Copying does not necessarily mean making an exact duplicate.

You hear a joke.

You remember the structure, forget several words, change a character...

...and tell it to somebody else.

Something survived the transformation.

external expression → perception → internal reconstruction → expression

A meme can appear outside us: as sound, gesture, image, text, object, ritual.

It can be reconstructed inside us: as memory, rule, association, expectation, intention.

Then it can become external again.

What exactly is being copied?

Memetics is a theory among other theories.

Human culture can also be studied through psychology, anthropology, sociology, cultural evolution, semiotics, media theory, neuroscience and many other perspectives.

Memetics highlights replication, variation and selection.

It does not explain the whole human being.

And although it may begin to look as if everything is a meme...

...it is not.

A virus spreads. That does not make it a cultural meme.

Genes are copied. That does not make them memes.

You discover by yourself that fire is hot. No person-to-person copying was necessary.

A yawn may trigger another yawn through an evolved response rather than culturally learned imitation.

Spread alone is not enough.

Is the meme the sentence?

The idea expressed by the sentence?

The memory in somebody's brain?

The rule that allows the sentence to be reconstructed?

The pattern distributed across people, media and artifacts?

Different memetic theories answer differently.

Memethical engineering is the deliberate design, modification, and circulation of memes and memetic environments in accordance with explicit ethical goals.

For example: counteracting propaganda and manipulation.

Increasing epistemic and cultural diversity.

Supporting critical reflection.

Increasing resilience against harmful or monopolizing meme complexes.

Memetic engineering asks: How can this spread?

Memethical engineering must additionally ask: Should it spread?

Who benefits?

What disappears when it succeeds?

Can people recognize the mechanism?

Can alternatives survive?

Success ≠ virality.

Let us now temporarily leave theory behind.

Look at ordinary life as a landscape of things passing from person to person.

We will move from the smallest and fastest patterns...

...toward increasingly complex cultural structures.

😮 yawning

😂 laughter

👏 applause

👀 looking where everybody else is looking

🌊 the stadium wave

These are useful starting examples because copying is immediately visible.

But some may be biological contagion rather than memes in Blackmore's strict sense.

One person suddenly looks intensely at the ceiling.

How many people look too?

Did information pass?

Was anything learned?

Would you call it a meme?

🤝 handshake

✋ high five

👊 fist bump

✌ peace sign

🫶 hand-heart

finger hearts

air quotes

A tiny movement can carry socially learned meaning.

The physical movement alone is not enough.

A raised thumb means something because other people already know how to interpret it.

The same movement can mean different things in different cultures.

A meme therefore often contains both performance and interpretation.

🎂 birthday cake + candles + song + wish

🥂 touching glasses before drinking

🎆 counting down at New Year

🪵 knocking on wood

🤞 crossing fingers

💰 throwing a coin into a fountain

Memes can become coordinated social scripts.

A phrase can detach itself from its original situation.

It becomes reusable.

People recognize it.

They repeat it because others recognize it.

Recognition itself can increase its probability of further replication.

Familiarity can become its own selection advantage.

A melody enters through the ears.

Hours later it is still playing internally.

You hum it.

Somebody else hears it.

Now it may inhabit another mind.

An earworm is almost a cartoonishly clear memetic lifecycle.

nursery rhymes

football chants

advertising jingles

melodies with changing lyrics

TikTok audio fragments detached from their original context

The carrier can change while the recognizable pattern survives.

♥ a heart that looks nothing like an anatomical heart

★ a five-pointed star

☀ a circle with rays

🏠 a square house with a triangular roof

💡 a light bulb meaning “idea”

We learn visual conventions by repeatedly encountering them.

Who knows how to draw the “Cool S”?

Who taught you?

Where did you first see it?

Do you know who invented it?

Why did generations of schoolchildren reproduce it?

A near-perfect classroom specimen of anonymous cultural transmission.

💾 floppy disk = save

🔍 magnifying glass = search

⚙ gear = settings

🗑 bin = delete

♥ heart = like

☰ three lines = menu

The original object can disappear while its symbolic descendant survives.

Many people click a floppy disk icon without ever having saved a file onto a floppy disk.

The symbol has become detached from the technology that produced it.

Its survival depends on continued copying inside interface culture.

Cultural ancestry can remain visible after functional ancestry has vanished.

ripped jeans

mullets

moustaches

Crocs

rolling trouser legs

particular sneaker styles

black clothing in particular creative milieus

Bodies become media.

Someone adopts a style.

Others notice it.

Some imitate it.

Some exaggerate it.

Some reject it.

Some revive an older version thirty years later.

Replication produces variation; variation produces selection.

family recipes

sourdough starters

cutting sandwiches diagonally

particular ways of folding pizza

“five-second rule”

putting a wet phone into rice

Useful, useless and questionable practices can all be culturally transmitted.

A meme does not have to be true to spread.

It does not have to be useful.

It does not have to benefit its host.

It merely needs properties that allow further transmission.

This is one of the most important—and most uncomfortable—ideas in memetics.

the elevator pitch

brainstorming with Post-its

the agenda slide

the TED-style talk

“three things I learned...”

the Venn diagram

the iceberg diagram

Sometimes the meme is not the content but the format.

image macros

reaction GIFs

“POV:”

“starter pack”

“nobody: / absolutely nobody:”

“tell me X without telling me X”

“how it started / how it's going”

The Internet did not invent memes. It created an extraordinarily fast memetic environment.

Internet memes make one property especially visible:

a stable template + many mutations.

Distracted Boyfriend.

Drake Hotline Bling.

Woman Yelling at a Cat.

The image remains recognizable while captions and meanings mutate.

Variation is not failure of copying. It is part of the evolutionary process.

urban legends

schoolyard rumours

ghost stories

“a friend of a friend once...”

life hacks

folk explanations

Stories are compressed, reconstructed and altered every time they move.

superstitions

stereotypes

ideas about success

ideas about beauty

ideas about what a “proper career” looks like

ideas about how families, schools or workplaces should function

At this scale, memes begin to shape perception itself.

Memes rarely live alone.

They support, trigger and protect one another.

A fashion includes clothes, vocabulary, gestures, music, places and identities.

A profession includes practices, jargon, values, rituals and status symbols.

Religions, ideologies, artistic movements and institutions can contain enormous interconnected systems of culturally transmitted elements.

Such complexes are often called memeplexes.

Something is encountered.

Something is reconstructed.

Something is expressed again.

Another person encounters it.

Replication does not require perfect duplication.

Misremember it.

Translate it.

Improve it.

Simplify it.

Exaggerate it.

Parody it.

Combine it with another meme.

Every transmission is an opportunity for mutation.

Some variants disappear.

Some are remembered.

Some are repeated.

Some fit a particular medium particularly well.

Some become part of institutions and persist for centuries.

Cultural environments select.

easy to remember?

easy to reproduce?

emotionally intense?

funny?

useful?

beautiful?

shocking?

socially rewarded?

already familiar?

And are these the same properties that make a meme good?

A communication system optimized only for replication may reward whatever replicates best.

But the fastest-spreading cultural environment is not necessarily the most desirable one.

Memethical engineering asks how environments might instead preserve:

diversity · autonomy · transparency · reflection · plurality · resilience

Think of one meme you encountered today.

Not necessarily an Internet meme.

Where did you encounter it?

What was its external form?

What did you reconstruct internally?

Did you reproduce it?

Did you modify it?

Why might this particular pattern survive?

gesture?

ritual?

phrase?

melody?

visual convention?

interface convention?

fashion?

social script?

story or belief?

memeplex?

Or perhaps: not a meme at all?

1. What is being copied?

2. Why does this variant survive?

3. What kind of cultural environment does its survival create?

A handshake.

A birthday song.

A stupid little drawing in a school notebook.

A phrase you suddenly notice yourself saying.

A floppy disk that survived its floppy disk.

A belief nobody remembers learning.

Culture replicates through us—but never without being reconstructed by us.