(2025-03-09) Rao The History And Future Of Memeing Things Into Reality

Venkatesh Rao: The History and Future of Memeing Things Into Reality. In early 2021, a ragtag group of Reddit users sent Wall Street into a frenzy by memeing a struggling video game retailer’s stock to unimaginable heights. What started as an inside joke about GameStop shares suddenly became very real: the stock’s price skyrocketed 1,700% in weeks, toppling hedge funds and minting overnight millionaires​.

From ancient myths to modern marketing, humans have long tried to “meme things into existence,” willing ideas to jump from our heads into the tangible world.

How have propaganda, occult thoughtforms, and sci-fi concepts blurred the line between fiction and reality? Can collective belief truly reshape the world, or are there hard limits to wishing something into being? We’ll tour a rogue’s gallery of reality-bending concepts – from egregores to hyperstitions – and see how they map onto today’s meme-driven culture.

Across cultures and eras, people have given names to the idea that imagination can become real. To ground our discussion, here’s a quick tour of key concepts and terms related to reality-making by belief (and where they come from):

Notably, Philip K. Dick serves as a patron saint of this topic. Though not an occultist or social scientist, his science fiction anticipated a world of synthetic realities. In a 1978 essay ("How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later"), Dick observed how modern society is bombarded with “pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms”

It’s fitting that his definition of reality – the part that doesn’t go away when belief does – serves as a reality check for all these grand ideas of meme magic.

From Propaganda to Tulpa: A Brief History of Willed Reality

Propaganda, for instance, can be seen as an early 20th-century “reality distortion field.” In World War I, governments learned that controlling the narrative could rally entire nations. By World War II, propaganda had grown so powerful that it fueled everything from the Nazi myth of an Aryan utopia to the Allied spirit of democracy. When Edward Bernays wrote in 1928 about “minds molded” and “ideas suggested” by unseen manipulators​ (commonsenseethics.com), he was pulling back the curtain on this very magic trick: convince people that X is true (through posters, radio, film), and lo – eventually X becomes true in the sense that people act on it en masse

Older still is the mystical route to reality-making. In many spiritual traditions, belief itself is a force. Take the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the tulpa, a spiritual entity or “imaginary friend” conjured entirely from disciplined thought

Western occultists adopted and adapted this idea in the 19th century, blending it with notions of group magic to birth the concept of the egregore. If one holy man’s thoughts could summon a phantom, imagine what hundreds of people believing together might do.

Money, too, is arguably an egregore: those colored pieces of paper have power because we all agree they do. (Social fiction)

Modern pop culture has its own breed of collective conjurations. Fan communities sometimes joke about “manifesting” something into reality – say, willing a cancelled TV show back on air by sheer hashtag power. This sounds fanciful, but it occasionally works. When enough fans make noise (a concentrated belief that “this show deserves to live”), studios take notice

In darker fashion, conspiracy theories can act like memetic viruses that create real chaos. The more people believed the QAnon conspiracy online, the more real-world impact it had – culminating in actual crowds showing up at rallies and even the U.S. Capitol, driven by what began as an internet “fiction.”

Hyperstition: When Fiction Hacks Reality

If occultists use the language of magic for collective belief, modern theorists use the language of coding and feedback loops. Hyperstition is a key idea here – essentially the art of making reality behave like a writable program. Coined in the 1990s by a renegade philosophy collective (CCRU), the term hyperstition means a self-fulfilling prophecy that deliberately makes itself real. Unlike a superstition (passive false belief), a hyperstition is an active cultural hack: spread the idea far and confidently enough, and the idea pulls itself into being.

Finance is another arena extremely sensitive to hyperstition​ (orphandriftarchive.com). Markets often run less on hard reality and more on perception (stories, expectations, memes!). If enough investors believe “X stock will go up,” their buying can make it go up – the belief becomes true.

Startups in Silicon Valley similarly thrive on hyperstition—“fake it til you make it” is practically a creed.

Even politics has flirted with hyperstition. Some commentators described the 2016 U.S. presidential campaig (Presidential Candidates 2016) n as powered by “meme magic,” where online communities earnestly believed they could influence outcomes through memetic warfare (think of the cult of KeK and the frog meme).

However, as potent as hyperstition and memetic manifesting can be, there’s always that Philip K. Dick quote lurking in the background: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

The Limits of Memed Reality

many attempts to meme a new reality run headlong into an immovable truth: wishing doesn’t make it so, not always. This section looks at those cautionary cases – where collective belief failed to reshape reality, or created only a fleeting illusion that eventually crashed.

Dick’s maxim could be the tagline for every financial asset bubble in history

most of these assets come crashing back to Earth when hard fundamentals (profits, supply and demand, physical utility) don’t justify the faith

Likewise, social or political movements driven by memes can find that belief isn’t enough to overcome material and structural forces. The Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 brimmed with genuine passion and the belief that a new social order was imminent. The slogan “We are the 99%” spread like wildfire

Physical reality is the hardest limit of all. No meme can make gravity disappear

material facts have a way of being stubborn.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, various factions fiercely believed conflicting realities – some thought the virus was a hoax, others treated it with extreme seriousness. Unfortunately, the virus didn’t care what anyone believed

Even our cleverest new reality-bending tools encounter limits. Advanced AI language models like ChatGPT can produce shockingly realistic text, often blurring fact and fiction

But outside the AI’s synthetic reality, the real facts remain unchanged

Modern finance and tech gave us perhaps the perfect parable: cryptocurrency

All these cases drive home a simple truth: belief needs reality as a partner, not a victim.

None of this is to pour cold water on imagination. Rather, it’s a reminder that the alchemy of memed reality is tricky

We can bend reality with memes, but we can’t fully break it. And knowing those limits is part of mastering the art.

Conclusion: Reality, Remixed but Not Replaced

for every triumphant hyperstition, there’s a crash to reality that follows

In the end, memeing things into existence is less like casting a spell and more like telling a really persuasive story – one so compelling that people act as if it were true, until it becomes true. We are the storytelling animal, and those stories can indeed walk off the page. The caveat is that reality is the editor who gets the final cut.