I’m tremendously optimistic about the spread and influence of harmful memes.

In our modern world we’ve done far too much to shield ourselves from the consequences of stupidity. We have automobiles engineered to the point where we can literally drive into a wall without injury. We have domestic appliances that for the most part make it difficult for us to hurt ourselves with them. We even have laws requiring coffee cups to state that their contents may be hot and for bags of peanuts to state that their contents may contain nuts.

This makes it tricky for evolution to work. If we insulate ourselves from the consequences of our stupidity this is basically similar to removing foxes from rabbit populations. The result: more and more rabbits or, in our case, more and more stupidity.

What we really need is for lethal social media memes to be far more prevalent in order to prevent the spread of a characteristic that doesn’t serve us well as a species. It’s not as if we’re short on idiocy — we live in a world of Trumps and Bolsonaros and Salvinis and Johnsons — so we don’t need to attempt to conserve this trait but rather we should be promoting mechanisms to achieve the opposite.

Satire? I leave that determination to you….