I recently finished reading qntm’s ‘There is No Antimemetics Division’. It’s a great read, I’d recommend it to anyone looking for something sci-fi but not spacey. Memetics is the study of memes. A quick online search will help you glean more information about memetics (on Wikipedia). In brief, memes are simply cultural and social tokens which can spread and evolve through societies. Of course, there’s a lot more nuance to it than what I’ve given but you can think of it like an idea or a belief. It spreads through word of mouth or (social) media or whatever medium is available and depending on how much it ‘captures’ a host society or group, can reproduce rapidly.
Though I am a little unconvinced at times about turning every cultural item, idea, or belief into a unit of memes, there are some interesting parallels and intriguing ideas which arise from this idea. Note that I am not an academic expert nor a full researcher on this subject. The main thing that caught my eye about this is the mere feeling that qntm’s book left me with which is: a sense of helpless impossibility. Why did it leave me with that dreaful feeling? Because I don’t know how much of our species is really prepared for a memetic virus or if we’ve succumbed to so many already in our history and we are but a droning zombified version of these viruses.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Before I go on, just to let you know that while most of us (myself included) exist in a capitalist world, I do not agree with its tenets. Systems, objects, and people should not be profited off and we should stop using net fiscal profit and shareholder value as markers of progress or development. I’d advocate for a version of social and ecological profit as a model for creating and reproducing value. This also isn’t to say we should throw out money as a tool for value exchange but we’ll talk about that another time. For now, you just need to know that I am an anti-capitalist (even though I participate in its systems, yes contradictions are normal and moral absolutism won’t get us anywhere). Finally, I won’t capture the entire conversation about capitalism or its critiques and alternatives here. If you find yourself wanting more, Wikipedia is a free resource to give you a start. For myself, I’ve found that books and media critiquing capitalism have been the most effective at helping me build a more realistic picture of this system.
So, what is capitalism anyway? From a general understanding, capitalism may simply seem like a system of economics where capitalists (capital holders or people with vast or flexible resources and commodities) create businesses which sell products, services, or knowledge in exchange for money from the consumer. These capitalists can hire workers who perform the job of producing items, providing services, or contributing/developing knowledge for a wage. A wage is an amount paid by the capitalist to the worker for their labour. Capitalism is, according to believers of that system, a self-regulating entity. What this means is that prices for goods and services are determined by demand and supply. This is the Invisible Hand theory, the assumption that capitalist economic systems are self-regulated through market demand and supply. The Invisble Hand makes it so that if there’s too much supply compared to the demand, then prices fall (a surplus economy) while on the other hand, should demand far outstrip supply, then prices increase (a shortage). The goal of every economic interaction between capitalists and consumers is to find the market basket, the price where most people are willing to purchase a good or service while the capitalist earns the most. In other words, it reaches maximum efficiency of goods produced to goods purchased at the largest amount of profit possible at that moment. This is capitalism according to capitalists and it doesn’t seem inherently insidious if we look at profiting as a reward for the risk that capitalists take for putting their resources to use.
From a Marxist perspective, profits only create inequality and he says that labourers should be the ones better compensated since they actually do the work of ideating, producing, and problem-solving. Labourers perform the actual work while capitalists simply put their “capital to work”. For Marx, labourers are the real owners of the means of production, not the capitalist. Other critiques analyse capitalism’s role in colonialism and the climate crisis- both very valid dynamics tied at the hip to capitalism. Let me add to this bowl of critiques: Capitalism is a memetic virus.
When an infectious virus enters your body, it has one goal: to reproduce. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw widespread science communications about COVID and its reproductive modus operandi. There are conflicting reports about the origin of the virus but the official World Health Organization (WHO) stance is that it began from Wuhan, China, specifically at a wild animal market where animals of various species (rare and otherwise) were caged and stacked like shipping pallets in a seaport. A global pandemic was declared 6 years ago because COVID-19 had been present in a multitude of countries over a short period of time, infecting 100,000 individuals within a few months of its discovery.
This coronavirus was so hellbent on reproducing. If you were exposed to it through people’s infected cough particles, it would reach your lungs where it would infect the cells there and reproduce rapidly. While other respiratory viruses do this too, what made COVID so deadly was its ability to weaponise your own immune system against you. Some even say that it was the immune system’s overreaction to the virus that killed people and not the virus itself.
Now that I’ve made you relive this era, I’d like to point out these relevant players in this short essay: the virus, the immune system, and the mode of infection.
Short answer, yes. Long answer, also yes. An idea can be extremely viral just like a TikTok trend. I mean, even TikTok videos have memetic value to them. TikTok videos have potential for virality and they’re also cultural artifacts in and of themselves. When something goes viral on TikTok, I’ve had senior colleagues ask me how to achieve something like this, to achieve virality. People think there’s a hidden formula but from my experience, hitting the right moments and right times to the right people matter more than the actual video itself. Of course, there’re algorithms on TikTok which control or dripfeed content, essentially also controlling people’s emotional highs and lows. This is the dopamine hit and withdrawal that we experience nowadays when we talk about social media manipulating our bodies.
Anyway, I think it’s not farfetched to say that ideas have viral potential to them. In the same way that biological viruses can cause global pandemics, ideas can also become viral. While biological viruses transmit via the exchange of physical substances across bodies (saliva, blood, ejaculate), memetic (ideational) viruses transmit via language, media, or “natural transferrence”. I’m not entirely sure yet about that last one so I won’t delve into it for now. But memetic viruses infect and replicate through language and media, that much is undeniable to me. So what makes capitalism a memetic virus?
If we come to the understanding that a memetic virus is an ideational virus, something that infects and spreads through the host, how then do we construct our idea of capitalism?
In brief, capitalism looks like a great system because it is “self-regulating” via markets and the ‘Invisible Hand’. When you read and are taught capitalist ideals and norms, it seems like a great equalising system where everyone is subject equally to the same system. If you end up bankrupting yourself from your billions because you risked all your money in a poorly executed business or idea, then capitalism’s theoretical answer would be that you deserve it. In the same (and more commonly realistic way), poverty is a result of people unable to properly bargain with the system. They may not be qualified, educated, or useful enough to be utilised as an economic or labour resource. On paper, capitalism treats everyone equally. But we all see that this is a farcry from our current reality. Other people delve into why or how this is the case, critiquing capitalism and its assumed tenets so I won’t go into it in detail. However, the overall sentiment is that capitalism has always generally benefitted the powerful and wealthy from the get go. At the instance that capitalism was instituted as a broad economic system, there was no initial redistribution of wealth or power to even out the playing field. Even amongst white straight people, there were huge class differences that resulted in a ruling upper economic class and a downtrodden or surviving poorer class. It didn’t matter then if a brilliant idea arose from a poor woman’s mind, she had no resources to enable these ideas to come to life or be brought to market. An even more moral question however is this: is profit an overall good for our society? More and more, it’s become clear that these systems have only further enriched those already wealthy and driven the rest of the world into debt, poverty, and hopelessness.
Historically, capitalism began in Europe as Adam Smith’s brainchild. It was a manifesto which laid the groundwork for an economic alternative to the feudal slave systems of the century. Now, I’m not a historian and I don’t intend to be one here. But my brief and limited understanding of the birth of capitalism was that it came as a reaction to the fief system where landowners (think minor royalty, dukes and dutchesses) would own fiefdoms and people would be servants to these landowners. The servants or serfs would be tasked to work the land and make it ‘productive’ land through the cultivation of crops. In exchange, landowners would keep their serfs alive. Serfdom is not exactly like slavery, the difference lies in the degree of ownership that landowners would have over serfs versus slaves. In slavery, people as the property of their owner. This included the ability to be bought and sold and ownership throughout their lives which serfdom did not have as a tenet. In other words, serfs were not the property of the landowners. They had maintained some dignity or humanity despite the indentured servitude that characterised serfdom. When serfdom was no longer viable, Europe began to hunt for new sources of labour and the European construction of racial superiority, the project of racialisation, became the default raison d’etre for centuries of slavery.
This marked the globalisation of capitalism, the ‘viral moment’ that capitalism seeked out to solidify itself as an economic system that continues to exploit and harm communities and other ideas to this day.
I’m aware that until now, I’ve shared my understanding and thoughts of a primarily western point of view. While Europe was busy with developing colonialism and capitalism as tools of oppression and inequality, the rest of the world was also hard at work literally doing their own thing. And like a drunk group of frat boys haphazardly entering a sharing circle, Europeans ran through the world on their boats with the aim of extracting the rich resources and cultures of the people they themselves deemed too animalistic to be human. I’m not even joking, the scale of understanding race as a category primarily scaled across ‘human’ to ‘animal’ (read as white to black, with all other categories of non-white human in between). Though this isn’t to say that East Asian, Polynesian, Indian, Malay, Indigenous Americans, and Arabs were better off. Systematically, these groups were also actively thrown into the mix of slave.
Captalism uses (yes, present) colonialism (yes, present) as a tool to wipe out alternative ideas or approaches to living. The subjection of other cultures and people to European colonial ideals comes from capitalism’s need to wipe out other alternatives. If you look at East Asian, Indian, South East Asian, Polynesian, Indigenous American, African, and Arabic cultures as alternative modes of living, bubbles where other belief systems and value systems function, they also serve as a threat to capitalism’s dominance because they provide a perspective (some say an antidote though not always) that capitalism itself cannot compatibly co-exist with. In other words, you can imagine capitalism as a virus that infiltrates and destroys other cultures as well. Using colonialism and colonial epistemicide (that is, the systematic wiping out of knowledge that is non-Western), capitalism effectively destroyed or heavily disrupted other cultures (organisms) to the point that they became nearly extinct. If there are no other seemingly viable alternatives, it becomes very difficult to imagine a world outside of itself. At the end of the day, an effective virus will take over its host in full so that all of the host’s resources can be concentrated on further replicating itself. This was the case as we know it historically. In the present, things look even bleaker.
In the modern age, how does capitalism repropagate itself? We’ve now entered the realm of media, advertising, and commodification. The initial colonial project primarily benefitted elites, those who already had access to capital and resources in the first place. In modernity, creating buy-in from the rest of the world means disavowing alternative ways of living, enforcing standards of pleasure, joy, and success, and turning everything you know and love into something that can be bought, sold, and mass produced. An era of conspicuous consumption is the highlight of our modern approach to capitalism. And it’s been brought to the masses in an alluring and almost undeniably manipulative way.
Like, growing up in the mid-late 2000s, I think some things were still sacred enough to not be touched but now, everything is an opportunity for profit. And it’s not like Disney or Nickelodeon were innocent, they were actively trying to form a generation of captive viewers. But a screen on every child, adult, and senior at all times with an algorithim designed to hack into your brain and develop addictive habits so that we become hyperconsumers, it seems actively dystopian and sinister. Right now, if you go online, you are bombarded with advertisements not just from companies but also directly from people, the ‘influencers’, encouraging us to purchase something with our money. Meanwhile, corporate profits and shareholder dividends continue to grow at unprecedented rates despite the world constantly being plunged into crisis. This is a function of a capitalist virus and it has captured en masse the world we live in.
Like a mental plague, it burns through people’s defences (we’ll talk about memetic immunity in a bit), things they’ve learned and experienced about the world which may not necessarily align with capitalist interests, eventually hollowing them out until the only thing that’s left is a shell of a person. Public health systems already look at human and ecological communities like they’re cellular groups with functions and goals like any organ or cell in our body. Once a cell is infected by a virus, it can quickly spread to other compatible cells within the vicinity.
How do people defend themselves against a memetic virus? Is there even such a thing as ‘immunity’ from a virus that spreads as an abstract idea and not as a ‘real biological entity’. Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Are ideas simply abstract? Just because they don’t have a tangible form (we cannot literally touch, see, or smell capitalism, only its comprising parts), does not mean it exists as an unsensable and suprabiological entity.
Education (and I mean a wise-making education) is a critical social tool for people and communities to defend against memetic viruses. In the pre-colonial past, this may have existed as a pluriverse of cultures with their own knowledge systems and ways of understanding the world, their own theories and connections with nature and its surrounding entities, and their own shared processes of historicising, contextualising, and translating this knowledge. Theirs was an education that existed outside of colonial and capitalist frameworks. While there have been both longstanding and young movements which try to break out of these colonial capitalist educations, most of us have been brought up to see education as a means to live within capitalist society. It’s become extremely difficult for most of us to imagine and live in a world outside of these systems. Education in a broad sense, the passing of knowledge between people across generations and communities, is a key social immune response to memetic viruses because they can provide a space to question, introspect, and analyse these systems and frameworks outside of colonial capitalism.
But you know, your body also has a sort of ‘built-in’ response to systemic dysfunction. Though I’d argue that some people are more sensitive to these feelings than others. How that difference came to be, I’m also not entirely sure of but it is likely a mixture of genetics and social/behavioural evolution. My main point here is that our bodies have, in varying capacities, the ability to feel that ‘something isn’t right’. This feeling that we have which resides as part of our gut instinct is an often ignored tool in the face of colonial capitalism unless it’s the instinct to make profit; but it is something we all have. It’s the feeling you get when you see a TikTok or Instagram reel talking about Palestinians, Congolese, Sudanese, Uyghurs, Crimean Tatars, and so many more people suffering a colonially organised genocide. It’s the feeling you get when you show up at work half-dead because you’ve been feeling like there’s no point to doing it. It’s the feeling you get when you’re in bed, restlessly looking at the ceiling hoping that it would have an answer for you. The question doesn’t even matter, you just want an answer. It shows up as unease, as disconnect, as the feeling of floatiness but not the good kind. It shows up as chronic inflammation, that’s my biggest tell. When I’m under a constant barrage of stress trying to make the world make sense, for it all to come together somehow into something coherent and consistent.
To defend against a memetic virus is to envision alternatives that are built on wholly different principles and histories. It is to know differently and to bring that knowing into an understanding, an active knowing. I think that in some ways, looking at colonial capitalism as this viral entity will also help us understand that we may not be a healthy society, that this virus has infected us so dramatically that it fundamentally changed our relationship with our world. If we are aware though that we are sick, maybe we can start to heal and look for a place where we act not out of virally-encouraged habits but instead through fuller agency of our lives and our world. I don't have any particular hopes though, I think I just wanted to put something small out here to see if anyone else resonates with this.