Why Does Everything End Up as a Meme?
The Meme as a Synthesis of Thought
When we hear the word “meme,” we usually think of funny images, ironic phrases, and short comments that circulate rapidly on social networks. However, the concept of meme predates the internet and even digital culture itself. It was proposed by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976, in his book The Selfish Gene, and its reach went far beyond humor or virality.
Dawkins sought to explain how certain ideas, beliefs, or customs spread much like genes do. To do so, he introduced the term “meme,” from the Greek mimeme (“that which is imitated”), as the minimal unit of cultural transmission. This unit could be a melody, a proverb, a technique, a habit, as long as it fulfilled the essential condition of being replicable. Even more: the meme, like the gene, not only sought persistence but replication, even at the expense of the carrier’s well-being if it ensured survival. It was, in Darwinian terms, a selfish structure.
What is remarkable is that this theory emerged in a world without networks, without smartphones, and without instant communication platforms. Yet, the symbolic contagion model he proposed anticipated what would become ubiquitous decades later: the logic of cultural virality. The accelerated spread of minimal ideas—capable of replicating by their symbolic or affective power, without requiring argumentative depth.
Within this framework, the digital meme is not an anomaly, but rather a coherent mutation. What now circulates as edited images, brief texts, or short videos follows the same replicative logic. These are compact symbolic units, easily transmissible, emotionally coded, whose success lies in their ability to be shared and recontextualized without losing effectiveness.
Of course, there are significant differences. Dawkins did not think of humor, or ephemerality, or the visual codes that now characterize memes. The original intent was to explain cultural persistence and change from an evolutionary logic. Today’s meme, however, is deeply enmeshed with pop culture, ironic commentary, and linguistic and visual play.
But there is also a structural continuity: the meme remains a minimal, highly contagious idea, transmitted not for its veracity or depth, but for its ability to anchor itself in the collective imagination and replicate quickly.
Within this economy of compressed signs, today’s memes also function as efficient attention-capturing mechanisms. In an environment saturated with stimuli, they manage to interrupt the flow, create a pause, highlight something. Their value does not lie solely in what they say but in how and when they say it. They interrupt, emphasize, provoke.
The Repressed and the Joke: Freud's Concept of Witz
In 1905, Sigmund Freud published Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, a text in which he examines not only how jokes work but also the psychic mechanisms at play. His interest goes beyond the superficial humor of the phenomenon and delves into its unconscious structure. What Freud calls Witz is not simply a witty comment or a casual joke, but an unconscious formation, comparable in many ways to dreams or slips of the tongue.
According to Freud, the joke operates as a channel for the expression of the repressed. Through humor, contents become sayable that would otherwise be censored by moral or social norms: desires, aggressions, drives, or taboos of different kinds. The joke acts as a symbolic mask allowing these materials to emerge, but in an acceptable, displaced, lightened form. Its efficacy lies precisely in that detour: what is said appears as not fully said, as if it escapes conscious judgment.
This mechanism generates a particular psychic economy. By momentarily breaking repression, the Witz allows for the release of internal tension. It is not merely entertainment, but a process involving energy savings, partial suspension of censorship, and a pleasure derived from outwitting the ego’s defenses. In this sense, humor not only communicates but also relieves, relaxes, disarms.
Freud thus presents a logic in which humor becomes an indirect expression of the forbidden. The subject may say what they shouldn’t, but without fully accepting the consequences of having said it. The Witz therefore functions as an ambiguous zone where what is at stake is not simply the joke’s content but the possibility of bypassing repression without breaking with the reality principle.
From this perspective, humor is not a denial of the unconscious, but one of its most elaborate forms of manifestation. In laughing, the subject not only finds amusement: they also access, if only fleetingly, what has been excluded or inhibited from conscious discourse. This dynamic between censorship, displacement, and pleasure is crucial for understanding what happens when the humorous becomes the predominant format of contemporary cultural expression.
What Does the Meme Relieve? Two Possible Interpretations
If we follow this Freudian logic and apply it to the contemporary meme, the focus is no longer simply on what makes us laugh, but on what that laughter releases. What does the meme disinhibit? What form of censorship is interrupted when the viral takes over? One possible interpretation is the meme as a social valve. Like the joke, it relieves tensions: economic, political, symbolic. In the face of precarity, absurdity, environmental crisis, or institutional discredit, the meme helps us bear the unbearable. It becomes a collective ritual, a shared space to symbolically process discomfort—a digital decompression chamber.
This effect is not minor. That lightness allows us to cope with situations that would otherwise be intolerable. But the meme does not only evade; it also signals. It can serve as a spark, an interruption that triggers unease—a prompt that does not contain reflection but may open it. In this sense, the meme can be a true gateway to thought. It points without closing, suggests without resolving, provokes without explaining. And while it does not replace analysis, it can anticipate it.
However, this initial potential should not be confused for a sufficient end. The risk is that the meme becomes exhausted in its own form, that irony becomes the only possible gesture, that the viral wink replaces symbolic elaboration. Thought often begins with an image or a brief phrase. But if it stops there, it remains surface. If the meme is the beginning, thought is what should follow.
This leads us to a second possible interpretation. Perhaps what the meme relieves is not only tension in the face of the unbearable outside world, but also a deeper, more uncomfortable drive: the need not to think, not to get involved, not to feel too much. In an age saturated with information, demands, news, appeals, and an expectation of constant opinion, what is truly forbidden is indifference. We are now expected to be informed, critical, socially aware. But deep down, we do not always desire this. Often we want to disconnect, numb ourselves, not come to terms with the magnitude of what happens, neither outside nor within. When faced with ecological collapse, economic precariousness, political banality, or others' suffering, a desire arises not to be fully present. And the meme offers an effective way to fulfill that wish without guilt. It enables participation in the social flow without bearing too much weight. A meme is shared, you laugh, you comment. There’s no need to elaborate, commit, or take a stand. The meme acts as an emotional interface that lets us inhabit meaninglessness with a smile.
This gesture, while understandable, can lead to the impoverishment of symbolic ties. What is gained in lightness is often lost in depth. What is instantly communicated is rarely questioned afterwards. The viral is consumed at the same speed at which it is spent. And this is where the real risk arises: that the meme, which could be a threshold to thought, becomes its replacement. That the question dissolves into laughter. That where there could be criticism, there is only a complicit wink. That where there could be elaboration, there remains nothing but repetition.
The problem, then, is not in the meme itself, but in what we do with it. Not in its capacity to provoke laughter, but in laughter that does not transform into reflection. The meme can and should be a door—an effective, albeit brief, entryway to thought. What it cannot be, if we aim to sustain a critical culture, is the only space where something is said. Critique often begins with a joke, but it cannot end there. Thinking means taking that initial symbolic gesture and moving beyond its condensed form. This is what Freud called elaboration, and what every culture needs if it wants its minimal forms of expression not to become its maximum limits as well.