, images, memories, puns, points of view, ideas, stories and hope. First private, then intimate, then public, eventually epic.

"In individuals, insanity is rare. In groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule." — Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosopher Ken Wilber maps reality as follows:

Subjective — The mind, its thoughts, emotions, perceptions.
Objective — The body, its abilities and behaviours.
Inter-subjective — Shared values, ideas, stories.
Inter-objective — Shared material world, its objects, technologies and institutions.

Clash of memes

Language games, ideas or concepts take root in collective consciousness through:

Utility — The language game helps the mind achieve desired results.
Replicability — The language game easily jumps from one brain to another.
Establishment — The language game is carried by artefact/structure (bible, church) and ritual (prayer).

Practical language games

Utility, at its core, is about survival. We use stories to make sense of nature’s overwhelming complexity. Stories are never literally true, but true enough to be practical and replicable.

The idea of God, for example, came about by itself in many places at many times in history. Not because it’s clearly true, but because it plausibly calms existential uncertainty in a scalable manner. Religion authenticates the mind’s will to eternity, promises ultimate justice and kickstarts community.

From a utility perspective, the god meme makes sense.

Self-multiplying language games

Utility leans into replicability: how easy a language game jumps from brain to brain.

Successful ideas resonate with the ego to parasitise the brain, turning it into a multiplication machine. Gods live on through words, art and music.

Humans are imitative creatures. We naturally mirror the ideas that inhabit our minds through language and art. Not necessarily because we like the idea — we also share out of hate and other emotions— but because we want others to know what we think of it. It’s how we signal identity: the individual ego asserts itself in collective culture by engaging with ideas in the inter-subjective. The idea, meanwhile, gains sway over an increasing number of minds with every mimic or share.

Reflexive idea sharing is known as “mimesis”. From mimesis, Richard Dawkins coined “meme” as the word for a self-replicating language game. Meme means “unit of cultural transmission”. Genes multiply nature through bodies, memes multiply culture through minds.

Old memes ⇄ new memes

Eventually, the meme becomes established in behavior and environment.

Establishment defends traditional (old) memes, even when they lose utility. To overcome traditions, progressive (new) memes need to win over minds with utility and replicability.

The god meme, for example, has long been retired by secular societies as grand narrative, but, to this day, lives on in buildings, rituals and institutions.

As I write this, the bitcoin meme (money backed by code) is challenging the established fiat meme (money backed by government).

Old ideas are proven. New ideas might work better, but carry risk: we don't know all unintended consequences. They must go through the mill of objection and scrutiny before they are to be adopted.

This cultural clash between habit and creativity drives human progress. Its trajectory across time is what we call history.

Memetic mechanics

When I say meme, you think GIFs, annotated JPEGs and TikToks. Dawkins’ original examples were “tunes, catch-phrases, fashions, pot styles and building arches.”

The immaterial language game needs a material carrier to travel to other brains — via sound and sight.

Such idea carriers are known as media.

What are media?

In a first-principle sense, a medium is a container that stores and broadcasts memes.

A book broadcasts a story.
A podcast broadcasts a conversation.
A newspaper broadcasts news.
Twitter broadcasts tweets.

But there's more to media than meets the eye.

Essentially, all technologies and objects humans create are media: they store and project the memes that spawned them. The Chilean physicist César Hidalgo poetically speaks of crystals of imagination.

Fashion broadcasts what’s trending.
A pot broadcasts a style and technique of pot-making.
A building arch broadcasts architecture.
A car broadcasts the concept of car and, by implication, its parts: wheel, brake, combustion engine, gearbox etc.

Because we construct and share imagination through language, language itself is the first medium downstream from the mind. Language makes the mind's magical world audible and visible to the ears and eyes of the neutral objective world.

"The world is but a canvas to our imagination." — Henry David Thoreau

Pieces of mind

Earlier, I said that memes multiply through minds.

You can say the mind is upstream of language, or equate language to the mind itself since it shapes thought. Whatever: the mind is the original medium.

The mind has ideas and broadcasts them through the body: in gestures, speech, writing, drawing, painting, sculpting, singing. Even facial expression, tone of voice, the way we walk. We're never not expressing the memes that make us.

Mind → Language → Technology

All things we conventionally think of as media (books, podcasts, videos) store and broadcast ideas in a way our bodies can’t. That’s why we created them in the first place.

As per iconic media theorist Marshall McLuhan, “technology is an extension of the body.”

Wheels extend the foot.
Clothes extend the skin.
Language extends the mind.
Computers extend the mind.

Technology augments what we can do. In doing so, it crystallises our collective imagination.

The medium is the meme

McLuhan is most famous for “the medium is the message.”

When we hear a tune or see a GIF, we don’t think of as an idea and its vehicle. It’s an undividable meme.

Book, car, pot, tweet or simply the words you use: a medium’s form and function define the meme to the point where they become one and the same. This plays out across multiple levels:

Spoken words are subject to voice, volume, tone, pace, and personality of the speaker.
During the 1960 US election, Richard Nixon had higher approval ratings on radio. JFK's looks got him more cheers on TV.
Donald Trump's sensational style maps perfectly onto social media algorithms, programmed to maximise engagement over truth.
Books leave room for interpretation (your mind makes its own movie), feature more contextual detail and allow to step into inner worlds of characters. Movies require less creative energy to process. They define what happens through video and audio, leaving you to guess underlying motives.

Maximum memetic transmission

To thrive in the cultural environment, memes mutate across media to achieve maximum reproducibility.

Religious stories first spread slowly and scatteringly from mouth-to-mouth, then scaled uniformly through books that established rituals, values, traditions and institutions.

A meme is reproducible when it's easy to:

Read.
Understand.
Remember.
Share.

The stickiest memes are simple and visual. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. Which is a more intuitive way of saying that brains process images ~16x faster than text. Showing beats telling.

Cultural LEGOs

Compose

Memes are LEGOs of culture: they click together to form new, more complex memes.

From the wheel are born chariots, bikes, cars, steering wheels, flywheels, wheels of fortune, spinning wheels, mills, pottery and more.

The wheel LEGO never needs to be re-invented, but can be re-used and re-mixed in ever-more complex configurations. Religion and ideology too network many LEGOs into complex narrative structures.

When memes dictate behavior, they create culture. When memes imagine better ways to get more with less, they create technology.

Remix

Remixing happens naturally and continuously through mimesis.

Every time you see or hear an idea and pass it on, you'll change it somewhat. You twist, turn and blend with other ideas you have in mind. Out comes a derivative of the input — itself derived from what came before.

By implication, ideas can never be entirely original.

The tweets you read today are far-flung, entangled mutations of mental models devised by the first humans. Perpetuated across time and space through minds of mimetic monkeys. Everything is a remix of a remix of a remix of a remix of a ...

Compound

Human civilisation accelerates because LEGO remixing compounds.

The more LEGOs (ideas), the bigger the surface area for new LEGOs (ideas) to integrate with. More LEGOs, more LEGO builders, more possibilities.

Creativity — that which leads to something "new" — is mixing what we already know in novel ways that somehow work. It's a team sport humans can play across seas and centuries, thanks to language-unlocked collective imagination.

“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” — Sir Isaac Newton

Leap

LEGO compounding shifts into higher gear when creativity invents new communication technologies. From speech to writing to printing to radio&tv to the Internet. With each invention, meme replication leaps by multiple orders of magnitude.

Memes invent technology. Technology scales memes.

You are your memes

Time to climb back up the rabbit hole.

Mind creates idea.
Language transmits idea.
Tweet transmits language.
Twitter transmits tweet.

By the time you read the tweet, you’ll barely think of it as a someone’s idea. You’ll think even less of all the preceding ideas that inspired it. All of which came to the tweeter through other tweets, videos, articles, conversations, education, language itself.

The tweet you read will inspire the tweet you’ll write — even if you’re unaware of it.

No offense, but you are a product of your mimetic environment.

Your mind is a screen onto which the memes around you project themselves. Those memes are, essentially, other minds, extended across space and time through bodies, objects, technologies — media. Your self-meme, also knows as your ego, interacts with these memes, and evolves in the process.

Every tweet you read executes a subliminal software update on your mind.

Man is a machine. Nothing enters our minds which is not directly or indirectly a response to stimuli beating upon our sense organs. — Nikola Tesla

We look outwards to make sense of a messy world, but in the process become inevitably conditioned by the memes we consume. Watch your meme diet.

All downstream from the meme

Bringing it all together.

Minds model the world through language.
Expressed outwardly, these models come alive in the web between minds as memes.
Memes multiply across the mind web through mimesis. Mimesis is the mind’s instinct to mirror the mental models it interacts with. Viruses jump from body to body via infection. Memes jump from mind to mind via mimesis.
Memes become subject to mimesis as they emerge from the world of ideas into the world of stuff through media. They’re broadcasted by our bodies, language, objects and technologies. Gestures, symbols, words, writing, speech, manuscripts, poems, plays, prayers, paintings, papers, pictures, podcasts, churches, clocks, clothes, cars, computers, tunes, tweets, tiktoks and a whole lot more. All signal the ideas that make them. Memes are atoms, mimesis is the energy that moves them.
Memes mutate as they multiply to achieve maximum mimetic transmission. New memes challenge established memes with utility and reproducibility. Reproducibility evolves memes to become easier to read, understand, remember and share.
Memes socialise strangers, scaling human cooperation from families to tribes, societies, nations and religions. At first to escape nature, eventually reprogramming it through technology to reflect the memes in our minds. And so humans moved ever further away from nature into daydreams. From African savannahs into farms, churches, factories, corporations and spaceships.

From memeverse to metaverse

Next up is the metaverse: a completely virtual reality for people to socialise, work and play in. If that feels like a stretch, consider how much of our lives already happens in digitally designed realities.

Work — From working in buildings to working from laptops and phones. From meeting rooms to Slack and Zoom.
Community — We care more about online followers than offline neighbours. Spend more time socialising on Instagram, Twitter, Discord and Reddit than in bars.
Play — More people today play online games than offline sports.
Identity — More people care about how we look online than in real life. Profiles, tweets and stories is how we broadcast who we are.

We made memes, now memes make us

The big point is that most of reality is made up, by memes that mutated through history.

The first memes were creations of the mind, but as new humans were born into existing cultures, the axis shifted. It's now the memes that make us.

Memes invent technology, build structures, allocate capital, rule markets, elect leaders, decide wars, distribute wealth, program how we behave and define how we see ourselves.

“People don't have ideas. Ideas have people.” — Carl Jung

Part II: Attention wars

“God is dead,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science.

To believe in something greater is a timeless human universal. For more than 2000 years, God had been our binding glue. By the time Nietzsche came around in the late 1800s however, we had antibiotics, electricity, engines, telephones and cameras. Not God but science had made the world smaller and less scary. Religion took a backseat to new grand narratives of infinite human progress. We had become gods ourselves.

Death by press

Who killed God? The printing press.

Before press

Before press, people didn't read. Ideas were stored in manu-scripts — written by hand. Memes travel slowly because manual copying takes ages and one script can only have one reader at a time.

You get inverse network effects. On the demand side, why and how would you learn to read with so few books available? On the supply side, why would you dedicate months and years to writing with so few readers available?

Distribution of memes concentrates in the hands of the literate handful. In the European Middle Ages, this power fell to the Catholic Church. Monks in monastery libraries would spend their sweet time scouring, selecting and copying texts. Of course, only those lip-syncing the holy word made the cut. From there, it'd trickle down to the masses orally through church service, cathedral schools, and the first universities.

It was a case of systemic ignorance rather than outright censorship. People just didn't know any better. Non-religious texts were rare because nobody cared. Critical writing even less so because it'd get you killed. The word of God was truth itself.

In meme terms, the god meme monopolised mimesis in medieval society. People were born into it and lived life obeying, praying and repenting so they'd go to heaven after. Representing God's will on Earth, the Church was the only source of truth and culture. The sole meme dealer.

After press

Introduced in by Johannes Gutenberg in ~1440, the printing press slashes the unit cost of text (meme) replication. Network effects flip. As books spring up like mushrooms, the common man learns to read, then write. Literacy and education grow to unprecedented levels.

Much to the Church's delight, at first. Bible sales were off the charts. But grapes quickly turn sour when critical readers discover glaring inconsistencies between God's word and the Church's actions. Corrupt practices like the sale of indulgences — you could pay for salvation — stir protest. Martin Luther and John Calvin openly challenge the Church, using mass print to rally masses to their opposing views.

There's a new meme dealer in town: Protestantism. Protestants and Catholics would be at each others' throats for centuries.

Enlightenment

The religious clash is just the first stone of the multi-dimensional domino effect set in motion by the printing press.

In a nutshell:

The press decentralises knowledge from the sole Church to the sum total of human knowledge at that time in history.
Long-lost Greek and Roman writings resurface. People discover different meme dealers (sources) and their memes (truth). They learn the art of interpretation: to construct their own truths.
Rationality finds its feet. We learn to think for ourselves. Knowledge is compared, combined and criticised to create more of it.
Reading triggers writing. New ideas are published. The meme pool diversifies, exponentially scaling cultural LEGO remix potential.
The never-ending process of truth-seeking becomes authority itself. We do this through reason and logic, supported by experimentation and measurement: the scientific method.
Off slides the veil of faith, illusion and dogma. The Church's monopoly of truth breaks.
The new arch-meme guides art (Renaissance) and thinking (humanism) in a cultural revolution known as The Enlightenment. The Enlightened man is curious, rational and inventive — like poster-boy Leonardo Da Vinci.
Human progress takes flight as curiosity → knowledge → imagination → invention.

Cheaper meme distribution shifts the power to shape culture from the hands of the one Church into those of the masses. In wake of Enlightenment, the decentralised meme pool would replace religion with ideologies like individualism, capitalism, liberalism, nationalism and democracy as the new cultural base layer: modernism.

Ends justify memes, memes justify ends

The printing press demonstrates how technology and power counter-balance to guide culture.

Part I modelled how memes take center stage in culture when they're:

Useful — Meme helps the mind achieve desired results.
Replicable — Meme easily jumps from one brain to another.
Established— Meme is carried by artefact/structure (bible, church) and ritual (prayer).

Culture progresses when new memes overcome established memes through utility and replicability.

Money has been universally useful to foster collaboration through trade and individual motivation. It's replicated with every exchange, backed by institutions and ubiquitous in art and behaviour. A world without money is unimaginable at this point. Yet, just under the surface, the money meme is still in constant flux. Not even fifty years ago, money was still backed by gold. Today, questions about the shelf life of government-backed money are plentiful. Fiat money is at risk of being toppled by digitally programmed money (bitcoin).
Communism emerged in Russia because it promised to work for more people than tsarism. In spite of being institutionally and violently enforced, it eventually broke down under the weight of its unfulfilled promises. In contrast, Chinese communism survived (and thrived) by mixing in other memes (like capitalism) and maintain utility as a result.
Like other drugs, caffeine alters your state of mind in an addictive way. Unlike many other drugs, coffee and tea are not only legal, but essential to public life across the planet. In fact, coffee rules morning rituals, streets and social scenes precisely because it promotes the ruling cultural order built on capitalist productivity. Established because useful and constantly replicated. It hasn't always been this way. In various times and places, coffee was outlawed because of its association with free-thinking individuals whose ideas threatened the political regime.
iPhones and AirPods beat out predecessors with obvious utility. Now, they are imprinted on your mind every time you go outside.

So, was god killed by utility or replicability?

Humanist ideas (in earlier forms) had been around since the Greeks and Romans, but disappeared from intersubjective reality because replication technology (writing) was easily monopolised by the powerful, who pushed self-legitimising ideas instead.

‍The Church controlled meme replication until the printing press scaled replication to a scale that was economically impossible to contain. Competing memes popped up everywhere. God was printed out of relevance. Cultural order reconfigured, power redistributed.

Regardless of utility and replicability:

Power monopolises technology to restrict meme replication and monopolise the meme pool.
Technology challenges power by scaling meme replication and diversifying the meme pool.

Humanist memes could only kill god with utility once technology broke the Church's power over replicability.

In a society:

Technology represents copy function. Its capacity for idea propagation.
Power flows from copy permission. Those with access to the copy function enforce memes that justify their power and censor those that undermine it.

Copy function

With all the talk about culture, where does art fit in?

Attention assets

Part I proposed that all objects can be thought of as media that project ideas. A hammer broadcasts the concept of hammer. Thing is, that's not why hammers exist. They exists to hit nails. Hammers have objective value: same for everyone.

An object is art when its core function is to signal underlying ideas. Books, paintings, music, films, GIFs and TikToks express, contemplate, challenge, play with cultural values — often in attempt to transcend them. They exist to advertise ideas. Art objects have subjective value: different for everyone.

In other words, art objects are memes whose sole function is to be shared. They're products of self-expression, made real with skill so others feel amazed, understood, recognised, thrilled, powerful. To feel anything, really. The sharing part is essential. Unshared art is not art.

Why do we share to make others feel something? Here's where we return to Ernest Becker and man's split between body and ego. Through art, we tell the story of our selves for others to acknowledge. When others feel something at our self-expression, we feel recognised for who we are.

We share to be recognised because recognition gives our lives meaning. While our bodies die when we stop breathing, somewhere deep down we believe we won't really be dead until the last person who knew us also dies.

Whether at the scale of family or history itself, sharing ourselves is the core why of culture. Outward cries for attention from all those egos networks together. Culture is how we don't feel alone in the face of impermanence.

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved. — Jorge Luis Borges

That makes everyone an artist, really. We all seek recognition in our own ways. The differentiator is scale. Recognition of Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Hitchcock and Kanye West reached epic levels, while it remains intimate for most. Their self-expression objects have claimed large shares of human attention's total addressable market.

Art imitating life and life imitating art

Recognition activates mimesis. We reflect someone's self-expression in and with our own self-expression. Attention thus leads replication. You tell friends, write articles, tweet, share photos, post YouTube videos. Another wave of attention-hungry self-expression. On and on it loops:

Create — Artist creates. Da Vinci paints. Shakespeare writes. Hitchcock directs. Ed Sheeran sings. Steve McCurry photographs. Ricky Gervais jokes. Elon Musk tweets.
Consume — Beholder consumes. Watches, listens, reads, feels.
Copy — Art self-copies through beholder: self-expression. A copy may be clone (retweet), fragment (GIF from movie), derivative (Ricky Gervais jokes about MacBeth), remix (Ed Sheeran on a dubstep beat) or simply inspire something new. Its concept (embedded ideas, values) may also rotate media, from painting to photograph to poem to tweet to joke to song lyrics.

Remember the word "meme" is derived from mimesis: to mimic, to imitate. Memes fashion culture through copies. Copies can appear as exact clone, something seemingly new and everything in between — but are always product of what came before. Every copy starts (creates) a new cycle. Art are those memes that reflect on culture itself and are created/copied to be shared.

Copy culture

Replication is built-in. A meme integrates:

Concept — Immaterial idea/values embedded in the medium. The inter-subjective reality to spread. Culture.
Copy function — Material medium that embeds the immaterial concept. The inter-objective reality that spreads. Technology.

In first-principle terms, memes are culture and technology in one. Ideas can't spread without technology. To become inter-subjective (culture), the subjective (thoughts) requires copy-function integration. The medium is the meme's replication technology.

Concept~Resonance * Copy~Replication

Concept and copy-function combine to direct how far the meme travels in culture. It models as an equation:

meme Reach = concept Resonance * medium Replication

Resonance — The extent to which meme impresses beholders to re-share. The more it resonates, the more you'll replicate in various ways, the more mimesis it drives. GIFs nobody find funny, die on arrival. GIFs that strike chords with many, go viral.
Replication — How fast the medium enables the concept to be shared from one mind to many. It takes days to copy an article by hand, minutes by press and seconds by internet.

* Reputation — Proof-of-resonance

There's a third variable: reputation. Who made the meme/art matters. The more resonating memes you create, the more attention every new creation commands. Reputation compounds through proof-of-work.

When The Weeknd was unknown in 2011, music aficionados took years to vibe with his YouTube mixtapes. Today, every track he drops gets millions of listens and shares in the first hours. Inversely, negative reputation builds resistance to the artist's work. Examples abound in this age of cancel culture: Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, Joe Rogan — to name a few.

Repeated resonance builds reputation. Once in place, reputation guides resonance and sets the pace for replication:

meme Reach = artist Reputation * (concept Resonance * medium Replication)

Leonardo's lucky strike

Here's a story that makes the point.

Leonardo Da Vinci is an icon of Western culture. Painter, scientist, inventor, engineer, architect — the man embodies Renaissance like no one else.

Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Realise that everything connects to everything else. — Leonardo Da Vinci

Yet, in his time, the average Joe(lle) had never heard of Leonardo. How could they? His science was in notes and drawings, his art in castles and churches. Even in the eyes of the elite with access, it appears Leonardo was overshadowed by Michelangelo and Rafael.

Leonardo's ascent from elusive to icon is best explained through the particular story of one of his most seminal paintings: The Last Supper.

Painted on the walls of Milan's Santa Maria delle Grazie church, The Last Supper's only reached locals. By Leonardo's death in 1519, it had reportedly deteriorated into ruin and seemed destined for anonymity.

Less than a century later, it had become a ubiquitous meme in Europe. For its sheer size and relative absence of optical effects, The Last Supper happened to be a perfect match for copper engraving: printing press-style technology to replicate images. Copies of various versions and sizes pop up all over Europe. The Last Supper becomes the first mass-distributed visual meme in history — a viral .JPEG avant-la-lettre. Leonardo's reputation scaled along, easing resonance for his other work.

This story is not to question Leonardo's creative genius — good luck finding someone more in awe of the man than me — but to demonstrate how technology steers culture.

Simple scales

For attention assets to gain great cultural value, resonance is required. But it's replication that scales.

Resonance determines potential cultural energy: what can be. It's the ratio of replicators to beholders. Out of a 100, how many spread the word?
Replication realises potential as kinetic cultural energy: what is. It's the speed at which the asset can multiply to reach its total addressable market of beholders.

Faster memes can beat more resonating memes. Fast memes are quick-to-read and quick-to-copy — like the most viral internet memes.

Artists have no choice but to work with the technology available to them. But they can optimise idea expression for maximum scale. That is, to simplify: easy, intuitive and quick to get. Great artists tell monumental stories in a matter of seconds. Instant recognition.

"An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way." — Charles Bukowski

Simple-to-read, but also simple-to-copy. The Last Supper is iconic because it's both.

By hand, replication of The Last Supper was expensive and slow — no way around it. When engraving emerged, replication skyrocketed because of the way Leonardo coincidentally painted it: simple.

Had Leonardo used more chiaroscuro and sfumato in The Last Supper, other paintings might have been faster to reproduce. Other artists may have caught tailwinds from technology and held in higher regard by culture today. Impossible to know for sure, but consider the scale at which the abundance of The Last Supper copies turned heads to Leonardo's work over others. Human attention is a finite resource and we tend to like what we already know. Coincidence biased Europe to fanboy Leonardo.

Copy-function better predicts cultural impact than concept. Badly communicated ideas are bad ideas.

Subtitle: Media

Time-to-copy is just one of the features of a medium's copy function:

Time-to-read — How long it takes to read the meme. Reading precedes replication. You can watch about 2000x TikToks in the time needed to read an average book. And share it 2000x by the time you can share the book.
Time-to-copy — How long it takes to replicate the meme. Copying books by hand takes days, by print hours, by internet milliseconds.
Shelf life— How long copies last. Speech evaporates instantly and so can only reach people same place same time. Material books can travel so they can be read across seas and centuries. Digital files last as long as the hardware they're stored on.
Fidelity — How close copies are to the original. Speech copies always differ because they need to be re-created from flawed memories every time. Hand-copied paintings and books are subject to human error and bias. Digital copies are identical.
Streaming bandwidth — How many beholders can read a copy at the same time. You can talk to everyone that can hear your voice. Only one reader per book at a time. Billions can simultaneously watch the same meme online.

As technology upgrades its features to spread more ideas faster, culture accelerates and complexifies. Let's look at history through the lens of its media.

0. Pre-speech

Pre-speech, memes are stuck in minds and don't spread. Technically, they're not memes at this point, but mere mental models. A mental model only becomes meme when it spreads through material media.

1. Speech culture (~300,000 BC onwards)

Spoken language is the first media technology. Mental models spread from individual minds into a collective web of minds through sound.

Speech packages ideas into sound (medium). Soundbits are the first memes. Mimesis happens through talking.
Replication is limited because sound evaporates instantly. Mimesis can only happen synchronously: between people in the same place at the same time. To live on, stories need to be told (copied) over and over again. The most retold stories establish as culture.
To retell a story means to re-create it from memory. Out comes a derivative, a distortion of the original meme because (1) minds are flawed storage devices, and (2) we unconsciously mix our egos in. We can never know the stories the first people told each other. Anyone who ever played the Chinese Whispers or Telephone game as a kid understand this intuitively.
Trust also reduces reach. You only listen to people you know. Tribal societies at the time capped at ~150: the maximum number of social relationships the human brain can manage (known as Dunbar's number.)
Speech fragments the world across countless disconnected communities, each with their own culture.

2. Writing culture (~3,400 BC onwards)

The alphabet ushers in manuscript culture. Memes spread through hand-written language.

Written language stores ideas on paper so memes can be read across seas and centuries.
Replication can now happen asynchronously. An idea only has to be recorded (written) once in a meme for it to reach (to be read) by countless people, in different places at different times.
The limit: one book can only be read by one person at a time. To spread faster, books need to be copied.
Unlike sound, writing can be copied word for word. Unlike oral lore, we can still read the ideas of people alive thousands of years ago. The original meme lives on as long as people read its written copies.
However, copying writing by hand takes time and skill. Those that have it gain control over which ideas are (not) replicated. Meme distribution centralises in the hands of institutions, like the Church. They proclaim serving collective interests but inevitably do so in way that legitimises their power.
Writing also scales more than speech because it's more rational and impersonal. You see the idea, not the writer — and trust is abstracted away into something more vague: reputation. You no longer need to know the meme dealer personally to be receptive to the meme.
Writing brings communities together around a centralised version of the truth, as established by institutions.

3. Print culture (1500 onwards)

The printing press machinises replication. Memes spread through printed language.

Ideas spread via text on paper in the same way, just much faster. Print culture is manuscript culture on steroids.

Ideas stored on paper can travel to reader in space and time much faster.
Publishing becomes affordable to many. Meme pools permutate from monopolies to melting pots.
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Ideas now spread so fast it becomes damn near impossible for power to rein in opposing cultural movements as they emerge.
Writing brings communities together around a centralised version of the truth, as established by institutions.

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Copy permission

I don't read a lot of fiction, but I have read every book of A Song Of Ice And Fire — known as Game Of Thrones on screen.

As the name hints, Game Of Thrones explores the struggle for power. In A Clash Of Kings, royal advisor Varys tells Tyrion Lannister a parable:

Varys: “A king, a priest and a rich man sit in a room. Between them stands a common sellsword. Each of the three bids the sellsword to kill the other two. Who lives, who dies?

Tyrion: “Depends on the sell-sword.”

Varys: “Does it? He has neither crown nor gold nor favours with the gods.”

Tyrion: "But he has a sword, the power of life and death.”

Varys: “But if it’s swordsmen who rule, why do we pretend kings hold all the power?"

Varys: "Power resides where men believe it resides. It's a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow."

Power is the ability to produce desired results.

At the individual level, power equals bodily capacity: what you are capable of doing. It ranges from inability to walk to running to being the fastest human on Earth. Technology expands power: it enables the body to do things it otherwise couldn't.

In the social sphere, power is influence over what others do. They behave to your will rather than their own. Parents have power over kids. Employers over employees. Idols over fans. Kings over subjects. States over citizens. Gods over worshippers.

Nature's way to power over others is violence. But violence doesn't scale. By now you know what does scale: stories. Millions of people don't carry out one king's will because they're physically forced to. They do it because they believe that's how it should be. The king's power is a story everyone believes.

To be clear, the story can be about violence. It may tell of the king's strength. His exceptional leadership. Or how he was chosen by God himself.

Whatever the stories, they'll work together to legitimise the ruling cultural order. What's important and what's not. How you should behave and how you shouldn't.

How culture orders

In Part I, we modelled culture as a process of memetic selection. Memes win over minds by being more useful and reproducible than others. Winning memes network together into cultural order. As values, norms and traditions, they dictate how society should organise. Strangers know what to expect from each other. At least, they don't hurt each other. Best case, the sky is the limit for collaboration. The common goals are peace, productivity and prosperity.

Politics encodes the cultural order in laws and institutions that maintain and protect it, with force if necessary. It ensures new memes can't topple established memes with violence (that would be war) but need to win over enough minds with utility and replicability.

That is, in a nutshell, how

Capital streams

Gatekeepers

The result is hierarchy and hierarchy creates order.

skill barrier

economic barrier

You have power over your body.

power is the measurement of influence you have over things

starting from your own direct environment extending out

Access to copy function: skill, economic, social

A society invested in the democratic meme believes power should reside where elections direct it.

Here's how memes do that: the memes that embed the most accrue cultural caital

Gatekeeper

attention allocation

Burning books and people

Rule the memes, rule the world.

Cashflows = copy right

NFTs — A free market for memes