“They tried to biologize culture. It was very reductionist and lacked nuance. You have so many situated forms of cultural gestures—humour, irony—that you cannot account for with hard science.”
– Internet archaeologist
Sophie Publig, on why the Darwinian thinking of early
memeticists failed. In her own research on meme culture, Publig borrows Donna Haraway’s concept of
sympoiesis—“making-with”—to understand memes as “sympoietic lifeforms” that include users, platforms, and cultural references. “It’s about the interplay between these different agents,” Publig tells Aksioma’s Neja Berger.
