I recently wrote about the internet and social media as a "telescope for memes", and often talk about how the net generation and the millennials are the "memetic generation", just as Timothy Leary predicted in Chaos and Cyberculture from 1994, how "this new breed is leaving the gene pools behind, forming post-industrial global meme-pools".

With smart phones as extensions of cognition and communication, with increased ability to choose what memes, stories and narratives to follow, as well as with the web 3.0, blockchains, consensus networks and what Johann Gevers calls the "technologies of trust" increasing the ability to choose what peers, people and networks to trust, the executive (ego) system within the human brain (which forms a default mode network) is augmented in its capacity to select memes and to self-regulate, making the individual more competitive.

From consensus trances to "consensus technology"

As Hoyle Leigh wrote in Genes, Memes, Culture and Mental Illness, with eusocial organization (Wilson, 2012) where laws are "hosted" within human brains^[1], through a consensus trance as a platform, the memetic capacity of the individual to select and regulate memetic content is suppressed in favor of the consensus platform.

Civilization itself is a memetic enterprise, an edifice of memetic replication, refinement, and evolution. As civilization became more complex and more interactive with civilizations of other areas, the status quo-oriented memes also became more complex and more reinforced and rigid. These tradition-sustaining memes are only for themselves and are no longer concerned with the survival of the individual or the civilization. Enveloped in the scrolls, edifices, and priestly robes, these tradition memes infect the young or vulnerable brain.

With "consensus technology", the blockchain and Ethereum being early examples, those replace the need for a consensus trance to "host" laws and contracts, and free up social cognition (which within consensus trance-based organization is suppressed), vastly augmenting the parts of the brain (directed selection and mutation of memes) which made technological evolution possible to begin with.

Towards sexual selection of memes by mate choice

With John Nash's Nash equilibrium, laws that no one would want to break even in the absence of an effective police force, there's a migration away from central regulation of selection of memes (rational behaviour, etc), towards a memetic ecology where memes spread through mate choice^[2], made possible through "technologies of trust" as augmentations.

References

1. Laws, when “hosted” in human brains, as memetic infections

2. Decentralized Law and Post-Geographical Communication leads to Decentralized Borderless Virtual Nations (DBVNs)