Memetics

In Kyle’s wiki, memetics is the study of ideas in terms of their efficacy in spreading through groups — the virality of ideas, deliberately distinguished from Mimetics (the human tendency to mimic people). Dan McMurtrie draws the distinction precisely in the Tyro Partners Q2 2021 letter: “Mimetics… broadly describes the human tendency to mimic one another. There is a related but distinct concept of Memetics, which is the study of ideas in terms of their efficacy in spreading through groups.” That same letter supplies the four-level memetic model Kyle leans on — Content → Reference → Advocacy → Community — and argues markets are now “metagames” where beliefs function as useful constraints.

Memetics is one of the core lenses behind Kyle’s essays. The Meme Economy research treats it alongside Mimetic Theory under the thesis that “belief precedes truth, and that has always been true” — the internet didn’t create the meme economy, it merely accelerated it, with Silicon Valley Bank’s social-media-induced bank run as the case study. raw/clippings/Peter Thiel’s Religion traces the deep root: if Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory is correct that desire is imitative, then memes (Greek mimeme, “that which is imitated”) are how those imitated desires propagate at internet speed. The concept also threads through The Storytelling of Investing (distilling a worldview into a “Dawkinsian meme” earns enduring mindshare), The State of Startup Media (memetics as “the memes of production”), and The Hits Business (A24’s command of internet culture and fandom).

Context: Memetics derives from Richard Dawkins’s 1976 coinage of “meme” in The Selfish Gene — a unit of cultural transmission that propagates and evolves analogously to a gene, subject to selection pressures of fidelity, fecundity, and longevity.

Where this appears

• The Black Swan — Kyle tags highlights with #Memetics alongside the Global Knowledge Graph theme
• Tyro Partners — Dan McMurtrie’s Q2 2021 letter draws the memetics-vs-mimetics distinction and the four-level memetic model
• Mimetics — the paired concept this page is defined against (mimicry of people vs. virality of ideas)
• raw/clippings/Peter Thiel’s Religion — Girardian Mimetic Theory as the deep root of memetics
• The Meme Economy (research) — memetics as a primary lens; belief precedes truth
• The State of Startup Media (research) — memetics as “the memes of production”
• The Storytelling of Investing (research) — distilling a worldview into a Dawkinsian meme for enduring mindshare
• The Hits Business (research) — A24’s understanding of internet culture and fandom
• Republic of Letters — “the memes of production”; how ideas propagate through the network
• Dan McMurtrie — the investor who drew the memetics/mimetics distinction

Saved tweets

Captured from Kyle’s Apple Notes on 2026-08-21 against link rot. The raw note text is held privately in the wiki.

• Excellent New Drexler Post When… (tweet)
• I Wrote A New Book!… (tweet)
• I’D Recommend The First Chapter… (tweet)
• The Digital Battlefield Has Changed… (tweet)