Civilization is dysgenic

90% of people alive today are horrifying mutants who are too dysfunctional to operate on Earth. Monogamy, abundant agriculture and health care (the backbone of civilization) are literally satanic and have created legions of people who hate nature and beauty due to their broken bodies and perverted minds.

Why do you think the rainforest is being cut down and replaced with soy beans to feed cows? Because subhuman freaks, the product of civilization, are rebelling against nature due to their inability to fit within it. Thank God the coming cataclysm will eradicate all of you anti-beauty fuck ups.

The crucial error here is this:
The NPCs who spread/serve/repeat/modify memes are not actually powerful. They're guided by meme script and acts as replicator units(memebots).

What actually happens:
The PCs(vast majority of meme engineers) who create and publish the initial memes(Original Content) are powerful(over NPCs perception) because they control its spread, nature and direction.
The PCs may choose to masquerade as memebot NPCs to seed the meme into a content farm(like 4chan/twitter), where its picked up and spread/modified further.
The memes barely affect other PCs, who are annoyed by the meme garbage spewed by memebot NPCs, so they devise deconstructions or subversions of the memes, controlling the direction of NPC crowd towards their goal.
In the end, brainwashed NPCs get tired from repeating PC-generated meme content and switch to something newer(thats why memes "expire" and "get old") and cycle repeats again.

Your "meme Gods" are just creative PCs with understanding of NPC psychology(aka crowd psychology), they sense what makes the NPCs tick and how the meme should be designed/spread(mimicry of NPC acceptance, fake approval, artificial peer pressure, guiding the crowd).