In the 1990s and early 2000s, John Barnes wrote a series of novels (called “The Century Next Door”) (note: somewhat unusually, two of them were YA novels and two were ultraviolent, definitely adult works), in which “The Meme Wars” were a major plot element, which start like this:
“The war had been raging ever since some bright guy had figured out how to write a program that could analyze any operating system it talked to, figure out how to penetrate it, and get in and take over AIs. Whoever it was, he’d probably never realized that to a program like that, a mind’s just one more operating system running on a slow-running massively parallel processor.”
Memes compete for human minds using computers as a vector, relentlessly pushing their ideas through conversational overwhelment, and work to undermine each other, while stealing techniques for quicker subversion, etc. All this before social media and ChatGPT were thought of - but you can’t read these books now without thinking of those concepts.
