A repeater is a cheap piece of commodity hardware. As far as computer components go, it doesn't do anything particularly fancy. Its job is not to produce a signal of its own, but to take an existing signal, strengthen it, and then send it on its way. This enables it to travel further over network lines.

Most of us are repeaters. We're a whole lot more creative than repeaters, and we like to apply our own biases to things we've heard before we spread them, but our role is to spread ideas. There's an evolutionary process that manages the content of the human network. The good ideas are sustained over many people and time, while the bad ones die out.

Racism, sexism, agism, or class discrimination may have organic elements to them--that is, they might have their origins, at least partially, somewhere in the human gene pool. But whatever their origins, its cultural norms and social structures that determine whether ideas bloom and prosper, or wither and die.

Or, as Kurt Vonnegut once wrote: "We are who we pretend to be, so we must be very careful about who we pretend to be."