Memes are units of cultural transmission, Dawkins’s analogue to genes, that hop from brain to brain by imitation. They can harden into norms, identities, and shared fictions, recruit emotion and tribal defense, and behave like agents in how people protect or spread them.

The word meme was introduced in Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976) as a replicator of culture; the Greek root mimema (“that which is imitated”) is folded into a rhyme with gene. Overview: Meme (Wikipedia).

Engagement-driven feeds rank by clicks and watch time, rewarding attention-seeking and performative identity. That speeds up the weak-men phase of the Hopf cycle: shallow performers rise ahead of competent people, and institutions slide toward failure faster.

The quoted line is from G. Michael Hopf’s novel Those Who Remain (2016). Hopf wrote it after Strauss and Howe’s The Fourth Turning (1993), which describes long-wave shifts between stability and crisis.