The Periodic Table of Memes

Every meme you’ve ever laughed at is built from about eight cognitive operations. That’s it. Eight moves, mixed and matched, at varying depths of recursion.

Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” and a deep-fried shitpost that says “E” — wildly different cultural objects. But they both have coordinates in the table I’m about to show you. Swift inverts expectations through sustained fictional framing — that’s Satirium, Z=9, period 2. The shitpost violates categories so hard it challenges whether coherence is required at all — Dadakium, Z=18, period 3. Different columns, different rows, different mass, different stability. Same table.

I didn’t expect this to work. The intuition started simpler: memes feel like terrain. Some paths are well-worn. Others are pristine. Some lead somewhere genuinely new. If there’s a landscape, there should be a map. What’s underneath?

the rocks in the fluid

The cultural surface churns — formats burn out in weeks, in-group references decay the moment they leak — but the cognitive operations underneath don’t move. Inversion, setting up X and delivering anti-X, has been funny for millennia. Aristophanes was doing it, and so was your group chat this morning. The content rotates but the operation is bedrock.

I started trying to enumerate these operations and kept landing on the same small set:

Inversion — setup implies X, punchline delivers anti-X. The ur-joke. Category violation — exploiting the boundary between two meanings, or putting something where it doesn’t belong. Scale shift — zoom in or out and the meaning changes. Compression — maximum meaning per word. The one-liner, the proverb. Decompression — one thing is actually seventeen things. True analogy — revealing genuine structural similarity between distant domains. False analogy revealed — showing that an accepted framing is wrong. Self-reference — the frame points at itself.

Eight operations. I kept trying to find a ninth and couldn’t.

The other axis is recursion depth. A pun operates directly — you get it on contact. Satire requires you to know the context it’s inverting. An anti-joke inverts the inversion — the joke is that there’s no joke, which is the joke. And past that, you get post-irony, where sincerity and irony become indistinguishable, like transuranic elements that decay before you can study them.

Four levels of recursion. Eight operations. Thirty-two cells, though some in the bottom row are empty — not every operation survives the trip to full self-consumption.

That’s a periodic table.

the table

Click any element to see its properties. Columns are operations. Rows are recursion depth. Z is the complexity rank — how much cognitive work it takes to decode.

reading the table

Each axis does real work.

Group (column) determines behaviour, the way shell configuration determines how a chemical element reacts. Inversion memes always feel a certain way regardless of content. Scale-shift memes always produce that vertigo of reframing. The operation is what’s conserved.

Period (row) maps to recursion depth, like the number of electron shells. More shells means more complexity and, past a point, instability. Period 4 elements — post-irony, semantic dissolution — are the meme equivalent of superheavy elements. Technically exist, barely stable, hard to observe in the wild without the observation itself changing the specimen.

Valence measures remixability. Taxonomium (alignment charts, political compasses) bonds with everything — valence 5. Gödelium stands alone — valence 1. High-valence elements produce the viral formats; low-valence ones produce the one-time insights.

Stability is cultural half-life. Subvertium is eternal — expectation subversion has been funny since language existed. Shibbium decays fast — in-group references have a shelf life measured in weeks.

Mass is information density. Koanium has infinite mass: you can’t reduce “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” further without destroying it. Punium has almost none — pure structural play, the lightest element.

molecules

The table maps elements, but in the wild everything is a compound.

Take the Charmander evolution meme — the one where Charmander/Charmeleon/Charizard map to grandpa/dad/me, each labelled with the signature industrial toxin of their generation: lead, asbestos, microplastics. Its molecular formula: Br₂Sv·Sh.

Bridgium (Br) × 2 — the dominant element. The Pokémon evolution line maps to generational succession on two levels: visual (small → big) and thematic (evolution implies improvement). The double-Br gives the meme its weight.

Subvertium (Sv) — the evolution framing sets up “getting stronger” but delivers “different poison.” Charizard is triumphant, roaring, and full of plastic. The gap between the visual energy and the actual payload is pure Sv.

Shibbium (Sh) — the bonding agent. You need to know the Charmander line for this to work. Someone who doesn’t know Pokémon gets maybe 40% of it. The shibboleth holds the molecule together.

Trace Zoomium (Zm) — the generational zoom-out reveals a pattern. Any single generation can ignore its toxin. Three in sequence makes it structural.

The decomposition tells you why the meme lands (double analogy + subversion), why it has cultural limits (the Shibbium requirement), and why the format is remixable (swap the toxins, swap the Pokémon line for any three-stage progression, the Br₂Sv core still works).

why memes land differently

Same table, different observers. Two people share the same cognitive operations and mostly the same concerns. What varies is position: which frames you hold as default, which operations you’ve seen enough to be numb to, and which concerns are live right now. A status-anxiety meme lands differently the morning after a promotion than the morning after a layoff.

The field is the same — the gradient you experience depends on where you’re standing in it.

element 27

The last element in the table is Ouroborium (Om, Z=27). Self-reference about everything and nothing. The snake eating its own tail. The system entirely self-consuming, no outside reference remaining.

Its example reads: “This is a periodic table of memes, which is itself a meme, which…”

I can’t tell you how to handle that. What I can tell you is this: I tried for weeks to find a cognitive operation that wasn’t on the list. A meme that works by some mechanism other than these eight. I couldn’t. That doesn’t mean the list is complete — but it’s a test anyone can run. Find the meme that breaks the table, and you’ve discovered element 28.