Meme beliefs evolve at the speed of computation. They ignite across networks, splinter, decay, and transform. They feedback on themselves, self amplifying and distorting as they go. By contrast, traditional religions seem dull and immutable, blanketed in featureless dust, despite marketing efforts to redress them into currency.
Meme religions are fun, and made of pixels. Their velocity increases because the fuel is plentiful: identity confirming clicks, swipes, and psyops. But they are featureless: low rez, blocky, often nostalgic representations of things that never were in the first place, with the inconvenient and boring parts left out. The more removed from the source the more value they hold. Clip art images of ordinary rocks are worth well more than actual diamonds. Crypto Punks, selling for tens of thousands as NFT’s for their generative uniqueness, are somehow entirely unrepresentative of those dizzy, drug addled days. We were fully fungible then, and not at all cute.
Theologian Paul Tillich defined religion as an “ultimate concern.” What is the ultimate concern of cryptocurrency believers? The co-founder of Dogecoin, who abandoned the project, noted the the emerging industry was filled with “white libertarian bros sitting around hoping to get rich and coming up with buzzword-filled business ideas.” Recent crypto believers may be largely unaware of the ideological foundations of Bitcoin and other crypto, and their fervor springs from other sources like FOMO and YOLO. Their ultimate concern may be belongingness, and an identifiable but evolving sense of group identity.
Is it possible that the speed and transience of meme beliefs are features as well as a bugs? That in auditioning multiple micro beliefs we are left with a pragmatic residue of strategies, of modular perspectives? Maybe, but we are just as likely to be left with the wreckage of addictions, a patchwork of conspiratorial illusions, toxic advertising and entertainment imagery, and web worn think tank propaganda. It’s not like most of us can see foundational beliefs anyway. Occasionally they are exposed, revealing their lack of mooring and dissonance with other, barely detectable assumptions. But mostly our foundations are assumed, like gravity, time, and the electric grid. Whoops.
If there’s an upside to transient belief surfing it is rehearsal and adaptation, but with a failure rate on par with day trading. Unseriousness is a benefit when trying on funny hats and partial world views because we are forced to play like preschoolers with crude but colorful building blocks. One hundred and forty years on, it’s much worse than Nietsche warned. Not only did we kill God but we replaced them with scams: money scams, art scams, a president scam, belief scams. The digital life rewards lack of seriousness with influence. Science is serious, and in popularized form promises an understandable, rational world. It is a foundation, if a fuzzy one, for most secular beliefs. But it doesn’t really offer a salve for our anxieties the way Dogecoin does (or did, or might still.)
The best case is that by auditioning perspectives at the speed of memes it is possible that tensions are revealed, fissures exploited in underlying assumptions, and new foundations are laid, even if pinned on top of others. Then again, it could just be more noise and we appear as floaties in the Pacific Ocean garbage vortex, bobbing around in our own plastic detritus. Maybe the entire internet is one endlessly repeating rickroll; meme belief surfing on metaverse pixel waves, shielding us from the contingencies of weather, nature, and our flesh wrapped vulnerabilities. Unless of course if you timed Gamestop perfectly. Boat!
In the end though, there’s something important latent in digital worlds and objects, we are just not sure what it is. Maybe it is speed itself, and paper handedness as virtue rather than sin. That somehow darting about and letting go is the path that allows us to blissfully hover and spin together in the illusory certainty of code and mathematics. Just as we can sense maybe there is a mind behind all the matter, or none at all, we can sense digital meaning may be the only future meaning. It isn’t a matter of misplacing the concrete real but of replacing it; relocating it, again and again.
Memes are cartoons for adults, and online beliefs are cartoon guides to reality. Flittering from one meme to the next keeps us occupied, limbs spinning in an infinite hold moment, only to realize we have no business with infinity. ♾