I remember first hearing the phrase internet meme
and then being kind of annoyed
because people very clearly thought that an internet meme
was the only kind of meme there is.
We think about culture being eras, epochs or times within art,
and so to actually talk about the discrete units that exist
that are surrounding us all the time and how they evolve -
that was super, super interesting.
All the time I was thinking,
"God these brands are just going to tear me apart
because of what I'm doing."
But they're still in on the joke.
And you have to be, and that's the thing.
You can't be seen as going,
"No, I don’t want to be a part of this."
This is the world we live in, this is it.
This is what's going on around us.
Do you send a lot of memes?
I do yeah, constantly.
Rather than communicate, like yeah.
That's how I communicate.
And they can just say a lot more than one sentence as well,
in some situations. True.
Yeah, a meme is a written...
is a written joke, yeah,
that's related to something that happens in real life.
I think it also links with this ironic attitude to everything.
Where you can just express your disdain, disappointment,
a lack of trust in something.
So that's why we call it a universal language.
It brings you to this part of the internet collective,
so you feel that a certain community gets you
or maybe you're getting a certain community.
I read The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins, back at university
and I was really inspired by the idea that you could have these
units of culture called a meme that spread from person to person.
So Dawkins talked about religion being the ultimate meme -
how you can have religion or the idea of God as such an infectious concept
that you can't not think about it once you've heard it,
but then as it passes from person to person, it evolves.
To understand memes,
you need to understand the concept of a replicator.
That is information that is copied with variation and selection.
So genes are a replicator,
when animals mate or seeds grow and so on
you have information that’s copied
with variations
and huge selection pressure, so most of them die.
This is what Darwin saw back in The Origin of Species in 1859.
The same applies to memes.
All the information that we put out all day long and all the books
we read and the radio programs and TV things we watch and so on,
they're competing for our attention.
Most of them we forget, most of them nobody bothers to watch
and the very few that succeed and get millions of people involved
are the ones that we see all around us in the world.
Same process is happening in biology with a different mechanism.
First of all it got a bit of attention
but it sort of sat there for a little bit
and things and I was thinking, "Ah maybe they're not that funny".
And then there was a fashion show in Paris, the Dior show.
And at the time Celine Dion was superhype because
she was over in Paris and everyone was just going crazy for her.
And I saw this image of her with this Dior bag, so I put the Celine logo
on top of it and faked it up to look like it was gold,
posted it,
went to bed,
woke up in the morning to a complete tirade of messages on my phone.
And Dior had reposted it and it just completely kicked off.
When I think of memes I think of them as synonymous with the idea
of creating bits of culture.
And I think the best advertising and the best design and the best thinkers
behind the best advertising, and best design,
have always gone out to create bits of culture. And that's memetic.
The fact that you've given people the structure for them
to find themselves in, they might not have called it
memetic or called it memes.
It's really important to understand what it means to say
genes are selfish.
Or replicators are selfish or memes are selfish.
What it means is that they will get copied
however and whenever they can, given the opportunity.
So when we think about the world of memes -
internet memes or every other kind of memes -
we think we're developing them, designing them, creating them
for our own purposes, when a different way of looking at it
is they are using us to get themselves ahead in the competition.
And that way of looking at it shows you how very close to biology it is
and how our role is not to be in charge and doing it for our own sake,
it's all really happening for the sake of the memes themselves.