memetic transfer

June 21, 2026 · 7 min read · essay, writing

back in 2012 when I moved from pattiveeranpatti, a small village in India to Chennai, a city in the same states . there was something interesting, the kids there had no mental model of villages, farming or the culture around it. Coffee ¹, vegetables, and everything else were just things that you procure from shops. I remember explaining in detail, the layers and process involved, but even then they could never grok it at the level, that i’ve lived it in. the smell of sheep and cow that constantly lives in the air, the struggle of having to spend a day traveling and waiting to visit the doctor, fights that break out often for seemingly dumb reasons… ²

but all of those were just obvious things of existence for my friends back home.

I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that I can take an overnight bus, and be transported from one bubble of existence to the other. it is as close to a time machine as you can get.

Then in, 2017 I was reading Richard Dawkins’, The Selfish Gene and came across the term meme. quite difficult for my young self to grok at first but after a bit of practice it made sense. meme is anything that is able to capture cultural transport. a song, an idea, a tune, an image with captions, everything can be modeled as a meme. Revolutions have broke out because an idea resonated with the collective knowledge of the crowd. So the memetic transport is an incredibly important piece in our cultural system.

In the last two decades, the internet has amplified this transfer by a few orders of magnitude. This is how my uncle who can’t read and lives in a mud house knows about mr.beast. this is significant because this was only made possible by the memetic transfer across states, countries, languages and rivalries.

the pieces

a meme³ is any idea that gets captured by an individual or medium.

meme cannot exist in a vaccum. without a host to keep a meme alive and propagate, the meme becomes extinct.⁴ this is what happens in the case of languages, cultures and communities that don’t exist anymore — the last host dies and the meme dies with them. a meme is always one generation away from extinction, which is why it has to keep finding new hosts to survive. for example, an idea like, “children must be educated”.

the tight network of hosts, called a bubble, determines what type of meme even reaches a host in the first place.⁵ more often than not the bubble gets defined by the individuals identity, the religion, the country or state they were born into. what is obvious inside one bubble can be unintelligible in the next — the same meme is gospel here and noise there.

these bubbles overlap into a larger network of bubbles that carries a meme forward, across the world. the network can be sliced across different dimensions such as geography, religion, culture, gender etc. and based on the subject of the meme, it becomes more valid in a specific dimension. a meme can only ever jump to an adjacent bubble, through the thin region where two of them overlap. and that crossing tends to ride on weak ties rather than close ones — the people closest to you already share most of what you know, so genuinely new memes usually arrive through the loose connections at the edges.⁶

a host has only so much attention, and a bubble only so much bandwidth, so memes aren’t simply spreading — they are competing with each other for the same scarce real estate inside people’s heads.⁷ most memes don’t die because they are wrong, they die because something else got the slot. this is the pressure that everything else — the boundaries, the carriers, the mediums — bears down on.

every overlap is also a boundary, and the boundary acts as a filter. a meme that reaches the edge of its bubble has to be re-expressed in terms the next bubble already understands, and most of them don’t survive that translation. they get stripped of context, flattened, or simply make no sense on the other side. so the boundary doesn’t select for what is true or deep, it selects for what is translatable. and translation resists complexity.

not every host moves a meme equally. a few of them, the carriers, sit in the overlap between bubbles and transmit far more than their share — the bilingual, the immigrant, the person with one foot in two scenes. epidemiology calls them superspreaders, gladwell called them connectors and mavens.⁸ these are the hosts that actually do the cross-bubble work. a meme that lands on one of them can jump a boundary it would never have crossed otherwise.

the medium of propagation is really important. as the medium controls how a meme is expressed. for example it is impossible to explain relativity in under 15 minutes, but that is basically what thousands of popular videos do, you can watch all these videos and still not have the first clue what it is. The medium is indeed the message ⁹ but at a vastly rapid and bidirectional scale. There are some meme that cannot be expressed in a 15 minute or a 30 second video the “surprisal” of the information is capped. The medium is also the reason why any reasonable conversation online gets degenerated into people calling each other nazis ¹⁰.

the speed of transmission of a meme determines how it traverses across bubbles. It depends a lot on how novel the meme is ¹¹.

and a meme never crosses cleanly. each host rebuilds it inside their own head rather than copying it byte for byte, so it mutates a little on every hop.¹² this fidelity, how much of a meme survives the retelling — decides whether it stays recognizably itself across a thousand hosts, or drifts, bubble by bubble, into something its origin would no longer recognize.

the mechanisms