Reckoning with the Terrain Beneath the Memeplex
Notes on the Memetic Mapping of the Battlefield
When I Think Every Word Acts as Weapon
I still catch myself doing it.
Holding words like blades.
Reading comments like incoming fire.
Crafting sentences to outflank, not to commune.
See, I learned early that in the memetic wilds, sharp words get remembered.
Framed right, a post can take the wind out of an opponent without ever naming them.
Snappy. Strategic. Surgical.
It felt powerful.
But it didn’t feel whole.
And here’s the hard truth I’m still chewing:
That battlefield frame never really left.
It just started wearing fancier language.
The instinct to win—to other, to defend, to divide—
That runs deep.
Baked into the memeplex itself.
Maybe even deeper.
The Memeplex Loves a Fight
Binary frames sell.
They spread.
They offer clarity with a side of adrenaline.
And in a world hungry for signal?
Weapons get attention.
Weapons get replicated.
But what happens when the map we’re using to track culture was drafted in the shape of a war?
Memes as genes.
Culture as virus.
Influence as territory.
That’s the terrain I was trained to move through.
It taught me speed. It taught me precision.
But it also taught me to see disagreement as danger—and ambiguity as weakness.
And now, I’m not so sure that map still fits the world I want to live in.
Questioning the Terrain
What if the problem ain’t just the weapons?
What if it’s the soil?
What if the very ground beneath the memetic frame—the assumptions, the logic, the metaphors we lean on to describe meaning itself—has gone brittle?
We’ve spent years mapping memetic movements like epidemiologists,
Charting belief like data packets,
Reducing complexity to transmission vectors.
But what if meaning don’t move like that?
What if meaning don’t want to “spread”?
What if it wants to unfold,
to attune,
to emerge in places our current maps can’t even render?
If we’re stuck thinking like warriors,
we miss the messages that come as whispers.
We overlook the symbols that don’t march in formation.
We forget to feel.
The Danger of Default Othering
Othering ain’t just a feature of conflict.
It’s become default code in memetic thinking.
And that hurts us.
Because when we tag a view as “infected,”
when we brand a speaker “off-narrative,”
we close the door on exactly the kind of presence that might've evolved the frame in the first place.
Binary thinking ain’t just about enemies.
It’s about premature certainty.
It keeps us on horseback, circling the same terrain, firing at shadows,
never seeing the grove just beyond the ridge.
The one that don’t show up on the battlefield map.
The one with symbols we don’t yet have language for.
I Ain’t Beyond It
Let me be real:
I still ride with a pistol of prose on my hip.
Still reach for the snappy frame when I feel cornered.
Still get seduced by clean categories when the ground gets muddy.
But I’m learning to pause.
To ask:
Is this a field? Or a fence?
Is this clarity? Or just control with better lighting?
And if it’s the latter—I set the weapon down.
Not ‘cause I’m soft.
But ‘cause I want to hear the melody that only plays when no one’s drawing lines.
Ending Without a Clean Holster
I don’t think we can fully unlearn the battlefield.
It gave us language. Structure. Survival.
But I do think we can learn to see past it.
To question the terrain it taught us to patrol.
To imagine new kinds of maps.
Ones with more contours.
More ambiguity.
More surprise.
Ones drawn not from war—but from wonder.
So I’ll keep riding,
threading where I used to slash,
listening where I used to diagnose,
letting go of the sharp meme,
in favor of the living one.
You feel it too, maybe?
That urge to soften the grip.
To trade winning for weaving.
If so, you’re not alone out here.
There’s a campfire somewhere past the ridge.
Ride slow.
We’ll meet there.