Humans are memetic creatures. We mimic the world and the people around us. Our behaviors are learned and, more importantly, so are our desires. Our desires come from what other people want and like.
You probably read that and said “that’s not me”. Give your self some time and you’ll figure out that at a minimum, you trust something to help you make sense of the some part of your experience whether its restaurants to try to what political philosophy to subscribe to.
For those who haven’t spent time with René Girard, I highly recommend at least perusing his wikipedia page. I am no expert but I went deep a few months back. I recently listened to the June 3 episode of the Infinite Loops podcast with Luke Burgis, who just released his new book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire. The conversation has been ringing in my head since. Some might be rolling your eyes right now. It’s so cliche to write about Girard. Cliche to the point where I got an email to join a course on Girard as I wrote this post. But it’s one of those things where once you learn about it, you can’t stop seeing it.
I will only be focusing on the implications of the initial assumption of Mimetic Theory, which is basically outlined in the first paragraph of this post. There are fascinating implications of how mimetic desire shapes conflict. I think it’s a useful framework to make sense of many parts of American culture these days, but I am not going to go down those threads in this post.
Anyways, I’ve been thinking about Memetic Theory along two specific threads lately: community & curation and how markets move.
Community & Curation
Marketing and brands are built on mimetic behavior. I am out of my depths when it comes to marketing psychology but I loosely see it playing out in a two ways. Either a brand really understands the moment and can tap into large scale memetic desires - think green washing or selling soccer jerseys in the US during the world cup - or brands earn your trust so they can shape your desires - think Fox News or the NYT…sorry if that offends anyone 🤷. They make consumers think they are smart, or cool, or fashionable so they, consciously or subconsciously, align with the brand.
Once a consumer trusts a brand, that brand feeds you whatever narrative will benefit them the most as long as they don’t push the boundaries too far. Because we are mimetic creatures, we go along with it and mimic what these brands offer us because we trust them to help us make sense of the world.
This is a good thing (usually)! It’s a product of evolution. We are hard wired this way. We do not have the capacity to process everything going on around us, so we have to outsource some of our beliefs, tastes, and desires. I desire to be healthy but am not a doctor so I will mimic the behaviors of doctors, healthy people, etc. to achieve that desire.
Over the last decade, we have seen the rise of influencers. They tap into all the same things that brands do. Historically individuals didn’t have the reach of big companies, now they do (via social media). Influencers are brands.
Now all this leads up for something I’ve been exploring a lot over the last 2 years with our team at Spero: community. Yes, it is super buzzy and it is starting to mean nothing. Is it a rejection of social media? Is it just a response to the least communal stretch of our lives (COVID)? Is it just another marketing scheme? Maybe all of those are true.
But I’ve come to believe what’s really going on is that people are, en masse, accepting that we are mimetic creatures! We are accepting that we need others to help us make sense of all the information and noise in the world. We are opting out of trusting legacy brands who likely have misaligned incentives and are out of touch with their roots. We opting into communities that (hopefully) have better aligned incentives be it through their business model (shout out to NFT and crypto world) or lack a business model.
And this gets us to curation. The best communities do curation really well. And they do it organically. The community itself is first and foremost a curation of people. People who have opted into a shared space and likely have shared desires.
I am in a few thriving, mostly online communities. I’ll highlight one as an example, Sprezza. Sprezza is run by Clayton Chambers and its all about fashion and lifestyle. There is a newsletter and a community on Geneva. The community has about 80 (mostly) men in it with channels about clothes, food, travel, etc. Because Clayton has established himself as a tastemaker for a certain kind of men’s fashion, he has built an audience of people who desire many of the things he writes about. He put us all in this community and the recommendations, questions, and conversation is flowing. I was out last week and asked the community if they had any restaurants recommendations for the neighborhood I was in. Within 30 min I had a list of awesome spots that I could trust. Clayton curated the community, the community is curating recommendations for me, and it’s all underpinned by mimetic desires.
Intuitively this feels healthier to me. It feels like it is a more conscious effort of opting into the forces that influence our desires. There is also an expectation that you have a two way relationship with the people and space that are shaping our desires.
The other thread along this line that I think is worth exploring more is how most tech companies turn to algorithms to do curation. What else are algorithms on platforms like Amazon, Youtube, Instagram, Netflix, Spotify, and Twitter doing if not surfacing new content based on what other people like you also like. These are usually useful, but it can also be dangerous. Check out the Rabbit Hole podcast to go down that rabbit hole (ha).
Markets
This will be a less baked take, but my friend Derek Urban wrote a piece recently in his newsletter, Opus, about the concept of Reflexivity. My simple interpretation is that markets, which are made up of desire laden people, decide value vs. underlying fundamentals deciding value. His post is nuanced and powerful and will also leave you seeing this pattern in every corner of life once you’ve finished it. You should read it.
Reflexivity is tied to Mimetic behavior. Basically if we all want a bull market why the heck can’t we just have a bull market? If enough people and capital can prop an economy up, it will stay up. Markets crash when enough people stop believing in something.
You also see this in startup land. The minute a few “top tier” investors invest in a space, the market turns to it and it becomes hot. For a minute bootcamps were the hottest thing in the market. No body talks about them anymore.
Meme stocks aren’t about the companies or their fundamentals. They are about a desire of the “little guys” to have a say in the financial markets. $GME has not created any new fundamental value. Instead, it was a community that shared a desire to stand up to Wall Street.
The music stops eventually and fundamentals do matter at the end of the day, right? They do matter, but if you look at the last two financial crises long enough and you’ll come to realize the markets, which again are run by desire laden people, were the driving force behind the underlying fundamentals crashing, which then led to the subsequent recessions. Bear Sterns and Lehman and others were super leveraged so a few bad days in the markets hit them really really hard. They had to mark to market their assets, including all the home loans they had bundled into CDO’s (collateralized debt obligations). This obviously dramatically impacted the fundamentals. They had to liquidate and then things began to tumble. Sure the collapse may have been inevitable, but the collapse didn’t start because someone all of the sudden decided the fundamentals of these banks were off. It happened because of market movements, and the people and desires behind the markets.
Silicon Valley’s dream philosopher
It’s interesting because the spread of people internalizing Mimetic Theory is in itself a mimetic experience. If I am being honest, the reason I went into learning about Mimetic Theory with an open mind was because there are A LOT of smart people who lean on this theory to make sense of the way people and markets behave. It’s tech’s greatest philosophy because it has network effects built in. For every one person who subscribes to believing in this theory, the more true the theory is and the more culturally relevant it becomes. The more culturally relevant it is, the more people will learn about it and mimic the people around them. Dang….
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As always - would love feedback/thoughts/pushback/questions!
I typically write this in one go and don’t do a ton of editing. Apologies for any major or minor errors. Don’t hold them against me.