THE FOOTNOTES
A fictional lab.
Real references.
sTARD is a meme about confidence, unopened wallets and questionable conclusions. The science below concerns humor and internet culture. It does not validate a token or predict returns.
Reading room
An anatomy of a YouTube meme
Limor Shifman (2012) · New Media & Society
Simplicity, repetition, humor and other recurring traits characterized the selected examples. The analysis treats creative imitation as participation.
Selected successful cases cannot establish which traits caused success. Early YouTube videos are not current crypto audiences.
Read the paper ↗“There’s no place for lulz on LOLCats”: The role of genre, gender, and group identity in the interpretation and enjoyment of an Internet meme
Kate M. Miltner (2014) · First Monday
The same meme genre supported different identities and contested understandings of what counted as a legitimate contribution.
A small, qualitative case study explains experiences; it does not estimate general audience preferences or engagement effects.
Read the paper ↗Benign Violations: Making Immoral Behavior Funny
A. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren (2010) · Psychological Science
Amusement was associated with perceiving a violation as simultaneously wrong and acceptable; psychological distance and alternative norms helped explain reactions.
These scenarios do not validate every joke or predict sharing. What seems harmless varies by audience; amusement can coexist with disgust.
Read the paper ↗What Makes Online Content Viral?
Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman (2012) · Journal of Marketing Research
Emotion and arousal were related to transmission; positive versus negative sentiment alone did not explain sharing.
News emailing and experimental transmission do not establish present-day meme performance. Observational associations are not universal causal recipes; see S05.
Read the paper ↗Does Physiological Arousal Increase Social Transmission of Information? Two Replications of Berger (2011)
Skyler Prowten and colleagues (2024) · Psychological Science
Neither study found an effect of incidental physiological arousal on willingness to share news on social media.
The sharing measure changed; these studies concern incidental arousal and replicate Berger 2011, not the entire Berger–Milkman 2012 paper.
Read the paper ↗Cumulative cultural evolution in the laboratory: An experimental approach to the origins of structure in human language
Simon Kirby, Hannah Cornish and Kenny Smith (2008) · PNAS
Transmission increased learnability and structure. Without an expressivity constraint, distinctions could disappear; constraining ambiguity promoted compositional structure.
This is language learning under laboratory constraints, not direct evidence that meme templates outperform other creative formats.
Read the paper ↗Competition among memes in a world with limited attention
L. Weng, A. Flammini, A. Vespignani and F. Menczer (2012) · Scientific Reports
The model reproduced broad popularity differences without assigning different intrinsic quality to messages.
A sufficient modeled mechanism is not proof that content quality is irrelevant or that a particular meme’s reach is predictable.
Read the paper ↗Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market
Matthew J. Salganik, Peter Sheridan Dodds and Duncan J. Watts (2006) · Science
Stronger social influence increased both inequality and unpredictability of success. Quality only partly explained outcomes.
An artificial music market is not a token market. The result rejects certainty, not the possibility of learning from local tests.
Read the paper ↗The Spread of Behavior in an Online Social Network Experiment
Damon Centola (2010) · Science
Multiple-neighbor reinforcement supported adoption; clustered networks produced farther and faster spread than corresponding random networks in this setting.
Adopting a behavior differs from seeing, liking or forwarding a joke. This does not establish that closed communities always grow better.
Read the paper ↗Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks
William J. Brady and colleagues (2017) · PNAS
Moral-emotional wording was associated with greater diffusion, especially within ideological groups.
The often-cited per-word association is context-specific, not a causal growth lever for crypto jokes or evidence that hostility is beneficial.
Read the paper ↗Back to the bit
The institute, its experiments and its conclusions are fictional. The mascot illustrations are AI-generated original artwork.