MEME SIMULATOR

In 1976, biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word meme — a unit of cultural information that replicates from mind to mind, just as genes replicate from body to body.

A memeplex is what happens when memes cluster for mutual survival. Afterlife spreads better alongside sacred texts, divine punishment, and ritual. They protect and amplify each other.

Religions, ideologies, conspiracy theories — all memeplexes. Nobody designs them. They self-organize through selection pressure.

Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, 1976) — coined "meme." Cultural transmission follows evolutionary logic: variation, selection, inheritance.

Susan Blackmore (The Meme Machine, 1999) — the self is a memeplex, not a container. Introduced "temes" — tech-based memes replicating independently of human minds.

Daniel Dennett — religions are wild memes that evolved to hijack cognitive systems exactly as parasites hijack biology.

CCRU / Nick Land — hyperstition: fictions that make themselves real through collective belief and action.

Jonathan Haidt — mapped the moral hooks that make memes sticky: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, purity, liberty.

For most of history, memeplex spread was limited by geography and literacy. A new religion might take centuries. The internet collapsed that to years. Social media collapsed it to months.

Nobody designed QAnon. It was an evolutionary event: memes found a stable self-reinforcing configuration matching the cognitive architecture of millions under status anxiety.

Understanding memeplexes is cognitive self-defense. When you can see the structure — afterlife + divine punishment + chosen people + cosmic enemy — you can recognize the attractor before it fully captures you.