Meme Creator Quotes

We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.* 12

We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

This safety from harm might cause the imaginative experience of reading a book to be judged inferior to real experience. But that is not the case. Making contact with memes, in the forms of books or movies or other media, provides knowledge and wisdom necessary for going out into the real world; they are legitimate experiences all the same.

We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism—something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.*

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism--something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

Upgrading from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0.” The user complains that Wife 1.0 has “begun unexpected child processing that took up a lot of space and valuable resources,” and that it blocks applications such as “Poker Night 10.3, Football 5.0, Hunting and Fishing 7.5, and Racing 3.6.” In his response, the tech support representative explains that the user’s problems stem from “a primary misconception: many people upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0, thinking it is merely a utilities and entertainment program. Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM and is designed by its creator to run EVERYTHING!!!

Andrei avoided the internet as well and this evasion only added to his gloom. He loved music, especially old songs, and he loved movies, of all sorts. If he had the patience, sometimes he would read. While most of the pages he turned bored him to sleep, certain books with certain lines disarranged him. Some literature brought him to his feet, laughing and howling in his room. When the book was right, it was bliss and he wept. His room hushed with serenity and indebtedness. When he turned to his computer, however, or took out his phone, he would inevitably come across a viral trend or video that took the art he loved and turned it into a joke. The internet, in Andrei’s desperate eyes, managed to make fun of everything serious. And if one did not laugh, they were not intelligent. The internet could not be slowed and no protest to criticize its exploitation of art could be made because recreations of art hid perfectly under the veneer of mockery and was thus, impenetrable. It was easy to use Chopin’s ‘Sonata No. 2’ for a quick laugh, to reduce the ‘Funeral March’ to background music. It was a sneaky way for a digital creator to be considered an artist—and parodying the classics made them appear cleverer than the original artist. Meanwhile, Andrei’s body had healed playing Chopin alone in his apartment. He would frailly replay movie moments, too, that he later found the world edited and ripped apart with its cheap teeth. And everyone ate the internet’s crumbs. This cruel derision was impossible to escape. But enough jokes, memes, and glam over someone’s precious source of life would eventually make a sensitive body numb. And Andrei was afraid of that. He needed his fountain of hope unblemished. For this reason, he escaped the internet’s claws and only surrendered to it for e-mails, navigation, and the weather.

Her contemporaries, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (born 1928), Yukio Mishima (born 1925), and others did much to disseminate transgressive and nonheteronormative memes, which in turn influenced the Year 24 Group—the next generation of creators, such as Moto Hagio, Keiko Takemiya, and Yumiko Oshima, who fueled the boom of girls’ manga containing themes of same-sex or otherwise forbidden or transgressive romance.

The Creative Gene will form connections—strands—between me and you, and maybe new memes will be made. Toward that hope, I will once again visit a bookstore today and search for strands that I have not yet seen.

A very long time ago, I dreamed that I met a cat. When I awoke, I had returned to being a high school student, and the dream quickly passed from my memory. But as an adult, reading Jennie again, I realized that I had never forgotten the experience of that dream, not even for an instant. Now, as always, I carry Jennie’s meme inside myself. And so, when I declared at the beginning of this essay that I had never had a cat, I was wrong. I had Jennie.

By becoming the tiger, I found a different way to pass on my stories than the one I had so rigidly insisted upon. And so, even as a tiger, I intend to keep on howling into the later generations. Those stories will become new memes, not as prose, but as video games.

Woman in the Dunes taught me the meme that freedom does not flow like sand; freedom is the flow itself.

Even though I’m part of it, I can’t help but be moved by the wonder of the story that carries the meme of Satoshi Itoh becoming Hideo Kojima, and Hideo Kojima returning to Project Itoh.

Perhaps the test we are faced with now—to preserve the seeds for the future—will be a new way of living (a new meme) in which we cast ourselves adrift from the previous era.

The memes these stories communicated to me provided the energy I use to create, and to live.

fear had seemed genuine. It was there and it was everywhere, in all the fractured cultures; godless or godly, they all had at the back of their minds the insidiously replicating meme which said that one day a system would wake up and say to its creators: “Yes, now there is a God.” Blessed are the Watchmakers, for they shall inherit the earth.

Their struggles save me from my loneliness. Their struggles are themselves another story and another meme.

And the meanings of those stories will change based on the time and circumstances in which they are read. Then, left to each individual recipient, certain elements will be imitated, and others expanded. Through that repeated behavior, new memes are born.

I suddenly thought of Low Roar’s “I’ll Keep Coming.” ME + ME connected as if the union had been planned from the start, and a new meme came to life.