For the second time in two days, Victoria Police expresses "extreme disappointment" in one of its officers, this time after alt-right material shared on social media was connected to an officer accused of using a hand gesture associated with white power.

A 22-year-old geology student pleads guilty to stealing from one of Australia's biggest gold mines, saying he wanted a "memento" to motivate him to finish his degree.

SA senator Sarah Hanson-Young says a crude Facebook post shared by a business owned by the Ceduna Mayor is "degrading" to women, but he says his Facebook account was hacked.

I can’t stop laughing at this.

Hate against Asians has been on the rise.

Lori Lightfoot meme is being used for charity.

Head coach Mike Leach tweeted a meme of a noose

Lori Lightfoot meme is being used for charity.

Questions and answers, the former from adrian_turtle, who is awesome, and at least one of the latter stolen from hobbitbabe, who is also awesome.

( Read more... )

From just about everybody.

1. Are you an Essential Worker?

Nope. I have been comfortably working from home for a month, making online education. It's useful, thousands of people have been learning about bacterial genomics from my stuff, but it's not essential. In many ways my job hasn't changed very much since lockdown since we did a lot of collaborating with scientists all over the world by conference call, in order to make material that goes on the internet anyway.

2. How many drinks have you had since the quarantine has started?

Hi, I've just finished celebrating Pesach. The two of us got through about 2 bottles of wine in the course of two seders and two kiddushes. And in the couple of weeks before that, something around one bottle between the two of us, again mostly for religious reasons rather than mental health reasons.

3. If you have kids... Are they driving you nuts?

I don't have kids, but there are children who are normally part of my life and now I'm quarantined in a different house from them. They are being amazing and bringing positivity to my life through the limited interaction we're allowed, playing music with me over video link, waving and sending hugs when I'm calling their adults or walking past their house for exercise. I am probably less sane than usual but it's from too little contact with not-my-own children, not too much.

4. What new hobby have you taken up during this

Online play readthroughs, organized by the marvellous wildeabandon. I've tried to start an ultra, ultra low-key exercise routine at home, which isn't a completely new hobby, but is something I hadn't done for some years.

5. How many grocery runs have you done?

None at all since I had maybe suspicious symptoms. We've got by on the generosity of friends bringing us occasional top-ups of extra-perishable stuff like milk and mushrooms, a big online order that fortuitously arrived just before we started full isolation, and a couple of local organizations that were able to make limited deliveries of produce. Before that, we weren't really counting. We had a decent amount of supplies in at the start of lockdown, and jack was visiting the local corner shop a couple of times a week to top up on fresh produce (with careful distancing), but we haven't needed to make a 'run' to a big supermarket since lockdown officially started.

6. What are you spending your stimulus check on?

I'm not getting any extra money, which is reasonable because I don't need any extra money. I am still working full time and still earning my full salary, as is jack. I'm not really even spending much extra on working from home rather than in an office; it's warm enough not to need the heating on during the day, and we already had plenty of broadband. We're spending very slightly more on food because we're getting everything delivered rather than picking up our own shopping, but it's fairly trivial on the scale of things.

Also, can I just say it's a weird framing to talk about a 'stimulus', ie money provided to encourage people to spend and keep the economy buoyant. The state is paying money to people to make it possible for them to stay home without starving, and really the aim is, or should be, to keep the economy as stagnant as possible, not to encourage economic activity which would involve people interacting and spreading the infection.

7. Do you have any special occasions that you will miss during this quarantine?

My plague of disappointment started with a work trip to Paraguay to help with some in-person training. Then I missed spending Passover with my family like I normally do. Other than that, I saw this coming far enough in advance that I didn't make a whole lot of plans for this spring or summer


8. Are you keeping your housework done?

About the same amount as normal. To an extent we tend to tidy for visitors and we're not having any visitors. But we're mostly succeeding with keeping on top of general maintenance. On the other hand I did zero Passover cleaning because I was isolating from jack at the time so not going into the kitchen, and I was uncertain enough about supplies that I wasn't willing to eliminate leavened products.

9a. What movie have you watched during this quarantine?

Lionheart
Porco Rosso

9b. What are you reading right now?

Err... Twitter, mostly. And some Gemara, the mystical bit of Chagigah, which is a project I've been meaning to get to for ages, and which I will hopefully be talking about soon.

9c. What video game are you playing?

At the weekend managed to progress our three-way game of Stellaris with cjwatson in a different house, so that was cool. Still a lot of Monster Legends on my phone. A little bit of the second chapter of 12 Labours of Hercules, but only about as often as I was playing it anyway, which isn't very often.

10. What are you streaming with?

Netflix, and even that occasionally. Spotify and YouTube for music. I haven't managed to watch any of the free broadcast theatre and opera performances yet.

11. 9 months from now is there any chance of you having a baby?

Very unlikely but not completely impossible. I'm quarantined away from the partner I'm most likely to have potentially-reproductive sex with (but I guess rarely indulging isn't never). I am 41 and was recently diagnosed with PCOS so I'm quite possibly not as fertile as I spent most of my adult life assuming. I have a coil, which should be pretty reliable at preventing pregnancy, but it has reached the end of its predicted 10-year lifetime, and getting it replaced was one of the things I failed to get sorted out while non-emergency medical stuff was still happening.

My partner is going to have a baby much sooner than 9 months away though! She made it before the virus even existed, and I have absolutely no idea how long it will be before I'm allowed to meet the little one, but I'm still quite excited.

12. What's your go-to quarantine meal?

About the same as not in quarantine: we call it goulash, but it isn't really anything to do with goulash. It's a sort of veggie chilli, basically onions, garlic, spice, tomato sauce, some combination of Quorn mince and beans, and veg if we have lots of veg available but otherwise it's nice on its own.

13. Is this whole situation making you paranoid?

So siderea the actual psych says it only counts as paranoia if you're irrationally afraid that beings with agency ... are behaving malevolently towards you personally. So, no, I do not think the virus is out to get me nor deliberately created by evil people.

However, I've already spent much of the last five years worrying that the government and much of the populace want me dead, and it's the worst version of that increasingly nasty government which is in charge of deciding whether buying ventilators and medical equipment is a good use of money that could otherwise be used for bridges to nowhere. When I hear people ranting about foreigners or Europeans or 'citizens of nowhere' it feels personal. I think it isn't, mostly. I'm a shirley exception for lots of people, or at least, I see posts on social media about how it's morally good to exterminate Jews from people who are broadly civil to me as an individual.

I'm scared of vigilantes who are using the pandemic as an excuse for violence against people they don't like being out in public, and to an extent I'm scared of overreach by the official police. And I'm somewhat scared of looting, of people getting desperate enough that they start breaking into houses like mine where there is enough toilet paper and storable foods. And a little bit scared of wannabe fascists trying to deliberately infect liberals and Jews. But not very scared, not to the point that it's actually interfering with my day-to-day life. Anxious, I guess, rather than paranoid.

14. Has your internet gone out on you during this time?

Nah. Internet is fine and I'm deeply grateful for that.

15. What month do you predict this all ends?

I don't think it's going to end, really, not all of it at once. It's going to be a very gradual climb back towards sufficient population immunity that we can live our lives without infection avoidance being the major determining factor in all decisions.

Predicting the end of the plague would require me to predict all of: how fast scientists will come up with a vaccine and reliable tests; how the disease itself will move through the population; and what our terrible politicians will decide, and I don't really have any information on any of those.

I'm guessing some relaxation of lockdown round about July or August, but we will still be very much in a pandemic situation. Sticking my finger in the air I think we'll likely have the capacity for mass vaccination and testing by early 2021, let's say January. But whether we will actually in practice have an effective programme of prevention and detection depends on decisions by a leadership who are erratic and evil, plus we are heading for a cliff-edge end to our Brexit transition at the end of 2020, so I think people will still be getting infected and dying well into 2021 or even 2022.

16. First thing you're gonna do when you get off quarantine?

Go to my OSOs' house and hug my partners and their children. And meet the baby, because I'm pretty certain that getting off quarantine is happening after baby is external.

17. Where do you wish you were right now?

I'm pretty happy with my location, my nice pleasant house with all my friends inside my computer, surrounded by a beautiful spring. The problem is not where I am, it's that I have been forced to stay here for a month and expect to continue here for months to come. I wish I could go to other places, especially places where my friends are.

I slightly wish to be in a country with a competent government, if I have to pick somewhere I'd probably go for New Zealand, but I don't actually wish I were in NZ, since I don't know anybody there and I can't imagine the circumstances that would lead to being there.

18. What free-from-quarantine activity are you missing the most?

Visiting people in person, primarily.

19. Have you run out of toilet paper and hand sanitizer?

No. We usually buy a big family pack of TP once every few weeks and we happened to do so just before lockdown. Also I don't believe in hand sanitizer in a domestic setting.

20. Do you have enough food to last a month?

Yeah, probably. If we really couldn't get any fresh supplies for a whole month we would struggle, and we haven't counted it out in terms of calories and micronutrients per person per day, but we have decent amounts of long-lasting carbs and tinned vegetables.

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Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell on Saturday morning, allegedly by suicide. While the media announced that the sex offender and financier had hung himself, the internet is not as convinced. Most people share the sentiment that he was in fact killed by someone with a whole lot of power. Here are the best conspiracy theory memes that play largely on Epstein's connections with the Clinton and Trump administration, the Clinton body count, and the accusations that many more people were involved in the wealthy man's sex trafficking operation. You don't need to drink the conspiracy theory Kool-Aid to find these funny memes entertaining, so make up your minds for yourselves.

Yesterday Trump tweeted a photo of himself hard at work on his inauguration speech and the internet has been having a field day with it. 

It started on twitter with people guessing at what The Donald might be drawing. Shortly thereafter it got a small photoshop battle. 

'What's Donald Drawing' definitely has the potential to catch on.

Get More Trump Memes that are simply tremendous, people tell me how amazing these memes are all the time.

These memes will make you us want to quit Stalin and overthrow capitalism right Mao.

During a meeting to discuss Syria, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was photographed assertively pointing a finger at Donald Trump. Trump later tweeted the photo with the caption, "Nervous Nancy's unhinged meltdown!" the photo has inspired a whole host of memes from every political angle. 

Whether you're a Trump supporter or a Pelosi fan, we think you'll find these trending memes amusing. Or maybe you hate both of them equally! That's certainly an option too!

Why do politics always make for the best meme material? We'll just let the politicians speak for themselves. 

In case you missed last night's democratic presidential debate, then we'll give you a little run down: Cory Booker accused Joe Biden of being high, Amy Klobuchar claimed she raised a crap-load of money from her ex-boyfriends, and Biden made an, uh, brain-dead comment about domestic violence. 

Scroll down to watch some of the highlights and view some of the internet's reactions!

Look, we definitely don't want to hate on any particular candidate or take sides in this presidential election cycle, but Joe Biden has just been so meme-able this election season that we really had to take advantage of the material handed to us. We think that Biden supporters and haters alike will be able to laugh at these.

We've been seeing these Bernie Sanders memes practically everywhere on the internet lately, and they don't appear to be stopping any time soon! Here's our last gallery in case you missed 'em. 

We sincerely hope you're not sick of political memes yet, because we've still got far to go before the 2020 presidential elections, so buckle up!

Last night the 2020 Iowa Democratic Caucus stirred up quite the controversy when it was announced that the results would be delayed due to "inconsistencies" in a new app meant to speed up the reporting results of the caucus. Ironic, to say the least. 

But hang tight, because they're set to be released at 5 pm Eastern Time.

Ahead of the results being released, Pete Buttigieg gave what appeared to be a victory speech last night to the confusion of many. The bizarre move has lead many to believe that the system may have been rigged in Mayor Pete's favor.

As always, we have to give the disclaimer that we're not picking sides; we're merely reporting on what the internet has been saying, so scroll down to see some of our favorite reaction memes and tweets while we all wait impatiently for the results.

What started as Bernie Sanders writing an innocent thank you note to his field staff on a white board turned into memers filling it in with hotter takes and less savory messages. Seriously, people should know better at this point than to post images on the internet of people with white boards. It's just asking for bad news.

President Donald Trump was photographed on Friday returning to the White House from a trip to North Carolina and let's just say...he's looking a bit like a mandarin orange. People have been meme-ing and roasting the photo, which shows a very defined tan line of the orange variety on his face. Trump of course called the photo "fake news," and while we have to partially agree that the original was likely altered a bit, it's still amusing to see the reactions nonetheless!

While we would love for election season to be over right about now, we've gotta admit that the resulting political memes have been top-notch. The internet has been loving this particular dank meme, which shows Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi ripping up Donald Trump's State of the Union speech.

You're probably already aware that Michael Bloomberg, cringey billionaire extraordinaire and 2020 presidential candidate, has been reaching out to various big-name meme accounts on Instagram asking them to post content that makes him look a little more...hip to the kids, shall we say? 

But apparently he's doing something right with his presidential campaign, as he's been soaring in the polls and we're seeing ads for him practically everywhere.

Normally we don't like to get too political, but it's clear that Bloomberg was not hugged enough as a child.

Last night's democratic debate in Nevada got pretty damn spicy to say the least. So much so that many are calling it the most entertaining debate of the election cycle so far. Pete spoke Spanish, Warren (and every other candidate, for that matter) came out swinging against Bloomberg, and many, many other things that warranted a monumental cringe fest. 

So please enjoy the following roast-y memes from the night and you can watch a more in-depth recap of it here!

Last night Americans tuned in to watch the audience-free live democratic debate between remaining candidates Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Topics of discussion included the Green New Deal, Donald Trump, and of course, the COVID-19 pandemic. You can watch the debate here to decide for yourself who won, and click here for more political memes!

In these trying and crazy times, Kentuckians are looking to Governor Andy Beshear for answers. His daily 5pm livestream updates have become popular for their wholesome messages and his amusing call-outs to stubborn bingo halls that just won't close for coronavirus quarantining. He's even earned himself a Facebook meme page, entitled "Andy Beshear Memes for Social Distancing Teens." 

Check some of them out below!  

Поздравляю всех с выходом ремейка. Вот вам ещё одна порция смехуёчков про Номуру и про  главных героев концовки.

Some things change: I never thought I’d see the day when I would walk into a gun shop wearing a mask and not be taken at gunpoint. Some things remain the same: The Land O’ Lakes people eradicated the Native … Read more

HEY! PLEASE FOLLOW @LAMEBOOK ON INSTAGRAM! THANKS!

Repórter da BBC volta a entrevistar líder de grupo após vídeo que virou meme.

What happens when memers meet the subject of their memes? In the case of the BA Test Kitchen meeting the brains behind @meme_appetit, pure gold. Harry Kersh and Will Martin started the accounts when they discovered their shared love of BA videos, and the Instagram and Twitter accounts have since taken off. 

Now with almost 400,000 followers on Instagram, the account has a lot of fans — including some members of the test kitchen. In this video, the BA cooks explain why they love (or dislike) some of the account's memes, whether it's accurate, and whether they even "get it." Watch them react to various memes and Kersh and Martin attempt to explain their reasoning behind them. Read more...

As the pols take the fight out back to the web, will the dank memes prevail?

Jemimah Rodrigues decided to give the Twitteratti a dose of laughter after the ICC asked fans who they would call if given a chance.

एनएसजीचे सदस्यत्व मिळण्यासाठी ओबामा यांनी दिलेला पाठिंबा आपल्यासाठी पुरेसा नाही.

A meme based on an image from a video clip of Lisa, a member of K-pop girl group Black Pink, has gone viral among global celebrities on Twitter. Lisa uploaded the 1 minute, 20 second video, which shows her performing a sexy dance routine, on her personal YouTube channel on April 20. Hollywood celebr...

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UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres has called for an "all-out effort to end hate speech globally" amid what he called a "tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scare-mongering" unleashed during the coronavirus pandemic.

This article from our 2013 issue, “Fame,” offers a look at the way information—whether it’s true or not—spreads across the Internet.

On April 11, 2012, Zeddie Little appeared on Good Morning America, wearing the radiant, slightly perplexed smile of one enjoying instant fame. About a week earlier, Little had been a normal, if handsome, 25-year-old trying to make it in public relations. Then on March 31, he was photographed amid a crowd of runners in a South Carolina race by a stranger, Will King, who posted the image to a social networking website, Reddit. Dubbed “Ridiculously Photogenic Guy,” Little’s picture circulated on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, accruing likes, comments, and captions (“Picture gets put up as employee of the month/for a company he doesn’t work for”). It spawned spinoffs (Ridiculously Photogenic Dog, Prisoner, and Syrian Rebel) and leapt to the mainstream media. At a high point, ABC Morning News reported that a Google search for “Zeddie Little” yielded 59 million hits.

Why the sudden fame? The truth is that Little hadn’t become famous: His meme had. According to website Know Your Meme, which documents viral Internet phenomena, a meme is “a piece of content or an idea that’s passed from person to person, changing and evolving along the way.” Ridiculously Photogenic Guy is a kind of Internet meme represented by LOL cats: that is, a photograph, video, or cartoon, often overlaid with a snarky message, perfect for incubating in the bored, fertile minds of cubicle workers and college students. In an age where politicians campaign through social media and viral marketers ponder the appeal of sneezing baby pandas, memes are more important than ever—however trivial they may seem.

But trawling the Internet, I found a strange paradox: While memes were everywhere, serious meme theory was almost nowhere. Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist who coined the word “meme” in his classic 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, seemed bent on disowning the Internet variety, calling it a “hijacking” of the original term. The peer-reviewed Journal of Memetics folded in 2005. “The term has moved away from its theoretical beginnings, and a lot of people don’t know or care about its theoretical use,” philosopher and meme theorist Daniel Dennett told me. What has happened to the idea of the meme, and what does that evolution reveal about its usefulness as a concept?

In an age where politicians campaign through social media and viral marketers ponder the appeal of sneezing baby pandas, memes are more important than ever—however trivial they may seem.

Memes were originally framed in relationship to genes. In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins claimed that humans are “survival machines” for our genes, the replicating molecules that emerged from the primordial soup and that, through mutation and natural selection, evolved to generate beings that were more effective as carriers and propagators of genes. Still, Dawkins explained, genes could not account for all of human behavior, particularly the evolution of cultures. So he identified a second replicator, a “unit of cultural transmission” that he believed was “leaping from brain to brain” through imitation. He named these units “memes,” an adaption of the Greek word mimene, “to imitate.”

Dawkins’ memes include everything from ideas, songs, and religious ideals to pottery fads. Like genes, memes mutate and evolve, competing for a limited resource—namely, our attention. Memes are, in Dawkins’ view, viruses of the mind—infectious. The successful ones grow exponentially, like a super flu. While memes are sometimes malignant (hellfire and faith, for atheist Dawkins), sometimes benign (catchy songs), and sometimes terrible for our genes (abstinence), memes do not have conscious motives. But still, he claims, memes parasitize us and drive us.

Pinpointing when memes first made the leap to the Internet is tricky. Nowadays, we might think of the dancing baby, also known as Baby Cha-Cha, that grooved into our inboxes in the 1990s. It was a kind of proto-meme, but no one called it that at the time. The first reference I could find to an “Internet meme” appeared in a footnote in a 2003 academic article, describing an important event in the life of Jonah Peretti, co-founder of the hugely successful websites The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. In 2001, as a procrastinating graduate student at MIT, Peretti decided to order a pair of Nike sneakers customized to read “sweatshop.” Nike refused. Peretti forwarded the email exchange to friends, who sent it on and on, until the story leapt to the mainstream media, where Peretti debated a Nike representative on NBC’s Today Show. Peretti later wrote, “Without really trying, I had released what biologist Richard Dawkins calls a meme.”

Peretti concluded that the email chain had spread exponentially “because it had access to such a wide range of different social networks.” Like Dawkins, he saw that a meme’s success depends on other memes, its ecosystem—and further saw that Internet memes’ ecosystems were online social networks, years before Facebook existed. According to a recent profile in New York Magazine, the Nike experience was formative for Peretti, who created BuzzFeed with the explicit goal of creating viral Internet memes. The company uses a formula called “Big Seed Marketing,” that begins with an equation describing the growth of a virus, the spread of a disease.

From the perspective of serious meme theorists, Internet memes have trivialized and distorted the spirit of the idea. Dennett told me that, in a planned workshop to be held in May 2014, he hopes to “rehabilitate the term in a very precise kind of way” for studying cultural evolution.

According to Dawkins, what sets Internet memes apart is how they are created. “Instead of mutating by random chance before spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity,” he explained in a recent video released by the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. He seems to think that the fact that Internet memes are engineered to go viral, rather than evolving by way of natural selection, is a salient difference that distinguishes from other memes—which is arguable, since what catches fire on the Internet can be as much a product of luck as any unexpected mutation. 

“I don’t know about you, but I’m not initially attracted by the idea of my brain as a sort of dung heap in which the larvae of other peoples’ ideas renew themselves.”

But if the concept of memes can really offer new insight into the intricate web of digital culture and cultural evolution more broadly, why have academics neglected it? Looking for answers, I called Susan Blackmore, a British professor who may be one of the last defenders of memetics as a scientific field. In a 2008 TED talk, Blackmore is an animated speaker, bright-eyed and wiry, her short grey hair dyed with streaks of blue. I reached her at her home in Devon, England, where she is occasionally joined in the garden by Dawkins and Dennett for meetings of the “meme lab.” “It’s only a bit of fun, nothing serious,” Blackmore said. Sometimes, members try experiments, like folding Chinese sailing ships from origami, itself a kind of meme. She remembered a March meeting in which the issue of Internet memes arose, saying, “Richard was upset because he invented the term, which shouldn’t just be about viral Internet memes. It’s a very powerful concept for understanding why humans are the way we are.”

For Blackmore, memetics is a science. An Oxford-educated psychologist, her early work was on telepathy, which she spent years investigating after an out-of-body experience at the age of 19. She subsequently found no evidence for the existence of paranormal phenomena, but she was no stranger to pushing scientific frontiers. It is perhaps unsurprising that she decided to flesh out memetics. Dawkins wrote that, with memes, he did not intend to “sculpt a grand theory of human culture.” In her 1999 book, The Meme Machine, Blackmore does just that. She argues that everything from the development of language to our big brains were products of “memetic drive.” This is perhaps her most radical claim: that memes make us do things.

Considering this idea in his book Consciousness Explained, Dennett writes, “I don’t know about you, but I’m not initially attracted by the idea of my brain as a sort of dung heap in which the larvae of other peoples’ ideas renew themselves… who’s in charge, in according to this vision—we or our memes?” Still, Dennett, too, became a major proponent of meme theory. Speaking on the phone, he used memes to explain the joy we take in our culture and related decisions not to procreate wildly. College, he pointed out, is a great underminer of genetic fitness. Reading Blackmore and Dennett, the idea of meme as mental parasite becomes both more and less convincing: If we are created and driven by our memes, then we are our memes, a duality that Dennett himself seems to recognize.

Perhaps the notion of the meme is evolving in the direction of its own survival.

Yet, the very breadth of the concept makes it difficult to approach memes from the perspective of serious, observation-based science. In the analogy to genes, memes have inevitably disappointed. As Dawkins himself wrote, memes, as entities, are more vague than genes, where alleles compete to hold the same “chromosomal slots.” Unlike genes, memes are not directly observable and have high rates of mutation. Also, no one seems to be sure if memes exist. On the phone, Blackmore told me “the one good reason” memetics might not be a science: “There has been no example of where some scientific discovery has been made using meme theory, that couldn’t have been made any other way.” Still, Blackmore told me that people are doing research on memes—they just don’t call them by that name.

Looking for meme theory at work, I found network theory, an interdisciplinary field that unites computer science, statistics, physics, ecology, and even marketing. “If you want to use memetics to explain ‘everything,’ like how religion spreads, the problem is the data,” said Michele Coscia, a researcher at the Harvard Kennedy School, who recently wrote a paper displaying a statistical “decision tree” that described the success of memes like Ridiculously Photogenic Guy. For Coscia, Internet memes, with their visible mutations and view counts, solved the problem of empirical evidence, allowing him to do work he sees as analogous to genetics experiments.

Perhaps the notion of the meme is evolving in the direction of its own survival. The term “Internet meme” appears to be growing exponentially from year to year, in classical memetic fashion. This is what Bob Scott, a digital humanities librarian at Columbia University, found when he ran various searches on the comprehensive news and wire-service aggregator LexisNexis. He saw that the term “Internet meme” showed up with the new millennium and really took off in 2004, with references roughly doubling each year thereafter. 

Infectious Internet memes are now big business. BuzzFeed now draws 85 million unique visitors a month, compared to The New York Times’ website at 29 million, and was recently valued at $200 million. Its staff trawl the Internet for viral content and curate it, adding news stories, humor pieces, and advertisements, or “sponsored posts.” These categories can be hard to disentangle, even though ads are printed on a taupe background. Scrolling through BuzzFeed, I read: “20 People We Hope to Never See Promoted on OK Cupid,” (which was an ad by Virgin Mobile), a new story on poisoned Indian children, and a post about a Republican Congressman who had “live tweeted” Jay-Z’s new album. It turned out that “23 Times When Wal-Mart Didn’t Disappoint” was not an ad, but still, the post made me think about how subversive humor—the kind that made Peretti’s email exchange with Nike so popular—could be used to advertise one of America’s least-subversive mega-chains.

While entertaining bored office workers seems harmless enough, there is something troubling about a multi-million dollar company using our minds as petri dishes in which to grow its ideas. I began to wonder if Dawkins was right—if the term meme is really being hijacked, rather than mindlessly evolving like bacteria. The idea of memes “forces you to recognize that we humans are not entirely the center of the universe where information is concerned—we’re vehicles and not necessarily in charge,” said James Gleick, author of The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, when I spoke to him on the phone. “It’s a humbling thing.”

It is more humbling still to think that our minds can be seduced not through the agency of memes, as Blackmore sees it, but through human agency and clever algorithms. Not by religions or quirks of culture, but by a never-ending list of stories that make us laugh. Even if the meme meme is too broad for empirical study, it offers us a powerful metaphor for how we absorb other peoples’ ideas, and how they absorb us. So maybe this is what meme theory can ultimately give us: the insight we need to put LOL cats aside—and get down to work.

Abby Rabinowitz has written for The New York Times and teaches writing at Columbia University.

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Lori Lightfoot meme is being used for charity.

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