Memes and Viruses
Meme. What pops up in your mind when you hear that word? Willy Wonka? A Shiba Inu dog? A random scene from a Marvel film? But will you think about the Covid-19 pandemic?
The sun was a homesick woman
You might’ve encountered your first meme not long after you were able to access the Internet. I myself started daily dosing my life with memes since I visited 9GAG for the first time, and it was about a decade ago. The meme is such an old thing, but when do you think memes started to emerge?
You might think that they were born some time after the advent of the Internet, that is, the 80s. But….
If you were thinking about the colloquial Internet memes, yes, you were right, they rose to popularity around those times. However, technically speaking, as first coined and defined by Richard Dawkins in his influential book, The Selfish Gene, a meme is a unit of cultural transmission. (And by the way, in the book, Dawkins clearly states that ‘meme’ “should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream.’”)
Even in the most ancient tribes, memes were ubiquitous in many forms.
Consider that Aboriginal story of the origin of sun that said the sun was originally a woman who ran away from her tribe to a barren land because she wasn’t permitted to marry the man she loved.
She then was pitied by the local holy spirits, and lifted into the sky. Later, she became homesick and looked down to her people, who were cold and suffering. Wanting to help, she made a giant campfire in the sky every morning. And that, folks, is how the sun was born.
I just got that story from a ten-second Google search. But I believe that the story dates back to centuries ago, when even if there had been a guy who said that there would be something as the Internet, he might’ve been stoned to death due to lunacy.
It is not hard to infer that, with enough regressions, the story was originated from a single person or group living aeons ago. Isn’t it amazing that that tale can reach me, and now, reach you?
That story is a meme, just like other cultural bits in the endless list of ancient repositories. By this logic, it’s not only stories that classify as memes. Songs, the instruction to make flint axes, food recipes, are all memes, passed down throughout the generations.
This means that your favourite song, the bad joke your dad gave to you last summer, that war story which your grandpa tells you every time you meet him, the Ice Bucket Challenge, are all memes.
I got 56k upvotes on Reddit
If you wonder what memes have to do with genes, Dawkins, in his book makes an analogy of them since they are both replicators:
Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.
In other words, memes and genes both passed on from one individual to the others.
So, based on this analogy, we can also liken viruses to (Internet) memes. After all, it is precisely by replicating their genes that they become problematic (for us). In fact, these past years have been witnessing the increase in the usage of the word ‘viral’ to indicate something, specifically on the Internet, that is widespread and well-known.
With that in mind, let’s consider how Internet memes spread.
I believe most, if not all, of you know at least one source for obtaining memes. Social media such as Facebook and Twitter are good ones. But there are more specialised place for such thing, like 9GAG or Reddit.
You may also have posted memes to those platforms, and watch those upvotes (or likes) go up and up. If your meme are good enough, you may get tens of thousands of upvotes, which indicates how many people like your meme, and, more than that, give a proportional measure of how many people have seen your meme.
I was lucky enough to have posted a meme that got over 56k upvotes on Reddit (and some others reached about 30k). (By the way, if your posts exceed 50k upvotes and get shown on frontpage, you’re gonna be invited to special subreddits). I believed that that particular meme was really funny, and like a beginner investor, I anxiously checked the number of upvotes I got every 15 minutes or so.
And here is the important part.
I noticed that the rate with which the upvotes increased got higher as my meme got more upvotes. In other words, it grew exponentially. That means that as my meme got more famous, it would get even more famous more easily, in contrast with linear growth, in which my meme’s upvotes would increase at the same rate at any given time.
The rich get richer, the richer get even richer.
Several factors contributed to the success of my meme.
People (who have good sense of humour) who found it funny share it with their friends via their social media, such as WhatsApp groups. And you know how easy it is to forward message in WhatsApp.
Also, Reddit has dedicated pages for those memes which are ‘Rising,’ ‘Top,’ Hot,’ and ‘Best’, which indicate that a meme is popular right now. By default, reddit will show you the most popular posts first, and I believe most people tend to just visit these pages. They are exactly the features that allowed my meme’s popularity to grow exponentially: they exposed my meme to a larger stage, to gather more attention. It’s as if those pages give labels to a meme, saying “this meme is liked by thousands, you may also like it.”
Hold that thought, and look at this graph:
There is no doubt that the number of people infected by Covid-19, like the upvotes for my meme, grows exponentially. The more people get infected, the more rapidly SARS-Cov-2 percolates, resulting in more and more people get infected.
Add to the mix some loosely-supervised international travels, complacencies and underplayings by governments, and severe indictments in the public understanding of science. Voilà! A pandemic!
In addition, one may argue that maybe if Reddit didn’t have specialised pages, a meme would not gather attention exponentially, so maybe a meme’s popularity doesn’t grow exponentially by its own nature, and cannot be used as an analogy for a virus’ spread. This, in fact, only makes Reddit a better analogy for virus replication rate.
The ‘Hot’ page includes memes which were on the ‘Rising’ page. The ‘Rising’ page includes memes which were on the ‘New’ page. Consider these pages as scales on which a meme can survive. Bad memes die on ‘New’, better memes die on ‘Rising’, best memes prevail to the hot page.
COVID-19 was initially just observed in a Chinese seafood and poultry marketas ‘pneumonia of unknown cause’, infecting ‘only’ dozens of people; on this scale, we called it an outbreak. It didn’t take long for it to raise the game and infect more people from more country. From an outbreak, it escalated to be an epidemic, and a pandemic. (Actually I don’t remember that COVID-19 was once classified an epidemic. What I do remember is that it was once an outbreak and afterwards a Public Health Emergency of International Concern [PHEIC] before being a pandemic. I just can assume that it spread so quickly that we immediately needed to call it a pandemic).
The closer a meme approaches the ‘Hot’ page on Reddit, the more people have seen and upvoted it. The closer a disease approaches the status ‘pandemic’, the more people from more countries have contracted and died from it.
Cold as ice
In 2014, there was a famous campaign to raise the awareness of the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), involving dousing a bucket of ice water into someone’s head. In addition, it also encouraged the doers to give donations to research on the disease.
The rule was quite simple: within 24 hours you have to submit a video of you accepting the challenge, filling a bucket with ice and water, and dumping it on your head (can be done yourself or by others). After this, you have to nominate a minimum of three people to do the same.
Based on that information, we can theoretically say that one submitter will result in three others. This is analogous to an important concept in epidemiology called the basic reproduction number (R₀ [pronounced R-nought, or R-zero]), which denotes how many people can be infected by one infected person.
If the R₀ number for a disease is more than one (R₀>1), the number of infected people will go exponentially. The greater the value, the hardest it is to curb the outbreak. Oppositely, when R₀<1, the outbreak is likely to slow down and vanished on its own. You can guess what happens when R₀=1.
In the case of ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, the theoretical R₀ is three.
Leaving the theoretical realms and into the real world we go
Later in the same year, in a witty study, a team five scientists from the University of Hong Kong calculated the empirical R₀. They binge watched 145 Ice Bucket Challenge videos of famous celebrities and public figure (social media celebrities included), and looked for their backgrounds. David Beckham, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Stephen Hawking were also taken into inclusion. Kermit the Frog and Homer Simpsons too, were included in the research process, but their data didn’t make it to the final calculation due to “difficulty in ascertaining their personal characteristics”, for which the results were adjusted.
After watching all those videos, they eventually stopped gathering data after the fifth generation because of “investigator fatigue.”
They found that the R₀ was actually 1.43, slightly less than half of what was intended. To give a context, this number is within the range of that of the 2009 A/H1N1 influenza pandemic (1.2–2.3), or the high end of 2012 MERS outbreak (0.5–1.3). To give more comparisons, these are R₀ values of some others viruses:
This happened mainly because some nominators sometimes failed to influence all three of their nominees. Among the participants, 24.2% had no successful nominations, 32.3% had one, 26.3% had two, and only 17.2% successfully influenced three people.
Unfortunately, while the rules of the Ice Bucket Challenge explicitly tells us what the theoretical R₀ is, diseases don’t just have a specification sheet attached to it. It is not hard then to deduce that R₀ values for diseases cannot be measured with absolute certainty. R₀ is at least dependent on many biological, sociobehavioural, environmental, and the model and assumptions used to calculate it. Not only do most of these factors vary from region to region, but also with time: you’d get different R₀ values from the beginning, middle, and end of an outbreak. Moreover, to quote the CDC, R₀ is “easily subject to misrepresentation, misinterpretation, and misapplication”, since “many researchers using R₀ have not been trained in sophisticated mathematical techniques.” To take the current ongoing pandemic as an example, the R₀ for SARS-Cov-2 was suggested to be 2.2–2.7 at the beginning of 2020. In February, a study estimated that it was 4.7–6.6. Later in July, another study by the same scientists told that the range was 3.8–8.9, with a median value of 5.7.
Despite the volatility of SARS-Cov-2’s R₀, one thing we can be sure of: the pandemic isn’t over yet, and its R₀ value is still more than one (with some exceptions observed in some role-model countries).
All the lonely Starbucks lovers
Let’s again walk down the memory lane. About five years ago, Taylor Swift’s hit Blank Space started a bizarre phenomenon about a lyrics.
The original lyrics in dispute was “Got a long list of ex-lovers.” However, some people decided that they were going to sing it as “All the lonely Starbucks lovers” Even her mother heard it as “All the lonely Starbucks lover” (Who didn’t?!).
It became quite an internet trend several months after its release in October 2014, when thousands, if not millions, realised that there was another group of people (including Taylor herself) who sang the lyrics without mentioning the multinational coffeehouse chain.
There are some hilarious other misheard lyrics, but I’m just going to give you the wrong versions:
- “Excuse me while I kiss this guy” (Purple Haze - Prince)
- “It doesn’t make a difference if we’re naked or not” (Livin’ on a Prayer - Bon Jovi)
- “Hold me close, young Tony Danza” (Tiny Dancer - Elton John)
This type of mistake is so significant that there’s even an official term for it: Mondegreen.
The last misheard lyrics on the above list, is believed to originate from an episode of Friends, in which Phoebe thinks that it is a song about that one guy from the 80s sitcom Who’s the Boss? However, more often than not, we don’t know the starting point of such mistake.
I can’t find the original source of the error of Blank Space, but I think it’s not too farfetched to surmise that it started with some hundreds of people mishearing that particular lyrics. (Or maybe they doubted what the words were, but they thought to themselves, “Did I hear Starbucks? Hmm, yes surely I did.”)
Say that a guy named Bobby is among them. Then, being certain that it was about Starbucks, Bobby sang his version of the lyrics more articulately and without no doubt (wrong with infinite precision, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb would say).
That same week, John, Bobby’s roommate, heard his friend singing the lyrics clearly as “All the lonely Starbucks lovers”. Needless to say, since the song was a huge hit, Bobby sang it quite frequently: when he showered, when he prepared his cereal, and when he packed his bag. As we observed, before long, the song was ubiquitous. (Like any other hit, you change radio station, but the song is still the same). It was inevitable, therefore, for John not to hear Blank Space. It is not hard to infer from here that when it came to that particular lyrics, John, having been primed with the wrong lyrics, thought that that lyrics was about Starbucks frequenters. He never bothered to check the true one, since he didn’t even knew that it was wrong.
This phenomenon perfectly epitomises mutations.
As you might remember from your high school biology teacher, genes mutate. When an organism (or a metaorganism, for that matter), mutates, the genetic information inside it changes. Some kind of mutations can lead to serious diseases, like thalassaemia and sickle-cell anaemia. Some others, in contrast, can give you some sort of ‘superpowers’, like increased bone density.
Likewise, viruses, consisting of genes, can mutate. In fact, mutations are inevitable for viruses.
Many viral outbreaks are actually thought to have been caused by viruses originally found in animals; it was only after mutations, that they became capable of infecting humans. As you might have known, SARS-Cov-2 was believed to have originated from bats, before hopping its way out to humans. Some other ones include: HIV, which is thought to come from monkeys; Avian Influenza, from birds; and Swine Flu, from pigs.
However, mutations don’t have to be that significant, it can be little, trivial changes that occur every time, leading to one observable change. Just like in a Chinese whispers game, each participant doesn’t have to alter much of the message to make the last person comes up with an absurd sentence that has nothing to do with the original message.
Earlier this year, scientists took samples of the virus from different patients, and compare their genetic structures to each other. They indeed saw that the viruses were slightly different from one patient to the other, as if each copy of the virus was unique only to one particular sufferer.
Based on this train of thoughts, we can know if a virus has been around a while or if it’s a newcomer. If there are a lot of different versions of it, it can be concluded that it’s been circulating for some more time; unlike a new one which has much fewer variations and looks pretty much the same, like the SARS-Cov-2.
One possible bad consequence of viral mutation is that we will not have a long-lasting antibodies to combat viruses, since they change (despite taking quite a long time to be significant). One may have to contract the virus once every several months or years to re-trigger her immune response. Specifically for coronaviruses, immunity typically lasts for months to years, but definitely not a lifetime.
That all being said, however, we should not worry too much about mutations in viruses. As I said before, they are inherent perks of being a virus, and most of the times, rarely impactful. They are “not indicative of outlandish and devastating new viral characteristics. Instead, they can inform our understanding of emerging outbreaks.”, said Nathan Grubaugh, Mary Petrone, and Edward Holmes in the comment article of March 2020’s edition of Nature Microbiology.
Never, ever inject disinfectant to your body
While some memes are beneficial in some ways — e. g. to convey jokes, to evoke feelings, to raise awareness — an unignorable proportion of them are harmful, like hoaxes.
Hoaxes distort your view of the world. They underplay urgent issues while exaggerate trivial ones at the same time. They give ostensibly trustworthy information when actually there is no underpinning evidence for it.
Their impacts range from something as benign as telling people to click the like button to complement (or substitute?) a prayer to save their loved ones from disasters; to an uncalled-for suggestion to inject disinfectant, which literally threatened lives.
When a false information has spread, it’s not always easy to right the wrong. We tend to get more comfortable with a falsehood that fits our beliefs than a truth that deny everything we hold dear. The old hackneyed proverbs ‘prevention is better than cure’ remains valid. It is better to not believe in hoaxes than to believe them and have to purge them later.
Mistaking lyrics is disproportionately harmless, compared to other types of misinformation; thus, we don’t really need to prevent it. In fact, as I’ve said above, it can be really amusing. Why prevent it at all?
On the other extreme of the spectrum, irresponsible people are spreading hoaxes and not only unwittingly, but intentionally inflict damage to other
As the Internet gets more and more integral in our lives, we can observe the number of well-meaning people offering their versions of alternative medicine, which give people false sense of security, while actually do nothing (or even do harm). In the 21st century, to spread terrors, people need not bombs or plane hijacks; they are only a few clicks and taps away from making people thousands of kilometres away petrified.
But as Yuval Noah Harari said in the first sentence of his book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, the world is deluged with irrelevant information, it is practically inevitable to consume hoaxes every now and then. We need more than just clarifications and corrections for false information; we need something to repel it altogether.
These are analogous to other important concepts: medicines and vaccines. We need more than just medicines, we need vaccines.
Now, I’m sure you learnt to distinguish the two back then in high school. But allow me to jog your memory by definitions from the Cambridge Dictionary.
A medicine is “a substance, especially in the form of a liquid or a pill, that is a treatment for illness or injury; “ while a vaccine is “a substance containing a virus or bacterium in a form that is not harmful, given to a person or animal to prevent them from getting the disease that the virus or bacterium causes.”
Back to the Starbucks lovers’ story, Taylor eventually told the public that the lyrics had nothing to do with Starbucks via a now-deleted tweet. As you might’ve inferred, this tweet only served as a medicine; it only corrected what had been wrong, with no interest in preventing people mistaking lyrics in the future.
If so, then, what will be the meme-version of vaccine?
It is fact-checking.
It comes in some forms, most notably those you find on social media, which, particularly this year, it has proven to be highly beneficial.
As we must try our best to get rid of false information (although this sounds like a pipe dream), we have to eradicate lethal viruses, an ambition that can only be achieved with vaccines.
In the 1960s-1980s, this is exactly what we were doing against smallpox, which is the first disease to have been fought on a global scale.
Smallpox had been a lethal disease that killed 3 out of 10 people who had contracted it (~30% fatality rate) for about 12,000 years. Yes, 12,000 years before it got eradicated in 1980. In the future, when you’re asked what Pharaoh Ramses V, Cuitláhuac, Louis I of Spain, George Washington, and Mozart had in common, you can answer with “They all had smallpox.”
It was clear that we needed to get rid of this virus.
Vaccines were extremely involved in this grand endeavour of humankind. The WHO did surveillance and campaigns on vaccination and preventive measure; especially to those countries in which knowledge and awareness about vaccination were luxury that few people possess. (Ironically, these countries now have a higher acceptance towards vaccines than some developed countries).
Blasphemers on flat Earth
Here’s a well-known fact that so bizarre it perplexes me every time I think of it: some people actually think that the Earth is flat, despite a myriad of proofs disproving it. Eccentrically, people subscribing to this view often deem that the evidence of round Earth is actually a conspiracy fabricated by NASA, despite the fact that you don’t need to leave the Earth to really prove that it is not flat.
At first, I thought this was all satirical, a harsh criticism to poor public understanding of science. After all, who on (round) Earth genuinely think we can find the edge of the Earth? I had taken the fact that the Earth was round for granted that I didn’t think that in the 21st century, there was still some people willing to go the extra mile to (unknowingly?) disguise pseudoscience with such meticulously concocted ‘proofs’ and stories.
Another, more grotesque, well-known fact is that in some countries, blasphemy is considered one of the most vile crimes one can do, and to some extent, punishable by death, most notably in the middle ages.
In his masterpiece, Summa Theologiae, the über-theologian Thomas Aquinas made clear that blasphemy “is more grave than murder,” because, although murder inflicts more harm to people than blasphemy does to God, the severity of a sin is assessed in terms of the “intention of evil” rather than the actual damage done. So maybe it was (or is?!) sensible to kill people who badmouth God.
In 1697, the same year as the modern Cinderella story was first published, Thomas Aikenhead (who, I believe, had no relation whatsoever with the previous Thomas), was hanged for “the denying of the incarnation of our Saviour, the Holy Trinity, and scoffing at the Holy Scriptures.” The 21-year-old medical student’s death was, in effect, aimed to deter the spread of criticism towards religion.
You might be confused as to why I present facts of flat Earthers and blasphemers. What’s the connection between them?
Flat Earth is not a widely adopted belief, just like secularism was back then. Most people have known fully well that the Earth is indisputably round that the belief of the otherwise has practically no effect, other than a round of titters. Same went for blasphemy. The majority devoutly revered their Gods (despite only superficially due to the fear of being persecuted), that the suggestion to question and assess carefully one’s inherited faith withered before came into bloom.
A mother doesn’t have to worry too much about her teenage boy believing the Earth is not spherical and makes him undergo a 4-year specialised training in physical geography. (Wow that’s extremely hyperbolic). Likewise, a clergyman on a regular sunny day didn’t need to be afraid that a member of his pew would rebel against the church. As long as most people firmly adhere to a belief at any given time, the possibility of a radical view prevailing over it is low.
These exemplify another concept in epidemiology: herd immunity.
Just like an ex-flat Earther who eventually realises that the Earth is more like a ball than a frisbee, someone can be immune to a disease by contracting it and recover. Also, just like a catholic school kid who is heavily indoctrinated by the “weakened version” of capital punishment (that is, in forms of threats and narratives), someone can be immune to a disease by getting vaccinated (remember that a vaccine is the weakened version of a pathogen microorganism to trigger your immune response).
When a certain amount of people in a group of people are immune to a particular disease, the population will give an indirect protection to those who lack immunity. This is due to the fact that those who are resistant to the pathogen will be much unlikely to transmit it, thereby minimising the chance of infection for those who aren’t immune to it and preventing an outbreak.
Regretfully, this is often mistaken for the absence of the need for vaccines. After all, I haven’t gotten smallpox, and I wasn’t vaccinated. See? Proof.
Herd immunity sounds like a brilliant idea right? And by this point, you may remember that when you were a 7-year old kid, your mom said that if you had had the chicken pox once, you wouldn’t get it again, and you shouldn’t worry to visit your friend who was just infected by it.
So, why on (round) Earth are we keeping people inside their houses instead of letting them get the Covid-19 and be immune to it afterwards? And, oh, I heard Sweden and the UK are doing this? I mean, the economy is getting worse and worse everyday, people are losing jobs, it just seems sensible to make more and more people sick, amirite?
Well, not so fast.
For less lethal diseases, such as chicken pox, this approach might be sensible; sadly this is not the case with Covid-19. While the exact fatality rate of it is still hazy, I think we can all agree that this pandemic is deadly. And as long as we still care for other living human beings, we might want to save them. Just imagine the chaos that would happen to, say, hospitals, if all people deliberately trying to get Covid-19.
Bear in mind that, I repeat, herd immunity can only be achieved when a sufficient proportion of the population have been immune. This, if anything, only accentuate the importance of vaccinations. Not all people have the luxury of getting immunised. Newborns and people who can’t afford vaccines are some of them. And it is up to the rest to protect these vulnerable people.
And if you think, “well, let people die, it’s not a huge price to pay for a global immunity anyway, cool off dude. They’ll eventually die anyway. It is what it is,” you might want to contemplate on your core values.
You know what’s not a huge price to pay for a global immunity? Wear masks, wash your hands, socially distance yourself from others, patiently wait for a vaccine, and get vaccinated.
Epilogue
This is sorrowful.
I started writing this piece in mid May, but life (and lots of procrastination, of course) got in the way and this writing was abandoned. Before I knew it, June and July just went like that (whoosh), and it was already August. I had hoped that by this time, talking about the novel coronavirus would not be as urgent as it had been in February or March.
Alas, I was wrong. In some country (including mine), the peak of the pandemic hadn’t even been reached, and it seems that no end in sight for the next few months. In others, surges were appearing, and the possibility of a second wave wasn’t something that could be completely thrown out of the window.
So I decided to continue writing this article, since it seemed that I wasn’t late at all to weigh in with another piece of my mind on the ongoing pandemic.
Sigh.
Anyway, I realised that not all analogies I made here are perfectly analogous in all aspect of the concept. For example, a vaccine works by triggering one’s immune system with a watered-down version of a pathogen, while teaching religion to people doesn’t really triggering any hostility within them to combat the input. That said, I deeply hope that with all these imperfections, my message can still be conveyed clearly.
A sentence from the WHO’s webpage on the Smallpox Eradication Programme resonates really well with today’s condition: “This extraordinary achievement was accomplished through the collaboration of countries around the world.”
Let that sink in.
