Internet memes no longer merely represent people; increasingly, people construct their personas from memes. This phenomenon can be understood by combining Richard Dawkins’s concept of the meme with Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation. Dawkins introduced the meme in The Selfish Gene as a cultural replicator transmitted through imitation, allowing cultural forms to reproduce, mutate, and compete for survival. Their reproductive success does not necessarily depend upon accurately representing reality. Internet archetypes such as the Doomer, Chad, NPC, Soyjak, Sigma, or CHUD illustrate this particularly well because they compress complicated personalities into immediately recognizable signs. Baudrillard allows us to take the argument further. In Simulacra and Simulation, the distinction between representation and reality becomes unstable as models increasingly precede and organize what they supposedly represent. The CHUD meme provides a good example of how this can occur online. What begins as a caricature develops its own recognizable appearance, vocabulary, humor, politics, and mannerisms. Real people are subsequently interpreted according to how closely they resemble the archetype, while some of those being caricatured may ironically embrace and perform it themselves. The process therefore reverses itself: person → caricature → meme → archetype → imitation → performed identity. The representation begins participating in the production of the reality it originally represented.
Freud helps explain how such representations can enter the construction of the self. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, identification can involve the ego taking on characteristics modeled upon another object, while the ego ideal provides an internal ideal against which the ego can be measured. Applied to contemporary meme culture, the significant development is that the model need not be another actual individual: it can be a memetic archetype assembled from thousands of images, jokes, expressions, videos, and stereotypes. Someone may begin speaking like a Doomer ironically, imitate the supposed behavior of a Sigma, or embrace the CHUD caricature as a joke, only for elements of the performance to become incorporated into his ordinary personality. The mask can gradually become part of the person wearing it. Social media intensifies this process because recognizable personas are particularly easy to circulate, imitate, reward, and reproduce. The individual can consequently become memetically legible, simplifying himself into recognizable aesthetics, opinions, expressions, and behaviors. This produces what I call the hyperreal self: instead of simply self → representation, we increasingly encounter representation → self. The person produces an image of himself, observes how that image is received, modifies himself in relation to it, and performs the modified persona again. The distinction between an original personality and its simulation can consequently become increasingly difficult to establish because the personality itself has developed partly through repeated interaction with its representations.
Praxeology prevents this synthesis from collapsing into memetic determinism. In the Misesian framework, memes do not act; individuals do. Mises defines human action as purposeful behavior and explicitly distinguishes praxeology from psychology and psychoanalysis: psychology may investigate the forces that produce particular desires or decisions, while praxeology begins with the fact that the individual acts purposively. Memes can therefore form part of the psychological and cultural environment within which individuals interpret themselves and develop particular ends, but praxeology does not attempt to explain why those particular ends emerged. An individual adopting a CHUD, Sigma, Doomer, or other memetic persona nevertheless acts when he employs means toward subjectively valued ends such as recognition, amusement, belonging, identity, or status. This produces a recursive relationship: memes influence actors → actors choose → actions reproduce memes → reproduced memes influence future actors. Dawkins helps explain the replication of the representation, Baudrillard its capacity to become a model for reality, Freud the individual’s identification with that model, and Mises the purposive action of the person inhabiting it. The resulting synthesis is the hyperreal self: memetic selection produces symbolic archetypes, individuals identify with and purposively perform those archetypes, and repeated performance produces real personalities increasingly modeled upon representations that originally caricatured real personalities. The meme has therefore accomplished something stranger than simply going viral. What began as a representation of human behavior returns to the physical world as human behavior. The meme no longer merely describes reality; reality begins cosplaying the meme.
Sources
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Chapter 11, “Memes: the New Replicators.” Dawkins introduces the meme as a unit of cultural transmission and develops the analogy between genetic replication and cultural transmission through imitation.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, particularly “The Precession of Simulacra.” Baudrillard develops the distinction between representation and simulation and describes the increasing precedence of models and signs over the reality they supposedly represent.
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, particularly the chapters on identification and the ego ideal. Freud examines identification as a process through which the ego can take on characteristics modeled upon an object and develops the relationship between the ego and its ideal.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, Chapter I, “Acting Man.” Mises defines human action as purposeful behavior and distinguishes the subject matter of praxeology from psychological and psychoanalytic explanations of the motivations underlying particular actions.
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