Dude, where’s my meme?

“Memes don’t exist. Tell your friends.”

Definition

Pronounced meem, a meme is an idea that replicates by planting itself in people’s minds and altering their behaviour so that they spread it to other people. Some examples of successful memes:

• Catchphrases: All your base are belong to us. Yo quiero Taco Bell. D’oh! Thou shalt not kill. Bee-yotch.
• Catchy songs and melodies: In the Western world, there’s nothing catchier than a simple three-chord progression such as I/IV/V (think Louie Louie, Twist and Shout, Wild Thing, I Wanna Be Sedated or Anarchy in the UK), two-chorders like I/IV (think Groove is in the Heart, Madonna’s Ray of Light, Bill Withers’ Use Me or C&C Music factory’s Things That Make You Go Hmmmm…) or I/V (think Achy Breaky Heart)
• Fashion: The Hippie look of the 60’s. Bell-bottom pants in the 70’s. The preppy look and baggy jackets in the 80’s. Grunge in the 90’s.
• Political ideas: Democracy. Facism. Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite! Give me liberty or give me death (Guess which one Patrick Henry got after saying that). Socialismo o muerte. Those goddamned Randroids.
• Methodologies: Twelve-tone music. Styles of columns (say, Dorian or Ionic). Just-in-time manfacturing. Poka-Yoke. Theory X versus Theory Y. Programming methodologies (such as object-oriented programming and extreme programming). Holding the gun sideways like the bad-asses in Tarantino movies do.

Richard Dawkins coined the term in his book The Selfish Gene, and my friend Cory Doctorow has the dubious distinction of being the person who carried out the most flagrant abuse of the term when he once talked about osmosing the meme (thankfully, he refrains from techno-striver-speak these days. Most of the time, anyway.).

My meme makes a round trip

In 1995, I was a programmer at Mackerel Interactive Multimedia, making interactive CD-ROMs back when they were all the rage. I was a subscriber to The Wombat, which was a little e-mail bulletin put out sporadically by and for the graduating class of Science ’91, my engineering class at Queen’s University. Face, the editor, asked me to write up a little joke to put in the next issue, something about being in the working world. I had just noted to Kevin Steele, one of Mackerel’s creative directors, that drug dealers and software developers both referred to their clientele as “users”. Taking that as a starting point, I came up with a cute little chart comparing the the two lines of work. It got some laughs, I got some e-mail responses along the line of “hey, that was funny.” I thought the joke would get passed around a small number of engineering and marketing offices and then disappear into the meme swamp.

Today, I was reading and older entry in Adam Curry’s blog, which had the following:

You know that age old joke about similarities between Drug Dealers and Software Developers?

I’m smokin’ the pipe dude.

I thought wait a minute… and clicked the “age old” link from the quote above. There it was, my joke, verbatim!

I did a quick Google search on “drug dealers” “software developers” and found a page after page of my gag. Some versions were word-for-word the same as mine, some were updated to use more current terminology, and some people had even inserted their own jokes. But they all had my little gag as their originator.

Who knows how much office productivity was lost by people’s forwarding my little joke? I’m sure the number crunchers would argue that millions of dollars have been wasted. Look at me, I’m sticking it to The Man!

Just for kicks, I’m going to have to look through my saved e-mail from the Mackerel days, which is sitting on an old 44-meg SyQuest cartridge disk (remember those?), just to see if I can find the original. Getting credit for it isn’t important to me; I just think that the original meme would be the socio-cultural equivalent of having the very first amoeba preserved in a petri dish.

But hey, if you really want to, say “Accordion Guy wrote that!” or “Dude, that’s Joey’s!” the next time you see it on a Web page or someone forwards it to you in an e-mail, go right ahead.

Recommended Reading

Memes.org: A discussion board for people who love memetics.

Burying the Fish: Cory Doctorow’s very nice elegy for Mackerel. Written for Wired magazine, it was never published.

And one last thought: Don’t “just say no.” Say “No, thank you.” Drug dealers have feelings too.