You Are All Diseased. We Have the Cure.

The Almanac guide to memes

We didn’t know it at the time, but arguably the greatest damage to contemporary public discourse came out of the early 2000s. I’m talking about memes, or the contagion model of information.

In the colloquial sense, memes are just viral humor—easy-to-digest, typically visual jokes published on a medium that makes them easy to share, something that did not start with the internet. As soon as we had the printing press, we had “broadsheets,” one-page blends of op-ed and political cartoon that would become the modern newspaper.

One of my favorites, a Cranach woodcut from 1545, features a pair of Protestant peasants—the Occupy movement of the 16th Century—farting on the Pope and his Cardinals.

In fact, it’s an open question whether we would’ve had the Reformation, or the American Revolution, without the printing press. Mass media greases mass movements. How else can the ideas of a German philosopher overturn the 3,000-year dynastic cycle in China in the span on one lifetime?

Print made ideas easier to spread, which is why it provoked such a reaction from people in power. Artists were always a little dangerous, but the audience for their hereticisms had previously been limited to those in attendance. The printing press radically altered both size and scope. Mass-printed materials could transcend borders, language, even literacy.

After the political cartoons of Thomas Nast repeatedly assaulted Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall, Tweed supposedly demanded, “Stop Them Damn Pictures. I don’t care so much what the papers write about me. My constituents can’t read. But, damn it, they can see pictures.”

Across the 19th Century, ever-cheaper mass media, along with ever-easier distribution, became a legitimate political danger. In France, the artist and lithographer Honore Daumier was first fined and then—in an early case of deplatforming—imprisoned for criticizing King Louis-Phillippe, who banned “memes” as harmful misinformation.

As with the new medium of photography, the printing press in its early days was more technical art than business. Printing houses, the startups of their day, repeatedly folded. The only way they made money was by selling expensive hardbound books to the wealthy, who were the only ones who could read anyway.

That began to change in the 1830s, when cheap unbound publications like the penny dreadful could be sold to increasingly literate factory workers, and gradually over the course of the 19th century, coincident with the rise of literacy, printing became less the obsession of artists, intellectuals, and provocateurs like Daumier and more an industry.

By the time the mass market paperback was invented the following century, the term yellow journalism had entered the cultural lexicon. Everyone in orbit of the Soviet world, which dominated much of the globe in the 20th Century, used the newspaper as birdcage-lining. Even in the West, control of mass media was so entrenched by the post-war period that everyone could watch the leader of the free world get assassinated on TV and still have no idea who really did it or why.

Now, as in earlier eras, our major institutions—corporate legacy media, corporate new media, universities, NGOs, the government—are obsessed with fighting memes under the guise of “disinformation.”

To anyone raised in the immediate wake of the Zapruder film, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, MK-Ultra, and the Church and Pike Commissions, it was just a given that governments lie, typically about the need for war, how it’s going, or whether the “enemy” even exists, which is why the term disinformation has such a different connotation to Gen Xers like me. We collected it! A pair of Amok dispatches are still on the shelf next to my computer.

From their website:

In 1986, emerging out of the creative ferment of LA’s punk rock and noise music community, a collective called Amok was formed dedicated to investigating and disseminating “the extremes of information.” Lacking the funds to actually stock a bookstore, they decided to issue a 30-page combination dada-inspired collage and book catalog dubbed the Amok First Dispatch. The Amok First Dispatch was organized like no other book catalog or bookstore – eschewing traditional genres it set up its own categories: Control, Mayhem, Orgone, Sleaze and others. The Amok First Dispatch became an immediate underground sensation and counted psychedelic visionary Timothy Leary among its first enthusiastic mail order customers.

“Disinformation” was an ironic badge we wore with pride. It meant information not approved to appear in the paper or on the nightly news, information the powerful thought might be dangerous.

It wasn’t that we believed it. It’s that we didn’t believe what was broadcast on those other places.

In the 1980s, if you said you were open-minded about alien visitation, people thought you were insane. Not kooky uncle insane. Horse-paste-eating-Charles-Manson-“put-him-in-a-COVID-camp” insane.

These days, clean-cut Rand-type military engineers are testifying openly before Congress on the very real possibility of alien visitation.

It’s true that disinformation is mostly trash. It’s the landfill where they bury the bodies.

In 1997, Wired magazine posted “Everything You Know Is Wrong” about a website called Disinformation and its creator, Richard Metzger, “who jokingly calls himself the High Priest of Harmful Matter.” (I owned their print collection.) The post describes in near-heroic terms how Metzger had recently moved his operation from New York to Los Angeles “after cable giant TCI pulled the plug.”

Today, Wired routinely supports the same kind of corporate deplatforming of anyone who says anything that someone somewhere might interpret in a potentially dangerous way. (King Louis-Phillipe would approve.)

Something happened between 1997 and now that changed the cultural perception of ideas and information, of memes.

In its original 1976 connotation, a “meme” was the mental equivalent of a gene: the basic unit of an idea, the smallest part that can be transmitted, alone or in nexuses, and so either rise or fall in frequency based on conditions.

In the 1990s, the idea that ideas could evolve breached the public consciousness, no doubt because the internet seemed to offer a way to quantify culture in ways that hadn’t been measurable before. This fascination was memorialized in Susan Blackmore’s 1999 book The Meme Machine, which attempted to establish “memetics” as a science akin to genetics. (Alas, it didn’t get very far.)

But as a meme itself—the meme of memes—that model is not what took hold in the popular culture. By 2004, people were speaking of posts “going viral,” I suspect because, in the popular consciousness at least, evolution invokes a sense of progressive improvement and so was too positive of a term to describe crude, often deliberately insulting humor of memes, like farting peasants. It seems so much edgier when likened to a disease.

Whatever triggered that change—I won’t speculate—it was the contagion model rather than the genetic-evolutionary one that took root with Millennial and younger generations, who have never known a time without a meme of memes.

We talk about “consuming” information—an idea, a meme. But that’s misleading. We don’t consume a meme like we consume a meal. If we did, we’d all be vomiting a lot more—a dozen or more times a day, by my count, as it’s very common for all of us to be exposed to an idea that we reject.

Ideas are not germs either. They don’t function or spread the same. Exposure, even repeated monotonous exposure, is not enough to cause infection, otherwise we’d all be fans of Taylor Swift by now. In fact, social psychologists have known for decades that repeated exposure to an idea you reject actually causes you to become more retrenched against that idea—not despite but especially when it comes attached to evidence! (Humans are a lark.)

Disinformation isn’t a vaccine, but it might be closer to that than a virus.

Information spreads, yes, but so do genes, water, and gravity. The idea that information spreads like a virus is simply wrong. Culture is not a disease.

We don’t have a good sense of what causes people to believe what they believe, except in the simplest of cases—i.e. it comports with what they already believe. In fact, there’s evidence that people’s opinions are not stable over time, that they continually construct and reconstruct them on the fly. (See the work of John Zaller and others.)

And yet, confidence in the contagion model is the basis for the latest public health-style fight against “disinformation.”

But if the idea that information spreads like a virus is wrong, that means—you may want to sit down for this one—the basis for anti-disinformation is itself disinformation. The anti-disinformation crowd ought to be eating itself.

That model in your head—the meme you carry about memes—matters. If it’s more like the genetic-evolutionary model, then you’ll leave room for mutation and selection. Ideas have to be allowed to mix and remix openly in the information ecosystem. We want viewpoint diversity, which is a public good. Without it, there’s no evolution.

If, on the other hand, you believe the contagion model, where bad ideas spread by contact, then you’ll take the public health approach, which is to track and monitor all variants so you can stop them from spreading, including by quarantine and isolation.

On this view, other people are not wrong. They’re sick. And they need to be cured.