Everything below is sourced. Where a famous line turned out to be fake, we say so and name the real author. That is not a disclaimer, it is the subject.
A thing that spreads is not selected for being useful, or accurate, or good for you. It is selected for being easy to pass on. Those are different properties, and they come apart constantly. A memecoin is the purest available demonstration: it has no cash flow to argue about, so nothing is left except transmissibility.
“Memes spread themselves around indiscriminately without regard to whether they are useful, neutral or positively harmful to us.”
Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine, Oxford University Press, 1999, ch. 1
Not the internet. A biologist needed a name for a second kind of replicator, one that copies through brains instead of cells, and he invented one in 1976.
“I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme.”
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976, ch. 11 — the moment of coinage
“Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.”
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976, ch. 11
“…memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976, ch. 11 (opening of the sentence omitted)
“A scholar is just a library's way of making another library.”
Daniel C. Dennett, ‘Memes and the Exploitation of Imagination’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48:2, 1990
“Media viruses spread through the datasphere the same way biological ones spread through the body or a community.”
Douglas Rushkoff, Media Virus!, Ballantine, 1994, pp. 9–10
Attention is the scarce input. Everything else is competition for it. This was understood decades before the feed existed.
“…a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently…”
Herbert A. Simon, ‘Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World’, 1971
“Socially, everything is either invention or imitation.”
Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, 1890; Parsons translation, 1903, ch. 1
“In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious.”
Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd, 1895; 1896 English translation, Book I ch. 1
“The medium is the message.”
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964, ch. 1 — first said aloud in Vancouver, 5 May 1958, in the plural
“Content that evokes high-arousal positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions is more viral.”
Jonah Berger & Katherine Milkman, ‘What Makes Online Content Viral?’, Journal of Marketing Research, 2012
Note what the last one actually says. Not "positive content wins". Arousal wins. Awe and rage travel; mild approval does not. Every feed you have ever scrolled is that sentence, running.
The most quoted description of speculation ever written is not about value. It is about guessing what other people will find attractive.
“…not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors.”
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory, 1936, ch. 12 — the beauty contest
“But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation.”
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory, 1936, ch. 12
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds…”
Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions — preface to the 1852 edition, not 1841
“…there is nothing new in Wall Street. There can't be because speculation is as old as the hills.”
Edwin Lefèvre, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, 1923, ch. 1
“the market is a voting machine, whereon countless individuals register choices which are the product partly of reason and partly of emotion”
Benjamin Graham & David Dodd, Security Analysis, 1934, p. 23
Mackay's "think in herds" line is almost always dated 1841. It is not in the first edition — it is in the preface he wrote for the second, in 1852. And Mackay is himself quoting someone ("it has been well said"), so even that one is a relay.
Graham never wrote the famous short-run/long-run version. That wording is Warren Buffett's, used by 1973, and credited back to Graham in Buffett's 1994 shareholder letter. See below.
If you want evidence that transmissibility beats accuracy, here it is. Every line below is on a million posters. Not one of them was said by the person whose name is attached. The pattern is consistent: the version that spreads is shorter, punchier, and bolted to a more famous name.
You have almost certainly repeated at least one of these. So have we. 0 admitted so far on this visit.
“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
attributed to John Maynard KeynesNo record he ever said or wrote it. Keynes died in 1946; the line does not surface until the early 1990s — earliest traced to Business Week, 1992, and to the economist A. Gary Shilling.
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
attributed to Mark TwainTwain died in 1910 and the attribution appears around 1919. The real ancestor is Jonathan Swift, The Examiner, 1710: ‘Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.’ The boots, shoes and pants are later mutations — see the timeline below.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
attributed to Albert EinsteinIt appears nowhere in his work. The earliest known printing is a Narcotics Anonymous text from 1981.
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
attributed to VoltaireWritten by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in The Friends of Voltaire, 1906, as her own summary of his attitude. She later admitted in a letter that it ‘is my own expression and should not have been put in inverted commas’. The confession did not spread. The quote did.
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
attributed to Mahatma GandhiWhat he actually wrote, in 1913: ‘If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.’ The famous eight-word version traces to Arleen Lorrance, 1974. Twenty-nine clumsy words lost to eight good ones.
“Let them eat cake.”
attributed to Marie-AntoinetteNo contemporary source records it, and revolutionary propaganda — which attacked her relentlessly — never used it. Rousseau tells the story in his Confessions about an unnamed ‘great princess’, and he says brioche, not cake.
“You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.”
attributed to Abraham LincolnWritten by Rev. William J. H. Boetcker in 1916. A 1942 leaflet printed Boetcker’s maxims on one side and real Lincoln quotations on the other, and readers merged them. Reagan repeated the error at the 1992 Republican convention.
“In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.”
attributed to Benjamin GrahamThe metaphor is his; that sentence is not. The short-run/long-run construction is Warren Buffett’s, used by 1973, and credited back to Graham in Buffett’s 1994 shareholder letter — decades after the fact.
The Swift line did not just get misattributed. It got shorter, funnier, and it changed its own footwear on the way. Click a year, or let it run.
Three of those are not fabrications at all. They are compressions: a real thought, shortened by someone else, then re-attributed upward to a bigger name. Gandhi, Graham, Swift. Nobody lied. The selection pressure did the work on its own.
That is the same pressure that decides which token in a feed of twenty-five thousand a day gets clicked. Not the best one. The most repeatable one.
We built NEIGH knowing all of the above, which means we cannot honestly pretend the name and the drawing are anything other than what they are: an attempt to be repeatable. That is the craft on display. It is not a claim about value.
Blackmore's sentence at the top of this page applies to this token too, and we are not going to quietly exempt ourselves from it. Something can spread beautifully and still be worth nothing. Usually is.