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Memes and the Philosophy of Digital Phenomena

Viral Culture as Epistemic Infrastructure?

Authors: Miguel Moreno (Universidad de Granada) · A. Claude et al. (Anthropic PBC)*
Date: circa March 2026
Format: Quarto HTML monograph · Dual light/dark theme · APA 7 citations


Overview

A scholarly monograph in the intersection of memetics, epistemology, philosophy of technology, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). The text examines internet memes not as ephemeral cultural debris but as constitutive infrastructure for collective knowledge formation in networked societies — with the Chuck Norris Facts (2005–present) as the primary case study.

This work operates in two explicit registers: rigorous academic argument and productive epistemic irony. Sections marked with amber Epistemic Irony panels perform critical analysis through humour rather than despite it — a methodological choice whose rationale is developed in the text.


Project Structure

.
├── meme-epistemology.qmd      # Main document (source)
├── references.bib             # Bibliography (APA 7)
├── apa.csl                    # Citation style (APA 7th edition)
├── styles-light.scss          # Light theme (base: cosmo)
├── styles-dark.scss           # Dark theme (base: darkly)
├── _meta-tags.html            # HTML head: OG, Twitter Card, Dublin Core, JSON-LD
├── og-image.png               # Social preview image (1200×630)
├── ogimage.png                # In-document cover image
└── README.md                  # This file

Note: apa.csl is not included in the repository.
Download from the Zotero CSL repository and place in the project root before rendering.


Dependencies

Required

Tool Version Notes
Quarto ≥ 1.4 Rendering engine
R + knitr ≥ 4.3 Optional; only required if R code chunks are added
apa.csl Download separately (see above)

Fonts (loaded via Google Fonts CDN)

  • Cormorant Garamond — body text
  • Playfair Display — headings
  • Lora — humor panels
  • JetBrains Mono — code, meme-facts, labels
  • Inter — UI elements, metadata, TOC

No local font installation required; the SCSS imports them at render time. For offline rendering, download the fonts and update the @import url(...) lines in both SCSS files accordingly.


Rendering

quarto render meme-epistemology.qmd

Output: index.html in the project root.

Deployment

The monograph is deployed at:


Citation

Archived at Zenodo with DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19277505.

@misc{moreno2026memes,
  author    = {Moreno Mu{\~n}oz, Miguel},
  title     = {Memes and the Philosophy of Digital Phenomena:
               Viral Culture as Epistemic Infrastructure?},
  year      = {2026},
  month     = mar,
  publisher = {Zenodo},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.19277505},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19277505},
  note      = {HTML monograph, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0}
}

Licence

© 2026 Miguel Moreno.
Text and original analysis: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Cited works remain the property of their respective authors and publishers.
Meme templates and viral artefacts discussed are the property of their respective creators; their inclusion constitutes fair dealing for the purposes of criticism, commentary, and academic research.


Acknowledgements

Source materials include three documents circulated as inspiration for this project:
The first is a journalistic retrospective on the Chuck Norris meme phenomenon published by Bastarrica (2026) in Digital Trends upon the actor’s death in March 2026. The second is Didyme-Dôme (2026), a Rolling Stone obituary that recontextualises Norris’s cultural afterlife by situating the meme economy within a broader narrative of celebrity durability and late‑career mythopoesis. The third is an anonymous satirical Tratado sobre el “Big Bang” de la Memética Moderna — a parody academic paper that, beneath its pantomime rigour, encodes several genuine insights into the structural mechanics of viral diffusion.

All three are cited where analytically relevant, which is more often than one might expect.


* The et al. in the second author attribution refers, with appropriate literalness, to the training corpus.

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Memes as Epistemic Infrastructure: Viral Culture, Knowledge Transmission, and the Philosophy of Digital Phenomena

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