Cultural Evolution of the Web

It is no secret that the Internet, like everything in our life, is developing and gradually becoming more complicated. Along with the global web, memes are also developing, acquiring more complex forms and touching on high topics such as politics, philosophy and art. In recent years they have suddenly grown wiser, memes such as Political Compass, Increasingly Verbose Memes and absurdist memes. It is important to understand that the original purpose of internet memes has never existed at all: those were just ideas floating from one computer to another. As spreading, people endowed them with a goal, and, in the end, it has become a kind of web humor, unique and extremely unusual. In real life, oddly enough, religion is a good example of meme development. Rituals, beliefs, myths, tales: all this under the influence of cultural evolution mixed up and formed into a united system of values, a memeplex. This was mentioned by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book 'The Selfish Gene'. Cultural evolution took place in ancient times and served as the beginning of a traditional society, where God and faith were the essential elements of everything. As the development progressed, people "rushed" to study the world around them and transform it to their needs, gradually moving away from all sorts of deities, in fact, becoming gods themselves. The memes were also developing, but people have fully realized their divine needs on the Internet.

The World Wide Web is an artificial world, which, nevertheless, develops according to certain rules of the real world. Due to its escapist nature and apartness, the Internet has realized many of people's desires, from creating utopias to spitting out their deviations. A new way of transmitting information has created a brand new kind of cultural "viruses", the weblore units: postmemes. From banal jokes and monotonous pictures and videos they grew into something greater, and one of the most obvious examples of this growth is Surreal Memes, the quintessence of Dank Memes, their highest point of development. Memers squeeze all the juices from their graphic editors and minds, experimenting with images, specific humor and structure. In fact, these are not memes in the usual sense, but an intermediate stage between traditional memes and art. Strange, postmodern and not always funny — but isn't that the point? Furthermore, this is a whole universe with recurring motifs and characters (take, for example, the theme of the illusory of the Universe and the concept of time, the leakage of red color, as well as the confrontation between Meme Man and Orang), in other words — a new mythology, created by a single Internet nation. The precursors of such a process can be seen in the history of Rage Comics, but their nature of transferring life situations to digital space through memorable forms and the lack of abstraction prevented further development. Also, the Internet community was not sufficiently cohesive to have a single lore back then. Howbeit, unlike other Internet currents such as pastafarianism and dudeism, which were already created as beliefs, the universe of Surreal Memes develops in its own way and initially was not supposed to grow into religion. This is the evidence of a cultural evolution, but in the scale of the World Wide Web. If we take into account the cyclical nature of our history, then after the formation of a "religion" people will take up the creation of a new world. Since creating an "Internet inside the Internet" is not possible at the moment, humans will experiment with reality, resorting to appropriate technologies.

Sooner or later the Internet will merge with real life. This environment will give birth to the next milestone of memes, the ideas of the future, which will go beyond the usual forms and, due to the peculiarities of mixed reality, will have greater interactivity. Such memes will border on the global web currents and trends of the real world and, in the end, will turn into a system of worldview. However, postpostmemes is an extremely vague thing at the moment, and it is unknown, what it will represent at all, except for new forms and concepts. We can speculate about the success of Augmented Reality, cyberpunk, escapism, the 3D memes becoming mainstream, virtual temples of the Vͯ̾̇͆ͥ̄̆̉ͥͤ͑ͤ͏̵̸̢̗͍̼̺͍̠̪͙͉͍̰͚Ǫ̭͚̥̳̝̞͐̈̉͘Í̢̾ͬ̇̇ͤ̇̑̔̍͊ͨ̆̏ͩ̐̌̑҉̙̦̟̬͚̭̻̻͙̝͜D̡ͦ͊̈͗ͤ̄̾͢͏̠͚̟͙̼̬͎̰͖͙̣̬͇͖͍̖̩̞ and the meme Crusades, but it is better to wait for all of this by ourselves.