The Memory We're Losing to Memes

This week my feed is flooded with Studio Ghibli images from ChatGPT's 4o update. By the middle of next week, I suspect it will be largely forgotten, replaced by something else equally ephemeral. When I mention it to friends or family outside of my filter bubble, they'll likely have no idea what I'm talking about.

What was the last viral thing you forgot?

Having transitioned from luxury alcohol branding to crypto, I've developed an eye for how ideas spread—or don't. There's a phenomenon accelerating around us I call "memetic churn": the increasingly rapid cycle of cultural ideas that rise to ubiquity then disappear almost instantly, creating a kind of cultural amnesia.

Memetic churn operates on a simple principle: every day there is a new Thing, and it's more Thingier than the previous Thing. Traditional memes, as conceived by Dawkins, emphasized longevity. Internet memes have inverted this—the most successful often burn brightest and die fastest.

The acceleration is striking: The Budweiser "Wassup" campaign (1999) remained culturally relevant for years. People still quote it occasionally, 25 years later. By 2014, the Ice Bucket Challenge dominated for weeks. In early 2025, Saratoga water bottles featured in an influencer's morning routine saturated my feed on Tuesday and were completely gone by Wednesday. Now it's Studio Ghibli images generated by AI.

As someone who is addicted to X to stay up to date with crypto, I've become an unwitting observer of this acceleration more acutely than those who maintain a healthier relationship with social media. The algorithms are optimized not just for engagement but for novelty, constantly pushing fresh content that makes yesterday's viral sensation feel like ancient history.

What we're experiencing is "digital-induced amnesia"—a collective forgetting caused by overconsumption of digital stimuli. Our brains simply weren't designed to process information at this speed.

Shared narratives matter for EVERYTHING. We are a species that lives off shared narrative. As Yuval Noah Harari argues in Sapiens, our unique ability to believe collectively in abstract concepts—from money to nations to brands—is what enabled humanity to cooperate at scale. When memes flash by too quickly to establish common ground, we lose more than entertainment; we lose the cultural scaffolding that makes human coordination possible.

As AI-generated content becomes more prevalent, we're approaching a reality where much of what we read online was never seen by another human. It's bespoke content, algorithmically tailored just for us, ensuring our experiences become increasingly personalized and simultaneously less shared.

Does this matter? I think it does. In both crypto and luxury marketing, I've witnessed firsthand how sustained narratives build communities and brands. Yet perhaps the beauty of Studio Ghibli AI images lies precisely in their fleeting nature—a shared moment rather than a lasting monument.

Perhaps the real cost of our accelerating memetic churn isn't cultural amnesia, but cultural atomization. When nothing persists long enough to become truly shared knowledge, we lose not just content but context—the foundation upon which communities build meaning. In a world optimized for novelty, remembering might be the most radical act of all.