The meme is the message
Jacob Horne speaking with Jackson Dahl on Episode 09 of Dialectic:
Jacob:
What is a meme?It's a shared idea, or an idea that is going to spread. Memes are obviously… there's like a million different ways you can come at this. It's the image that you're going to share with your friend, or that's going viral on Twitter. It's a large idea that maybe an industry or a group of people organize around.
At an even higher level, there are large visions or shelling points that you can organize around. [...]
At the most fundamental, it's like, "Oh, cool, this is a funny picture." But at their higher level, it's, "We have this shared idea that we want to work towards." And it's both in our minds and in many people's minds.
Jackson:
We have a kind of "last 20 years" idea in our head of capital-M "Meme," growing from the early block-text 4chan thing to stuff now. But one of the things that you've articulated well is: the cross is an incredibly powerful meme. The American flag is an incredibly powerful meme. [...]One of the more interesting ideas you've ever shared is, if you put the American flag at the center of that overlapping circles, the truest, almost most American thing is the flag. On the perimeter, you could have liberty, freedom, and different versions of what being American means.
Jacob:
Yeah, the American dream, all the surrounding memes and ideas and symbols. It's like, "Oh, you need your house," or "Home of the free, land of the brave." Every cultural tenet is actually anchoring around that single thing. [...]Jackson:
Yeah. It's a helpful way to realize, too, that this isn't a new thing. We've had memes forever. Obviously, we're calling it something in the internet-native form. But in fact, these things are maybe the true shelling point for movements, maybe even religions.