Memetics—in the original sense—asks which cultural expressions survive, and why. Not what makes an idea good, but what makes it persist. These are different questions, and the gap between them is where power lives.
Every domain has its own selection apparatus. In science, it is peer review and citation networks. In law, precedent and judicial authority. In media, editorial judgment and algorithmic distribution. In the arts, patronage, curation, and the slow accumulation of institutional endorsement. These systems share deep structural properties—concentration, path dependence, the disproportionate influence of a few gatekeepers—but they are rarely studied as instances of the same phenomenon.
AI is collapsing production costs across every domain it touches. That transformation is exhilarating for some and existential for others—particularly for artists, writers, and other cultural workers who are watching the economic foundations of their practice erode in real time. The anxiety is legitimate. But the harder question underneath it is structural: when making things is no longer the bottleneck, the systems that decide which things matter become the binding constraint. And those systems were never neutral to begin with.