The Memetic Nature of Digital Media and AI

Ideas spread like wildfire now, but not just any ideas—the ones that the system rewards. The ones that travel well. The ones that fit inside the pipes and platforms that carry them. This is memetics in the digital age.

A meme isn’t just a joke on the internet. It’s any unit of culture that replicates and mutates as it moves from one person to another. Stories, phrases, habits, songs. Some thrive, some fade away. This has always been true, but what’s different now is the velocity and the scale. The sheer force of the system itself, selecting what lives and what dies—not through conscious choice, but through the invisible hand of algorithms, attention, and engagement.

This is the world that media ecology warns us about. Media isn’t just something we consume; it’s an environment we live in. And environments shape behavior. A fish doesn’t notice the water until it changes temperature (if at all). We don’t notice our media environment until it shifts beneath us, until suddenly, what spreads isn’t what’s true or what’s useful, but simply what moves the fastest.

And then there’s AI. Not just another tool, but another kind of memetic system. One that absorbs the sum total of human knowledge—our histories, our biases, our triumphs and mistakes—and then remixes them into something new. But not new like an artist in a studio, pondering, hesitating, revising. AI doesn’t ponder. It predicts. It assembles. It plays the game of cultural evolution at machine speed, producing thousands of iterations in the time it takes a human to write a sentence. And the system watches. Which versions do we click on? Which get shared? The AI learns, adapts, generates again. A feedback loop, tight and relentless.

Where does that leave us? In a world where memes, algorithms, and AI don’t just reflect culture—they steer it. The question isn’t just what we consume anymore. It’s what we allow to shape us. What we choose to notice. What we choose to amplify.

Media has always made us, just as we make it. But now, the pace of the game has changed. The systems move faster than our awareness of them. And maybe, just maybe, the first step toward reclaiming control isn’t to unplug—but to see the water we’re swimming in.