Memetic Reproductive Environments

A couple of weeks I mentioned this idea as an aside in a twitter reply, & twitter user @not_a_hot_girl asked where she could read more about this. The answer is that almost certainly someone out there has conceptualized and written about this better, but I can’t find it, so you’re getting my somewhat inchoate version instead. Part of the purpose of this post is me searching for a better exploration of these ideas; if you read this and you know one, you’d be doing me a huge favor by telling me.

Memes reproduce by spreading through individuals, like genes do. Different environments have different incentive structures for how they spread.

1. Experimental: ideas reproduce by accurately predicting events. Relatively self explanatory.

2. Traditional: in my head, I use this word to mean something that basically no one else ever means when they use the word “traditional,” but it’s a concept that’s helpful for me and I need a word for. A “traditional” memetic reproductive environment is one where ideas reproduce via people reproducing. In this environment, there is a limit on how dysfunctional and harmful a meme can be while still reproducing. This usage of “traditional” has some overlap with normal uses of trad, which I will here call trad-coded, but also important differences. I’ll give a couple of examples to tease it out.

   Something that is not trad-coded but is traditional:¹ Freudian psychology is hardly trad, but it’s traditional, in my sense, for me, because both of my parents are big believers in it & they have six kids, and my grandfather was even more into it & had five kids (and, not for nothing, Freud himself had six). For my line, but maybe not for yours, Freudian psychology allows us to produce and raise lots of children.

   On the other hand, something that is trad-coded but is not traditional (again, with me as the reference point): women having kids in their early twenties. No woman in my distaff line has given birth before 28 for generations, but once they get started they’re fertile for a long time with good spacing. If I had gotten married & had a kid at like 23, it might have been trad-coded, but it would not have been traditional, and it easily could have turned out that early motherhood is a bad strategy that does not produce a lot of kids for women related to me for some reason. Like, maybe we’re really emotionally immature or something.

3. Institutional: ideas reproduce by reproducing (continuing to produce) an institution.

4. Immediate-attention based: of all of them, this would be the best one to have a catchy name for, but I do not. I thought about “viral” but it seems like an oversimplification. This is the environment where stuff like the toxoplasma of rage & scissor statements are a really good reproductive strategy—neither of those strategies would be particularly competitive in an experimental or traditional memetic reproductive environment. There are lots of subtypes of this one based on slight incentive differences—do you get immediate attention by cultivating a personal brand, like on Twitter, or by saying something everyone agrees with, like on Reddit?

And then of course there are mixed environments. The Catholic Church could be seen (uncharitably) as ideas-that-continue-an-institution parasitizing on ideas-that-continue-family-lines, I’m hardly the first to think of this. STEM Academia is supposed to be an experimental memetic reproductive environment, but in fact it’s super institutional.

I feel like the list gives the impression that I think immediate-attention based memetic reproductive environments are bad. I don’t think this! Good literature reproduces this way—and I think that to the degree that writing workshops fail, it’s because they fail to produce a microcosm of that environment, to teach you stuff like how to find your audience & ignore everyone else etc etc etc (which a lot of the great 19th century novelists learned through writing for magazines and newspapers) & work by reproducing the MFA institution instead. It’s worse than that, because the stories themselves reproduce institutionally, but the advice given in workshop, which should be reproducing experimentally (ie by predicting better stories) is actually for incentive reasons reproducing via a combination of institutional & immediate-attention based strategies.

1. And, to be super clear, traditional means traditional for me. “Traditional” in this sense is always “traditional with reference to a specific person.”