Memes are the most elemental, fundamental unit of culture. Somehow, they pass from one person's mind through a collective understanding of meaning, intuitively. A new cultural phenomenon. A joke. An inside joke. One which requires someone to be initiated to "get it" and thus create meaning, a month, group, subgroup.

In this strange, bizarre moment that we find ourselves, semiotic symbols and the ability of narratives and perspectives seem to distort reality. Where subjectivity, emotional perception, and someone's feelings about a particular subject can override reason. This battle between the Apollonian and the Dionysian has roots over 2,000 years ago, where reason and the western mind slowly began to give structure and order to a previously more intuitive, poetic interpretation of the world.

As we mapped the physical world, literally caressing the coasts of the landmasses, we understood the physical domain. We built our infrastructure like veins and nerves across the planet to transmit that unique thing that we call culture - the thing that arises after trillions and trillions of memes pass through time. The best last longer, as they are preserved within the actions and cultural idiosyncrasies of each time. Science. Art. Language. All memes. Marriage. Friendship. All culturally appropriated memes stacked on top of each other.

How do we start a meme? How does this meme get born? There must be a modality, a way to construct and architect and engineer. Or is it something that emerges spontaneously at the right moment, at the right time, as a result of a truth that emerges in situ? Elon Musk says that the most likely outcome is typically the one that is the funniest, the one which is most absurd. It's almost like our collective expectation, our giddiness, our childhood classroom eagerness to see the joke emerge is what actually makes the teacher slip on the banana peel. Our glee, our need for entertainment, the absurdity of existence needs to manifest in some part of the story - a story that needs to constantly evolve for us to better understand who we are and where we come from.

We've reached a time where we've been able to democratize being a god. We are now able to create mythologies about ourselves - semiotic stories that attract attention. Yes, attention: the most important novel thing in the universe. The thing that only the human conscious mind can do. The most interesting semiotic system that we know of. The human mind can only do one thing at any given moment, and that is to pay attention to one thing. In that moment, when we devote time and attention to a specific thing, our attention charges that thing - whether it is physical, conceptual, or abstract. An idea, a story, a myth. The more people's attention you can capture, the more that story, myth, or idea gets charged with that energy.

Think of us as little beings, and our consciousness is a glow that comes off of our head very much like a halo. When we pay attention, that halo turns into a flashlight beam, a laser beam that gets concentrated on whatever we're paying attention to. When we're in a movie theater or in the theater itself, the screen or the actors' faces are places where our collective gaze and attention is concentrated, synchronized. We are all downloading a story in real time, coordinating our feelings, being programmed with meaning.

Some of these stories started a long time ago, from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Iliad and the Odyssey, to Beowulf and all the stories of the ancients. Stories were transmitted initially only from mouth to mouth. People would remember epic poems that took hours, sometimes days to recite. In some state of ecstasy, they channeled the story that had been charged into the ether for thousands of years through the collective memory of a tribe which devoted an individual to learn this story and carry it from one generation to the next.

The oral tradition later was corrupted in a way, and this ritual and ability to channel long narrative was slowly lost, but writing down our ideas gave us a new power. It gave ideas immortality in a way they didn't have before. As reason and writing spread across the world, a new chapter began when we were able to mass-produce writing through the invention of the printing press.

With the printing press, the best ideas could be replicated and spread to every corner of the globe. The first book mass-produced was the Bible, and bizarrely, the second was Don Quixote. From that moment on, the ability to encode the world with meaning and story gave rise to the novel with all its iterations and different forms across Europe and eventually in the new world. The novel was the medium of its time.

Then came the splitting of the atom. When we understood that matter and energy are one and the same thing, that matter is essentially condensed energy, and that subjectivity is what ultimately determines through observation when something is a particle or a wave - through the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the double slit experiment - we all of a sudden start to realize the importance of how the world is shaped by our collective mythology, a story, a narrative, a common ground that we constantly are projecting onto the world. And if we have a rigid scientific materialistic secular worldview, one which disenchants the world and attempts in some arrogant way to assume that this lens is the only lens that we understand the world through and should understand the world through, not realizing that through the worldview itself, we alter reality. Strip it of its magic, its mysticism, its sacredness. We turn it into a pornography, a sensational landscape without meaning.

As we approached the early 20th century with the invention of cameras, both still and motion, and the ability to record sound and light scientifically, we became able to depict our world not through interpretation but as we see and perceive it. As technology improved, the ability to capture the world around us, magnify it, amplify it, interpret it, and regurgitate it had taken us far from the early stages of ancient Greece where the gaze of a few citizens first lay on the first theatrical rituals.

Now in dark rooms, stories in black and white images projected on large screens seduced and hypnotized audiences. The characters of those stories collected those gazes, that energy and attention charged them, and they slowly began to rise larger than life as the stories of their lives were intertwined with mythical dimensions.

At a certain time in history, a talented musician was born - Elvis - someone gifted and able to transmit his emotions through music, dance, and performance in a way that was unusual and ahead of its time. This person was lucky to have been born when someone's image and sound could be transmitted across the planet in real-time. When they performed, they no longer needed to perform in small bars and theatrical stages. With the power of electric guitars, amplifiers, and speakers, large stages, cameras, and lights, all that action could be captured and transmitted across the planet simultaneously, collecting the gaze and attention through the eyeballs of an audience billions in size.

That energy, that attention, that feedback loop created through Elvis' ability to move his hips and play his music created an ecstatic release of excitement from his audience. That energy went back to Elvis, giving him more confidence, and his radiance further amplified through the speakers and amps excited the audience even more, which screamed back even louder, giving him even more confidence, making them even more excited. That feedback loop of attention creates a star - an individual who's no longer orbiting some other cluster but actually becomes the center of that cluster, that solar system. He becomes a sun, a point of reference that others want to absorb, learn from, follow, be inspired by.

As they transcend and shed their individuality, they go through this rite of passage and become modern gods. They have this heroic journey they must commit to - one which could lead them to eternal glory, being remembered in some modern pantheon of glorious celebrities, or be crushed by the inevitable traumatic experience of losing one's individuality and becoming a public figure.

There are plenty of examples of celebrities unable to handle it - Elvis was one of them. Ironically, their glory, once they lose control of their story, leads to their demise. They are either a puppeteer writing a story for their puppet and character in a world they create through imagination and creativity, or they become a puppet in a story written by an audience expecting them to fulfill the character in a stage prepackaged and designed for them.

There are so many - Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Anna Nicole Smith, Michael Jackson. Ironically, the thing that made them famous ended up being the darkness of their life. Marilyn Monroe, the most desired woman, died lonely. Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix's hedonism - the same hedonism that brought them inspiration - was the thing that ended up destroying them.

As these gods progress through time and the feedback loops of attention increase through channels of communication - radio stations, magazines, television, and eventually social media - those feedback loops become smaller streams of that bigger channel, that river of attention piped around the world through our media infrastructure. Eventually, this vibrating nebula of information we call the Internet beams down to us through satellite infrastructure.

Now a teenager is no longer faced with the rite of passage of going into the forest and making their first kill. Now a rite of passage is being given a smartphone, a social media account at age 14, 15, or 16 - a time where our identity is no longer shaped by real-time interactions of our intimate nuclear family. With our first post, we create our semiotic image. We start to design our avatar in this new media landscape that started from the edges and on the wall, to the early printed books, and now a collective tapestry that we collectively draw in cyberspace, creating an even more faithful representation of the real world through a semiotic understanding of it.

A collective story, a mashing of memes, which are intertwined and give the world meaning. How do we participate in this story? What myth will we tell ourselves? How will we transcend our individuality and handle that same pain that crushed our early first gods of the 20th century? Now at the dawn of the 21st, how do we democratize being gods? What narratives and myths do we tell ourselves? How do we capture attention from the world, and how do we create meaning through our actions?

Are we going to steal people's attention? Trigger them and turn them into beasts, bring out that animalistic, uncontrollable urge, create a form of semiotic pornography where we cast a spell on the other person and scare them? Or make them feel insecure or manipulate their attention through bright colors and pornographic imagery?

Don't get me wrong - I'm not talking about sexual organs or sexual acts. Pornography is anything that treats you as an animal and not like the spiritual being, something that captures the attention, something that turns you into an uncontrollable beast. It could be Coca-Cola, Pringles, MTV, a chocolate bar, a video game, or pornography itself. It's anything that turns you into an animal, a beast whose attention has been stolen - a hacking of our biology, a loss of agency and control, and the ability to think clearly and to manifest your vision in the world, make your dreams a reality by weaving them through the stories you tell.

So when you give your child its first smartphone, or you're the child who receives it, realize that the stories you tell and the way you capture people's attention will mold you, will shape you, will lead you on the great adventure of self-discovery or trap you in a cage of delusion and insecure self-doubt. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all? What do I need to say or do to capture everyone's attention?

Only those who tell stories worth listening to because they're true, because they resonate on an emotional and poetic level, through their truthfulness, are desired to be listened to. One surrenders and willfully gives you their attention. You do not steal it, grab it, or trick them into giving it to you. It is given with joy and grace, as they understand that by giving it to you, they are also getting something in return: a story of meaning, one worth remembering, one which could also become a meme.