CULTURE
The Memeocene: Humanity’s New Epoch
Slouching toward mediocrity?
Behold the Memeocene: Dialogue and politics are dead, and we have killed them
As human population and technology grow, there is increasing talk that we have entered a new epoch — the Anthropocene or epoch of humans. The idea behind the appellation is that the Earth–its biology and geology–is being altered by human activity.
There is merit to such an idea. True, humans are altering the planet geologically and ecologically, but humanity itself is being altered by another factor, and there should be a name for this new epoch of humanity: the Memeocene.
In the 1500s, the printing press revolutionized how humans communicated. In the 1920s, radio did the same, followed by television in the 1950s. Innovations in technology are usually associated with improvements in human society. It was understandably assumed that the development of the Internet around the beginning of the 2000s would usher in a new golden era of human communication, knowledge sharing, and progress.
It did not.
Instead, despite the best intentions, the Internet ushered in the Memeocene (pronounced MĒM-oh-sēn): the epoch of memes. Whereas the printing press…
