Wait, what??? Can a 'no-virus' meme be 'viral' if there is actually no 'virus'?

Is the cognitive dissonance too much? Or is there something to learn here?

Apr 30, 2024

I have written confidently about the lack of evidence for the existence of “viruses” as “disease-causing agents,” and about the concept of contagion as a description of the spread of “disease” being a false paradigm. I remain certain about these concepts being false (while always open to being shown that I am wrong). As far as anyone knows for sure, viruses do not exist (see almost anything written by Mike Stone on his Substack, ViroLIEgy) and every attempt to prove contagion has failed (see Can You Catch a Cold? by Daniel Roytas, and my recent post, Contagion has never, ever been proven).

Imagine my surprise, then, to see a series of Internet memes featuring some of the leading voices in the no-virus discourse and their words about the nonexistence of “viruses!” Internet memes are, as you know, informational graphics that “go viral” when they are shared on social media over and over. The word “viral,” of course, is derived from the word “virus,” a supposedly pathogenic particle that is said to spread through the population by being shared over and over, making everyone sick.

Wait, what? These people are brilliant at explaining that viruses are fiction! Yet they are shown in memes, which are viral! If viruses don’t exist, how can anything be viral? But it’s such a good word for how ideas spread! Too much irony! Ow, my brain hurts!

The no-virus memes I saw were assembled by The Starfire Codes (which posts wonderful meme drops almost daily—see end of this post for more). These featured the words and faces of some of the most prominent names associated with the “no-virus position”—Dr. Tom Cowan, Dr. Mark Bailey, Dawn Lester, John Blaid, Stefan Lanka, and others. (In case it isn’t clear, these individuals did NOT create the memes in which they are featured. Anyone can create a meme using a “meme generator” that has templates to which you add photos, art, text, or whatever. I am sure the people in these memes have better things to do than make memes of their own words! Just wanted to clear that up in case anyone was confused.)

After letting my brain settle down a little bit from its initial wave of cognitive dissonance, I got to wondering whether the concepts of “viruses” and contagion have been hijacked, in a way, and put to incorrect and highly misleading uses by our for-profit medical system. I wanted to find out if there was a legitimate meaning for the term “virus” and the concept of contagion!

Maybe effects or influences being passed between people is something that happens, but not in the way that the disproven germ hypothesis has defined it. Maybe there are exchanges between humans on a subtle level that could be described as “viral” or “contagious” but not in the sense of deadly microbes sailing through the air and spreading disease. Maybe what spreads from one to another is not pathogens or disease-causing entities, but something else…Hmmm…

There is a great deal to say about these words and what they have meant to past generations—and that will be for another time! For this post, I will focus on the word “meme,” which carries with it the concept of “virality,” because there is also a good deal to say about what a “meme” is and does that is relevant to the inquiry about “viruses,” the unproven germ hypothesis, and contagion.

What is a ‘meme’?

The term “meme,” the original concept on which Internet memes are based, comes from Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist who published The Selfish Gene in 1976. The premise of his thinking is that human evolution actually happens on the level of the survival of genes, not on the level of individual organism or group or even species survival. Essentially, he postulates, our genes are using us to replicate themselves—it is their evolution, not ours, that is primary. We’re just their vehicles to move through time and live on.

In the context of this argument about the primacy of genes and their replication, Dawkins coined the term “meme” to describe a unit of culture that also, like a gene, replicates itself across generations.

According to Britannica,

Dawkins conceived of memes as the cultural parallel to biological genes and considered them, in a manner similar to “selfish” genes, as being in control of their own reproduction and thus serving their own ends. Understood in those terms, memes carry information, are replicated, and are transmitted from one person to another, and they have the ability to evolve, mutating at random and undergoing natural selection, with or without impacts on human fitness (reproduction and survival).

Memes are units of culture—of information

Memes are things like behaviors, skills, words or phrases, styles of dress, etc., as well as ideas and beliefs, that are handed down through generations and passed around among individuals, spreading through imitation (the Greek etymology of the word) and also verbally. Some have said they spread virally, from one mind or person to another, which can happen through imitation (as in viral marketing) or through words people hear or read.

Similar to genes, memes evolve and change over time. Mainly, again like genes, they are information. Memes are part of the stories of any given culture by which people define themselves and their relationships and understand the world around them. They give us a structure for belonging. You might say they are bits and fragments of culture—the patterns that allow us not to have to start over every day figuring out who we are and what is going on around us.

I have not been able to find out whether Dawkins used the word “virally” to describe how memes spread, but others have. Dawkins did say that they are like his concept of the gene in that they self-replicate outside of the control of people or of culture itself. Which is exactly what “viruses” are said to do. And Internet memes have surely arisen for the same purpose: to spread ideas through the population rapidly via social media, by packaging them in small, appealing units that replicate each time they are shared.

Memes as pieces of stories

Back in the 1990s, a group of counter-culture people using the word “meme” were conceiving of it as a way to insert different ideas into the discourse—to tell a different story than the story of ecological destruction, competition, greed, and cruelty that were (and still are) significant traits and values of the dominant culture. (I don’t recall the name of this group but I knew about them back then.) Their thinking was to articulate ideas that would give people a new way to see the world and their lives, to suggest that the world could be different and better. These ideas would resonate with people’s innate humanity, their longing for a more fair, compassionate, and beautiful way of life.

sticky notes on corkboard — Photo by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash

The people attempting to use memes this way were not writing philosophical essays or political tracts, or making speeches or filming movies or doing any long-form kinds of communication to spread new memes. Rather, they were holding gatherings where they encouraged participants to contribute meme-like ideas to a larger storyboard. They were not so much producing memes themselves, but were indirectly conveying a meme through their events—hoping to “infect” people attending their workshops with the meme that they already had these “new” ideas inside them, lying dormant.

Their theory was that people already possess the memes of a more humane and just world, but these memes have been overridden by the memes of the dominant narrative of destruction and inhumanity. The memes that support aggressive competition, greed, disregard for nature, etc., are reinforced by day-to-day experience and the social and economic structures in which we live, but those other memes are still present and could be revived. By surfacing the “good” memes, perhaps together people could start to write a new story for the culture.

The people doing this work were hoping that “new story” memes surfaced and generated at the gatherings they hosted would spread virally to more and more people, and thus help to shift the culture away from the negative characteristics and toward more positive ones as people gave more attention to the more positive set of memes.

(I’m just riffing on indistinct memory here, really—I don’t recall exactly what this group was doing, and my searches for any digital trace of them have yielded nothing. I do remember being very impressed with what they were doing—it felt potent to me at the time. Maybe what I’m describing is what I would do if I were engaging people in working with memes to create change. There was a strong energy in the late 1990s for people being able to shift the culture by learning to think differently about ourselves and our relationships to each other, the world, and nature. I was involved then with a different aspect of that type of work—I’ll tell you about it sometime.)

Packaging enhances meme virality

Internet memes sometimes seem to have the same purpose in mind: to give people a different way of thinking about a topic and perhaps provoke new thought. By packaging a discrete idea in a graphically appealing and easy-to-consume form, a meme can command attention and convey the idea more powerfully than the words alone. Note the no-virus memes above and below, and compare how the ideas they encapsulate would come across if you just saw those words, say, in the middle of an article, or heard someone say them in a documentary.

“Viral” has a broader meaning than just being about sickness, perhaps because it has been taken up and used in marketing. From the American Heritage dictionary, definition 2:

2. Of or relating to the propagation of information, ideas, or trends by means of social networks rather than conventional mass media.

This, of course, perfectly describes viral marketing as well as Internet memes and their virality.

So I think there is a usefulness for this term “viral” as a way of understanding how ideas, words, cultural practices, etc., do pass between people and spread through populations. The word “contagious,” though it has the same meaning, is not used in the meme context, probably because it has a negative connotation of spreading sickness or other vileness—and while memes can be highly negative, they can also be highly positive. “Viral” partakes of a bit of this negative connotation, for the same reason—and there is a sharpness to the word, a way that it affects us viscerally that is not entirely either positive or negative, but carries a bit of a jolt.

Also relevant is Dawkins’ suggestion that memes, like “selfish” genes, replicate themselves outside of our control. If that is so, the somewhat charged energy of the word “viral” is an important aspect of memes. I feel this energy as being almost like a poison, or at least a sharp or pungent taste, that raises my consciousness, wakes me up, gives me a shiver of potential. I once read a poem called “Eating the Sting,” by John Caddy, about a mouse he watched on his porch who ate a dead wasp, perhaps thinking it was a corn kernel, and as the poison of the sting ran through her tiny body, she metabolized and transmuted it into, not just a stimulant to her system, but a triumph over something that could have killed her. Powerful little poem.

Viral” is not merely a descriptive word, but one with a charge. And this, the sense of “virus” as being a poison, is actually its original meaning in the Greek. I will explore this in my next post, because it will help us unpack the ways in which the word “virus” itself is a meme—one which we can, perhaps, reclaim and in doing so override or transmute the poisonous “pathogenic particle” meme that “virus” carries in our present culture.

On reflection

After taking a deeper look at what memes are, I think this is not just a legitimate use for the word “viral,” but a very appropriate one. We’re not talking about submicroscopic not-really-alive particles that cause disease and spread between people in a contagious fashion. We’re talking about how ideas are shared among people and become rooted in a culture so that they shape how people relate to each other and the world around them. The word “viral” very well describes this process. And there is nothing I want more than for the cultural information unit that “viruses are fiction” to become rooted in the minds of as many people as possible!

As always, thank you for reading my Substack. I appreciate your time and attention more than I can tell you. Next up, more on “viral” and “virus,” and also an exploration of “contagion” to examine what these words and concepts meant before the advent of the disproven germ hypothesis, and how they might have some truth and application today outside of that particular paradigm.

The memes that inspired this article

Many thanks for these to Demi Pietchell and Starfire Codes! You should check out her almost daily meme drops for some very entertaining and truth-containing bits of cultural information! Here’s the one with the no-virus memes, along with many others: