The Sunshine Empire

From Wikipedia:

“A meme (pronounced /ˈmiːm/, rhyming with “cream”[1]) is a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. (The etymology of the term relates to the Greek word μιμητισμός ([mɪmetɪsmos]) for “something imitated”.)[2] Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.”

For regular users of the interwebs, memes are a fact of life. Lolcatz, All Your Base, and such are regular staples of internet life, but today was a perfect example of the evolution of a meme in real time. This morning, friend of the site Will sent me a video of a racist old white man and a belligerent young black gentleman getting into a fight on a bus in San Francisco. The video is a bit violent so I’ll just link to it here: Old Man Wins Bus Fight. Just ten minutes after that our west coast operative Jolemite independently sent a Demotivational poster image culled from the same fight video. He sent it without knowing that I was watching the video at that moment. Then the meme evolved further. Another associate of mine then sent this .gif file that compared the fight to the video game Mortal Kombat. Not to be out done, Will then produced this You Tube video that fully developed the bus fight/Mortal Kombat meme to its natural conclusion.

By lunchtime, stories were being unearthed involving the old racist white man being tased at an Oakland Athletics game. This all came in real time from several different sources as close as this room and as far away as the Pacific Northwest. In the future, memes will be able to perpetuate themselves with the help of Skynet and Google. But at the rate we are going Google could be Skynet by then.