The Birth of the Meme & Group 7

The Birth of the Meme

In 1976, Richard Dawkins in his towering treatise, The Selfish Gene, enshrined the “meme” as the cultural analogue of the gene: a replicator, a unit of information that leaps from mind to mind, replicating, mutating, and competing, subject to the same Darwinian rules that govern life. (Wikipedia)

A meme might be a catchy tune, a religious belief, a style of dress, or a persuasive catch-phrase—anything that can be imitated and transmitted. (Dr Susan Blackmore) Memes survive best when they fulfil three key conditions, akin to a successful gene’s: fidelity in copying, fecundity (rapid reproduction), and longevity (lasting through many “generations” of minds). (pratclif.com)

Some memes flourish because they align with human nature; others succeed through exploitation. “Viral” memes take hold even if they drain or distort their hosts. As one critic of memetics put it, "...memes can be parasites of the mind, turning brains into mere vehicles for their own propagation." (rubinghscience.org)

Thus was born the notion of the “meme-pool,” where ideas struggle, mutate, die, or rise, shaping culture across generations. (Nature)

The Internet is the Perfect Petri Dish

With the advent of the internet, the “memetic soup” found a perfect environment. Digital memes spread faster, mutate faster, and face fierce competition for our attention. (Nature)

In the realm of images, the growth is astounding. Large-scale studies tracking millions of visuals over a decade found that the number of new meme templates doubled roughly every six months. (Nature) As templates evolve, only a sliver survive—the ones that adapt best to the habits and moods of the online crowd.

And social media platforms are not neutral grounds by any means. They are built to amplify imitation. On TikTok, for instance, its editing tools, its “For You Page,” its norms of mimicry, encourages users to copy, remix, and replicate. (ResearchGate)

In such a vast, creative soup, memes no longer behave like quiet ideas spreading slowly across communities and the centuries—they behave like viral contagions, amplified by algorithms, hurled across user feeds in seconds.

Imitation Publics

Scholars such as Diana Zulli and David J. Zulli have argued that platforms like TikTok don’t just host memes, they are memetic texts. Their rhythms, their affordances, their social architecture are built to foster imitation. (ResearchGate)

From this arises what they call “imitation publics,” gatherings not defined by shared history, location, or deep connections, but by shared acts of repetition, mimicry, and participation in a viral loop. (Studocu)

In such publics, community isn't being built by conversation or shared values, but by the very act of reproducing the meme—the dance, the sound-bite, the challenge. Each replication binds another soul to the meme-pool, each variation gives birth to a new limb in the branching tree.

It is here that memetics reveals a deeper, an perhaps darker truth. In this new age, culture evolves not slowly over centuries, but in pulses of hours and days, shaped more by code and algorithm than by human deliberation.

Group 7 | October 2025

Consider now the phenomenon of Group 7. In October 2025, independent artist & musician Sophia James posted a sequence of seven videos on TikTok, each slightly different—a deliberate social experiment meant to see which video would “hit.” The seventh, labeled “Group 7,” exploded. Millions of views. Millions of likes. Thousands of followers. Suddenly, a vague label became a badge of belonging. (People.com)

That simple experiment is what memetics is at its core. Group 7, quite literally became a self-replicating identity. Users by the millions claimed their membership, made videos, jokes, and memes celebrating “Group 7,” and thus extended the replicator. (EW.com)

What began as a marketing gambit mutated into social belonging and identity. It boasted the hallmarks of a successful meme, spreading rapidly (fecundity), reaching across wide populations (the global meme-pool), and sticking around long enough to make many new copies via new comments, duets, reposts, parodies.

In that moment, memory and identity—once anchored in family, tradition, shared geography—became fluid, algorithmically allocated, and ephemeral. Group 7 shows that a meme need not be deep or meaningful to capture minds, it needs only to replicate.

Memetics, Occultists, Entrepreneurs, and the New Alchemies

What does this mean for those who see themselves as seekers? What about the occultists, influencers, entrepreneurs, creators of new worlds out of idea-dust? Quite a great deal, actually.

• To the occultist: The meme is modern magick. Not ritual or sacrifice, but replication—a sigil made of signifiers, cast into the collective unconscious. If you can understand what patterns capture human attention, you can seed your own “meme-spirits,” watch them replicate and take on a life independent of your intent. Remember that memes, like spirits, live only through believers, through hosts. Cults of personality, viral religion, digital spiritual movements, all are possible.

• To the entrepreneur: Group 7 stands as a case study and experiment with algorithmic logic, no deeper product, yet enormous payoff in attention and identity-branding. In the modern economy, attention is currency. Marketing, brand-building, building a community around a “badge” or a “group identity” may matter more than function or value. The replicator—not the product—becomes the value.

• To the aspiring influencer: The rules have changed. It’s no longer primarily about authenticity or artistry. It’s about resonance. It’s about tapping into the cultural “meme-pool,” finding the tune that triggers imitation. The moment a post becomes copied, remixed, imitated—you have achieved the first law of memetic success.

And for all: Beware. 

As with genetic parasites, some memes exploit hosts. These nefarious memes spread because they prey on human vulnerabilities like fear, desire, identity-hunger, and tribal belonging. A meme that demands loyalty, identity, exclusive membership—that defines “insiders” vs “outsiders,”may carry cult-like force.

Consider the darker tales from platforms past, when a content‐house transforms into a cult of paranoia, when dance houses become human trafficking centers, when meme-driven identity becomes social control. Such forms are not speculative—they have happened. (Wikipedia)

What We’re Witnessing

We stand today in a swirling sea of replicators. Entire social identities are now replicable, remixable, fungible. The old boundaries of nation, tribe, and clan, are giving way to algorithmic communes, fleeting publics, and virtual collectives.

In this new ecology, “quality,” as in truth, substance, and meaning may count less than “shareability.” Memes live or die by their capacity to be copied. Recent research tracking two million “visual memes” over ten years found that templates proliferate like wildfire, but only a fraction endure. (Nature)

Moreover, propagation isn’t always mere imitation. Sometimes it is contagion. Studies of social media diffusion find mechanisms akin to epidemic spread—exposure, reinforcement, repetition. (arXiv)

Platforms like TikTok don’t just host memes. By their design, they accelerate them. They reward replication. They make every user a node in a vast replicator-network, and every upload a potential seed. (ResearchGate)

Thus, culture no longer evolves slowly by generations, but in viral surges, social experiments, and fleeting group identities.

The Undying Liturgy of the Meme

If there one needs proof of magick in the modern world, it is this—the magic of replication. The magick of the idea that outlives its author, outlives its first host, spawning echoes across hearts and screens.

Memetics reveals that we are not only biological beings carrying genes, but we are also carriers of ideas, of patterns, of flickering codes. And in the age of TikTok and viral trends, those codes replicate faster than ever before.

So, as you scroll through the Litanies of TikTok, remember that you are not just a viewer.

You may be the host.