http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/116
A short video for you to watch.
nice1 cheers!
that was - in short - really really good. He crystalized a lot of the thoughts I've been having about how memes get out of control and really do act as their own entities.
Anonymous is a good example of this. Anonymous is no longer a group of people - it's a network entity composed of zillions of assholes. It has no leadership and no central direction. What leads it are strong memes.
For example, anonymous' current push against Scientology took off for several reasons:
-it's fun to trash on Scientologists
-Scientology is a small, though well funded group. The battleground is the net, where all of Scientology's money means dick. I'd estimate that both hiveminds are at about the same power level. The coming battle will say for sure.
-the notion of the attack on Scientology being a "good cause"... in one of Anonymous' videos, the strange disembodied voice said that one of their big accomplishments was earmarking Scientology as a target for activism. People participating in this fight are taking up 'the good fight' and will be able to use that to justify actions which would seem amoral or uncalled for in other contexts.
I'm going to think on this video and ruminate further. I raise an eyebrow at the lecturer's solution - that we should just be more aware and careful with our memes. But the problem there is that it leads to detachment. And as a member of a group which takes "not taking ourselves seriously" somewhat seriously, I advocate this - but I don't think many other people will.
As some of you are aware, John Robb has influenced a lot of my thinking, here is his take on this (I got the link from his site, btw):
QuoteToxic ideas. When western European colonists arrived on the shores of previously isolated locations, they often carried many afflictions to which they had immunity (a product of a large and diverse population). The result was devastating to local populations since they didn't share this immunity. A reprise of this process is underway within the world of ideas. Ideas (or Richard Dawkins' memes) for which we have a certain degree of immunity to -- from alcohol to pornography to divorce to gambling to irreverence... -- in the developed world can be toxic to those populations that are now exposed by globalization. The result is a violent reaction as people turn to primary loyalties for protection. We've seen this from Thailand to Algeria.
The motivations of the above can be accelerated by shocks to the global system. These shocks include the unintentionally self-inflicted like regime change/nation-building or intentional like terrorism that targets systems. Others include those that we don't control: from economic dislocations caused by malfunctions/non-linearity in the global marketplace (energy shocks to financial panics) to pandemics to natural disasters. The list goes on. In each of these situations, the shock causes a return to primary loyalties for safety.
I think this also ties in with my identity politics post. Those primary loyalties are going to be the labels people identify most strongly with.
I'm not really sure that a Hazmat suit could be built to keep us from spreading our memes... but I think the discussion was fantastic ;-)
I also LOL'd at the comments.
The greatest form of social control is to make the rebels think they are actually rebelling and not conforming to a new thought pattern.
I should work for a shadow government or something I think sometimes.
Quote from: Bharlion on February 11, 2008, 12:41:19 AM
The greatest form of social control is to make the rebels think they are actually rebelling and not conforming to a new thought pattern.
Agreed.
The revolution will be led by the government.
From the ashes of the old world rises... the old world.
AUTO-TOXIC: Dangerous to itself. Highly auto-toxic memes are usually self-limiting because they promote the destruction of their hosts (such as the Jim Jones meme; any military indoctrination meme-complex; any "martyrdom" meme). (GMG) (See exo-toxic.)
BAIT: The part of a meme-complex that promises to benefit the host (usually in return for replicating the complex). The bait usually justifies, but does not explicitly urge, the replication of a meme-complex. (Donald Going, quoted by Hofstadter.) Also called the reward co-meme. (In many religions, "Salvation" is the bait, or promised reward; "Spread the Word" is the hook. Other common bait co-memes are "Eternal Bliss", "Security", "Prosperity", "Freedom".) (See hook; threat; infection strategy.)
BELIEF-SPACE: Since a person can only be infected with and transmit a finite number of memes, there is a limit to their belief space (Henson). Memes evolve in competition for niches in the belief-space of individuals and societies.
CENSORSHIP: Any attempt to hinder the spread of a meme by eliminating its vectors. Hence, censorship is analogous to attempts to halt diseases by spraying insecticides. Censorship can never fully kill off an offensive meme, and may actually help to promote the meme's most virulent strain, while killing off milder forms.
CO-MEME: A meme which has symbiotically co-evolved with other memes, to form a mutually-assisting meme-complex. Also called a symmeme. (GMG)
CULT : A sociotype of an auto-toxic meme-complex, composed of membots and/or memeoids. (GMG) Characteristics of cults include: self-isolation of the infected group (or at least new recruits); brainwashing by repetitive exposure (inducing dependent mental states); genetic functions discouraged (through celibacy, sterilization, devalued family) in favor of replication (proselytizing); and leader-worship ("personality cult"). (Henson.)
DORMANT: Currently without human hosts. The ancient Egyptian hieroglyph system and the Gnostic Gospels are examples of "dead" schemes which lay dormant for millennia in hidden or untranslatable texts, waiting to re-activate themselves by infecting modern archeologists. Some obsolete memes never become entirely dormant, such as Phlogiston theory, which simply mutated from a "belief" into a "quaint historical footnote."
EARWORM: "A tune or melody which infects a population rapidly." (Rheingold); a hit song. (Such as: "Don't Worry, Be Happy".) (f. German, ohrwurm=earworm.)
EXO-TOXIC: Dangerous to others. Highly exo-toxic memes promote the destruction of persons other than their hosts, particularly those who are carriers of rival memes. (Such as: Nazism, the Inquisition, Pol Pot.) (See meme-allergy.) (GMG)
HISTAMEME: See vaccime. (Morgan)
HOOK : The part of a meme-complex that urges replication. The hook is often most effective when it is not an explicit statement, but a logical consequence of the meme's content. (Hofstadter) (See bait, threat.)
HOST : A person who has been successfully infected by a meme. See infection, membot, memeoid.
IDEOSPHERE: The realm of memetic evolution, as the biosphere is the realm of biological evolution. The entire memetic ecology. (Hofstadter.) The health of an ideosphere can be measured by its memetic diversity.
IMMUNO-DEPRESSANT: Anything that tends to reduce a personUs memetic immunity. Common immuno-depressants are: travel, disorientation, physical and emotional exhaustion, insecurity, emotional shock, loss of home or loved ones, future shock, culture shock, isolation stress, unfamiliar social situations, certain drugs, loneliness, alienation, paranoia, repeated exposure, respect for Authority, escapism, and hypnosis (suspension of critical judgment). Recruiters for cults often target airports and bus terminals because travelers are likely to be subject to a number of these immuno-depressants. (GMG) (See cult.)
IMMUNO-MEME: See vaccime. (GMG)
INFECTION: 1. Successful encoding of a meme in the memory of a human being. A memetic infection can be either active or inactive. It is inactive if the host does not feel inclined to transmit the meme to other people. An active infection causes the host to want to infect others. Fanatically active hosts are often membots or memeoids. A person who is exposed to a meme but who does not remember it (consciously or otherwise) is not infected. (A host can indeed be unconsciously infected, and even transmit a meme without conscious awareness of the fact. Many societal norms are transmitted this way.) (GMG)
2. Some memeticists have used `infection' as a synonym for `belief' (i.e. only believers are infected, non-believers are not). However, this usage ignores the fact that people often transmit memes they do not "believe in." Songs, jokes, and fantasies are memes which do not rely on "belief" as an infection strategy.
INFECTION STRATEGY: Any memetic strategy which encourages infection of a host. Jokes encourage infection by being humorous, tunes by evoking various emotions, slogans and catch-phrases by being terse and continuously repeated. Common infection strategies are "Villain vs. victim", "Fear of Death", and "Sense of Community". In a meme-complex, the bait co-meme is often central to the infection strategy. (See replication strategy; mimicry.) (GMG)
MEMBOT: A person whose entire life has become subordinated to the propagation of a meme, robotically and at any opportunity. (Such as many Jehovah's Witnesses, Krishnas, and Scientologists.) Due to internal competition, the most vocal and extreme membots tend to rise to top of their sociotype's hierarchy. A self-destructive membot is a memeoid. (GMG)
MEME: (pron. `meem') A contagious information pattern that replicates by symbiotically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. (Term coined by Dawkins, by analogy with "gene".) Individual slogans, catch-phrases, melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions are typical memes. An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else. All transmitted knowledge is memetic. (Wheelis, quoted in Hofstadter.) (See meme-complex).
MEME-ALLERGY: A form of intolerance; a condition which causes a person to react in an unusually extreme manner when exposed to a specific semiotic stimulus, or `meme-allergen.' Exo-toxic meme-complexes typically confer dangerous meme-allergies on their hosts. Often, the actual meme-allergens need not be present, but merely perceived to be present, to trigger a reaction. Common meme-allergies include homophobia, paranoid anti-Communism, and porno phobia. Common forms of meme-allergic reaction are censorship, vandalism, belligerent verbal abuse, and physical violence. (GMG)
MEME-COMPLEX: A set of mutually-assisting memes which have co-evolved a symbiotic relationship. Religious and political dogmas, social movements, artistic styles, traditions and customs, chain letters, paradigms, languages, etc. are meme-complexes. Also called an m-plex, or scheme (Hofstadter). Types of co-memes commonly found in a scheme are called the: bait; hook; threat; and vaccime. A successful scheme commonly has certain attributes: wide scope (a paradigm that explains much); opportunity for the carriers to participate and contribute; conviction of its self-evident truth (carries Authority); offers order and a sense of place, helping to stave off the dread of meaninglessness. (Wheelis, quoted by Hofstadter.)
MEMEOID, or MEMOID: A person "whose behavior is so strongly influenced by a [meme] that their own survival becomes inconsequential in their own minds." (Henson) (Such as: Kamikazes, Shiite terrorists, Jim Jones followers, any military personnel). hosts and membots are not necessarily memeoids. (See auto-toxic; exo-toxic.)
MEMEPLEX: See meme-complex.
MEME POOL: The full diversity of memes accessible to a culture or individual. Learning languages and traveling are methods of expanding one's meme pool.
MEMETIC: Related to memes.
MEMETIC DRIFT: Accumulated mis-replications; (the rate of) memetic mutation or evolution. Written texts tend to slow the memetic drift of dogmas (Henson).
MEMETIC ENGINEER: One who consciously devises memes, through meme-splicing and memetic synthesis, with the intent of altering the behavior of others. Writers of manifestos and of commercials are typical memetic engineers. (GMG)
MEMETICIST: 1. One who studies memetics. 2. A memetic engineer. (GMG)
MEMETICS: The study of memes and their social effects.
MEMOTYPE: 1. The actual information-content of a meme, as distinct from its sociotype.
2. A class of similar memes. (GMG)
META-MEME: Any meme about memes (such as: "tolerance", "metaphor").
META-MEME, the: The concept of memes, considered as a meme itself.
MILLENNIAL MEME, the: Any of several currently-epidemic memes which predict catastrophic events for the year 2000, including the battle of Armageddon, the Rapture, the thousand-year reign of Jesus, etc. The "Imminent New Age" meme is simply a pan-denominational version of this. (Also called the `Endmeme.')
MIMICRY: An infection strategy in which a meme attempts to imitate the semiotics of another successful meme. Such as: pseudo-science (Creationism, UFOlogy); pseudo-rebelliousness (Heavy Metal); subversion by forgery (Situationist detournement). (GMG)
REPLICATION STRATEGY: Any memetic strategy used by a meme to encourage its host to repeat the meme to other people. The hook co-meme of a meme-complex. (GMG)
RETROMEME: A meme which attempts to splice itself into an existing meme-complex (example: Marxist-Leninists trying to co-opt other sociotypes). (GMG)
REWARD CO-MEME: See bait.
SCHEME: A meme-complex. (Hofstadter.)
SOCIOTYPE: 1. The social expression of a memotype, as the body of an organism is the physical expression (phenotype) of the gene (genotype). Hence, the Protestant Church is one sociotype of the Bible's memotype. 2. A class of similar social organisations. (GMG)
SYMMEME: See co-meme.
THREAT: The part of a meme-complex that encourages adherence and discourages mis-replication. ("Damnation to Hell" is the threat co-meme in many religious schemes.) (See: bait, hook, vaccime.) (Hofstadter)
TOLERANCE: A meta-meme which confers resistance to a wide variety of memes (and their sociotypes), without conferring meme-allergies. In its purest form, Tolerance allows its host to be repeatedly exposed to rival memes, even intolerant rivals, without active infection or meme-allergic reaction. Tolerance is a central co-meme in a wide variety of schemes, particularly "liberalism", and "democracy". Without it, a scheme will often become exo-toxic and confer meme-allergies on its hosts. Since schemes compete for finite belief-space, tolerance is not necessarily a virtue, but it has co-evolved in the ideosphere in much the same way as co-operation has evolved in biological ecosystems. (Henson.)
UTISM: UTism is short for 'us-versus-them-ism.' Dogmatic adherence to a belief system can create an 'us vs. them' mentality in the believer. The 'us' group consists of people who share our beliefs, and the 'them' group consists of those who hold conflicting beliefs. (KMO)
VACCIME: (pron. vak-seem) Any meta-meme which confers resistance or immunity to one or more memes, allowing that person to be exposed without acquiring an active infection. Also called an `immuno-meme.' Common immune-conferring memes are "Faith", "Loyalty", "Skepticism", and "tolerance". (See: meme-allergy.) (GMG.)
Every scheme includes a vaccime to protect against rival memes. For instance:
o Conservatism: automatically resist all new memes.
o Orthodoxy: automatically reject all new memes.
o Science: test new memes for theoretical consistency and(where applicable) empirical repeatability; continually re-assess old memes; accept schemes only conditionally, pending future re:-assessment.
o Radicalism: embrace one new scheme, reject all others.
o Nihilism: reject all schemes, new and old.
o New Age: accept all esthetically-appealing memes, new and old, regardless of empirical (or even internal) consistency; reject others. (Note that this one doesn't provide much protection.)
o Japanese: adapt (parts of) new schemes to the old ones.
VECTOR: A medium, method, or vehicle for the transmission of memes. Almost any communication medium can be a memetic vector. (GMG)
VILLAIN VS. VICTIM: An infection strategy common to many meme-complexes, placing the potential host in the role of Victim and playing on their insecurity, as in: "the bourgeoisie is oppressing the proletariat" (Hofstadter). Often dangerously toxic to host and society in general. Also known as the "Us-and-Them" strategy. (See UTism.)
Footnotes
* 1. The original definition read "parasitically" instead of "symbiotically". Thanks to Tyson Vaughan for making the suggestion.
Share-Right (S), 1990, by Glenn Grant, PO Box 36 Station H, Montreal, Quebec, H3C 2K5. (You may reproduce this material, only if your recipients may also reproduce it, you do not change it, and you include this notice
Great post, Cain. I think it's really important to learn memetic language - it helps to "understand" the various forces and pressures at play. But when reading all this memetic theory, I'm struck with a sense of helplessness. In memetic theory, humans are relegated to being carriers and transmitters of these ideaviruses. It's kind of depressing, because at a certain magnification, our world is a clash of ideologies, not individuals.
Goddamn.
Question: is this all another metaphor?
That is to say, do memes "exist", or is it simply best to think about the transmission of ideas through the metaphor of a meme?
Memes are software packets. Their existence is sorta a given in that we can define them, therefore they exist. Minds will process and spread them, virally in most cases, ie involuntarily.
It's good to have a semantic framework in place to describe memetics because then you move from being a 'user' to being a 'programmer' and it's quite empowering to suddenly be aware of the effects and interactions of memes on that level.
There also follows a greater level of immunity to involuntary 'meme-sneezing' - allowing you to move from carrier to designer if you are that way inclined and this provides the opportunity for Lulz!
Quote from: LMNO on February 25, 2008, 02:58:24 PM
Goddamn.
Question: is this all another metaphor?
That is to say, do memes "exist", or is it simply best to think about the transmission of ideas through the metaphor of a meme?
not to get too ephemeral, but it depends on what you mean by "exist".
Ok, good point.
I'm just trying to figure out the level of abstractness needed here.
yes, what cram said. although i'm tempted to say that they exist "more" than a lot of magical concepts.
in my personal opinion, memes are very real.
did you watch that video on TED that Cain posted a while ago? might explain some more.
also, i think i read these definitions a long time ago (on a different site), and i kept on going back to one of the memetics threads (cram's) on these fora, and tried to find these definitions. but apparently they weren't there all that time.
In a more philosophical sense one could envisage memes as being a new evolutionary sphere. It works something like this...
- First you have the sphere of primitive materiality... and elemental evolution in the fires of suns
- Elemental evolution finds itself supporting primordial substance... and thus primordial evolution begins
- Primordial evolution supports specie... and thus comes the bloody evolution of natural selection
- Dominant specie support sociality... and thus comes frenetic social selection
- And now, society supports concept... and thus, memetic evolution begins
It isn't so difficult to posit the likelihood that ultradominant memes will evolve. Just as it makes no sense for elements to be aware of our social sphere it does not automatically follow that we will be fully aware of the relevance of memetic evolution...
If one wanted to promote this to a modern memetic theology... memes are competing to become what? ultimate truth?... The universe is attempting to label itself and, in doing so, become. Perhaps the ultimate pinnacle of memetic evolution fulfills a cyclic role very much akin to christian creationism...
... and, the MEME moved in the void.
Or, perhaps, self aware creatures are the primitive synapses of the great machine. Memes are the first throughts flickering over those synapses, dancing their patterns... creating new and ever more brilliant displays and ever more dominant memes until at some point... Gods are born of the memetic hive consciousness.
Oh Jeeesus... Coca Cola!
MAN, I MUST GET MORE OF THESE MUSHROOMS. I'm making absolutely fuck all sense and I love it.
~ Pope Fing Feng III
Emergence.
let me say that again(i love this word) emergence.
"so you're saying that whenever you reach a certain complexity threshold new properties just appear? thats crazy!"
"don't look at me man, i didn't do it."
http://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Connected-Brains-Cities-Software/dp/0684868768 (http://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Connected-Brains-Cities-Software/dp/0684868768)
good book before reading this i never would have thought it would apply to cities.
Quote from: Regret on March 23, 2008, 01:00:59 AM
"so you're saying that whenever you reach a certain complexity threshold new properties just appear? thats crazy!"
i've been going on about this for years, it's one of the most awesome things out there.
in case you haven't checked out the wikipedia article on Emergence, you should, it's got some pretty good stuff in it.
tell me, i dunno about your background, but have you ever ran computer simulations of systems or networks that display emergent properties? personally i have the feeling that one cannot quite grasp the amazingness of the concept of emergence until one has created and caused it himself. otherwise it seems slightly too much like a "trick" or a "that's obvious" kind of thing.
yeah i ran some simulations of simple ecosystems at uni, something like 1 primairy producer(example: photosynthetic algae), 1 'grazer' and 1 top predator (that eats both grazer and algae)
It weas pretty easy to tweak the system so that it became unpredictable, within certain parameters we managed to create chaos.
If this sounds like cheating just remember that having a consumed food to biomass convertion efficiency of near zero for one of the beasties is the same as removing said beasty. And the something like that goes for all other traits too.
I have a simple example somewhere you can try with you calculator but i have to dig up the book(something something chaos i think)
cool!
was it by any chance the Volterra-Lotka simulation?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka-Volterra_equation
or perhaps the logistic map?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map
what kind of study do you do? especially if it includes books named "something something chaos"? :)
i'm a Computer Science student myself, mastering in Computational Science and Machine Learning.
i study biology, and the chaos book was a gift from my father (or maybe i borrowed it(that would explain why i can't find it))
Lotka Volterra sounds familiar but this was more then a year ago, and i'm not very good at remembering silly details like facts, methods or models(how i manage to stay in the university is beyond me too)
It was really fun to learn to think multidimensionally and F-ing hard to explain it to my fellow students(the modelling thing was one of many diverse projects).
How good are you at understanding/'visualizing' systems with 10+ variables?
in my head? not so good, cause my head's not made for that kind of stuff. highest meaningful bandwidth is attained via our eyes, which are 2D in nature (which is why Virtual Reality keeps being such a failure at this sort of thing, you can represent stuff in 3D, but in the end it projects onto a 2D retina anyway, so you don't gain very much).
i do, however, have a whole bunch of scientific visualisation toolsets at my disposal for slicing and cutting up N-dimensional spaces, datasets and timeseries into meaningful representations so that i can interpret the outcomes of my computer simulations, not as a shitload of numbers, but as pretty graphs and pictures :)
it mostly comes down to a bit of creativity and practice in order to turn high dimensional data into a meaningful 2D representation. funny thing is, in Scientific Visualisation (part of my masters curriculum), there are a lot of parallels with Graphics Design theory (hence my interest in both), even though they don't really go into that very much, i noticed that my brother (who studies Industrial Design) got the same examples of "good visualisations" for some course in his study as i was presented.
okay maybe i can hold a vague conceptual idea in my head of a high dimensional space. but in my mind it usually ends up looking like a 3D space (which is the highest you can imagine, unless you train, a LOT), with the added mental note "actually it looks a lot more complicated than this" :)
for example my bachelors research project was about classifying 35x19 pixel images of boar spermatozoid head cells into "good" (healthy) and "bad" (damaged), that's 665 pixels, and therefore 665 dimensions. at one point, my professor theorized that, because all the good cells looked the same, but the bad ones could be deformed in a lot of different ways, the distribution of our dataset (in 665 dimensions!), where every instance of a cell is a point in 665D space (of all possible 35x19 images), might sort of look like a central cluster of good cells, with on the edges farther away from the center all the variations, the bad cells. in my head this ends up looking like a 3D swarm of points, with the mental note "actually this is 665D". it's not entirely accurate, but at least it's workable :)
so, you're a biology student that voluntarily picked a very mathematical topic for a project? that is very cool, we need more biology students like that ;-)
my master's research (which is currently on hold, but i shall hopefully start again soon) is partly in cooperation with the biology center of my university, and when i visit them to discuss plans and such, it's like we're coming from two different worlds sometimes :) the CS guys want to say "just give us the numbers we don't care where they come from" and the bio guys start explaining about cells and transcription factor binding sites and whatnot (which is really interesting btw, don't get me wrong), but especially when it comes to statistics and other mathematical oriented subjects, i sometimes wonder how they get any proper scientific research done at all (the answer: hard work, blood sweat and tears).
ok, you did see where i put visualize in '' right?
You were lucky with the 665D space cause it was just a binairy choice(healthy or other right?) imagine using gradients like we did(ok the value of variable X was somewhere between 0 and 1 but i accidentily didn''t write it down or save it somewhere... )
Changing the data into a good visualisation was hell! (we ended up using a 2D chart with 2 of the relevant variables on the axi , and a color coding for the different areas for wich the resulting system was judged on stability and presence of species. The only reason we got somewhat stable and sensible data was because we used an theoretical ecosystem that was so extremely limited that it won't happen irl ever.
Don't ask me to do any statistics right away btw, if i concentrate adn someone is willing to explain it to me, i could understand it but without preparation i'm as useless as most biologists :P
Oh i found the chaos book: "Does god play dice? The mathematcs of chaos" by Ian Stewart
and the trick i referenced to was this:
pick a value between 0 and 1, put into this formula 2X2 -1 and iterate(put the result back into the formula)
try this for as long as you want, it wont settle down to something predictable, also try changing the beginning value just the tiniest bit and the result wil still be completely unpredictable but also very different from the previous result.
and here's a prog you can try if you know a bit about computers(i assume you know how to do this i have no clue, i would love tips or the finished product btw)
10 INPUT k
20 x = 0.54321
30 FOR n = 1 TO 50
40 x = k*x*x-1
50 NEXT n
60 FOR n = 1 TO 100
70 x = k*x*x-1
80 PRINT x
90 NEXT n
100 STOP
chaos enters if you use a k-value of about 1.5, the higher k the more chaotic. Ofcourse there are lots of exeptions, apparantly using 1.75 leads to order again(after 60 iterations you get a cycle of 3 values)
My favorite bit is were the results may vary depending on the computer you are using.
P.S. sorry 000 i also typed this for those without your elite mathematical skillz