MUST READ: About memebombs

[bugmenоt]

The first place where I read the word "memebomb" was this board. As I understood a memebomb is a short phrase which is intended to change the reader's consciousness of certain things. It must be a well prepared meme though, because the writer of the meme probably has some idea about how this change would have to look like. Or maybe the intention is to change a specific part of the reader's consciousness in a random way? Or even change random parts of it in a random way?

Since i read about memebombs, i have compared them with specially crafted packages which are sent in a computer network to gain privileges on an other computer or to change it's settings. Ok i have started to compare humans to computers, so i go on. Let's say every human being has a basic root shell for it's own machine. It has access to a large number of hardware/software functions such as moving our legs, getting signals of the eyes or linking a tree to the word "tree".

Our hardware drivers symbolize our power to use those functions. As a child, we have learnt how to walk, how to interpret the signals coming from the eyes (e.g. turning the image upside down in our mind because it's sent to us upside down) and how to call a tree "tree". As a child we wrote those drivers by ourselves, learning the functions from observing/getting taught by others or through the success-failure-principle. After writing such a driver the next step is to get used to the driver. At this point we compile the driver into a binary in order to have it ready to use at every moment. In this step most of our driver's source code information becomes unnessecary or gets lost. As soon a driver shows acceptable results we forget all about the learning process, how the driver came together and possible bugs contained. We just use it. We don't have to think how to walk, how to see and how to acknowledge a tree.

For acknowledging a tree is quite a simple mental activity, let's look at more complicated ones, like opinions or social behaviour. We also have read-and-write access to our "having opinions" or "acting in a group" drivers, but we tend to synchronize our data with other humans and we have problems telling apart our self-written data and another one's data. Also there are many security holes which lead to unwanted manipulation and which allow others to inject specially crafted packages, such as propaganda, advertising or memebombs. But how to protect oneself from manipulation? A common practise is to finaly compile one's own opinion drivers and delete the source code, so they seemingly can't be changed by anyone anymore. This practise gives one the illusion of security and i call it dogma. In fact, compiling your own opinion into a dogma and deleting the source code makes manipulation more difficult only for yourself. For people who want to manipulate you it's mostly still the same game because a manipulator doesn't nessecarily have to know your source sode. There are many other ways to find security holes: Observing your output signals (words, noise, body language...), studying human's program code (psychology, esoteric crap), hardware details (neuroscience) or just intuition.

What's the difference between propaganda and meme bombs? I think propaganda wants to change the opinion drivers of people in a specific way and make people compile those drivers after changing. Memebombs howewer want to get people to de-compile or rewrite their own opinion drivers and keep as many drivers as possible open source. Both propaganda and memebombs seem to become more efficient if they are seen/heard more often.

Some questions to all meme bombers:
1. What methods for finding security holes and preparing the proper memebombs do you prefer? 
2. (How) do you want to modify the drivers of the reader? 

[Cramulus]

a very interesting analysis of these "processes".. I suspect you may really enjoy The Art of Memetics, which talks in detail about how the ecology and lifecycle of memes and memetic networks.

Some questions to all meme bombers:
1. What methods for finding security holes and preparing the proper memebombs do you prefer? 

collectively, our methods include talking about them in the meme bomb thread, and the Meme Bomb Archive.

personally, I read the meme and then try to sense any low Quality deficiencies. This is mostly a trial and error process, refined over time through discussion.

2. (How) do you want to modify the drivers of the reader?

that's the ten million dollar question, right?

a few snippets to answer:

The basic math is that the more frequently people develop their critical thinking skills, the better it is for everybody involved.

You cannot effect a large scale change, and if you make a serious attempt you WILL be neutralized. Instead, each and every one of you should make a conscious effort to effect a small reprogramming of the MACHINE(tm) in a manner that affects you and your immediate surroundings. keep the mutation small, and give it a chance to become effectively contagious. If we all effect a change on our own paradigm, there WILL be an eventual overlap, at which point the large scale change which you have hoped to effect all along will be impossible to stop.

[Captain Utopia]

Protip: Adding "MUST READ" into the title isn't likely to create a positive response.

While I think I understand where you're going with the source-code metaphor, I think it's in danger of being over-used. What you seem to be talking about is at the moment when someone takes a position on an issue, they may have multiple conflicting influences of thought, which then quickly resolve themselves into simplified assumptions and beliefs. So yes - if you keep the intricacies of those influences in mind then you will find it easier to revisit that decision, but at the same time you can't possibly keep in mind such an endless fractal tree of thought... its debilitating... which is why a conclusion is simply where you stopped thinking.

I would also say that there's no meaningful difference between "self-written data and another one's data", and as such, attempting to prevent infection is a pointless task. Even the cynical end up forming their own fanbases and disseminate information in the "correct" way.

Another failing of the source-code analogy is that you can take any belief or decision or thought, and deconstruct it.. and change your mind about it at any time. I would say this is a vital habit if you want to protect yourself from the lasting effects of propaganda - and it doesn't take anything more than will, courage and the ability to laugh at yourself.

So I see memebombs as encouraging those vital qualities - a simple example might be someone reading a one-sentence memebomb on their way to work, chuckling over it, sharing it over the water cooler, and having some smartass see through it and show how it also applies to X, Y or Z. Maybe it goes nowhere or maybe that clique starts riffing on those themes, if so then you've seeded a motivation to start peeling back the layers of reality.

I dunno. We seem to be told that reality is mostly explicable, almost entirely explainable in simple terms and sound bites.. so save your excitement for pre-packaged entertainment.. memebombs mix that up a little.. they make it fun to live in a reality which is always just a little bit stranger than most people think.

I think that just about answers #2 in a waffly round-about way, for #1 I would suggest following up with the professors links - there are people trying to make this into a science (marketers for one), and I think that should in theory have a higher success rate than the "art"/gut-feeling approach.

[Cramulus]

Protip: Adding "MUST READ" into the title isn't likely to create a positive response.

it sure got our attention, fp 

[rong]

i don't think i possess the language or the time to fully articulate what i'm about to say - so i'm just gonna kind of hint at it and hope i get the point across.

i think a crucial element of a good meme bomb is humor.  my favorite ones are the ones i believe to be the funniest.  i'm not talking the typical HAR HAR HAR humor (at least not the fart and dick joke kind of humor - or maybe that is relevant, too?), but i think there has to be a certain amount of chuckling that goes on somewhere in your head for the memebomb to be a "good" one.

i don't want to derail this thread into a discussion of what is humor/funny etc, and i honestly don't know much about the psychology of what makes us laugh - but fitting this into the computer/mind metaphor, i think, will help answer both questions.

i.e. the "so and so walks into a bar . . . says 'ouch' " is funny because the audience realizes they assumed the word "bar" meant a place to order drinks and the joke teller points out, "nope, you assumed incorrectly, it was a regular old bar." to which the audience responds (for the sake of this example, at least) oh, haha - you just taught me that some of my assumptions are incorrect.

in a sense, i guess, then, a joke to a "computer" mind would be something that makes it divide by zero, or at least causes the operating system to "choke" a little bit.

for the joke to work, the audience has to "get it" - and i think memebombs are the same way.  and to "get it" i *think* means to have learned something about oneself.

i think goedel's incompleteness theorem was the best joke anyone ever told to mathematics.  but i don't think mathematics "got it"

[Captain Utopia]

Protip: Adding "MUST READ" into the title isn't likely to create a positive response.

it sure got our attention, fp 

  Personally, it was the word "MEME" which made me come into this thread.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Why must I read it?

TGRR,
Didn't read it.

[Iron Sulfide]

1. What methods for finding security holes and preparing the proper memebombs do you prefer?
2. (How) do you want to modify the drivers of the reader? 

1. i prefer to use methods that exploit "natural" or "common" tendencies.
Cram illustrates what i mean with his memebomb:

As I read the words, the struggle inside intensified.

There is a common tendency to identify with First Person narration, which orients the reader to accept the information about the struggle.

2. assuming i understand your computer model, my only goal is to highlight a divergent path, one i think a lot of people walk blindly past all the time. IMO When the reality of having options is glimpsed, you actually begin to have choices.

But i also like psychobabble.

[bugmenоt]

Thanks for the links, Cramulus.

FP: I think i can follow your critics. The source code metaphor sure has some weaknesses. ,,Compiling" from a programmer's view is not a choice, because in order for the machine to understand a source code, it MUST be compiled. Otherwise i'd have to talk about ,,scripts" which are interpreted instead of compiled (so the programmer and the machine read from the same text).
And yes, a thought can be deconstruced. But a compiled code can also be deconstructed, that's what is called decompiling. Now i have the problem that it's harder to understand a compiled code instead of an open source text. This doesnt go with my metaphor.

Rong: I like the ,,dividing-by-zero" thing. Like if you call a function in a way which was not at all planned ty the programmer and which leads to a crash of a current process. Also one could speak of buffer overflows which can happen if a function gets data which don't fit the reserved memory.

Prat Fest: So i could say that one basic memebomb attack is to inject packages which lead to unsolvable conflicts between certain inner processes, forcing the remote machine to recompile them.

Roger: I hereby forbid you to read the first post in that thread.

[P3nT4gR4m]

i don't think i possess the language or the time to fully articulate what i'm about to say - so i'm just gonna kind of hint at it and hope i get the point across.

i think a crucial element of a good meme bomb is humor.  my favorite ones are the ones i believe to be the funniest.  i'm not talking the typical HAR HAR HAR humor (at least not the fart and dick joke kind of humor - or maybe that is relevant, too?), but i think there has to be a certain amount of chuckling that goes on somewhere in your head for the memebomb to be a "good" one.

i don't want to derail this thread into a discussion of what is humor/funny etc, and i honestly don't know much about the psychology of what makes us laugh - but fitting this into the computer/mind metaphor, i think, will help answer both questions.

i.e. the "so and so walks into a bar . . . says 'ouch' " is funny because the audience realizes they assumed the word "bar" meant a place to order drinks and the joke teller points out, "nope, you assumed incorrectly, it was a regular old bar." to which the audience responds (for the sake of this example, at least) oh, haha - you just taught me that some of my assumptions are incorrect.

in a sense, i guess, then, a joke to a "computer" mind would be something that makes it divide by zero, or at least causes the operating system to "choke" a little bit.

for the joke to work, the audience has to "get it" - and i think memebombs are the same way.  and to "get it" i *think* means to have learned something about oneself.

i think goedel's incompleteness theorem was the best joke anyone ever told to mathematics.  but i don't think mathematics "got it"

They say enlightenment is usually accompanied by the urge to laugh. Maybe laughing is a side effect of the brain having to reorganise a whole bunch of shit because it suddenly isn't how it thought it was.

[LMNO]

Laughter has also been linked to threat response. 

[rong]

Laughter has also been linked to threat response. 

i've heard that and i think that's (at least part) of what i was getting at.  a good memebomb should threaten your reality tube in some way.  so, if it makes you laugh . . . it's a good one

[Fuquad]

Is there anything in this thread worth reading?

[Cramulus]

Is there anything in this thread worth reading?

^
certainly not this post

[The Johnny]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humour_in_Freud

In his view, jokes happen when the conscious allows forbidden thoughts which society suppresses.The superego allows the ego to generate humor.[1] A benevolent superego allows a light and comforting type of humor while a harsh superego creates a biting and sarcastic type of humor.[3] A very harsh superego suppresses humor all together.[4][2][3] Freud's humor theory was based on the dynamic among id, ego and superego.[2] The commanding superego will impede the ego to continue its pleasure-seeking from the id, or to momentarily adapt itself to the demands of reality.[2] Moreover Freud (1960)[3] also contributes to the development of the relief theory of laughter in which he proposed that emotional energy is released by humor sense.

Later Freud re-turned his attention to humor noting that not everyone is capable of formulating humor.[

I have not read this book.

BUT i have observed a certain correlation between people that make a lot of jokes and their personality. These tend to be people that like the attention or are a bit on the neurotic side.

Is it a coincidence that a lot of comedians are of jewish descent? I think not.