a seed that went nowhere

[Darth Cupcake]

Found in my notebook during coffee break; I don't remember where I was going with this:



Back in middle school, my science teacher had a poster on the wall that said "If you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

On the internet, if you aren't the maker of the meme, you're part of the machine.




I feel like I was going to springboard in some direction from this, but this is all I've got left. Plz to be poking with sticks to jumpstart my brain again. kthx.

-DC
Currently doing notebook archaeology for rant material

[Triple Zero]

be master of your own reality ?

kind of that if you don't actively try to take control and stay in control, someone else will take control of you (and making you (more) part of the machine)

[Darth Cupcake]

be master of your own reality ?

kind of that if you don't actively try to take control and stay in control, someone else will take control of you (and making you (more) part of the machine)

I would subscribe to that newsletter.


In the margin next to said notes is also scrawled "get off the internets!" This was during the time that I was feeling like I wasn't actually doing anything with myself except sitting on the internet, repeating internet memes. I still do that a lot, but not quite as much.

Memes are funny. Hell, we use them all the time here. But there needs to be a time and place where the line is drawn and we think for ourselves. Start your own meme, or get the fuck out and do something with yourself. Don't just be the drone that takes in and spits out other people's stuff. Come up with your stuff; do your own thing.

I just feel very much like a one-way road sometimes. Things come in, but I never put anything back out. It's frustrating as all hell, because I have such a long list of things I want to do (paintings, short stories, etc), but I sit down to do them and can't seem to come up with what I want, but instead just an explosion, splooge-like, of all these cultural memes that are not mine and often don't even have anything to do with me.

It's fucking exhausting trying to slog through this disgusting pile of generic cultural crap and it's all trappings that I am sometimes drowning in. Trying to somehow find a way to breathe enough that I can function on my own, instead of in this meme-bubble. Suffocation can fuck you up.

[Triple Zero]

get off the internet .. i know what you mean

- 000,
may be an addict

[Cain]

Of course, we hardly hold the monopoly on memes.  Our job is poisoning the well, not diversifying market choice.  Just creating more adds to exploitable markets, arbritrary divisions which can be exploited and a reserve pool of avante-garde to fop off potentially dangerous people with (Cain, combining Gramsci with memes since after it was popular).

I didn't want to be a jerk, but I felt it did need pointing out. 

[Darth Cupcake]

No, I 100% agree Cain. There is a wide world of memes beyond PD.com, and a lot of those memes are the ones that I find are really the problematic, invasive ones that make me need to get off the tubes for a bit.

[B_M_W]

get off the internet .. i know what you mean

- 000,
may be an addict

Its not just the internet. Memes are everywhere. Internet isn't nearly as bad a source as TV or Radio. Books are better. But its all memes.

Some might say culture is nothing more than a bunch of memes.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Back in middle school, my science teacher had a poster on the wall that said "If you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

They say that like it's a bad thing.

TGRR,
Proudly part of the problem since the Johnson Administration.

[Cramulus]

Its not just the internet. Memes are everywhere. Internet isn't nearly as bad a source as TV or Radio. Books are better. But its all memes.

Some might say culture is nothing more than a bunch of memes.

Wasn't that Richard Dawkins' conclusion? (he invented the word meme) He thinks that religion and god are just self-replicating viral structures? Interesting stuff.

Douglas Hofstadter talks about that too. Same process as the following viral sentence: "If you do not get 10 people to repeat this sentence you will suffer eternally."

[P3nT4gR4m]

Memes, the way I take the phrase, account for pretty much anything. The word itself is merely a unit of thought currency - a spoon is a meme or 'memeplex' in the case of something so complicated.

Where the internets are concerned a meme is usually an image of some description, coupled with a snappy slogan.

The key to the whole concept of memetics being useful to you is awareness. Awareness of how these units affect your mind.

More and more I'm becoming convinced that the entire mind is just one huge memeplex. If thats the case then potentially you can completely assfuck a human mind with just a few good memes.

I look around at the cabbages in the street and that aint so hard to believe.

My quest is to discover the mother of all memes which, for me, would be one that rendered the majority of the earths population complete vegetables.

Like Monty Python's worlds funniest joke.

[Cain]

A self-destructing memetic virus that wiped the mental meme pool clean (by contaminating them with the same "taint") is possibly an interesting idea.

The question of course is how to encode so much information in so little space, make it widely popular and linkable to everything else.

[P3nT4gR4m]

A self-destructing memetic virus that wiped the mental meme pool clean (by contaminating them with the same "taint") is possibly an interesting idea.

The question of course is how to encode so much information in so little space, make it widely popular and linkable to everything else.

It's basically the hydrogen bomb of paradigm terrorism. And I think it's going to come down to a succession of 'eureka' discoveries in the field of memetics, nlp and common or garden psychology.

I'd love to be the one who made one of these discoveries. Teh icing on the cake would be the one who put the final piece of the jigsaw into place and ended up pressing the 'erase' button but, tbh, I'd settle for just seeing it happen.

It'd have to be a concept which spread rapidly - in this day and age that means email, but had a delayed impact, giving the infectees enough time to pass it on before their brains just shut down.

Something along the lines of a logic conundrum which led to catatonic depression, pvs or just a complete psychotic break.

The interesting time is going to come as neural/silicon interfaces are developed, giving us the ability to directly program the wetware and, at the same time, providing a semantic interface for doing so which, in itself will probably unravel a lot of the mysteries of the mind.

[Triple Zero]

the following viral sentence: "If you do not get 10 people to repeat this sentence you will suffer eternally."

for that to work, you just need to add something so that people will actually believe it.

one of the reasons why those holy books are so successful, they tell you about the punishment, but they also tell you to copy them. and they used to be handcopied, which i guess leaves a bigger imprint cause you're working with it more intensely.

A self-destructing memetic virus that wiped the mental meme pool clean (by contaminating them with the same "taint") is possibly an interesting idea.

i just have to mention "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson here

[Darth Cupcake]

Memes, the way I take the phrase, account for pretty much anything. The word itself is merely a unit of thought currency - a spoon is a meme or 'memeplex' in the case of something so complicated.

Where the internets are concerned a meme is usually an image of some description, coupled with a snappy slogan.

The key to the whole concept of memetics being useful to you is awareness. Awareness of how these units affect your mind.

More and more I'm becoming convinced that the entire mind is just one huge memeplex. If thats the case then potentially you can completely assfuck a human mind with just a few good memes.

I look around at the cabbages in the street and that aint so hard to believe.

My quest is to discover the mother of all memes which, for me, would be one that rendered the majority of the earths population complete vegetables.

Like Monty Python's worlds funniest joke.

That's a good quest.

The thing for me is just how, even when I am maintaining some sort of awareness of the memeplex that is my brain, it is really next to impossible to wrap my mind around. Being a "creative type," as it were, or at least a wannabe creative type, it can sometimes be downright fatiguing to try to create something that is me, and not just a pile of memes. It is the question of how do I work WITH the memes, instead of the memes working me.

Culture, both on and off the internet, is indeed just a giant explosion of memes. But I don't really watch TV or listen to the radio, so that is why I say I need to get off the internet sometimes, because that's my main source of cultural input. The internet and the white noise of constant cultural babble surrounding me when I'm at work/driving/walking/etc.

So I take all these things IN. And now I want to put something back OUT, but actually create something, instead of just giving a glassy-eyed recitation of everything I've taken in, like a sixth grader taking a science quiz. I've already had discussions with people about the fact that when you get right down it, most likely everything has already been done. All fiction, for example, is pretty much just constant retelling of the same stories and tropes, over and over again. It's just in how you present it.

So how does one go about breaking the hold of the memes so that you can shuffle them up and present them a little differently for a change?

I think this is starting to stray away from what this board is after, a bit. But this is what is on my mind at this particular moment. So sorry if I'm going off on an unrelated tangent. I really appreciate the feedback; people here tend to have good stuff to say that keeps me thinking.

[Cain]