The process of chasing down the Xanadu “meme” was quite different from interpreting Spielberg’s Jaws.
Late in 2005 I had become a guest author at a now defunct group blog, The Valve, which was having a symposium on Franko Moretti’s book, Graphs, Maps, Trees. In that general context I did a web search on the term, “Xanadu,” though at this point I don’t recall whether or not I was explicitly thinking about that symposium when I did the search. Judging from my notes, that was likely in the second week of January 2006. To surprise I got roughly 2 million hits.[1] That seemed high to me. On a hunch I decided to investigate. On January 24 posted the (initial) results of my investigation, One Candle, a Thousand Points of Light: Moretti and the Individual Text. I argued that many of the hits feel into one of two clusters, which I termed the sybaritic group and the cybernetic group.
I don’t recall any moment when, after I made that first web search, I decided “I’ve got it.” That is, there was no moment comparable to the point in my work on Jaws where, suddenly recalling Girard’s ideas, I switched from open-ended exploration to the focused elaboration of a specific thesis. Judging from my vague recollections and from notes I made at the time, what seems to have happened is that, as I went poking around what I found was sufficient to justify the effort, so I kept it up. Before long I had something worth writing about. Four years later, in March of 2010, I published a working paper, One Candle, a Thousand Points of Light: The Xanadu Meme. Then, earlier this year (July 10, 2025), I called on ChatGPT to update that work, Tracking the “Xanadu” Meme.
Let’s take a closer look.
Note: Richard Dawkins introduced the term “meme” in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. He thought of it as the cultural analog to the biological gene. Since that time there has been considerable discussion of memes in cultural evolution without any consensus being established. For various reasons I’ve decided to abandon the term as a term of art and talk about coordinators instead. But we need not worry about that here. For the purposes of this post the term “meme” is fine as long as you realize that I’m not using it as a technical term. It’s just a convenient way of referring to a “bit” of culture without worry about just what role it plays in the process.
Cultural evolution
I don’t recall just why I did a web search on “Xanadu.” I do a lot of things out of idle curiosity. Let’s chalk it up to that.
I was surprised when I got 2,000,000 hits. Why? For one thing, “Xanadu” is not a common word. It has no use in daily life. It’s the name of Kubla Khan’s summer capital in 13th century CE. It’s also the second work I Coleridge’s poem “Kuba Khan,” which begins, “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure-dome decree.” I had a long-standing interest in that poem, which is why I searched on that term. And, while it is one of the best-known poems in the English language, as these things go, it’s not that well known, not in comparison to recent pop songs, current movie stars, major world leaders, and so forth.
Beyond that, I have a long-term interest in cultural evolution. Thus I wasn’t thinking about “Xanadu” as just some word. I was thinking about it as a culturally laden word. Perhaps its presence on the web tells us something about culture?
By the time I’d done that web search I also knew that “Xanadu” has been introduced into modern English through Coleridge’s poem. I also knew that that poem had been quoted in Orson Welles’ 1941 movie, Citizen Kane, where it was the name of a mansion Kane had built in Florida. I saw the film in college in the 1960s and then again somewhat later when it had been re-released. Citizen Kane has been called the best (American) film ever made. Regardless of that claim, it’s been seen by millions of people. Could it be that a lot of those web hits could be traced back to Welles’ film rather than to Coleridge’s poem? That is, the people who’d created those pages, and many who saw them, may never had read Coleridge’s poem.
That’s the kind of question that was on my mind when I began poking around on the web. I saw the web, which its rich connectivity, as a way of exploring how the process of cultural evolution. Perhaps “Xanadu” was an interesting case. I didn’t take much work for me to conclude that, yes, a lot of those hits probably could be traced back to Citizen Kane. That gave me what I termed the sybaritic group of web pages, which is about luxury and excess verging into sensuality (see what you get when you search on “sex Xanadu”).
The cybernetic cluster appears
Now let’s look at the pages returned by my “Xanadu” query early in 2006. These were the first ten items returned:
1. Xanadu (1980): Xanadu - Cast, Crew, Reviews, Plot Summary, Comments, Discussion, Taglines, Trailers, Posters, Photos, Showtimes, Link to Official Site, Fan Sites.
2. Kubla Khan: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man: Down to a sunless sea. ...
3. Xanadu Australia: The name "Xanadu" and the Flaming-X symbol are software an eid service trademarks of Project Xanadu, registered in certain countries and claimed elsewhere. ...
4. XANADU Software Home Page: In XANADU did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree... ---. The XANADU software package comprises high-level, multi-mission tasks for X-ray astronomical ...
5. Welcome to Udanax.com: Xanadu Secrets Become Udanax Open-Source. The long history of the Xanadu® vision of hypertext has inspired many individual
6. The Mills - Madrid Xanadu: Madrid Xanadu · Register for X Alerts. Lo último en Madrid Xanadú. No hay ningún evento previsto actualmente.
7. Index: .:Test Page - www2:. www.xanaduwines.com.au/ - 1k - Cached - Similar pages
8. Xanadu: The language and translation wizard Xanadu: The language and translation wizard. Translate words and terms. Find professional translators. Read language related news.
9. Amazon.com: Xanadu (1980): DVD: Xanadu, Olivia Newton-John, Gene Kelly, Michael Beck, James Sloyan, Dimitra Arliss, Katie Hanley, Fred McCarren, Ren Woods, Sandahl Bergman, Lynn Latham, ...
10. Ted Nelson and Xanadu: The Electronic Labyrinth is a study of the implications of hypertext for creative writers looking to move beyond traditional notions of linearity.
From my 2006 post:
The first and ninth items are for a 1980 movie starring Olivia Newton-John and are obviously associated with her hit song of the same name [...] The second item is a text of the poem itself in the online text repository at the University of Virginia [...] This is one of many copies of the text online; I've made no attempt to count them, but that should be doable with the appropriate resources. Entries three, four, five, eight, and ten are all related to Ted Nelson's Xanadu project [...] There's nothing at item seven, nor do I have any idea why it is so highly ranked. Item eight is a retail and entertainment complex in Madrid (also in the Wikipedia list) that features an indoor ski-slope – caves of ice?
Think about entries 3, 4, 5, 8, and 10. They’re all associated with a single software project, Ted Nelson’s pioneering hypertext work, Project Xanadu, which was well-known in the tech world. That’s where I got the idea of a cybernetic cluster of web pages. Entries 1 and 9 are related to Olivia Newton-John’s 1908 film, Xanadu, in which Gene Kelly recites the opening lines of “Kubla Khan.” They belong to the sybaritic cluster.
That’s more or less where things stood when I posted my results to The Valve. But if you go to the link above you’ll see that the post generated a fair amount of discussion. And on January 26 I posted some remarks from my friend, the late Tim Perper, who was trained as a biologist, who’d posted some simple Boolean queries which refined my results. I took a cue from Tim and generated some queries of my own. That discussion went into early February. (Note: I’ve also made a PDF of the post and the whole discussion, which you can download here.)
Looking through my files I see I have an unpublished document from February 8, 2006, “Notes on Xanadu Lineages and Related Matters.” In that document, a month after the discussion at The Valve, I’d decided that Olivi Newton-John’s song and film, Xanadu, had in fact established a third population of hits that was independent of the first two, the sybaritic and the cybernetic. That’s where things remained when I decided to wrap things up and publish that working paper: One Candle, a Thousand Points of Light: The Xanadu Meme.
But still, what got me started?
That’s where I ended up. But what got me started in the first place? As I said, I was surprised that a search on “Xanadu” turned up 2,000,000 hits. So what? In what sense is 2,000,000 a large number? I should note that I did a number of searches at various intervals just to verify the number. I’d gotten as few as 1,600,000 hits and on one occasion 7,000,000. As I noted in my post at The Valve:
Yet there's more involved that simply the number itself, which is, in context, not terribly impressive. Though it is not easy to determine how many pages there are in the web, the number is probably upward of 4 billion. Two million hits is five ten thousandths of the web. But, what percentage of the web would you expect any one query item to retrieve? At this point these are just numbers; their significance is obscure.
At this point I’m included to say that I had a hunch, a hunch that turned out to lead somewhere. I have lots of hunches. I follow some of them, and some of them actually lead somewhere.
On the one hand, by that time I had a good deal of experience in make web searches and so had developed some sense of the kind of results you get when making a query. That’s the background against I had my hunch, vague though it is. But, as I’ve already said, I was interested in cultural evolution. And cultural evolution takes place through hundreds upon thousands upon millions of face-to-face transactions between individuals, but also broadcast transactions between individuals that various media properties. “Xanadu” is one of those bits of culture.
Opportunity cost
Here's how I’m now thinking about it: I had a hunch as a result of making a web query. Making web queries is easy. So I decided to verify my initial query. Easy to do. It was easy to look up “Xanadu” in Wikipedia and see what turns up there. Similarly, I could go to the Oxford English Dictionary and I could even query the archives of The New York Times for occurrences of the term. All of these things were quick and easy and, wouldn’t you know, the results turned out to be interesting.
And I didn’t have anything pressing on me at the time.
That is to say, conversely, the opportunity cost of getting more information was low. As long as new stuff turned up, why stop? That’s what kept me going long enough to produce my initial post to The Valve and kept me continuing on until, in the middle of March, I’d decided that we had three clusters, not two. I didn’t see any point in trying to work things into a formal article since I didn’t know of any place that would consider such an article. So I stopped working.
Academia.edu started up in 2008. I probably found out about it shortly after, but I don’t know when I decided to join it myself. Once I did I realized that, not only could I use it as a way of distributing articles that I’d already published, but I could use it to distribute new work. That’s when I decided to take the work that I’d done on “Xanadu” and publish it though Academia.edu.
At some point I wondered whether or not I should update that work. I’ve got records of web searches I did in 2018. But I never got around to doing all the fiddly details needed for a proper update. Why not? Opportunity cost. I had more fruitful ways of using my time.
Then earlier this year, I was doing some work with ChatGPT where I uploaded my working paper in connection with something or another. ChatGPT offered to update that work.
I wasn’t interested in it at just that moment, but I kept the offer in mind and a couple weeks later decided to go ahead with the study. It turned out that ChatGPT had to work through the night executing the study, but that wasn’t my time. I was sleeping. When I got up the next morning, the study was done. It was then a relatively simple matter to combine that work with a summary of my original paper and produce the updated study: Tracking the “Xanadu” Meme.
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[1] By way of comparison, when I search Google on “Xanadu” today I get roughly 9 million hits.
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