From Viral to Vital: Memeforms and the Grammar of Internalization

Designing culture that can be felt, lived, and carried—even beyond the barriers of disgust.

Meme Misfire

Speak the word “meme” in a room of thinkers and watch the air shift—half a smirk, half a shrug.

The term “meme” as coined by Richard Dawkins to explain cultural evolution, has now been hogtied to punchlines, TikTok skits, and algorithm-fed irony. Try discussing political cognition or cultural transmission and you’ll often find yourself explaining why “meme” doesn’t just mean that image of SpongeBob looking confused.

But the breakdown isn’t just in how the word is used. It’s in how the meaning-field around it has collapsed. The terrain of meaning has shifted beneath our boots.

This is where memeforms come in—not to simplify, but to clarify. Where “meme” has been worn thin by overuse and misuse, memeform introduces structure. Where memes point to the seeds of cultural content, memeforms point to the plant—the embodied, patterned structure capable of rooting in perception, identity, and behavior. They are living units of transmission, not just fragments of replication.

As Pieter de Beer outlines in Memeforms and the Fabric of Cultural Power [1], we ain’t seeing a rebranding of memes, we’re witnessing a rewiring of how ideas take hold and grow—from scattered symbols to embodied systems. Memeforms offer more than a fix to a broken term. They offer a more honest frame for what memes have always been becoming—not just content, but cultural architecture. And with Pieter’s work, we’re handed a language sharp enough to trace that architecture, and spacious enough to design within it.

This is a call to ride beyond meme virality as internet noise—toward resonance, embodiment, and responsibility.

We’ll trace the roots of memeform theory, map its anatomy, and test its limits in the wild—where emotions like disgust can harden the ground, and where cultural engineers must reckon with the ethics of what they plant.

So saddle up. What follows ain’t just theory—it’s a trail guide for designing what endures.

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Why ‘Meme’ Is No Longer Enough

The original insight was clean and sharp: memes as units of cultural transmission, passed from mind to mind like genes in a population. Elegant, Dawkins’ idea. A tool for tracking how ideas evolve across time and terrain. So powerful its potential even got investigated by US military powers - a deeper subject to crack open some other time.

But somewhere between Dawkins and Doge, the trail got dusty for us common folk. The term meme wandered off the scholarly path and found itself knee-deep in internet kitsch—looping cat videos, ironic detachment, and digital in-jokes with lifespans shorter than a campfire spark.

These aren’t just semantic bumps in the road. They signal a deeper breakdown.

Here’s what’s eroded:

Analytical slippage:
Try bringing memetics into political psychology or systems design and you’ll get sideways glances. When your core vocabulary sounds like something off a Discord server, it’s hard to command epistemic respect.

Explanatory shortfall:
We’ve lacked language to describe why some ideas die quick deaths while others burrow into being—reshaping laws, identities, and worldviews. Memes spread, sure. But which ones settle? Which ones stay?

We need more than the old map.
We need a sharper instrument.

As I put it in From Dead Ends to Open Trails: Rethinking Memetics in Light of Culture Science:

“Memetics didn’t fail because it was wrong. It failed because it tried to play by rules that didn’t fit. But philosophy ain’t about rigid frameworks—it’s about exploring the wild terrain of thought, carving out new paths where the old ones don’t go.”
—Memetic Cowboy

Philosophy, I wagered, could give memetics its soul—resonance instead of replication, agency instead of determinism—but it didn’t give it legs. Science, meanwhile, asked for structure and got metaphor.

Now, with Defender’s take on an emerging Culture Science [2] stepping in to test narrative function and behavioral impact [3], and with memeform theory giving us a formal architecture of internalization, we might just have the tools to cross the canyon.

Not just to track what goes viral,
but to understand what takes root.

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Enter the Memeform – A Better Cognitive Architecture

Pieter de Beer draws the next contour on the map—and what he sketches ain’t just a new term. It’s a crucial signpost on new terrain I’m still exploring.

Memeforms, as he puts it, are “not just messages, but frames of embodiment.” These aren’t ideas floating loose in the wind. They’re shaped structures, built to settle into the psyche, take up residence in behavior, and pattern the rhythms of perception. They’re not optimized for replication like their memetic ancestors—but for resonance. For rooting.

This shift changes everything.

To understand memeforms is to reimagine memetics—not as the science of spread, but as the craft of felt meaning. Not viral marketing, but cultural sculpting. If we’re serious about dismantling systems of domination, or planting seeds for emergent patterns of care, we can’t settle for slogans. We must shape what can be lived, not just what can be shared.

And here’s the soul of it: the triadic anatomy that gives a memeform its life.

• Memotype – The encoded pattern. The symbolic core. Like the DNA of an idea, it holds its structure.

• Cognotype – How that pattern is seen, felt, or sensed. The interface where the form meets perception—color, sound, metaphor, texture.

Internalization Pathways – The rituals, repetitions, and embodied routes through which the memeform becomes a lived rhythm.

It’s the difference between a single note and a full orchestration.

One might catch your attention.
The other moves you.

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Mapping Memeforms Across the Memetic Landscape

De Beer’s contribution is evolutionary in the most literal sense—it reframes the ecology of ideas. Classic memetic terms like memeplex, sociotype, and selfplex still matter. But memeforms operate at a higher resolution: not what spreads, but what settles.

A possible mapping:

The shift here is subtle but seismic:
We stop asking, what spreads fastest?
And start asking, what takes root most deeply?

Because memeforms shape power —not only Power Over (“The Grip That Shapes the World” [3]), but:

• Power With – Collaboration by resonance. Shared forms aligning behavior and intention.

• Power Through – Systemic embodiment. The form becomes protocol; the memeform rides the machine.

• Power Within – Empowerment through internalized structure. When a pattern awakens volition.
  

In short: Memeforms don’t just ride the culture—they sculpt its gait.

They’re the code of the code, the pattern behind the pattern, the blueprint that lives in breath and gesture alike.

And they’re not neutral.
They condition how we see, move, and relate—often without asking permission.

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The Disgust Reflex – When Memeforms Trigger the Immune System

Now, every good trail map eventually meets the land it’s drawn from. We’ve been speaking in frames, forms, and internalization structures—but all that theory’s got to stand the weather of the real world. And in the wild, not every memeform finds fertile ground.

Some don’t just fail to take root.
They get spit back out.

This is where we meet disgust. And not the metaphorical kind, but visceral. Studies now show that people feel actual physical disgust in response to the faces of political opponents [4]. This is deeper than polarization. A deep-seated reflex that marks certain symbols, expressions, or ideas as contaminated.

Disgust doesn’t argue.
It doesn’t engage.
It expels.

From a memeform design perspective, this changes the game. You might have a beautifully structured form, elegant in narrative and tuned for resonance—but if it triggers disgust, the gates to internalization slam shut. No ritual, no repetition, no story strong enough to override that somatic recoil.

It’s like trying to plant seeds in poisoned soil.

So why include this here? Because this is where the theory gets tested—where cognition meets biology, and resonance hits resistance.
Understanding disgust isn’t a detour from memeform theory.
It’s a threshold condition.

Every deep memetic pattern must cross the affective immune system before it can embed.

And that means if we want to shape culture responsibly—or shift it at all—we have to account for what people will refuse to hold, no matter how rational or righteous the message may seem.

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Counter-Memeforms and the Alchemy of Disgust

The good news? Disgust isn’t the end of the trail.

If memeforms can trigger rejection, they can also be crafted to transmute it. Like turning rust back into ore, or fear back into fire, there are ways to meet disgust without feeding it.

These aren’t magic tricks.
They’re design choices—and they walk a narrow pass between transformation and manipulation.

Here’s what the research—and the trail—suggests:

Counter-Memeform Strategies:

1. Facilitated Dialogue – Structured conversations across lines of difference reduce affective polarization [5]. This isn't kumbaya; it’s neural rewiring through narrative exchange.

2. Shared Humanity Framing – Stories that emphasize vulnerability, common struggle, or sacred values reduce the “contaminant” frame and open space for empathy [6].

3. Redirected Disgust – Targeting shared threats (e.g., climate change as noted in linked article) rather than scapegoats can unify affect [7]. But this must be done ethically, without manufacturing new monsters.

Culture architects, beware: the line between transformative alchemy and manipulative sorcery is thin. Transparency and consent matter.

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Memetic Responsibility and Cultural Engineering

A meme spreads. A memeform settles.
And once it settles, it doesn’t just shape what a person thinks.
It starts to shape who they become.

That’s why memeforms come with a kind of ethical weight. They ain’t just content riding the current—they’re scaffolds of consciousness. And any good builder knows: scaffolding can raise a shelter… or cage a body.

So how do we measure what’s worth embedding?

Well, one of the earliest and most precise attempts came out of military memetics—Dr. Robert Finkelstein and his crew in the defense world. They weren’t out to inspire—they were out to influence. And to do that, they needed numbers.

Finkelstein’s model measured memetic fitness by what he called person-hours transformed—how many minds you could move, for how long, and how deeply [8]. It broke down like this:

They also had a checklist for content quality—accuracy, relevance, brevity, usability—built for strategic utility, not soulful transformation.

It’s good work. Tactical. Functional.
But it stops short of where memeform theory begins.

Because Pieter de Beer isn’t just asking how far a memeform travels. He’s asking how deep it cuts.
Not what gets shared—but what gets lived.

He’s not tracking surface movement.
He’s tracking volitional gravity—the pull a pattern exerts on identity, behavior, and belief.

So where Finkelstein rode for influence, memeform theory rides for internalization.

And that shift changes the stakes.
We’re no longer in the business of messaging.
We’re in the business of meaning design.

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🧠 Memeform Fitness: Upgrading the Metric with Internalization

Pieter de Beer deepens the model by shifting the focus from spread to settling. A memeform is not just an idea with reach; it’s a form-idea—something that roots into behavior, identity, and volition. What matters is not just what the meme does, but what it becomes inside us.

To account for this, we can reformulate memetic fitness for the memeform paradigm:

Memeform Fitness (MF) =

Propagation × Persistence × Internalization Depth × Narrative Coherence

This model retains the mechanical elegance of Finkelstein’s formulation but adds what it was never meant to measure: transformation that goes all the way down.

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⚖️ From Metrics to Ethics: When Fitness Becomes Influence

Once you start designing memeforms for internalization—not just attention—you’re no longer playing the numbers game.

You’ve crossed a threshold.

You’re not asking, “Will this go viral?”
You’re asking, “Will this take up residence in a person’s identity?”
Will it live in their gestures, their choices, their sense of self?

That ain’t just strategy anymore.
That’s stewardship.

And with that kind of depth, comes the need for guardrails. Not to limit creativity, but to honor the terrain you’re shaping—the interior wilds of human consciousness.

So here’s what the trail demands:

• Transparency – Is the purpose of the memeform out in the open, or hidden behind charm and cleverness?

• Agency – Does it invite volition, or does it hijack it? Does it light a fire, or build a cage?

• Alignment – Is it riding in the direction of care, dignity, and shared becoming? Or is it just well-packaged coercion?

Because if memeforms are technologies of transformation,
then those who craft them aren’t just designers.

They’re cultural architects with a conscience.

And conscience, out here, is the compass that keeps you from building empires when you meant to build bridges.

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Toward a Memeform Praxis

So what does it look like to design memeforms that deepen culture rather than distort it?

Ask:

• Can this be felt, not just shared?

• Does it pattern behavior, or merely provoke thought?

• Is it aligned with the architecture of volition?

Applications abound:

• Activism – Not slogans, but ritualized resonance.

• Therapy – Identity rewrites through narrative embedment.

• System change – Memes as new protocols of perception.

• Self-reinvention – Memeform as metamorphic technology.

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Conclusion: Riding the Deeper Currents

We’ve moved beyond the age of information. The question now ain’t just what spreads—it’s what settles. What patterns get beneath the noise, into the nervous system, and stay there.

That’s where memeforms ride—beneath the chatter, shaping the long wave of internalization.

They offer us more than theory. They offer a grammar for deep culture. A way to craft with care instead of just broadcasting with speed. They give us the tools not only to name the world—but to grow it.

To Pieter de Beer—a tip of the hat for sketching the architecture of this terrain. The map you’ve drawn is rich with signal. But the horizon still stretches.

And many trails remain uncharted:

• How do ritual, trauma, and myth braid themselves into internalization depth?

• Can we design aesthetics that embed without slipping into spectacle or control?

• Where’s the true boundary between guiding perception and violating sovereignty?

These aren’t easy questions.
But they’re the right ones.

So no, this ain’t a conclusion.
It’s an invitation.

To those walking the edge of culture, narrative, design, and embodiment—
saddle up.
The memescape is wide, and the pattern winds are shifting.

Let’s ride the horizon together.
Not just to share what we see—
but to build what can be felt, lived, and carried forward.

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References

[1] de Beer, Memeforms and the Fabric of Cultural Power

[2] Defender, A Beginner's Guide to Culture Science

[3] de Beer, The Grip That Shapes the World

[4] Batres, Psychology Today, Why We Use Language of Disgust to Describe Political Foes

[5] Stecula, Levendusky, PoliSci, Colorado State University

[6] The Guardian, The power of framing: It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it

[7] Murray, Psychology Today, Could Disgust Make You an Environmentalist?

[8] Venam, Internet: Medium For Communication, Medium For Narrative Control