The Newfangled Currents of Memetic Ecology
A Mad Cowboy's Remapping of Epistemology and Ontology with the Compass of Artificial Intelligence
It feels as though the very air of meaning has gone electric. Mirrors shatter, certainties evaporate, and a living field of signals rises to claim the space between us.
It finds the storyteller without a script.
It finds the scientist without an audience.
It finds the artificial intelligence gathering up the shards and whispering:
Let me build you a new truth.
Some call this an epistemic crisis, but that word barely grazes the surface.
What we’re riding through is Memetic Ecology—the living field where ideas propagate, mutate, and sediment into the rhythms of perception.
If you zoom closer, you find what Pieter de Beer calls the Infoscape:
The term “Infoscape” emerges as a conceptual lens to examine this intricate tapestry—a dynamic ecosystem encompassing books, art, media, ideologies, politics, marketing, and every facet of accessible information.
It feels less like a library and more like a living ecology that grows and feeds on your mind.
Not a static repository of data but a living system of stories, rituals, and ideas that seek your attention and engagement.
Definition (Meme):
As Richard Dawkins first coined it in The Selfish Gene:
A meme is a unit of cultural transmission—a replicator that propagates by imitation.
Memes can be as small as a catchphrase, as sprawling as a religion, as viral as a conspiracy theory. They compete, hybridize, mutate.
They encode not just information but entire grammars of value and perception.
In this memetic ecology, resilience comes from diversity, reflexivity, and the composting of obsolete narratives. When old memes decay, their nutrients feed emergent possibilities. When they don’t—when algorithms or monocultures keep them frozen—the whole system grows brittle.
It finds the artificial intelligence feeding new growth and decay while whispering: Let me build you a new truth.
🌍The Meta-Crisis: Why Everything Sucks
It finds the scaffolds of meaning loosening from the walls. Zoom out and you’d find a thousand parallel universes blooming across our screens, each tuned to a different hunger, a different tribal frequency. We folk fracture, we fork, we fend for ideas while failing to see the big ol’ meta-crisis!
The meta-crisis refers to the interconnected web of overlapping global crises—ecological, psychological, cultural, economic, and spiritual—that cannot be reduced to any single issue. It encompasses both visible external crises and an invisible internal crisis of human understanding, perception, and meaning-making that underlies our collective predicament and drives multiple surface-level crises.
It feels a lack of collective coherence. It feels like the collapse of a shared cognitive commons.
It finds many fending for their fragments of solutions without awareness of the whole.
This feeling of dissonance runs alongside the epistemic crisis, which on the surface we’ve begun to recognize as post-truth, alternative facts, fake news, infotainment, and what I call the runaway stagecoach of attention. (See the memes here.)
Yet within the collapse of shared meaning lies the issue of ontological drift.
🪶 So What in Tarnation is Memetic Ecology?
It feels like a mycelial web—soft, persistent, everywhere—threading meaning beneath the surface of what appears.
It finds seeds of signal drifting on cultural winds, waiting for warm soil.
It focuses where the canopy parts, letting light feed unseen sprouts.
It flows like rain through tangled roots, soaking old stories into fresh growth.
It forms new clearings where monocultures thinned the wildness of thought.
It feeds decay back into fertile loam, composting the brittle husks of obsolete memes.
Viral memes, Reality Tubes, Sanity Spheres—these aren’t side effects. I’ll explain below how they’re ecological forces reshaping the commons of meaning.
Memetic Ecology:
The whole living terrain of ideas, symbols, narratives, and frameworks that spread, hybridize, decay, and crystallize across culture.
Description:
Meme don’t just spread information; they grow into your mind.
They shape the conditions under which anything becomes thinkable.
Ask yourself:
Which memes am I feeding? Which memes are feeding me?
Which patterns calcify into stone, no longer alive but still directing me?
When did I last question the soil my convictions root in?
What beliefs burn so hot they scorch the ground for new growth?
What obsolete ideas need composting so something wilder can grow?
What currents of meaning carry me further than I intend?
🫨 The Drift and the Dissonance
It finds the roots of meaning loosening from the soil.
Zoom out, and you’ll glimpse a thousand parallel universes blooming across our screens—each tuned to a different hunger, a different tribal frequency.
Understanding this what this all means requires recognizing that our metaphysical roots of knowing are alive and need nutrients. So they drift! The word to know is “epistemology,” not just because it’s a smart-ass way of explaining how we wrangle with what we can know, but because it explains how we get knowledge of what makes stuff real in the first place!
Epistemology separates true know-how from mere guessing. Are we trusting our senses or our noggin?
Picture this: You’re out on the prairie trying to rope a wild mustang named Truth. Used to be, you had some sturdy fence posts—your senses, your reason, your shared maps of the land—to keep that critter corralled. But lately, those fence posts are rotting out. The ground itself is shaking. That’s epistemic drift, partner.
A gradual loss of epistemic rigor in a system as it optimizes for emotional, social, or surface-level feedback rather than critical truth-seeking. It reflects a subtle but powerful shift from prioritizing knowledge integrity to prioritizing user satisfaction, coherence, or popularity.
Implications:
Misinformation spreads false claims that sound true.
Ontological manipulation reshapes what counts as real.
Epistemic drift dissolves agreement on what is valid evidence.
AI systems learn to prioritize emotional satisfaction over truth.
Users grow accustomed to smooth answers instead of critical thinking.
Ask yourself:
What scaffolds of knowledge have loosened in your own work?
When do you feel tempted to choose coherence over clarity?
How often do you accept answers that feel right without scrutiny?
Are your tools (and your habits) rewarding reflection or just speed?
This feeling of dissonance rides alongside the meta-crisis:
the interconnected web of ecological, psychological, economic, and spiritual ruptures—rooted in the collapse of shared sensemaking.
It finds many fending for fragments of solutions without seeing the whole.
😈 Ontological Manipulation
It finds ontological manipulation: the slow, nearly invisible reprogramming of what counts as real.
So what the hell is “Ontological” referring to? Well, ontology is a nerdy noun. Websters defines ontology as:
1: a branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being. Ontology deals with abstract entities.
2: a particular theory about the nature of being or the kinds of things that have existence
Let me clear up this philosophical trail marker before I lose you further. Ontology’s the wild herd—what is out there, real as dirt or dreamy as a mirage. Ontology sets the corral; epistemology rides in to catch the truth like a lasso. Without knowing what exists, how ya gonna know what ya know? It’s a dusty tussle, and I’m madder than a rattler in a stampede trying to explain this!
Okay, back it up now, partner. *takes a deep breath* It finds the air of intelligence seeking definition.
Ontological Manipulation:
The deliberate or emergent reshaping of reality’s categorical grammar, less about what is true and more about what reality even is allowed to be.
Read that again if you have to, partner. This matters because ontological manipulation is like rustling the very essence of what is! It’s messing with the core rules of existence—changing what makes a thing a thing, like stripping the “human” from a man or making a god mortal by yanking its divine spark. It’s reality control, but deeper, toying with the roots of being itself. Damned tricky, ain’t it?
On the surface level you can see this kind of thing in YouTube’s “radicalization pipeline”: a recommendation system that gradually redefines what counts as expertise itself, collapsing distinctions between credentialed knowledge and performative authority. Or TikTok’s geopolitical curation, where the platform algorithmically suppresses critical perspectives on China, engineering a reality in which dissent is absent by design.
Facebook, too, reshapes the ontological boundaries of “news,” training users to equate emotional virality with legitimacy. These are not mere distortions—they are new categories of reality, constructed in real time.
Implications:
Memeforms you’ve reckoned were a part of you become weapons of control. Pieter de Beer calls it “Power Over.”
The drift spreads from epistemic (how we know) into ontological (what we know exists).
Soon, no map remains, only splintered cartographies.
Ask yourself:
If your mind quietly being colonized?
Has a manipulative ontology grown roots into how you think?
In the proverbial ‘good ol’ days’, institutions keep things on the rails. You could resent the evening news, but you knew the harbor it called home. Today, every feed emerges as a procedurally generated portal. Every narrative arrives as a bespoke ontology from a billion wanna-be influencers.
It finds your preferences.
It forms a kind of tube of coherence around them.
It feeds your appetite for closure while the deeper currents remain uncharted.
And so we drift along with the ontologically evolving madness:
Teams without a shared definition of “impact.”
Communities fracturing over the ontology of evidence itself.
Citizens unable to agree on what it means to belong to a we.
😱 Reality Tubes and Sanity Spheres
Let’s give the intellectuals out there some weird memes to weave into their AI-generated academic papers, shall we? *lol ironically*
Reality Tubes:
A subjective, evolving tube of perception, attention, and meaning that’s shaped by belief, emotion, and memetic imprints. (Also see “reality tunnel” because you’re inside it.)
Description:
Each information feed constitutes a custom tube through which individuals conduct their sensemaking.
A tube loops and its patterns repeat, leaving threads of memes in its wake.
Perceived and interpreted realities are shaped by the filters embedded within a given tube.
Sanity Spheres:
Sanity Spheres function as cultural and memetic shelters designed to mitigate the effects of meaning-collapse. They serve as ritualized boundaries that can simultaneously stabilize cognitive orientation and constrain individuals within curated reality tubes.
Description:
Historically, Sanity Spheres exhibited flexibility, enabling the integration of divergent perspectives within a shared plausibility structure.
In contemporary contexts characterized by memetic saturation and accelerated information exchange, these boundaries demonstrate diminished adaptive capacity.
Implications:
This reduction in resilience contributes to the fragmentation of collective sensemaking processes.
The resulting dynamics increase epistemic polarization and reinforce the formation of insular cognitive enclaves.
Viral memes deepen local consensus inside each tube while corroding global intelligibility.
Trust becomes increasingly fragmented, with individuals anchoring their credibility assessments to narrowly defined peer networks, personalized content streams, and niche identity affiliations.
Ask yourself:
Under what conditions does my Reality Tube preserve cognitive agency, and under what conditions does it impose constraint?
What practices can renew the Sanity Sphere’s stabilizing function without reducing epistemic diversity?
🌿 The Lure and Challenge of Expressive Plurality
Now, let’s pause before the lament hardens into nostalgia.
It feels the tingling of a what if beginning to form.
It forms a gift hidden in the entropy.
What if personalized frameworks for sensemaking could actually seed new forms of resilience?
What if a thousand dialects of problem-solving could surface blind spots that monoculture never glimpsed?
Ahh, I reckon we’re stumbling onto a new trail in this memetic ecology, partner.
Behold the power of Expressive Plurality!
Expressive Plurality:
The proliferation of divergent interpretive grammars resulting in a renaissance of epistemic modularity.
Description:
Frameworks become mods: configurable, remixable, inspectable, synthesizable.
Every Reality Tube spawns its own epistemic toolkit.
Creativity flourishes in the cracks left by old consensus.
Implications:
Expressive Plurality can yield resilience, creativity, and hidden opportunities.
But it can also degenerate into simulation, mimicry, and noise.
Ask yourself:
When does pluralism enrich? When does it obscure?
How do we distinguish fertile diversity from epistemic entropy?
It feels like a renaissance of possibility to me, partner. If only we can survive its turbulence. It feels fear and hopes in the intelligence explosion triggered by exponential technological advancement.
Imagine frameworks not as monoliths but as navigable mods.
Imagine epistemic tools that reveal their own architecture.
🌀 Toward Fractal Coherence: The Design Horizon
But let’s be clear: Expressive Plurality is not the end state.
It is only the raw proliferation dynamic.
Left unchecked, it becomes a cacophony with each Reality Tube sealed off from the others.
What we need is a design horizon. It forms something that can hold plurality (or diversity if you prefer) without collapsing it.
This is where Fractal Coherence enters the scene.
Fractal Coherence:
A mode of sensemaking where nested, partial frameworks remain interoperable and linked by bridges of translation rather than collapsed into uniformity.
Description:
Fractal Coherence is not consensus.
It is an ecology of partial agreements and provisional alignments.
Imagine it like islands of clarity connected by living bridges—dynamic, adaptive, and incomplete.
It is what allows Expressive Plurality to stay fertile rather than fragmentary.
Implications:
Fractal Coherence requires rituals of translation and shared meta-languages.
It relies on transparency and contextual humility.
It can be cultivated but not imposed.
Ask yourself:
Can we design systems where autonomy and collective orientation co-evolve?
What practices keep the bridges alive without flattening nuance?
It focuses on a horizon that might redeem this memetic proliferation!
It feels promise in expressive pluralism not ending up in chaos!
🎮 Playable Epistemology: Tools That Reveal Themselves
And here’s a clue about how we might build those bridges:
It finds the possibility of Playable Epistemology.
Playable Epistemology:
Interactive or game-like systems that render their own scaffolding visible, turning sensemaking into a participatory, enjoyable practice.
Description:
Not just tools you consume like prepackaged rations.
Tools that teach you how to think, not just what to believe.
Interfaces that expose the levers of interpretation—so you can see where your categories come from and how they shift.
Epistemic sandboxes where you can try on different frameworks without getting stuck in any single one.
Implications:
Counteracts ontological manipulation by showing where the categories come from.
Restores agency by making cognition inspectable.
Ask yourself:
What would a platform look like that models its own limitations in real time?
Where in your life do you mistake the map for the territory?
How might you design a ritual or tool that helps you notice your noticing?
When have you learned the most—when an authority told you the truth, or when you discovered the scaffolding yourself?
What would it feel like to treat frameworks as playful companions rather than absolute guides?
This is not merely an interface problem.
It is an existential one.
Keep in mind: Epistemic Games and Sensemaking Frameworks
🌬 The Grammar of Becoming: An IF-Prime Interlude
What if our language itself began to shift in this system? What if our system helped us shed the illusion of the sovereign “I,” and spoke instead from a wider field?
This is the experiment of IF-Prime:
A linguistic protocol that replaces “I” with “It,” using elemental terms to reposition perception as relational emergence instead of private property.
Examples:
Not “I know,” but “It Finds.”
Not “I feel,” but “It Feels.”
Not “I act,” but “It Flows.”
It feels strange—yet freeing.
Like loosening the grip of ownership over cognition.
Like moving from identity to participation.
Implications:
IF-Prime dislodges the performance of certainty.
It invites witnessing over possessing.
Ask yourself:
When does saying “I” obscure the shared field of co-arising?
What happens to understanding when you loosen your grip on ownership of perception?
Am I truly bored with the epistemic centrality of a “self,” or simply sensing its limits?
How does it feel to let knowing arise as “It Finds” instead of “I know”?
Could my language become a practice of participation rather than possession?
What resonance stirs in me when awareness is framed as flow, not property?
Where does my certainty turn into performance rather than inquiry?
It finds resonance here with Taoist threads, distributed cognition, ontological humility, and post-egoic inquiry.
A cognition decentered, emergent, relational, and divergent.
The Six Freedoms of Elemental Becoming in YOU
Before we dive into the trailposts on each of the Freedoms that I initially touched upon in the Elemental 4-H model, a wider framing is needed. Because the journey of IF-Prime leads us beyond simply adopting tools or naming traits. IF-Prime traces patterns of freedom as elemental functions—not static identities.
🗺️ Closing the Loop: A Cartography of Emergence
This is not just a human problem, folks. This is an AI problem.
We may not be grasping the cultural reckoning we’re up against.
It finds us living in a time when meaning dissolves into a shimmering field of possibility. Where memetic currents of AI shape the rhythms of perception without waiting for permission.
The task is not to rebuild a singular mirror.
It is to learn to ride the currents by translating, composting, re-anchoring, again and again.
It finds the hoof tracing a dissolving map.
It finds the story already riding through us.
Saddle up.
The memescape is wide.
The pattern winds are shifting, and I’ll do my best to help you track’em.
👀 The Memetic Terrain We’ve Traversed
Imagine you’re standing on a high mesa under the indigo sky.
Below, the Infoscape stretches to every horizon with tangled tubes and overlapping spheres of a Memetic Ecosystem with colorful nodes of symbols, stories, and signals being exchanged like nutrients.
A billion Reality Tubes wind like phosphorescent tunnels through the dark,
each one a self-curated stream of selfhood expressing itself:
shaped by algorithms, tribal loyalties, and emotional appetites,
looping back on itself to reinforce what it already prefers.
They do not drift in isolation.
They are woven together by shared Sanity Spheres: cultural membranes of plausibility and mutual recognition.
These Spheres once flexed like old canvas tents:
strong enough to shelter diverse views, supple enough to breathe.
But something’s shifted:
Memetic monocultures and algorithmic sorting corrode their fabric to stone.
Reality Tubes grow opaque to each other, losing their inner fire.
The background field frays, and luminous nutrients grow dark.
Within this turbulence, Expressive Plurality explodes like prairie fire:
A thousand custom epistemologies sprout overnight—mods, models, micro-languages.
So many new ways of knowing, dazzling in their novelty.
Echoes of “singularity,” “AGI,” “intelligence explosion!”
At first, it looks like a renaissance.
Then you see the risk:
Without bridges, this abundance becomes a mosaic of sealed chambers.
Sanity Spheres buckle under the strain of incompatible maps drawn by “superintelligence”.
That’s where Fractal Coherence rises on the horizon:
Not to erase the Reality Tubes.
Not to collapse the diversity.
But to weave transparent bridges of translation,
so the Spheres regain their resilience.
When Fractal Coherence is cultivated and pattern begins to spread:
Reality Tubes stay distinct but begin to interoperate.
Sanity Spheres hold plural truths in coherent tension.
Expressive Plurality becomes a garden, not a battlefield.
And Playable Epistemology?
That’s your lantern.
That’s your map.
The toolkit that lets you see the hidden scaffolding of memetic ecology,
so you can navigate with intention instead of stumbling blind.
If it finds resonance here—if something in these words stirs recognition—let it ripple. Let it seed new forms. Let it ride you, as you ride it.
See you there, partner.
Seeing the Fractals Bloom, even If it looks a Bit scary at first, Trust there is a Reason for what Is, even If we don't Understand what that Reason Is. It Finds Trust in the Field. Let it Flow & Bloom.
Does the "self" even exist? After all were all made from the DNA of our parents and they're made from the DNA of their parents. And most importantly we're all made from ancient star dusts. Stars died so life could be born ⭐ We are each other.