by TEJINDER SINGH

John Sexton, President of New York University, astutely describes today’s public sphere as a “coliseum culture that reduces discourse to gladiatorial combat. Viewpoints are caricatured in their most absolute form, with moderated, nuanced, or mixed positions given little or no voice. Propositions incapable of simple explanation in catchy, easily labeled phrases are ignored.”[1] Liberals and conservatives alike spout empty slogans, sound bites, and talking points in an apparent effort to plumb the depths of the public’s consciousness for a least common denominator. Even more frightening, these tactics work. Americans respond enthusiastically to demagogues, cheering for their favorites and shouting down opponents. Persuasion has gone out of style, as people increasingly converse only with others “like them” and suspect the worst of everybody else. Information technology, touted as a virtual bridge connecting diverse groups, only exacerbates the problem by shrinking our attention spans and granting us unprecedented power to filter reality to suit our tastes. The most vitriolic speech seems to thrive in cyberspace, and online political communities exhibit even greater insularity and polarization than their brick-and-mortar counterparts.

This Essay argues that in an ongoing battle between citizenship and consumerism, consumerism is winning. Today’s political landscape is a marketplace of ideas in the worst sense of the term. More and more, citizens behave like consumers—seeking out evidence that supports their preferences the same way that they seek goods to fulfill desires. In today’s public sphere, pundits and politicians treat invective as incontrovertible truth, and people stare inconvenient facts in the eye and declare, “I don’t buy that.” In the absence of the checks and balances of reasoned debate, misinformation runs rampant, and anger and even hatred bubble to the surface during even the most mundane policy discussions. All the while, we assure ourselves that we are participating in a vibrant debate.

The impact on our democracy is tragic and warrants immediate attention from progressives and from all people of good conscience. Fortunately, the very techniques and technologies that currently spoon-feed us easy (and often wrong) answers may help us to replace our consumerist approach to politics with a strong norm of engaged citizenship.[2] To that end, this Essay argues that citizenship should “go viral”—that is, citizens should deploy new technologies to market the ideal of citizenship and spark a national conversation about democratic values and the importance of reasoned discourse.

I. A Concrete Illustration of the Problem, and a Brief Discussion of Memes

On Friday, August 7, 2009, at 4:26 PM, a post entitled “Statement on the Current Health Care Debate” appeared on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page. In the post, the former Alaska Governor stated that the “America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide . . . whether they are worthy of health care.”[3] Though the post did not cite a specific provision of the healthcare reform bill, it apparently took aim at Section 1223 of H.R. 3200, which authorized reimbursements to doctors who provided patients with end-of-life counseling, a provision that had bipartisan support and approval from the AARP.[4]

In the ensuing days, bloggers, pundits, and politicians alike fixated on “death panels.” Prominent opponents of healthcare reform defended Palin’s comment as segments of the public became hysterical about the prospect of government bureaucrats who wanted to “pull the plug on grandma.”[5] Many, including Alaska’s own Republican Senator, Lisa Murkowski (who disfavors many provisions of the healthcare bill), responded that the “death panel” label was unfair and inaccurate, but the damage had already been done.[6] On August 13, just six days after Sarah Palin’s Facebook post, the influential Senate Finance Committee dropped end-of-life counseling from its version of the healthcare reform bill.[7]

The story does not end there. A Google search for “death panels” between August 7 and October 7 produced 839,000 hits. A LexisNexis search for news stories mentioning “death panel” or “death panels” between August 7 and October 7 produced 6783 results. Breaking the LexisNexis results down by date produces the following graph:

Two features of the graph deserve mention. First, death panels caught on quickly. On August 7, the search produced seven hits. In one week, that number rocketed to its peak of 322. Second, the graph shows that media interest in death panels waned from August 14 onward, but spiked in early September, when President Obama delivered his address to a joint session of Congress to announce the White House’s plan for healthcare reform. This indicates that the non-existent death panels exhibited staying power, even after the claim was thoroughly debunked.[8]

The episode left many puzzled. How did a benign section of the healthcare reform bill become a lightning rod for conservative opposition? And, how did we go from Facebook post to legislative action in under a week? Isn’t Facebook where college students go to post photographs of their major life mistakes and digitally “poke” each other as an alternative to flirting face-to-face?

The answer is that the phrase “death panel” is a work of genius. It conveys a simple message: the government wants to kill your grandmother. It uses jarring, pithy language: two words, one of which is “death.” It invokes concrete imagery: you see grandma shackled before a table in a dark room, across from three sadistic bureaucrats eager to push a big, red “DEATH” button. It emanates from a credible source: a former Republican Vice Presidential candidate who cares about “real Americans.” The timing was perfect: the administration had not yet clarified its healthcare plan, and the air was thick with uncertainty. Most of all, “death panel” taps a strong emotion: fear. It is hard to imagine a better tool to scare the wits out of a worried population than a “death panel.” It is the type of phrase that you love to repeat to your friends, or at your dinner table, or in your quasi-scholarly writing. It is an idea that was born to replicate itself: a meme.[9]

The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in 1976.[10] Memes are cultural analogues to genes—they are units of information that replicate. A meme can be as large as a religion, which is a meme composed of many other memes, or as small as a single digit or letter. Some memes replicate because they are true, or useful for our survival, or beautiful; but other memes—like “death panels”—replicate in spite of the fact that they are none of those things. Other thinkers, building on Dawkins’s idea, have produced a theory called memetics.[11] The memetic hypothesis is that memes emerge and live in a symbiotic relationship with people, and that the memes that define our culture are the ones that replicate the best in our minds. Scholars continue to debate whether we control memes or they control us.[12]

The memetics literature is fascinating and controversial, but one need not embrace much of it in order to accept the central argument of this Essay. The crucial points are that some memes replicate better than others, and that people can craft memes that are more likely to replicate successfully. These days, the memes that replicate best appear to jive with the public’s pre-existing biases.

II. Consumer Politics in a Digital Age

Consumerism’s central tenet is that happiness comes from satisfying one’s desires as efficiently as possible. Today’s consumers thus tend to prioritize the easy over the hard, the simple over the complex, and the fast over the slow.[13] Businesses encourage these priorities.[14] When the consumer mindset infiltrates politics, it gives rise to a selfish and simplified worldview that leaves little room for nuance and even less for honest reflection.[15] The politics of preferences conflates being opinionated with being engaged, and large swaths of the public have come to believe that participating in democracy means hurling uninformed opinions at each other.

Consumerism is ubiquitous in the political sphere.[16] Political campaigns act like marketing organizations by playing to biases, segmenting the market for votes, and oversimplifying policy issues into slogans and sound bites. They also cultivate brand loyalty. For example, most campaigns no longer attempt to convince voters of the opposing party to change allegiance. Instead, they focus on getting existing supporters to turn out—and on keeping opposing voters at home—on election day.[17] Campaigns also use “wedge issues” like gay marriage, the minimum wage, stem-cell research, or immigration to segment the public into bands of single-issue voters, and then craft narrow appeals to those populations.[18] Pollsters and focus groups tell candidates exactly what their audience wants to hear.[19] And, the candidates themselves say as little as possible. A pair of Harvard University studies found that from 1968 to the year 2000, the length of the average sound bite featuring a candidate’s own voice went from 42.3 seconds to 7.8 seconds.[20]

Members of the public contribute as well, by responding to the elites’ tactics and even more significantly, by treating their own political preferences as sacrosanct. Many refuse to acknowledge their biases,[21] whereas others accept that they are biased but behave as if those biases embody some noble expression of democratic values.[22] One recent example is the debate over intelligent design in science classrooms. Despite the fact that intelligent design lacks any scientific basis, its proponents argue that it deserves a place alongside evolution and that schools should “teach the controversy.”[23] This illustrates a common sentiment: if enough people feel strongly about an idea, then society should accommodate that preference. At first blush, this sounds like democracy, but only if one assumes that people’s views are the products of a considered, deliberative process that effectively distinguishes fact from personal ideological conviction. In a consumers’ democracy, this assumption strains credulity.[24]

This ideological polarization occurs against a backdrop of physical balkanization as people sort themselves into politically homogenous communities. One need only glance at CNN’s red versus blue electoral maps to conclude that America is indeed a house divided. The state-by-state map represents only the tip of the iceberg. Within states, people move to neighborhoods, attend church, and join volunteer organizations with others who are “like them”—typically people with a similar level of education or income, or a common religious, racial, or ethnic heritage. Perhaps not surprisingly, these traits correlate with partisan allegiance.[25] The resulting communities serve as havens for ideology and groupthink.

Although Americans have pursued homogeneity in their communities for decades, they are only beginning to filter information to produce the same effect. With regard to television, Republicans strongly prefer conservative Fox News, and Democrats prefer almost anything but Fox News.[26] On the Internet, users filter even more intensely to create “The Daily Me,” a condition in which they hear only the music they want to hear, see only the programs they want to see, and communicate only with people like them.[27]

The Daily Me promotes polarization and also renders people uniquely vulnerable to information cascades. Information cascades occur when a person adopts an idea simply because others appear to have done so. An idea’s popularity becomes evidence of its validity, and it transforms into a meme that spreads at a remarkable rate. The Web allows information to flow freely, making such cascades more likely.[28] In geek-speak, cascading memes “go viral.”[29]

The damage that the consumer mindset does to the public sphere is severe. The facts above show at least three concrete harms that the consumer mindset works on American democracy: it prevents dialogue by isolating and polarizing segments of the population; it spreads misinformation by encouraging the people to accept easy answers and disregard inconvenient facts; and it increases social tension by de-emphasizing civility in favor of theater. These three harms are particularly insidious because they are self-perpetuating and mutually reinforcing. As misinformation spreads, it becomes harder to bridge divides between people because, after all, the “other side” tells lies! As society becomes more polarized, civility declines because the “other side” rejects any attempt at productive dialogue. And, as civility collapses, reasoned debate gives way to exaggeration and lies.

The ultimate danger, however, is not to some abstract notion of deliberative democracy. The fact is that a consumers’ democracy is simply not as good at making policy as a citizens’ democracy. We face serious problems: healthcare reform, regulation of the financial sector, the war in Afghanistan, and climate change, to name just a few. Society simply cannot afford to make policy irrationally or to remain inert as crises worsen. We must make every effort to revive serious debate in this country and to start real conversations about how we are to deal, together, with the challenges that confront us.

III. Viral Citizenship

To revitalize our public sphere, we must convince our fellow Americans to put an end to the “coliseum culture” and to restore society’s appetite for nuanced debate among diverse constituencies. The first step must be to accept our fair share of responsibility for today’s deplorable state of affairs and to become engaged by reaching out to those with whom we disagree. By doing so, we not only stand to learn a great deal, but we also enhance our credibility among those who might disagree with us, which will come in handy when we want to persuade them of something.

Simply changing our own behavior, however, is unlikely to turn the tide in the battle between citizenship and consumerism. In order to achieve lasting change in the quality of public discourse, we must replace the market for innuendo and ideology with an equally robust one for dialogue and debate. The challenge is daunting. But, if Sarah Palin can incite thousands of people to take a reactionary stand against end-of-life counseling from her Facebook page, then surely the vast collective intellect of the progressive community can persuade people to approach politics in a more thoughtful manner. Indeed, what would it say about us if we couldn’t?

In the current polarized atmosphere, any attempt to alter the political culture will likely face opposition, especially if such attempt takes the form of criticism directed at conservatives.[30] To get around this problem, we must avoid the temptation to lecture about the ills of consumerism or the virtues of citizenship. Instead, this Essay proposes that we approach the job like viral marketers, and saturate the public sphere with memes that emphasize the positive value of civility, nuance, and reason. We know that these tactics work to sabotage public discourse, but we ought to redeploy them for the common good.[31]

Pro-citizenship memes should take several forms. Many successful memes include a common thread: they communicate through images and examples that open the audience’s mind, rather than through rational arguments that encourage a defensive response. Two particularly effective classes of memes are stories and proverbs.

Stories are incredibly powerful vehicles for political messages. In fact, one popular formula states that the best memes are Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional Stories (acronym: SUCCESs).[32] President Obama is deft at deploying pro-citizenship memes that fit this template. During a commencement speech at Notre Dame University, for example, the President shared the story of a pro-life doctor who contacted him during the election with concerns over the campaign’s website, which branded anti-abortion activists as “right-wing ideologues.” The President did not change his pro-choice stance, but he changed the website, and “said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me.” He urged his audience to live with open hearts, open minds, and fair-minded words, to roaring applause.[33]

In addition to stories, progressives should coin proverbs that steer public discourse in a positive direction. Godwin’s Law, which states that as “an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one,” provides a brilliant example.^[34] Mike Godwin promulgated this law in 1990 as an effort to curb glib Nazi analogies in Internet discussions. He sought “to build a counter-meme designed to make discussion participants see how they are acting as vectors to a particularly silly and offensive meme.”[35] He appears to have largely succeeded. Although some adhere to the practice of characterizing their opponents in a debate as Nazis, that tactic typically fails to impress.

Godwin’s example illustrates that each of us can improve the quality of civil discourse without significant expense or a full-time commitment. Many of us already have platforms from which to promote citizenship norms—for example, e-mail distribution lists, websites, blogs, and social networking profiles. The key is to use those platforms to spread strong pro-citizenship memes, in the hopes that we can create a market for honest, rigorous discussion about the issues that will shape our collective future.

IV. Conclusion

The progressive community has a very deep bench when it comes to creativity, and I do not pretend to be the best person to craft viral pro-citizenship memes. I do, however, want to offer a story, in the hope that my attempt will encourage others to put forth their own stories and proverbs, until the air is so thick with pro-citizenship memes that they crowd out hostility and misinformation.

My favorite teacher in law school was Professor William Stuntz. Professor Stuntz and I are a bit of an odd couple. He is a well-known member of the conservative evangelical Christian community, while my family is Sikh, and I wear a turban and sport a long, full beard. But I have always enjoyed Professor Stuntz’s company, and as a law student I concocted many laughable excuses to visit his office hours. During one such drop-in session, curiosity got the better of me and I asked: “So, you may have noticed that I’m not exactly Christian. I don’t know a lot about evangelism, but I was wondering—does that irk you?” Professor Stuntz leaned back in his chair, deep in thought, for a brief eternity. Then he whispered, “Can I be honest with you?”

At this point, I believed that I certainly faced about a thirty-five percent chance of being damned to Hell by my favorite professor. But there was no turning back now, so I responded “Of course,” and braced myself for the worst.

And then he let me have it. “I’m so glad you’re different from me. I’m not indifferent to whether my friends convert to my faith, but if I had to spend all day surrounded only by people who agree with me, that would be so boring.” As I left the office, I had a genuine “only in America” moment contemplating the idea of a liberal Sikh and a conservative evangelical Christian who do not just tolerate, but deeply appreciate, each other. In that spirit, I offer a concluding thought: Love those who disagree with you, because they are the only ones who can actually make you smarter.

[1] John Sexton, Dogmatism and Complexity: Civil Discourse and the Research University, (Aug. 2, 2005), http://www.nyu.edu/about/sexton-dogmatism.html.

[2] Citizenship, as discussed here, refers to a sense of civic responsibility that transcends individual interests, and also to an ethic of participation that emphasizes respectful, rigorous debate. Ideal citizens thus strive to reach the right answer for all of society and do not care whether that answer conforms to their own ideological preferences.

[3] Posting of Sarah Palin, Statement on the Current Health Care Debate, Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=113851103434 (Aug. 7, 2009, 4:26 PM EST).

[4] Ben Evans, GOP Backs Away from End-of-Life Counseling, Associated Press, Aug. 14, 2009, http://www.newsvine.com/_news/2009/08/14/3153231-gop-backs-away-from-end-of-life-counseling.

[5] Id.

[6] Lisa Demer, Murkowski: Don’t Tell Lies About the Health-Care Reform Bill, Anchorage Daily News, Aug. 11, 2009, http://www.adn.com/life/health/story/895431.html.

[7] Bernie Becker, Senate Bill Will Not Address End-of-Life Care, N.Y. Times Prescriptions Blog, Aug. 13, 2009, http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/senate-bill-will-not-address-end-of-life-care/?scp=5&sq=end%20of%20life&st=cse.

[8] Talking Points Memo (“TPM”) has a feature tracking the ongoing use of death panels. See TPM, http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/death-panels/ (last visited Oct. 30, 2009). Of course, many stories that mention “death panels” do so in order to criticize the term. But, this is not terribly important. As long as the issue is whether or not the President’s plan includes “death panels,” the more salient policy points remain in the background, and opponents of reform have an easy target.

[9] See Roger Ebert, “Death Panels.” A most excellent term, Chicago Sun-Times, Aug. 17, 2009, http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/08/death_panels_an_excellent_phra.html.

[10] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene 192 (1976).

[11] See e.g., Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science (Robert Aunger ed., 2001); Susan Blackmore & Richard Dawkins, The Meme Machine (2000); Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1995).

[12] See Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea 346–47 (1995).

[13] Benjamin R. Barber, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole 83 (2007) (offering a much longer list of consumer priorities that Barber distills into these three dyads).

[14] Consider some popular slogans: “The customer is always right” (often credited to Gordon Selfridge, a London department store owner). “Your way, right away” (Burger King). “Where do you want to go today?” (Microsoft). “Your world. Delivered.” (AT&T). Businesses also cater to the full range of human desires—for example, by offering thirty-three varieties of pasta sauce, or by publishing magazines for everybody from motor home enthusiasts to cigar aficionados to miniature donkey owners. The message to consumers is: We are here to serve you, no matter how unreasonable you may be.

[15] Consumerism is not the only explanation for the Manichean tone of today’s political discourse. Some argue that the religious Right has raised the stakes of political conversations to the level of good vs. evil, and thus foreclosed debate. See, e.g., Sexton, supra note 1. This explanation is compelling, but consumerism is a better fit for our symptoms: many atheists are just as militant as believers, and the Left is often as vitriolic as the Right. Laying all blame at the door of the religious Right seems self-serving.

[16] The history of American consumerism is not only a tale of rampant greed and decay. As Professor Lizabeth Cohen of Harvard University points out, consumerism and advocacy on behalf of consumers have historically served as touchstones for progressive causes. For example, during and after the Great Depression, being a consumer was about getting a fair shake from the producers of goods, and policies promoting consumption were designed to ensure everybody a minimum standard of prosperity. See Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America 23 (2003). Many civil rights activists wielded their power as consumers and boycotted stores as part of the struggle for social justice. Id. at 370–73. JFK held himself out as an advocate for consumers, id. at 345, and others, like Ralph Nader, regarded consumer advocacy as a universal “people’s movement” that could challenge corporate greed and social inequality. Id. at 351. Even modern consumerism is not all bad—for example, people exercise power to preserve the environment and ensure fair labor standards by buying eco-friendly and fair-trade goods. The point of this Essay is not to disparage or discount the role that consumerism has played in progressive efforts, but is rather to highlight a specific contemporary problem: that consumerism has eclipsed citizenship as our primary means of self-identification, and our democracy needs us to restore balance between those two roles. On this point, Professor Cohen agrees. Id. at 409–10.

[17] Id. at 342. See also Bill Bishop & Robert G. Cushing, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart 194–95 (2008).

[18] See generally D. Sunshine Hillygus & Todd G. Shields, The Persuadable Voter: Wedge Issues in Presidential Campaigns (2008).

[19] See Bishop, supra note 17, at 195.

[20] Susan Jacoby, The Dumbing of America, Wash. Post, Feb. 17, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021502901_2.html?sid=ST2008021801642.

[21] See Anthony G. Greenwald & Linda Hamilton Krieger, Symposium on Behavioral Realism: Implicit Bias: Scientific Foundations, 94 Calif. L. Rev. 945, 955–60 (2006) (reviewing research using the Implicit Association Test which demonstrates that implicit biases about issues such as race—among others—are pervasive among study subjects).

[22] See Charles P. Pierce, Greetings from Idiot America, Esquire, Oct. 31, 2005, http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0207GREETINGS. See also Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason xix (2008) (arguing that many Americans disparage expertise as elitism).

[23] See Jacoby, supra note 22, at 27.

[24] See Farhad Manjoo, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society 192–93 (2008). Some will brand this Essay’s call for more engaged politics as elitist. I offer two responses. First, there is nothing elitist about factual accuracy. Second, it is only because I respect my fellow citizens that I think we can do better than the status quo. In the consumer’s democracy, a cadre of elites insults our intelligence by offering us easy answers and coarse discourse. All I am suggesting is that we—all of us—are smarter and more capable than the elites think. Charges of elitism assume the opposite: that the American people are too stupid to be meaningfully engaged. That assumption strikes me as condescending and inaccurate.

[25] See Bishop, supra note 17, at 50–56, 153–55.

[26] Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, News Audiences Increasingly Politicized, Survey Reports, June 8, 2004, http://people-press.org/report/215/news-audiences-increasingly-politicized. Everybody appears to favor news programs that deliver short statements about current events, punctuated by commentary, as opposed to lengthier discussions of a few stories (such as the NewsHour). Id. This may be a product of America’s decreasing attention span, a trend that the Internet exacerbates. See Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, The Atlantic, July/Aug. 2008, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google.

[27] Cass Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0, 1–5 (2006). The term “Daily Me” was originally coined by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab.

[28] Id. at 87–91. Cascades are often bad, but not always: when a true or otherwise beneficial meme cascades, society benefits.

[29] Some argue that the Internet has opened the public sphere to a series of new voices that are reinvigorating politics by providing fresh perspectives. Professor Matthew Hindman conducted one of the most thorough studies of politics on the Internet to date and concluded that the data does not support this claim. According to Hindman, a handful of influential sites—the ones with the most inbound links—get the vast majority of web traffic. Matthew Hindman, The Myth of Digital Democracy 55 (2009). For a new voice, “putting up a political Web site is usually equivalent to hosting a talk show on public access television at 3:30 in the morning.” Id. at 56. On the other hand, the Internet excels at motivating and organizing partisans. Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign raised $41 million, roughly half of that online, and recruited tens of thousands of volunteers through its website, many of them participating in a campaign for the first time. Id. at 29–31. President Obama took Internet fundraising to the next level, raising over half a billion dollars online. Jose Antonio Vargas, Obama Raised Half a Billion Online, Wash. Post, Nov. 20, 2008, http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2008/11/20/obama_raised_half_a_billion_on.html.

[30] Recent history has witnessed an inane round of finger-pointing about who has been less civil, or who the media favors. See, e.g., Jim Rutenberg, Behind the War Between White House and Fox, N.Y. Times, Oct. 23, 2009; Mark Salter, The Media’s Pathetic Double Standard, Real Clear Politics, Sept. 15, 2009, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/09/15/the_medias_pathetic_double_standard_98303.html.

[31] Some argue that irrationality and emotion are natural, and so rather than attempt the futile task of exorcising them from politics, progressives should learn to use them to advance their political agenda. See Drew Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation 133–37, 417–18 (2007). This position is broadly consistent with the argument in this Essay. This Essay does not argue that progressives should pretend that Americans have dispassionate minds. Rather, it contends that we should craft an emotional appeal to the American people encouraging them to think for themselves, to cherish rigorous debate, and to resist attempts to reduce their participation in society to a glorified form of consumption. To the extent that an engaged citizenry is part of the progressive agenda (and it ought to be), this Essay’s argument is for emotional appeals in service of progressive ideals.

[32] Chip Heath & Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die 16–18 (2007). For a more granular overview of the variables that make memes stick, see Francis Heylighen, What makes a meme successful? Selection criteria for cultural evolution, Proc. 16th Int’l Congress on Cybernetics (1998), http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/MemeticsNamur.html.

[33] See Barack Obama, Remarks by the President in Commencement Address at the University of Notre Dame (May 17, 2009), http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-at-Notre-Dame-Commencement.

[34] Mike Godwin, Meme, Counter-meme, Wired, Issue 2.10, Oct. 1994, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html. Another wonderful series of examples comes from the Ad Council, which prepares Public Service Announcements, and is responsible for such memes as “Only you can prevent forest fires,” “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” and “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” See Ad Council, About Ad Council, http://www.adcouncil.org/default.aspx?id=68.

[35] Godwin, supra note 34.

Preferred Citation: Tejinder Singh, The Case for Viral Citizenship, 4 Harv. L. & Pol’y Rev. (Online) (Jan. 5, 2010), http://www.hlpronline.com/2010/01/singh.