[wanderingstan]

Years ago I wrote an essay on a neighboring idea, that Attention is meme sex (and Google is a dating service). http://wanderingstan.com/2006-10-11/attention_is_meme_sex_an...

>Advertisements are sometimes consensual too, as when people tune in to watch the superbowl ads. But ads often constitute a theft of attention, a non-consensual transmission of ideas. TV advertisements, email spam, billboards, flashing banner ads…they’re all there to steal a little of your attention. The chances of successful replication are lower of course, but the advertiser only needs a few successes to make it worth their while. Not to stretch the analogy too far, but this non-consensual transmission of ideas could aptly be described as a sort of “memetic assault”.

Tl;tr Ideas replicate only through attention, thus the battle for our attention.