Susan Blackmore sees human beings, who she says have set cultural evolution in motion, as being something akin to Pandora and her box -- once you let it out of the box, and you begin to see its effects, it is too late -- you cannot put it back into the box.
She believes that her serious application of the concept of memetics provides a useful way of thinking about what is happening on the cultural landscape generally, and perhaps in the cosmos as a whole.
She says that memetics is founded on the principle of universal Darwinism: If you have something that varies, and if there is a struggle for survival among those somethings that vary so that nearly all of them die, and if those few that survive pass on to their offspring that very thing that helped them to survive then those offspring must be better adapted to the circumstances in which all of this happened than their parents were.
In other words, if you have variation, selection and heredity you will get design out chaos -- design without the need of a designer. She says, "If you have something that it is copied with variation and it's selected then you must get design appearing out nowhere." It cannot be stopped.
Universal Darwinism, as applied to information, Blackmore says, means that any information that is varied and selected will result in design.
Richard Dawkins, Blackmore notes, called the information that is copied "the selfish replicator", not in the sense that it has selfish emotions, but in the sense that it will get copied if it can be copied, regardless of the consequences. It doesn't care about consequences because it can't care -- it's just information, hence the reference to being "selfish".
Blackmore notes that generally we think about genes as being that which is copied with variation and selection, but there is something else that is copied: information. We copy information, she says, from person to person by imitation. We do this by language, by telling stories, by behavior and even by the clothes we wear.
All of this, she says, is information being copied with variation and selection; the very description of a design process.
The core definition of meme, she says, is "that which is imitated." Another way of saying this is to say that a meme is information that is copied from person to person -- it is not equivalent to an idea or anything else, she says emphatically, it is that which is imitated.
Memes, she says, will get copied if they can and it is human beings who do the copying, therefore she sees human beings as "meme machines"; we are being "used" by memes to ensure that they will be replicated.
To be sure, part of Blackmore's project is to turn our understanding of what it means to be human on its head. Rather than seeing ideas and language as being tools humans use for their own benefit, Blackmore sees humans as machines that memes use for their replication.
In fact, Blackmore sees all gene-replicated species as contributing to this end. Humans are useful to memes, according to Blackmore, because we replicate biologically -- we replicate genetically. The evolution of other genetically replicated creatures was part of risky path of development to arrive at the point where we are today: with gene-replicated creatures who are also capable of replicating memes.
There is no reason, however, to think that things will stop at this point according to Blackmore. Memes can be replicated without the human species then they will be -- as to the fate of the human species, memes really don't care.
For Blackmore, the most important thing about the universe is not that its nature is intelligence, but that its nature is the generation of idea replicators to transmit that intelligence. She sees different levels of replicators in the universe, each one feeding upon the one that came before it.
She defines the first stage of replication as being the emergence of human beings on the scene.
The second stage of replication, she says, is the variation and duplication of memes that occurs outside of human brains, such as through language, on clay tablets and more recently, through the use of computers.
She thinks we are now entering the third stage of replication in which memes are sent beyond the sphere of the earth. She sees the emergence of the internet as being part of the third stage of replication.
So, to sum up:
Blackmore points out that the development of each new phase of meme replication "machines" is fraught with danger, at least from the standpoint of the biological host. The development of meme replicators, to contain and transmit the memes, is a risky business. Again, whether or not human beings survive the process, according to Blackmore, is not the primary concern of memes -- just so long as they can be replicated.
For now, she believes, that memes need us because we are both self-replicated gene machines and idea replicating meme machines -- but she thinks we are approaching the time when we may no longer be indispensable for the replication and transmission of memes.
While this is an interesting way of thinking about ideas in relation to human beings and the internet, just how literally, seriously and useful one should take her argument I will leave to the reader to decide.
Nonetheless, Blackmore's contribution to the overall discussion of how human beings interact with digital technology is that it throws into question the whole idea that creativity is based on originality, as opposed to imitation and interaction, and the role of human beings as "meme machines" is a way of thinking about, and exploring the question of why people are motivated to collaborate and create content on the internet.
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