This article is about the concept and origin of the Sown Echoes app. It touches on my own experience at school and how I came to understand the ideas behind it.
When I was in middle school, a writer once came to give a talk at our school. In the grand auditorium, students from every grade were present. Not long into his talk, the writer told a short story: A man had been walking alone through the desert for many days. He kept pushing on, hoping to be rescued. As time went by, his supplies and water had long run out, and there was no hope of survival left. In the very instant before he died, he ejaculated.
The story was so short, and its ending so abrupt — there was something literary in it. Saying something so explicit, in public, to several hundred middle schoolers, caused an uproar in the room at the time. But I didn’t think much of it. Because we were at an age of sexual curiosity, my classmates were thrilled to hear an adult say such words out loud; yet at the same time, being middle schoolers, we were innocent enough to still ponder the philosophy in it. The story is roughly about this: life will do everything it can to continue life itself, no matter how vanishingly small the chance. Just like the desert traveler who, on the verge of death, instinctively ejaculated under conditions where it could almost certainly have no effect.
What does this have to do with the Sown Echoes app and the title “meme lives”? The little desert story is about the survival of life in the material world. After the information world was constructed by humans, the survival of the meme — as a concept of the mind — within the information world is similar. The individual is small and powerless, but as a whole it is instead strong and hard to extinguish; it keeps copying and modifying itself, and the death or disappearance of a few individuals is negligible from the perspective of the whole. The data on a single computer or a single storage medium will, given enough time, be utterly lost to failure or misplacement. But ever since the internet, memes — like genes — keep copying, spreading, and evolving. The various systems that host articles and videos store data in a relatively high-availability way, and the crawlers of every search engine go and scrape this data that is already exposed on the net. A single piece of information is fragile, but once it is put on the internet, it instead becomes hard to erase.
The meme, to some degree, reenacts the laws of the gene. But the meme goes a step further, beyond the scale of the gene: it is more abstract and its cost is lower. The meme is cross-species and cross-time; it can spread among any species of intelligent life, and it can cross vast spans of time. Each time a meme is thought by intelligent life, it comes alive again.
If you’re starting to get confused, just remember that all of this is about staying alive — only by continually transcending and expanding the dimension. The desert traveler trying to walk out of the desert and be rescued is the most basic continuation of the individual body. His uncontrollable and seemingly meaningless ejaculation is the will of the species hoping to continue the survival of the species. By this point, for the traveler, it already transcends his individual self; what remains is an unknowable future. The whole is already the future — abstract to the individual, and already unrelated to the individual. The meme is simply more abstract still. Some people care only about the survival of their own body and their present consciousness; others can more actively imagine a future not directly related to themselves. But regardless of their will or inclination, none can change the laws of the whole.
To get concrete about the memes related to us, think now about how our own memes get passed down. The typical scene is this: on apps like X (Twitter) or YouTube/TikTok, our viewing and all our other habits are tracked. This data is used by algorithms to push more videos or articles we might watch for longer durations, and the basis for that is our dwell time, likes, shares, saves, and similar data. It’s not just content consumers; if you are a content producer, you are equally shaped by the algorithm. If the videos you produce don’t win the algorithm’s favor, then economically or in terms of psychological motivation you not only can’t sustain it — in reality, not many people will see your content either. In the end, the memes generated on these platforms, because of the weighting given to dwell time, have drifted far away from the form in which we survive in the material world. This isn’t to say it is wrong, but that it becomes more entertaining and more utilitarian. Entertainment and utility are only one part of human society. If your children or grandchildren mostly inherited only the parts of you that concern entertainment and utility, wouldn’t you wish they also possessed more, much more of the traits you have? For example: selflessness, anger, shame, patience, seriousness, humility, prudence, gentleness, long-termism, silence, neutrality and objectivity, and so on… these traits that are innately at odds with the algorithm would all be heavily diluted. Other content in real life that is more private, and more easily censored by terms of service, becomes almost invisible. And there are many real experiences and traits — qualities inherently incompatible with the medium of video or posts — that cannot be left behind at all.
This is one of the reasons I made the Sown Echoes app: on the premise that we ourselves are ready, we express and articulate the experiences we find beautiful, true, and otherwise worth recording — rather than simply letting every app track our every little movement and letting these trivial bits of information define us. The highest principle of a tech company’s app algorithm is to maximize the time the user stays in the app. Unless your life’s goal is to spend as much time as possible in some app, it is ultimately not your final value. Human value is directional; not all trivial facts are important. For instance, when I am invited to give an address, I select and distill from life experience how we ought to act and how we ought to think — rather than printing out my browsing history and the trivial things I did each day. Humans have their own agency. What is, is merely what is; and we must pursue the value of what ought to be. For example, when we teach children, even if we ourselves cannot be perfect, we still teach them the most ideal ideas.
While every app runs a similar algorithm, actively producing articles that conform to one’s own values seems futile. But fortunately, we have entered the age of AI, and we no longer have to fear that our articles must rack up many views in order to be passed down. At the moment of writing this, the native data that AI can train on is nearly exhausted; any meaningful article on the internet will be taken for training. Besides letting you converse with your own echo without sharing your privacy, Sown Echoes — if you choose to contribute your articles within it — has an upload format already designed to be suitable for AI training, making it very high-quality training material for researchers at AI labs. Your articles will become part of the weights of future large models, and your thoughts can live on forever together with the model.
Such an act seems, and indeed almost certainly is, futile — including my making this app itself, just like the desert traveler in the instant before death. The difference from the gene is that, within the realm of the meme, we have a higher chance of being left behind.