Minds model the world through memes. And by commanding our attention, memes command what we value. Coding societies that live according to gods, kings, philosophers, scientists, dictators, entrepreneurs and influencers. That glorify some people and cancel others. That pay fortunes for some paintings, cars, phones, watches, handbags, stocks, bananas, cartoon monkeys and not for others.

"Control the manner in which a man interprets his world, and you have gone a long way toward controlling his behaviour." — Stanley Milgram

Memes rule the world. Alas, meme markets are not free but centrally controlled. Not the best memes come out on top, but those that serve the interests of Churches, states and Facebooks. They rule the memes and thus the world.

We're closing in on how NFTs might break meme monopolies for good. Let's recap one more time before the finale.

Minds

Brains are locked in black boxes. They rely on data coming in from sense organs to map the world around and act accordingly. Lived experience is stored in memory. These can be deconstructed in conceptual building blocks (abstraction) and then recombined into new, mentally invented realities (imagination).

To minimise energy use, brains predict large swaths of experience from memory and imagination. So attention can be focused on the most important/uncertain elements around us. Because memory and imagination guide focus, thinking patterns self-reinforce. What you focus on and how you interpret (predict) things become habitual. Predicting present from past, we naturally see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, and believe what we want to believe.

This subjective experience orchestrated from memory and imagination is the self.

Minds in media = memes

We can share the mental models in our minds with other minds by expressing them in language and media as memes.

Made audible and visual, memes subject your mental models to the attention of others and prompt mimesis. In reflexive idea sharing, models self-expressed by one mind update those of other minds and vice versa. Minds invested in (infected by) the same mental models, connect.

From shared models flows aligned behaviour: minds act as one. Humans came to dominate nature because large groups of strangers act in alignment with the same values and ideas. They don’t have to trust each other individually because they share a culture.

Mind networks open-source imagination. Between minds, ideas of all times and places compose, remix and compound like LEGOs to invent new cultures and technologies. When memes dictate what we should and shouldn't do, they invent culture. When memes imagine better ways to get more with less, they invent technology. Media technology, for example, shares ever-more ideas in ever-less time as it advances.

Culture self-copies

The first cultures mirrored nature. Then, as collective imagination compounded, the balance flipped. Culture now submits nature.

Cultures and technologies engineered human societies away from nature and its dangers. More and more, new generations were born into worlds of memes rather than of predators and prey. Rather than minds having ideas, ideas have minds. Cultures self-perpetuate through minds by programming them as they grow up within their values. Memes around us instruct how to map the world and replicate through our behaviour as we act accordingly.

Culture depends not on our choices but where we are born — at least initially. We inherit it from the priests, synagogues, qurans, swastikas and rituals around us.

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.” — Aldous Huxley

Memes take root in culture by being useful and replicable mental models to eventually establish in a society’s traditions and institutions. Establishment defends memes against competition from new memes, which’ll need to be significantly more useful and replicable to take over.

Attention markets

In economic terms, cultures are markets wherein minds (demand)  spend the scarce resource attention (currency) on memes (supply); mental models to map the world.

• Memes are products. Minds produce memes through self-expression. Minds consume memes through attention.
• Memes gain intersubjective market share as a function of claimed attention. More attention scales memetic reach because it unlocks replication: the meme infects new minds (resonance) and is retweeted in their self-expression. Ignorance, in contrast, bleeds memes dry.
• Attention is energy as focused by the brain and thus a scarce resource. The sum of all minds — or rather all the attention they can spend — makes up the total addressable market memes compete in.
• Meme markets scale through media technology. More efficient media technology slashed meme time-to-read and time-to-copy, leaving more attention to spend.

Memes compete for attention with:

• Utility because brains retain the memes that help achieve goals. Useful memes inform real-world behaviour of which the results validate internal mapping, rather than causing prediction errors.
• Replicability because it markets memes to more minds. Replicable memes are quick-to-read and quick-to-copy, as determined by (1) media technology and (2) skill to communicate ideas efficiently wielding said media technology.

Cultural capital

The memes a mind pays attention to over others proportionally impress that mind's map as well as the self-reinforcing thinking and behaviour patterns it informs. Because the brain predicts reality, we come to mirror the memes that inhabit our minds — thereby impressing them onto the attention of others in mimesis.

Leveraging the brain's inclination for echo chambers through inside-out prediction, memes secure attention flows over time. Attention is stored as capital: cultural capital. Much like companies can be financially valued by estimating their future cashflows (how much money they will be paid), memes can be culturally valued from future attention flows.

Societal source code

How a society distributes cultural capital to some memes over others explains its configuration. It codes how we eat, dress, work, play, party, gift, speak, write, argue, judge, govern, love and hate — self-express — all feeds from and back into mimesis.

Let's replay a few examples

• Part VII detailed how Leonardo’s Last Supper accumulated cultural capital because it uniquely fit new media technology with unprecedented replication features.
• God long proved a useful model to navigate the unexplainable but then irrevocably lost cultural ground against science as better results proved it a better map.
• Money indispensably expedites culture through trade but what form is most useful? Governments left the gold standard because fiat money is easier to manipulate in economic policy. But now people distrust fiat because inflation dilutes the wealth in their wallets. Fiat’s cultural capital is pulled to Bitcoin as its features of scarcity, programmability and pseudonymity seem more useful for individuals. How long before viral Bitcoin memes breaks down fiat’s institutional and traditional walls?
• Into the 1800s, European nobles wore tailed coats, knee breeches, silk stockings, heels and wigs. English dandy Beau Brummell, history's original hipster, thought that looked ridiculous and instead rocked a simple jacket with full-length trousers, with shirt and necktie. The suit meme assumed cultural capital and today has long been the formal standard for men's fashion. Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, along with CEOs, lawyers, mafia dons, graduates and football coaches from all walks of Earth and life wear suits when putting one's best foot forward.
• The prime function of industry is to provide people with necessary means to survival. When the Industrial Revolution scaled producer supply beyond what people needed in the early 20th, companies developed marketing to scale demand and keep pushing the goalposts of infinite economic growth. In mimetic loops compounded through ads, media and peers, people increasingly spent leisure time and disposable incomes on products they wanted rather than needed. Today we buy things more for entertainment and status than utility (let alone survival). Consumerist culture has been the established backbone of capitalist growth in the past few decades. Now, as environmental and psychological harms have become obvious, progressive antidotal memes are eating away at consumerism's cultural capitalisation: minimalist living, circular business models, mindfulness — to name a few.

Memetic moats

If utility and replicability are dynamic enough to keep mimetic wheels compounding, the meme eventually establishes in traditions, institutions and law. Establishment is a meme's durable, long-term competitive advantage in the culture market — the memetic equivalent of economic moats.

• Physical moats defend castle riches from preying outsiders. They're established in deep ditches filled with water.
• Economic moats defend company profits and market share from competitors. They're established in scale, network effects, switching costs, efficient production, intellectual property etc.
• Cultural moats defend meme attention flows and cultural market share from competing memes. They're established in institutions, laws, rituals, traditions etc.

Cultural moats fix a meme's feature in mimesis. They secure attention flows for the meme by rooting it deep into the self-replicating cultural source code. Christmas, nations, weekends, breakfast, companies, money are fixed features of life in many places, seeming as real as birds, trees, mountains and rivers.

In fact, they’re figments of imagination our minds are programmed to invest attention in. Inherited from caregivers, taught in schools, enforced in laws, replicated in traditions, defended by institutions and expressed in media.

Memes of power

On top sit all-encompassing epic cultures: religions and ideologies. As networked values, norms and traditions, they cohere society. Within cultural bounds, 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.

Law and order

New memes challenge the status-quo all the time. Laws and institutions protect the cultural order from chaos. They stage the public arena wherein politics can evolve society without breaking it, through conversation, criticism and compromise. Conservatives defend, progressives challenge. New memes override established memes when they win over enough conservatives with utility and replicability.

Outscaling violence

Ultimately, institutions protect ruling memes with violence. Violate memes coded in their laws and their police puts you in prison. States monopolise violence in territories: only their violence is legal.

Violence is nature's way of power: influence over what others do. Violence, however, doesn't scale. Physically forcing millions of bodies is economically prohibitive. Instead, empires and nations rules minds with stories. Stories telling who to fear, obey, fight for, pray to, celebrate, love and hate. Stories of violence, heroes, enemies, wars, prisons, conspiracies, manifest destinies, kings chosen by gods and parliaments representing peoples. Stories of how things should be.

“Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.” — Niccolò Machiavelli

A shadow on the wall

In A Song Of Ice And Fire — known as Game Of Thrones on screen — 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 sells-word. Each of the three bids the sell-sword 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 granted by memes. It distributes as a function of how society allocates cultural capital.

Culture wars

Politics advances society when cultural groups converse to balance meme networks in compromise.

When groups and their meme networks alienate, however, society polarises and common ground crumbles. As trust decays into paranoia, diplomacy becomes impossible and both cultures come to believe they're mutually exclusive. The clash becomes existentially winner-take-all: one can only survive at the downfall of the other.

Culture wars are fought in media with language and memes: propaganda. We are innocent, superior, virtuous, honest, strong, legitimate — and so we must win. They are guilty, inferior, depraved, corrupt, weak, illegitimate — and so they must lose. Such discourse only deepens the divide and can erode empathy to the point where words become guns. Not all culture wars turn to shooting, but all shooting wars are cultural first because it's culture that legitimises shooting.

Cultural belligerents take up arms to establish their meme networks through violence.

• When cultures clash within the same polity, it's a civil war. The American Civil War was fought over the slavery meme. The Russian civil war was fought between the Reds (Bolshevik communism) and Whites (monarchist capitalism). The ongoing American culture war has so far been waged mostly in media, with memes increasingly justifying violence — as Donald Trump incited supporters to storm the US Capital following his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
• When cultures clash across sovereign borders, it's an imperialist war. The old Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and Chinese all fought "barbarians", i.e. "culture-less" people who in reality just had different cultures. The Latin Church launched crusades against heretics, i.e. everyone not living according to Catholic doctrine. The Nazis destroyed states so to catalyse Hitler's world view of racial anarchy from which "superior" Germans would emerge as masters. As I write this, Putin's Russia justifies war crimes against Ukrainians from the idea that "Ukraine is an integral part of the Russian fatherland ("Little Russia") that's been stolen and corrupted by the West", while Ukrainian cultural identity in fact has a rich history independent from Russia.

Germany's nazification in the 1930s shows the full cycle of how outcast memes can infiltrate institutions to monopolise violence and culture.

1. Hitler first tried to seize power with violence in 1923, mimicking Mussolini's successful march on Rome with his own Beer Hall Putsch. It failed because nazi cultural capital was yet too fringe to challenge ruling institutions. Hitler was arrested, the nazi party and newspaper banned.
2. Hitler's trial would bring nazi memes to the attention of the German public for the first time and sparked front-page headlines around the world. In prison, he laid the groundwork for Nazi ideology in Mein Kampf. The failed putsch convinced Hitler to pursue revolution by ideas rather than force.
3. Out of prison, Hitler and his nazis would play by the rules to obtain power democratically. Throughout the following decade, the nazis would build cultural capital through campaigns, rallies and propaganda and be elected the largest party in the Reichstag parliament in 1932.
4. Violence was used mostly memetically: not to seize power directly, but to delegitimise the establishment's monopoly on violence. By beating opponents and starting brawls in the streets with impunity, nazi stormtroopers demonstrated the weakness of the ruling system. Thereby claiming cultural capital for nazi memes of violence: Germans feared stormtroopers over state police.
5. By January 1933, Hitler was named Chancellor. When the Reichstag building burned down a month later, Hitler abused his powers to suspend civil liberties like freedom of speech, freedom of speech, right to public meetings, secrecy of post and telephone. The police were authorised to detain citizens without cause. After failing to fight the establishment from the outside, nazi minds and memes infiltrated the establishment to submit it from the inside.
6. Opposition muzzled and violence monopolised, Hitler now had a free hand to take over German society. All other parties were abolished. Institutions were nazified and racialised: run by fanatic "pure blood" nazis enforcing nazi memes. A party-state programmed by a sole meme dealer: Nazi Germany.
7. ‍German culture was purged in a memocide. Like a genocide cleanses the gene pool of "corrupt" genes, a memocide cleanses the meme pool of "corrupt" memes. Every book not ardently supporting nazism was burnt. Every free-thinking author, artist, scientist, teacher, lawyer, doctor that didn't flee in time was imprisoned in camps and/or killed.
8. Monopoly of violence established monopoly of truth. Books, text books, comics, newspapers, magazines, artworks, photographs and radio pushed nazi memes as programmed by Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda. Young German minds grew up mentally mapping the world according to nazi memes fed by them in schools and youth movements. Nazi propaganda was the only truth.
9. The army initially resisted. With deep roots in German history and nobility, the military was the most established institution at the time. Its officers felt rivalled by the SA paramilitary stormtroopers and rightly so: SA leader Ernst Röhm wanted to take over the army in a second, violent revolution. Hitler instead chose consolidation over chaos and had the the SA leadership executed in The Night Of The Long Knives. The move finally submitted the army to Hitler's leadership and established him as supreme administrator of "justice" in Germany. The totalitarian takeover was now complete.

"All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth." — Friedrich Nietzsche

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Culture distributes money and status

Power is associated with money and status.

Because cultural capital commands what we value, it's upstream from economic and social capital.

Economic capital

Economic capital, typically money, is exchanged for value on markets. The more money, the more options, the more agency over what you do, where you live and who you're with — the three big variables that defines one's life.

Price = utility ⇄ meme

To differing extents, the value of a good or service is:

• Objective — What you can do with it. Utility.
• Subjective — What it means to you. Meme.

Utility and meme together drive demand. In markets, demand interacts with supply to set prices.

• Art prices directly reflect cultural capitalisation. And so the most expensive painting in history is from Leonardo's hand: Salvator Mundi, sold for $450.3m in 2017. The Mona Lisa and the Last Supper are probably worth more, but were never for sale because deemed to belong to culture itself: literally priceless.
• Everyday handbags are ~80% utility to 20% meme. Designer handbags like Louis Vuitton invert that ratio. Same idea for Fords vs. Ferraris.
• Smartwatch (and smartphones) utility has re-dimensioned mechanic watches to mostly meme. Rolexes tell time but that's not why you spend five figures on them.
• Nike Adidas
• Red Bull's energy drink domination is almost purely mimetic. Production costs are minimised so as much as possible can be invested in telling the story of Red Bull as the default choice for high-performance achievement, e.g. Formula 1, football, world record stunts, e-sports etc.

Brands = memes

In business, utility is product and meme is brand.

Successful brands are, in fact, successful memes. Consumers pay disproportionally more for products from brands with high cultural capitalisation over alternatives with comparable utility. Examples include Ferrari, Gucci, Apple, Supreme, Rolex, Dom Pérignon.

Product management and innovation aims to expand utility, so to win over customers with greater objective value. Marketing aims to claim and retain attention for the brand, so to win over customers with greater subjective value.

Marketing tries to accumulate a brand's cultural capital in two stages:

• Performance marketing draws attention with the right message in the right place at the right time, e.g. advertising, content, sponsorships, influencers.
• Brand marketing retains attention through consistent communication and experience of values customers identify with. The bigger the brand, the more memetic energy: customers emulate the brands they love like they mimic the memes that run their minds.

Marketing tells a story about how your life is better with the product. Product fulfils the story as experience. Happy customers tell and involve others or naturally advertise the product for free as they use it. Best-selling products market themselves, i.e. they're useful memes with high replicability rates: AirPods, iPhones, Netflix, Starbucks, Coca Cola.

Marketing without product draws attention but can't keep it. Product without marketing is just a thing. Successful brands unify marketing and product, meme and utility, culture and technology in self-replicating user experiences.

Memes move markets

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Rational choice theory

• Asset prices famously follow narratives at least as much as economic realities. Rising prices memetically compound across headlines and FOMO, inflating them way past fundamental valuation in bubbles. Instantaneous internet networks turbocharge this process to a point where economic capitalisation can be carried by culture alone, as exemplified in meme stocks like $GME and Dogecoin.