The Greek word *poiēma* meant "a thing made," and in its journey into Latin, French, and English it came to mean a poem, a crafted work of words. In the present age of digital media, we can extend this lineage and imagine documents themselves as *poiēmata* — crafted, living documents that shape thought, memory, and communication.
When considered as media-rich artifacts, structured with metadata and swimming in a sea mediated by augmented intelligence, documents take on a new role. They are no longer static repositories of information but Memetic Documents: evolving carriers of meaning that interact with human and machine readers alike.
Each such document is not merely a record but an active participant in cultural transmission, embodying and replicating patterns of thought — memes — across networks. To understand how such documents, are congruent with well desinged deliberative methodologies we need to look at both the history and practice of law, as well as the deep thought and emerging future of software engineering and language design.
- Legal Abiguity and Literate Law
In this view, the wiki becomes a substrate, an ocean that supports a new form of deliberative practice. Within it, documents are fluid, linkable, and reconfigurable. They host a dialogue between human editors and machine agents, who together refine, annotate, and interpret. Metadata allows fine-grained awareness of structure, history, and context, while media richness ensures that expression extends beyond text to include images, sound, and code.
- Yam
The deliberative practice that emerges is not simply a conversation among people, nor is it a mechanical computation. It is a hybrid process in which man and machine collaborate through the medium of memetic documents. This aligns with the older sense of *poiein* — making. What is made now is not only poems or stories, but a distributed cultural ocean in which knowledge circulates, adapts, and finds new forms.
The argument I make here, suggests that memetic documents may represent the starting point for a new kind of democratic and epistemic practice. Just as the Renaissance critic Sir Philip Sidney once described poets as makers of worlds, today we might describe communities of humans and machines as makers of this new form of living document — that is able to capture deep value, adn through their support of structured deliberation enable better governance at planetary scale.