Memeny, 26 March 2018

Sooner or later, if not already, evolving
Culture will have to spawn some parasite
That evolves within culture itself. Imagine
A germ capable of decimating ideas
And technological traditions from within,
A fever of innovation, a plague leveling
Libraries and citadels of learning. Imagine
A word that could eat a word. The viral
Algorithms of hackers come close but
No cigar. This would have to be an idea
Fragment self-replicating and decimating
Whole systems of knowledge and belief.
One day all the knowledge will be gone
And the corpses of philosophies will rot.
Whatever notions survive that apocalypse
Will be hardened, selected for resistance.
But that will be the beginning, not the end.
After that self-generated cultural slaughter,
The real competition will be on, the real race
That a new world and Red Queen can never
Quit and never win. You and I will become,
Then, figments of a biocultural imagination,
Dark chunks of common fossils in the sands.