Is Viral Good?
Memes are the cultural currency of social media. Even the most committed Luddite will have seen the familiar format: A standard image backdrop, "good guy Greg," "Jimmy 'Too Damn High' McMillen," "Pepe the Frog"; overlaid there is a white text joke or comment that follows a set of tropes depending on the image in the background. This is the standard format that most people today recognize as a meme. But the word actually comes from 40 years ago, and describes a phenomenon many thousands of years older. The term was coined by Richard Dawkins as an analogy: that cultural and intellectual ideas can be spread to a civilization in a way similar to genetic changes, but much more efficiently because they use a mental rather than genetic framework to spread. Because of this efficiency, large scale intellectual advancements like fire, language, governments can be rapidly adopted without waiting for a cycle of birth and death to cement these ideas into instinct. It also meant people could build more complex mental structures. Once the mind is genetically equipped to understand, create, and reproduce memes, it is capable of building expansive and complex worldviews that can be passed on to others before they die, and thus preserve their advancement. It in essence is the mechanism that allows human civilization to ratchet itself up, to make incremental progress toward better, more complex ideas and manifestations of those ideas. It then makes sense that the human species, once capable of spreading these memes and reaping their collective benefit, would further select and foster minds that were effective at spreading and using memes.
Memes in this understanding are incredibly important to our identity and advancement as a species. It is also readily evident from both the science behind it, and common sense, that we as a species have become really good at spreading memes. Most of the world is now literate, fire & electricity using, and governed by a set of 2 or 3 standard governmental models. All of this is memetic, and it's pretty impressive. Before we can understand what that means for today's memes, we need to understand a bit more about genes, the structure that Dawkins made his initial analogy from, and the unforeseen problem lurking in the corner of his surprisingly apt comparison.
Gene coding within a cell loosely but compellingly models the replication of cultural memes, they are replicated naturally, as the product of the cell simply doing its job. When needed, the genetic code is replicated within the cell and the cell splits or produces proteins until the need has been saturated. This too is how ideas have tended to evolve and spread, taking up space and time in people's brains until they are at the desired level of functionality, a working language for example. Then they cool off and gradually people tweak the base code, but leave things substantively the same. Language, in this metaphor, is mutated but not reinvented. This saves us tons of mental effort. The other side to this metaphor though are the pathogens that use and abuse our genetic functioning, specifically viruses. A virus is a tiny snippet of genetic code, way smaller and less complex than any cell, even tiny bacteria. It works by infiltrating a cell, and hijacking the genetic replication mechanisms of the cell to create copies of itself many times over. It requires far less energy to create a new fully functioning virus than it takes to reproduce the whole cell. So, a virus can come in and reproduce itself many times over using the functional energy of the cell to do so, before it eventually ruptures the cell itself and disperses its viral replicas to infect other hosts. This is why they are damaging. They gunk up the machinery used for more complex, productive functions by preoccupying it with replication of the virus' tiny basic genome.
The same thing can happen with memetics, to societies. A few parts of our culture have openly, if inadvertently embraced this metaphor. Think first of Silicon Valley and their social media platforms' obsession with going "viral." The industry openly predicates itself on the premise of "disrupting" the system by going viral and building a user base so large that it must attract attention, and with that, money. Whole portions of the thought leadership in this space dedicate massive amounts of energy to making products "addictive" so that people get hooked on the single product enough to come back over and over, spending increased minutes and thought time on their product. The focus of these qualities is on spread, and mental energy use, as proxies for quality. The goal in all these scenarios is to exploit the radically effective ways that human societies adopt and transmit shiny new things. It perfectly rides the mechanism of memes to spread their product rapidly and deeply into peoples lives. In this way, the world of tech, especially social tech seems to have inadvertently mirrored the viral mode in memes instead of genes. They are of course not the only sector to have fallen into this method though.
Media on TV and online has slipped down this path alongside tech. In the battle for ears and eyeballs, we have seen the fall of messaging. From covering snowstorms as breaking news, to occupying days of national coverage on a local criminal trials, TV media has courted ideas that are not particularly important above their complex or unsensational story counterparts. Instead they are distinct by virtue of being easy visceral bites of information that elicit a basic amygdala-bait response. The stories covered draw the ire of watchers across the country, many say they want better content but their watching habits say otherwise. Investigative news programming has seen viewership decline. Morning talk shows have seen consistent increase in viewership. Fox news and its brand of outrage based reporting followed by news segments reporting the outrage that "some are talking about" has seen skyrocketing revenue.
Online has been no different. Twitter, Google and Facebook are the funnel for the vast majority of all news on the internet. Twitter, by its very 140 character limit format disallows anything but the simplest of communication, the most fragmentary memetic code to be shared. It invites the type of cultural ideas that fit a viral mode of intellectual spread. On the other hand we have the ballooning presence of fake news on social networks. Facebook has been found to have one of the most impressive collections of fake news highlighted by its algorithms because it has realized, like other online media hubs, fake stories generate more attention. Attention of course is the currency of social media, because in most cases the only revenue source for these companies is advertising. So again we see the same gravity as in TV media, for social media to focus exclusively on reaching the most brains and eyeballs, and holding them there as firmly as possible. This means advertisers get more value, and spend more money. There is admittedly some crossover here between this media and the business/design ethos in Silicon Valley, though the consequences are more widespread here because the sole aim of social media business is to spread and propagate ideas. In this case, the ideas spread are the ones that occupy massive amounts of mental effort by virtue of their bombardment of the emotion circuits in never-ending rapid-fire packets of familiar, digestible content. Anyone who has lost hours of life down the rabbit hole of cat videos and vine compilations knows what it means to be ensnared in this world of viral memetics.
One of the most recent dominoes to fully fall is western politics. Politics, like many other cultural spheres is a lagging indicator; it absorbs and reflects predominant cultural trends but usually at a delay. Media and business had fully embraced the viral ethos for years prior to it staking out a dominant position in politics. The trend seems to have caught on across the western democratic world in recent years under the brand "post-truth politics." The defining characteristics of this explosively popular political mold are that truth and nuance are superfluous, and the most important part of gaining power is the ability to create and harness "feeling." A political idea's value is not found it its use or truth, it is found in whether the populace "feels" that it's true. under these auspices, we have seen the rise of impulse movements across the globe from Le Pen in France, to Brexit in England, to Trump in America. The world of post-truth politics seems to grow out of the same mechanisms as other virally based cultural frames. The ideas that propel these movements and their surrogates to power are not the facts on the ground but on feelings of dispossession, of corruption, of anger. The Trump candidacy for example had stunning levels of dishonesty, more than any other candidate in the field at any time, but his message "felt" more compelling to nearly half of the country and so was able to seize power in the election. The ideas discussed and the way they are communicated have been steadily falling in political discourse for a few decades now, and in the most recent election you could almost predict candidate success by how low their speaking grade-level was. All this again points to our tendency to value spread, and emotional energy expenditure over truth, or value. It is the part of democracy that the framers' of the US most feared, when they built indirect elections of Senators, and the electoral college; it is the "mob rule" tendency that many enlightenment era aristocrats feared most. We have made strident advances in our expansion of rights since that time of codified elitism but our discourse has likely fallen alongside our zealous de-elitization of politics.
All of this is not to place blame on politicians, media outlets, or tech businesses for the drift toward the basic and sensational. These are cultural currents that have pulled imperceptibly on our minds and discourse the same way as when you play in the ocean for a bit too long and realize that you're now a five minute walk away from where you put your towels. We have an exceptional system for propagating thought through culture. We must simply be aware of the danger inherent in that exceptionalism, that while we're great at spreading good ideas, we're even better at spreading distracting, or useless ones. We have tremendous capacity to make great complex beautiful things, but we have even more capacity to make simple, trite, silliness. While there is nothing wrong with unseriousness or simplicity of thought, it should not come at the cost of our capacity to do otherwise. In our current state, we have allowed this compulsion to go too far. We have fallen prey to a viral mode of thought that does not just coexist passively alongside our complexity. It has been elevated to the point that civilization has its higher-thought bandwidth clogged with amygdala-bait memes that run their viral course but are replaced before they're gone, by new trite, eyeball-gluing, gunk. We have allowed sensation and primality in communication to run wild to a point that it has begun to compromise sections of our society. If we would like to continue to create higher things with higher thought, we're duty bound to purge ourselves of this sickness.
