On shitting on Google.

[Jasper]

Memes?  I dunno.  They seem to be narratives.  Cool thing is you can try this at home.

Take a meme like democracy, why not.  The story is about majority getting what they ask for.  There are lots of ways this happens, but the concept breaks if that part of the story doesn't happen, and as a consequence we say "this is not democracy".

So when our nation tried e-voting with those scamming bastards, and Bush became president even though it was not (I am told) what the people asked for, they said "not democracy".

So yes, memes seem to be a form of narrative.  Almost any conceivable idea is.  That's why I think narratives are very important with regard to modeling human thought and experience.

As far as planting sleeper narratives?  I have no idea, I can't think of a way that would work.  Narratives matter because they are (I think) the presenting mechanism of thought.  If nobody's thinking about a narrative, it can't be said to exist.  .: no sleeper narratives (at least in unaugmented brains).

(This is really my pet theory about human consciousness, but I like seeing if I can apply it to normative situations.)

[Captain Utopia]

In the case of the cup narrative, it need not be transmitted from one mind to another as with a meme, but it can be a learned experience.  What about the class of learning that cannot be taught, only experienced - in those cases is it the internal formation of a non-transferable narrative which is occurring?

The way you're describing narratives make them sound to me like little processing units.  They take input data, pattern-match, and fire accordingly.  In that sense, I guess they would be the first line of defence (or weakness) against new memes?  But if I present you with some data now, and it fires the same narrative that the same data would an hour from now - doesn't that narrative exist in your head even while you're not consciously considering it?

With sleeper narratives, take an event we can predict - say a reduction in online privacy resulting in society realising that it is weirder than it knew - you've got maybe two competing narratives - a) The internet makes people weirder  b) The internet reveals how weird people have always been.  Couldn't you create jokes/chain-letters which favour one narrative over another?  I expect that if the issue is not contentious at the time then an individuals defenses are lowered.

E.g. A conversation from last week:

Wife: "Huh, it's didn't rain today and the weather forecast had a little rain icon, I guess they got it wrong"

Me: "Well yeah - it also said 40% POP which is the weather forecasters way of hedging its bets - it'd rather predict rain and have the day be sunny, than predict sun and have it rain -- because then people would write in and complain.  No-one writes in to complain about being pleasantly surprised."

Wife: "Nuh-uh - it doesn't work like that!"


But I suspect if I'd made that little speech a few days earlier, then her internal narrative would not have felt threatened, and I could have avoided that argument.

[Jasper]

In the way you're thinking about narratives, most if not all are sleepers.  They don't change unless an observed event threatens them, and being the one who tries to break stories is never easy.

Someone on here once said that hijacking the narrative is the most grievous heresy.  It's true.  People die over that shit.

Instead of presenting an opposed narrative when an existing one was in play, in the case of the weather, you might have presented a different, preexisting narrative by saying "They were just guessing, there's really no way to know for sure."  When she asked how they guess, you could have then supplied the new narrative, since the old one was then weakened.

It'd be nice if I could think of this stuff in the middle of actual conversations.

[Captain Utopia]

I have a feeling that bridging narratives like you describe - to avoid immediate confrontation but to lead towards your desired end - might have some overlap with some of the more seedy aspects of NLP?

I'm not sure how to conceptualise a non-sleeper narrative - where is it kept when it's not being used?

[Jasper]

There's been some progress in figuring out the way the brain encodes episodic memory, but figuring out the way the brain carries anticipations of event patterns is probably not a question we can ask yet.

I don't consider NLP rigorous, until it moves past gimmicky new age stuff it's more worth our time to look at cognitive psychology or neuroscience.

IMO.

[Triple Zero]

Wait.

So the internet stays anonymous in your utopia or not?

The internet I'd like to see is pretty much how it is now -- you can get anonymity easily, and you can choose to trade privacy to interact with personalised services.  I'd go a step further and codify that applications which deal with personal information should allow the user to drill down and explicitly check or remove the personal data which it shares and with whom.

Not gonna work, or not gonna do much good. Please to read archives of Bruce Schneier's blog, or anything else dealing with "soft" security. That being the human factor. You can improve technology, and for sure it will do some good, but it's already been established* that technology can't account for the majority of the human-based security holes [aka "the gaping security anus"].

* by these blogs, researchers, papers on "soft security" or "physical security" [the latter mostly dealing with doors, but also SocEng]

[Triple Zero]

And if it's newsworthy then public perception will be turned in favour of the victims.  Expect the word "Anonymous" in large fonts with sinister music playing in the background.

This, as you probably are aware of, has already happened:

http://encyclopediadramatica.com/HACKERS_ON_STEROIDS

BTW for anyone that hasn't seen it, be sure to check it as it is hilarious, Fox News on Anonymous/4chan

[Triple Zero]

This would be a great question to ask a social psychologist.  I've only taken one 300-level SP course myself, but here goes:

In an event where we become aware, collectively, that everyone is weirder than anticipated, cognitive dissonance naturally looms.  In a situation like this, we look at each other hoping for a clue about how to react.  In that moment, the first person to react sets the pace for the entire group's reaction.  Are they disgusted?  Amused?  The first impression on things will color the flurry of rationalizations and arguments that attempt to integrate the new knowledge.  

The direction an event like this would push us would tend to be reflected by the prevailing mindsets, then.  

Whoa, really does social psychology predict this? It's not immediately obvious to me, but not unbelievable either.

However, if this is the case, we should start plastering Cramulus's Strange Times essay ALL OVER THE FUCKING PLACE, in order to tip the odds in our favour. Because it's more likely to happen than not.

(...) For example, cups don't exist.  Barstool, let me rephrase that:  Materials don't know about cups.  There are however stories we tell about cups. (...)

heh, I like how you used "Barstool" as an interjection here

[Jasper]

I can dig up my textbook and hunt down the specifics later, but yes.  I don't know if it stated it the way I did, but a lot of the stuff is meant to be applied to a variety of situations.  I may have to revise the statement for accuracy later, fair warning.

Postering the Strange Times everywhere is advisable regardless.