The Art of Memetics - Pirate edition

[Cain]

http://greylodge.org/torrents/drgrey/TheArtOfMemetics_PirateEdition.pdf

Might be worth a read.  This is by Wes Unruh, one of the main contributers to Grey Lodge and Alterati.

[Cain]

I'm about half way through this now.

Most interestingly, this gets easier and more practical minded the further in I read.  We should really consider talking over and implementing some of these ideas for the GASMs and our propaganda.  I can think of at least 2 ideas we could do right now, with minimal effort and possible large payoff.

[Bu🤠ns]

which ones? i'm close to halfway and i kept picking up on some ideas as well.  it seems to begin with abstraction after abstraction but as i get further concrete examples begin to develop.


are you refering to "developing techniques to offset handicaps of individuals within the group?" part?

or perhaps developing upon the idea of the Zeigarnik Effect..

as i'm reading i'm making connections that seem to answer your earlier question regarding ways of altering another's belief system.  for instance the part where the authors say

you don't convince someone by pushing what you believe against what they believe. It is when their belief system is questioning itself that you can lean in and offer what you want them to do or believe as the answer to the instability. Point out contradictions inherent in their belief system and they themeslves may throw it out of balance. Get them to question one end of their beliefs using another end and then offer your meme as the solution to the feelings of doubt

it might be useful to take that "best of memebombs" thread and rate them.  picking out some of the more advantageous ones and possibly refining them based on ideal memetic structure and putting them into action.

more to read.  i'm finding that this book is a fast primer on cybernetics, systems theory and various other ideas that i've only touched on...back to the book

[Cain]

The Zeigarnik Effect was certainly something I had in mind.  I'm going to go through this again tonight and make notes on what we could actually do with the information.

[Cramulus]

So far I have devoured about 70 pages and it just keeps getting better.

This has been an excellent find, though a little dense for casual reading.

I really like the author's usage of the word "magic." He pushes that if magic is only good for personal, subjective things, we should at least take some of the other cool ideas that have arisen from Chaos Magic et all and examine them under the lens of other disciplines. The term Egregore, for example, seems so much more tangible to me when we talk about it in cybernetic / memetic terms than as some sort of magic living collective thoughtform.

Moar thoughts when I have time.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

So far I have devoured about 70 pages and it just keeps getting better.

This has been an excellent find, though a little dense for casual reading.

I really like the author's usage of the word "magic." He pushes that if magic is only good for personal, subjective things, we should at least take some of the other cool ideas that have arisen from Chaos Magic et all and examine them under the lens of other disciplines. The term Egregore, for example, seems so much more tangible to me when we talk about it in cybernetic / memetic terms than as some sort of magic living collective thoughtform.

Moar thoughts when I have time.

I think its a great example of multiple models... this reads almost identically to The Book Of Atem, except that Hine is using the magic model.

Very nice.

[Cain]

Page 1 of Notes:



There are two models of memetics we are using concurrently; one is the seed or virus model where small scale individual signals infect hosts and predispose them to particular actions. This model is most useful for creating communications and understanding how they spread. The second is the entity model, useful for understanding political and social movements. Here we look at larger memetic structures can act on the world through people who hold the belief sets, as if the memetic entities were intentional beings


Nodal memory is a pattern that allows cyberspace to exist and this concept of nodal memory holds true for human social networks as well. The memory of individuals is a kind of nodal memory, and the interaction that individuals engage in form the connections that define the network. So in essence, there is a type of cyberspace that exists entirely on the 'hardware' of human brains and personal social interactions. This cyberspace is the 'meme space' and has been called the Noosphere by Pierre Teilhard14 before the concept of memetics was fully fleshed out by Richard Dawkins.


Memes incline the host organism to actions that further the meme's survival in some manner. Sometimes the actions increase replication via communication over various types of networks, sometimes they increase the meme's persistence in memory. Many times the actions the meme encourages adjust these two primary factors indirectly. Observed actions are a kind of communication, so memes spread via performance as well as through verbal interaction. Performing an action plants the idea of the performance as action in the minds of the observers.


Memes that depend on new technological advances in communication mediums will be more likely to encourage changes in the social order towards supporting those new mediums. Perhaps this is why the internet has triggered more memes geared toward social change than older, more established mediums. However, as society shifts to integrate the internet, the memetic content online will presumably shift to memes more supportive of this new social structure.


In contemporary society examining survival pressures means looking at the socioeconomic system within which people are embedded. Memes that make their host unemployable have smaller potential populations, and contravening the social mores and norms endangers the host's survivability and reduces the meme's communicational effectiveness. It is detrimental to memetic survival to promote behavior that destroys the host's ability to maneuver in a social space.


A useful understanding is that there are many subsystems, or circuits, within the overall system of the world. There are many paths that a signal can take through these circuits either serially or concurrently. The reactions to or transformations of our actions along these multiple pathways can either reinforce each other and increase the effects of our signals or conflict and decrease the effects. The greater the scope of our understanding the greater our ability to release signals that will be reinforced by more subsystems, and correspondingly the greater potential our actions can have toward manifesting change on the world.


A simple psychological trick exists where if one is told two pieces of information separated by a 'but' one is more likely to remember the phrase after the 'but'. The technique then, widely used by advertisers, is to raise a weak form of the objections to their message at the beginning and to answer with the message they intend to get across.


In the memetic ideosphere, the persona or projected self is created by a process of remixing the available memes, and subcultures form around deforming, transforming, or refusing specific aspects of their cultural memepool. Sorting and selecting from the memes available, most of us pre-consciously create a composite identity that is worn as a vehicle to navigate and negotiate social spaces. The act of selecting a self out of memes is a conceptual bricolage which produces a persona.

[Bu🤠ns]

SWEET!

[Cain]

I'm doing this in bite-size pieces, so that those who dont read the book can still benefit from it.


In the memetic ideosphere, the persona or projected self is created by a process of remixing the available memes, and subcultures form around deforming, transforming, or refusing specific aspects of their cultural memepool. Sorting and selecting from the memes available, most of us pre-consciously create a composite identity that is worn as a vehicle to navigate and negotiate social spaces. The act of selecting a self out of memes is a conceptual bricolage which produces a persona.


Stress itself is an emotional marker, and an agitator of memetic evolution. Things that place one under stress have survival significance to older physiological systems so the experiences that are paired with stress are more memorable. Bonds formed in the face of stress are more intense.


Memes use communication to change things about the world. Changing someone's emotional state makes physiological changes in their body and alters the actions they are likely to take.


However, there is no reason to assume memetics requires language to operate. All identity construction, in addition to being a kind of bricolage, is also existent only within a social context. You do not have an identity without some kind of community formation against which to project that identity. This community space is also a theater in which performance and stress builds connections....The propaganda of the deed is most commonly pictured as terrorism, but can mean any dramatic or awe-inspiring action designed as communication. In the past the actions only affected those who were physically present. If those not present were effected it was via a retelling or textualizing. Today's media environment in which events and actions are filmed, associated with various emotional markers through juxtaposition and shown directly to many people repeatedly has widened the impact of these types of communication. It is against this backdrop of our current communication structure that terrorism has gained its modern power and prevalence, as it is one thing to be told that hundreds of people have died in an event, but it is quite another thing entirely to be shown the event in all its drama, movement, and color.


As egregores are also capable of transmitting memes, they too are a memetic body. The meme has an extension into time and space, and to affect its vector, its direction, one must enter into this extension and apply some force to it. The most obvious method, and most widely used historically in changing a memetic vector, is to physically alter or constrain the behavior of the meme bearing members (an example that springs to mind is the historical cases of heresy being prosecuted by the Catholic Church). Another method involves transmitting an engineered phage into the memetic network to devour the meme.


You don't convince someone by pushing what you believe against what they believe. It is when their belief system is questioning itself that you can lean in and offer what you want them to do or believe as the answer to the instability. Point out contradictions inherent in their belief system and they themselves may throw it out of balance. Get them to question one end of their beliefs using another end and then offer your meme as the solution to the feelings of doubt.


In applying these ideas on an individual level, you must first understand your position within a larger social cluster, figure out where your strongest incoming signals are originating, and begin modeling, sketching out, mind-mapping, or otherwise diagramming your position. Just being aware of your social network in real life, and via virtual extensions, will prime you to see opportunities, both for yourself and for the people you know. Actively connecting people or nodes together to more densely mesh the network can result in a pattern integrity effect which improves the quality of feedback. It is possible that the route through a network your information moves seems contrary to your goal but your actions will only bring you closer to your goals if it is compatible with the motion of the ecology of the network.

[Triple Zero]

question, i fully intend to read the book, are these notes sort of a spoiler? they are shorter to print out

[Cain]

They're points I find interesting or useful.  They may not give you the full picture, but if you dont currently have the time to read them, these should spark some ideas.

[Cramulus]

SNAPE KILLS RICHARD DAWKINS ON PAGE 137

[Bu🤠ns]

 

[Triple Zero]

[Cain]

The necessary component of a meme-signal to exposure is its attractiveness or noticeableness. If the signal is sufficiently different from surrounding signals and appears new or fresh it will garner enough attention to give it a chance at being picked up by a new node, or 'infected'. To carry over from exposure to infection the meme must address itself to the needs and priorities of the potential nodal host. The needs of the host are partially influenced by its prior acceptance of previous memes from the same nodal network, which is part of the reason why we see memes clustered around each other conceptually.


An interesting facet of human behavior is that we don't react emotionally to a situation, but rather we react to the meaning we have attached to the given situation. Memes then work by associating situations with emotions that the organism reacts by acting to fulfill the situation if the associations are positive or avoid the situation if the associations are negative.


For the most part, we live in a world constructed by language. What and how we see the world is tied directly to how we describe it. In many ways, the fact that the English language has divided the noun and the verb does the English speaker a great disservice. Nowhere is there a noun not participating in a process, nor a verb not embodied in physical matter. Our descriptions limit how we move through space and the possibilities we can imagine in relation to the manipulation of objects. The spell of noun-language has convinced us that change is difficult, that things must remain as we have labeled them.


There are three egregore types, those being religious, institutional, and corporate egregores. Religious egregores are the most readily understood as meme carriers as it is usually the religion's task to spread the egregore's mind share by any means necessary. These egregores are symbolically represented in the archetypes of the deity or deities of the religion, along with whatever embodiment of evil that deity may oppose. The physical accretions of the egregore then are the temples, structures, and iconography made manifest by and at the commission of the religion's followers. Often these entities have moved across different languages in their spread and, correspondingly, they become adaptable across cultures, yet they rely on embedded mythologies and archetypes to resonate, bond, and spread in new cultural environments.


Institutional egregores are more perverse, more recent, and tend to be geographically bound. The United States Government is run by egregores manifesting Uncle Sam and the Goddess Columbia, when viewed from this perspective. Academic institutions generate egregore personifications as well, often producing them in ritualized settings through mascots. The marketer and the memeticist often have difficulty with these institutions, because the lifespan of these egregores significantly outweighs an individual's ability to gather enough information on the lifecycle of these bodies, as well as religious egregores even longer cycles.


Last of the three is the corporate egregore, the youngest of all egregores, coming into its own in the United States in a federal court in 1886, when justices decreed corporations to be legal persons in their own right, capable of owning property or being held responsible for damages. However, these are technically immortal bodies, impossible to kill or physically punish as an entity (although a more powerful government egregore can appropriate its assets.) Thanks to the countless companies which pop in and out of existence, the memeticist and marketer can get a much more useful sampling of group minds, operating at various efficiencies, to extrapolate actionable data that can be applied to egregore engineering and understanding this new direction of human evolution.


When we intentionally learn a skill we go through four phases. Unconscious incompetence, when we can't do it and aren't aware of it. Conscious incompetence, when we know we can't do it. Conscious competence, when we know we can do it as long as we focus on what we're doing. And lastly unconscious competence, when we do it while no longer needing to be totally conscious of how we are doing it.