Episode Details

In 1976, Richard Dawkins needed a word for a unit of cultural transmission — and accidentally named the internet's native language. This episode traces the full arc: from the Greek "mimeme" to Mike Godwin's 1993 coining of "internet meme," through Lolcats and image macros, all the way to the moment a Tumblr user captioned a stranger in Nintendo's Switch trailer and invented "Karen." Along the way, we dig into the scholarly fight over whether memes spread like viruses or like deliberate authorship — and why that academic argument carries real political weight. We also look at the SIR epidemiological model applied to meme spread, the strange case of the word "meme" becoming a meme itself, and why text, not GIFs, was the internet's first meme format. Episode #957544 — open it directly at myweirdprompts.com/957544