The video that Richard Dawkins made for an advertising company in Cannes is like a particularly vivid anti-drug commercial: this is your brain on bad acid, except, of course, that this is a portrait of a brain wrecked by self-importance. Yet it does have a slightly wider point. The purpose of it is to get linked and spread. To this end we are collaborating here on the Guardian. But at the same time the video completely misunderstands the way that real internet memes spread.

The things that do flash briefly around the internet were hardly ever intended to do so. Either they are completely unintentional moments of self-parody, like one of the first — "All your base are belong to us" or they are private jokes that leak out into a wider world, like the Rev Kate Bottley's disco dancing wedding.

There are some deliberate forms of parody which enjoy a year or two of fame. Older readers will remember Downfall videos and even lolcats. But here, too, the humour derives from incongruity: from the message being wrenched out of its original context. And this in turn points at the fatuity of the meme concept if it is intended (as it was) to be a serious account of cultural transmission. It is entirely without reference to meaning. What can be copied – and what is – are simple patterns of sound or words or pictures. But what makes these things worth communicating is their meaning. And in the video above you see the perfection of something designed to be copied without any meaning at all.