The Meme System ★

Memes are the central nervous system of Theatrum Orbis: everything an individual can know, believe, or have heard. They gate capability and carry culture, reputation, and opportunity. This is the core invention — the engine that makes civilizations dynamic.

Memes are the bedrock, not a pillar

The economy, culture, and politics are not three separate engines. They are three views of one meme-driven civilization: the economy is praxis-memes gating what can be made; culture is doctrine-memes carrying conviction (enjoining the praxes a people perform); politics is institution-memes gating organizational forms. Everything in The Living Canvas is expressed in memes.

The capability triplet

What a person can do is never one number. It’s the product of three independent axes that move at different speeds and spread by different means:

• Memes gate — do you know how? A praxis meme is a binary gate.
• Skills measure — how well? Skills grow with practice; they set quality and speed.
• Traits modify — what bends the rates? Lua modifiers on learning rate, quality, decay.

They’re kept separate because a meme can be taught in an afternoon, a skill takes years, and traits barely move. See Capability Triplet.

Two trees, one join

The design is authored as two connected graphs:

• The knowledge / meme tree — what you can know (see Meme Types and Relationships).
• The commodity / recipe tree — what can be made from what, and which knowledge it takes (see Economy).

Every commodity edge (“iron ore → wrought iron”) is performed by a meme (“bloomery iron”). The producing praxis(es) are the bridge between the two trees.

In this section

• Meme Types — the nine types across two lifecycles.
• Relationships — prerequisite, affinity, disaffinity, conflict.
• Conviction & Conflict — how beliefs strengthen, clash, and resolve.
• Storage & Transmission — how memes are stored and spread.
• Authoring Rules — the rules that govern how every node is written.
• Discovery — how new memes enter the world. 🚧