Part I · §0 — Frontispiece & scope
A Field Manual for the
Classification & Culture
of Living Memes
A meme is a unit of cultural transmission — a self-replicating idea that survives by its fitness to spread through human minds. This manual catalogues specimens across six diagnostic dimensions, renders each into a numeric genome, and propagates them under glass to observe which ideas saturate a population.
- Document
- MX-06
- Specimens
- 9 catalogued
- Dimensions
- 6 diagnostic
- Method
- In-vitro assay
- Status
- All viable
Memes live and die by evolutionary fitness. They compete for the scarcest resources — attention and conviction — and, like organisms, they mutate, defend themselves against criticism, and absorb beneficial traits from rivals. Each specimen in the catalogue below is rendered into a six-trait genome; a handful can then be loaded into the propagation assay (§2) and set loose in a shared culture of host minds to see which idea saturates the population.
§1Specimen Catalogue
9 cataloguedMissionary Religions
Fides evangelica
Patient, organized, and built to outlast empires.
Capitalism and Free Markets
Mercatus liber
Absorbs everything, rewards its own spread, never sleeps.
Techno-Optimism
Progressus perpetuus
Explosively contagious in a boom, fragile in a bust.
Strange Loops
Recursio mirabilis
Hard to catch, impossible to shake once it takes hold.
Universal Darwinism
Acidum universale
The universal acid — slow to catch, dissolves every rival it touches.
New Atheism
Ratio militans
Explosively viral on the attack, but burns hot and fades fast.
The Beginning of Infinity
Cognitio infinita
Demanding to catch, but a near-unshakable lens once installed.
Effective Accelerationism
Acceleratio thermodynamica
A bull-market wildfire — wildly contagious, thrives on its enemies.
AI Doom
Timor existentialis
Fear-borne and sticky; every capability jump feeds the dread.
§2The Propagation Assay
live · interactiveawaiting first mutation