Ryan Collison

Series: Digital Folklore | Part: 4 of 10 Walk into a Comic-Con. Thousands of people in costume, speaking in references, forming lines at 4am for panels, treating actors like priests of sacred texts. Ask them if they’re practicing a religion and they’ll laugh. But functionally, structurally, phenomenologically—they

Series: Digital Folklore | Part: 3 of 10 Finches on the Galápagos Islands evolved different beak shapes because each island had different food sources. Same ancestor, different selection pressures, divergent evolution. Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, Instagram are digital islands. Same underlying cognitive machinery, different algorithmic pressures, divergent memetic evolution. The myths that

Series: Digital Folklore | Part: 2 of 10 Claude Lévi-Strauss spent decades analyzing the myths of indigenous South American cultures. What he discovered wasn’t chaos—it was combinatorial structure. Myths weren’t unique creations. They were assemblies of smaller units that recombined, mutated, and propagated across cultures. He called

Series: Digital Folklore | Part: 1 of 10 You’ve scrolled past ten thousand of them this year. Image macros. Video formats. Copypasta. Reaction GIFs. Audio clips that trigger instant recognition. They feel disposable, trivial, like cultural junk food. But that’s not what they are. Memes are myths. Not in

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this series. Let’s bring it together. Myths are not primitive science. They’re not failed attempts to explain thunder and seasons. They’re evolved information technology—compression algorithms for coherence instructions, optimized over millennia through cultural transmission. They stick because they

Here’s a pattern you’ve probably noticed: people are desperate for meaning. Self-help books promising purpose top bestseller lists. Meditation retreats are booked months in advance. Jordan Peterson’s lectures on ancient wisdom get millions of views. Young men join extremist movements offering identity and narrative. Wellness culture