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Comment by ayngg | Hacker News Reader

A similar thread could be the proliferation of literature meant to help identify and condemn witches with the invention of the printing press, which greatly influenced the witch hunt moral panic that followed.

In contrast, telephones don't amplify messages in the same way, and radio had the drawback of being temporary since broadcasts couldn't easily be recorded and distributed like pamphlets and books.

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Oh yeah, the witch hunts! Such an experiment through which we're living, giving people megaphones to communicate to almost anyone on the planet, whether 1-to-1, 1-to-few, or 1-to-many. And as you said, have it be recorded! What I'm typing here from my kitchen table will be sent 'round the world to however many people who are reading now...but will continue to be sent to those people for as long as this website exists and gets indexed by search engines...or longer if it gets picked up by an archive service. For negligible cost to me, practically free. Goodness.

Goodness, indeed. But, in the context of memes, this means ideas no longer have to be beneficial to their human hosts in order to proliferate. It used to be that you’d have to be at least moderately well-to-do (thus, capable financially and biologically) for extended periods of time in order for your ideas to appear in print and be spread. That is no longer the case: an idea might be deadly or ruinous within hours and still have enough time to go viral.

I'm a little lost yet curious, what do you mean by "no longer have to be beneficial to their human hosts in order to proliferate"?

I took it to mean that the idea has escaped into the wider world and its fate is no longer tied to its originator's alone.

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