What the Hell Is Going on in Memetic Ecology?
Clarified Foundations: On Memes and Memeforms and How Food Reveals Answers
“The meme is the spark. The memeform is the fire it becomes in your gut.”
Howdy folks. I reckon it’s time to clear up something about different memetic camps. In particular these terms I’ve been throwing around and wrangling with for a while. Memes and memeforms.
Let’s kick it off by saying memes don’t become memeforms the way seeds become sprouts. They don’t evolve through category or taxonomy. They transform through contact, digestion, and resonance.
You can’t track this through spreadsheet logic. You feel it through your ribs. Through your inherited postures. Through the pauses in your voice before you speak in front of certain people. So what am I saying?
Memes live outside you. Memeforms live inside you. And that inside/outside line? It shifts. Like wind. Like loyalty. Like memory on a bad day.
That line matters more than ever now. Especially when the culture around you floods with noise so fast your I-Tube can’t tell food from poison.
Pieter de Beer and I crossed trails recently. He sketches fields of power, coordination, and collective architecture. Always through his work we arrive at memeforms. Not “memes.” It’s a wise move because memes have become synonymous with funny internet images (Wikipedia clarifies these are “Internet Memes”)
Call me a lonesome cowboy, but I’m holding onto the term “memes” for good ol’ classical memetics, for reasons I’ll explain in this post.
On The Simplicity of Memeforms
So, Pieter and I just stood there—two travelers watching the same storm from different ledges. I caught the beauty and the voltage in memeforms, their strange capacity to bridge belief and behavior.
Pieter de Beer frames them clean: “a subset of memes fit for internalization.” Later called them “culturally transmitted units of meaning that shape behavior, thought, or identity once internalized—phrases, scripts, gestures, ideologies.” I admire where he rides with that. But I don’t ride that same trail.
See, things get tangled in his Internalization Architecture model, where memeforms start to stretch into territory I’d map as memeplexes—religions, national myths, political frameworks, family systems. When memeforms start covering both the atomic signal and the whole lattice of coordinated belief, the distinction gets muddy.
In Pieter’s work, memeforms mostly serve as glue—fostering coordination through shared internalized values. And I get it. Resonant Cognitive Architecture (Griffin and de Beer, 2025) builds from that logic: internalization over replication, resonance over virality. It’s an elegant pivot. Maybe we should sweep the memeplex debris and ditch the tired internet vs. academic meme debates. Simplify the terrain. Tighten the frame.
Memeforms seem most crucial in his work in facilitating coordination based on shared values that get internalized. I know where this idea of memeforms is going because he told us in (Griffin and de Beer 2025). Maybe it’s a good idea to simplify memetics, cut the fluff of any talk of “memeplexes” and clear out the ambiguity of “memes” vs “internet memes” to pave the way to a more actionable framework. RCA emphasizes internalization over replication, though I see these overlapping with memes as cultural units that do indeed replicate, without or without internalization!
RCA’s five-fold typology aims to organize memeforms by function:
Norm-Claim
Value-Signal
Structural-Logic
Affect-Norming
Ritual
Useful categories. But I started to itch when I saw “form” do the work of “function.” That split between what something does and what something is. I get the sense we’re mapping process and product with the same line. And that confusion? It echoes the old split in Classical Memetics—internal vs. external memes, mind vs. culture, belief vs. behavior. When we conflate them, we lose the recursive current. We forget the membrane. We forget the I-Tube.
Dawkins, the Meme, and the Broken Trail
When Dawkins dropped the word “meme” in The Selfish Gene, he didn’t just hand culture a term—he handed us a mirror. One that bent around imitation, transmission, fidelity. Ideas moved like genes. Culture mutated. Imitation replicated the fittest signals.
Then came the fork in the road.
Some folks (internalists) claimed memes nested in neural patterns. Beliefs, mantras, biases—stored and replayed in skullspace. Others (externalists) waved at symbols. They pointed at rituals, hashtags, and TikToks. Look, there—the memes. Floating in the cultural soup.
Neither path told the whole truth. Neither map showed the digestive trail from encounter to integration to expression.
That terrain needed a new cartography.
Memetic Ecology Doesn’t Ask What a Meme Is
It tracks what a meme does.
A meme doesn’t define your beliefs. It brushes past your sensory gates, rides a memory echo, stirs a taste, or slaps your shame circuits awake. It lands—or it doesn’t. When it lands, it digs. When it digs, it changes your gait.
If a meme hits with enough heat—if it loops with rhythm, story, tone, and touch—it crosses the I-Tube.
Once inside, it no longer behaves like signal. It behaves like sediment. Like a spell. Like an unseen root system shaping your inner weather.
We call that new structure a memeform!
You can’t observe it directly. You feel it in how someone hesitates before defending their joy. You hear it in someone’s silence when the old ritual gets mentioned. Memeforms don’t show up as words. They show up as world-shaping reflex inside you. You might wrestle with it in relation to other memeforms, and that’s where mutation or the desire to replicate the meme happens. The meme has formed a part of you. It’s no longer just a meme.
It’s a memeform.
So you shout what it means at someone. That shout, that’s the meme.
How Meaning Gets Eaten
Imagine the world offers you a meme—a phrase, a chant, a slur, a ritual, a video. It carries scent, rhythm, social charge.
You don’t always choose to eat it. Sometimes it slips past your awareness. Sometimes the We-Sphere around you normalizes it so deeply that your I-Tube opens like muscle memory.
If that meme finds resonance—if it fits the story already running in your nervous system—it passes through.
Now it lives in your My-Stream.
That stream doesn’t just flow thoughts. It flows moods, affinities, loyalties. Your laughter at the wrong moment. Your discomfort at the truth. Your sense of who deserves trust.
Over time, that memeform doesn’t just sit. It circulates. It fuels your behaviors. It shapes your cravings. And eventually, it leaks back out—reshaped, re-emitted, re-performed.
Not as a copy.
As something else.
As signal refracted through the storm of your selfhood.
That’s the meme. You might even say it’s “your meme.” But I’d tell you that you’re wrong.
The Selfplex, Disassembled
Susan Blackmore’s Selfplex described the bundle of internal memes that create the illusion of self. In memetic ecology, we separate that illusion into parts:
The I-Tube handles intake.
It’s a semi-permeable membrane shaped by history, trauma, resonance, gut instincts, and cultural encoding. It decides what enters. It metabolizes meaning.
The My-Stream carries what got in.
It’s a river of digested meaning—a bloodstream of belief-habits and pattern-affinities. Not fixed ideas, but flowing tendencies: moods, reactivity, preferences, intuitions.
When someone says, “That’s just who I am,” they often mistake the grooves of their My-Stream for a static identity. But those grooves were carved by repeated memeforms—meaning-patterns internalized over time. And the more deeply a groove runs, the more it shapes the I-Tube itself—like a river shaping its banks.
Just because a meme was internalized doesn’t mean you did it on purpose.
Some memes come with a plan: not just to be accepted once, but to shape how your I-Tube accepts or rejects future memes. They embed preferences, taboos, expectations—conditioning your inner filter for what fits in.
The I-Tube acts as your internalizer.
The My-Stream acts as your integrator.
It doesn’t just carry meaning—it stitches it into lived experience. It’s the current where internalized signal becomes the felt sense of self.
Clear as mud?
From Memeplex to We-Sphere
Memetics once gave us the term memeplex—a bundle of reinforcing memes. Think religion. Think brand loyalty. Think subculture.
In memetic ecology, we translate memeplex into territory. Into “collective architecture” (de Beer, 2025).
The We-Sphere feels like a shared symbolic kitchen. It curates the memetic menu. It tells you what counts as food, and what you should reject as poison.
It defines sacred dishes. Revered rituals. Banned flavors.
It doesn’t just shape taste. It shapes belonging.
It tells you: these meals belong to us. These plates define who we are. And those over there? Those people with the unfamiliar ingredients? They don’t belong here.
But here’s the trap: most We-Spheres confuse adjacent kitchens for alien invaders! Grab your guns, fellas!
🪞 The Mirage of Otherness
You scroll past someone’s belief. It sounds foreign. You feel heat rise in your chest. You call it madness. You call them indoctrinated. You call their cuisine unthinkable.
But what if their kitchen shares more architecture with yours than you realize?
What if their spices just carry different memories?
These spheres deemed as “other” rarely arrives from outside the human ecosystem. Most of the time, it walks beside you. Sharing the same memes in different flavors.
And yet—memetic conflict thrives on this illusion of distance.
“We are the sane ones. They’ve been brainwashed.”
No. They’ve just digested different memeforms. They followed a different internalization sequence. With a different palette.
Same digestive system.
Different seasoning.
Invisible Spheres, Actual Cages
While We-Spheres argue over meals and meanings, often calling each other “the others,” the real power flows elsewhere.
Other-Spheres—the encompassing symbolic infrastructures—feed all the We-Spheres at once.
These include:
Algorithmic feeds that dictate what your I-Tube swallows
School systems that train your taste before your teeth come in
Religious narratives that codify your cravings
Economic filters that decide which memes you get to eat and which memes starve in shadow
And most people don’t see them. Because the memeplex of those systems already mirror the memeforms inside everyone.
Two factions clash in public view—each blaming the other’s brainwashing. But the fight itself has been pre-written by memeforms distributed by the same algorithmic factory.
When power wants to hide, it doesn’t silence. It multiplies.
It feeds both sides. It keeps them looking sideways—never up, never down.
Bound by stone. Captured light. Epistemic crisis zones. (To be explored: Richard Rorty on the The Death of Epistemology.)
Eating With Kin, Not Swords Drawn
Memetic ecology doesn’t dream of unification. It dreams of recognition.
Recognition that your enemy might just cook with different spices. That what offends your taste might nourish someone else’s childhood. That the We-Sphere you reject could’ve raised you, had the wind shifted differently.
That kinship doesn’t require sameness. It requires honesty about digestion.
You don’t have to eat their food. But you might learn something from watching them prepare it.
This isn’t about tolerance. It’s about expressive plurality—the kind of wild grammar Feyerabend chased across the epistemic desert. He didn’t ask anyone to agree. He just tore open the cathedral, let in dust and wind, and called it liberation. In that spirit, we ride alongside contradiction, not to tame it—but to recognize it as kin. Because in a memetic ecology, no memeplex owns the truth. They just offer dishes for a table too wide for any one flavor to satisfy.
Ask: what has fed you? What has poisoned you?
And maybe more urgently: What have you kept feeding others without realizing it made them sick?
Final Loop: Not Just Signal
Memes replicate.
Memeforms reside.
Memes signal.
Memeforms construct.
And those We-Spheres where you feel “seen”? They don’t just welcome you. They regulate you. They decide what counts as good taste, moral nutrition, edible belief.
But what happens when two kitchens serve different meals, and both ring true in the gut?
That’s where Pieter and I find ourselves—not adversaries across enemy lines, but kin stirring stew in different pots. Our I-Tubes twist through different histories. Our My-Streams flow with distinct spices. But we sit at the same table, trading flavors and frameworks, watching for what emerges in the middle space.
That’s not contradiction—it’s epistemic pluralism. Feyerabend’s ghost nods. “Anything goes,” he once muttered. Not as chaos. As hospitality. As the only way to track truth through tangled ecosystems.
What we’re doing—me with Memetic Ecology, Pieter with RCA—isn’t two We-Spheres fencing. It’s shared digestion. Two travelers eating from the same trail, mapping out how resonance metabolizes meaning in distinct but compatible languages.
And maybe this—this willingness to cook in parallel kitchens, to cross-test flavors, to say “your map works too”—this marks a deeper shift.
From epistemic pluralism to epistemic populism.
Where trust doesn’t follow credentials. It follows gut sense. Embodied resonance. Where truth grows not from institutional decree but from folk coherence—ritual, story, shared digestion.
Where we learn to ask not just, “Is this true?”
But, “Can I feel the root of this in my My-Stream?”
“Does this nourish?”
“Or does it poison?”
You don’t escape the memetic loop by thinking harder. You exit by choosing better meals. And recognizing when someone else’s strange dish still comes from the same soil.
Not everyone needs to agree on the menu.
But we sure as hell need to remember:
We’re all eating.
We’re all feeding.
And we’re all, somehow, shaping the next recipe.
So light the fire. Stir the broth. And maybe this time taste it together.
The Newfangled Currents of Memetic Ecology
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.
Gonna need the weekend to mull over your words here. Much to digest and metabolize