Computer chip manufacturers are beginning to toy with molecularly precise components. Biology, and all its sub-domains in anthropology, ecology, forensics, medicine, and so on, have all resolved themselves to view the world with molecular precision. Perhaps nanotechnology can best be understood as a fairly new set of memes with particularly dramatic material consequences. But this will only be possible, I feel, if we are able to substantially reconfigure major portions of human culture through a process of memetic engineering. By taking in that last sentence, you become infected with the meme about memes.
Memes are a new form of self-replicators, or viral life.
Memetics is the antithesis of metaphysics, insisting that matter matters. Felix Guattari performs a kind of memetic analysis when he argues that a wide range of heterogeneous machinic components lead to the production of contemporary subjectivities. Today, memes exploit the new media and travel as electronic and electromagnetic pulses and hibernate as magnetic patterns and as microscopic pits on laser-read compact disks. To the extent that we participate in language, economics, history, or aesthetics, we inhabit a memetic realm. Using the energy of our living flesh to maintain, mutate, and express themselves, memes live in and through us.