The more easily viruses are transmitted from body to body, the less their fertility depends on their hosts’ survival. So highly lethal viruses tend to evolve in urban areas.
Infectious diseases typically benefit from high host population densities. Many memes certainly like to be in areas where there are lots of people. Modern memes have successfully manipulated many of their human their hosts into living together in cities—attaining high population densities. With human cooperation, they have invented high rise apartment and office blocks—to cram the humans together as tightly as possible—which just happens to create an environment which maximizes the rate of meme spread between humans—allowing memes to evolve and adapt to their hosts faster.
It’s not clear to me high rise apartment and office blocks foster meme spreading more than a hub-spokes model of broadcasters and tight-knit communities. (This may just be a nitpick about ‘maximizes’, or it may lead to a more subtle point. I’m not quite sure which it is.)
To quote from my 2011 book on memetics:
Much the same point applies to the internet.
It’s not clear to me high rise apartment and office blocks foster meme spreading more than a hub-spokes model of broadcasters and tight-knit communities. (This may just be a nitpick about ‘maximizes’, or it may lead to a more subtle point. I’m not quite sure which it is.)