| This is the first of two posts I placed on memespace.org, a site that discusses memes. Stickernation.com is a project I have created in order to open-source my ability to turn my slogans into memes, and I thought you might get a kick out of my thoughts on the subject... |
| THE TEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
memes are a technology: just like a computer, they can help
you to get from intention to actualization. if your intention is to sell
more Ruffles, you can use memes to do this. if your intention is to make
sure nothing ever changes, you can create a "memeplex": school=education,
bosses=management, money=wealth, work=productivity, consumption=fun, mcdonalds=food,
TV=leisure, NFL=athletics, CNN=knowledge about the world, etc. etc. etc.
These false (or incomplete) equations are the psychological tools
with which "they" govern our lives. the way squares relate is almost
a "buy-in" process - they buy into one after another of these ideas
and ultimately they become predictable. The left side of the equation
is easier to achieve than the right, so obviously instead of really
informing yourself, you say "i watch CNN"; rather than making reading
books a part of your life it's easier to say "i went to college, of
course i'm educated". No need to converse intelligently - you've got
a Harvard degree, of COURSE you're smarter than everyone else in the
room! Swathed in memes created by the System as indicators of status,
congregating in the pseudotribes that are marketed as "communities"
while your family erodes and your friendships remain removed
from actual creativity, you become dependent on the easy answer,
which is to say addicted to that component of the System.
MEMES: Once you reject one equation, you find that others keep popping
up. Any tiny rejection of the system can be tolerated by it as long
as you keep buying into other parts of it. In other words, you can have
a cool punk business and still be a slave to "their" economic values
because of debt or whatever. It's only by rejecting (or re-evaluating
or redefining) all of the system's memes that you can escape the memeplex
they've created. Once you do, then you start seeing that everyone else
is sort of trapped, and you then have to go through endless temptations
to rejoin because it's lonely outside of that belief structure.
Either that, or you form your own little meme scheme and hope that a
hundred million bottles will wash up on the shore like in that Police
song.
Of course, like every technology from fire to nuclear power, the effects
of the technology derive from the intent of those who wield it. If there
is to be a meaningful resistance to What We All Fear Most, let the resisters
be at least armed with an understanding of the memetic nature of the
tools wielded by The System in its domination of civilization. We, too,
can wield these tools with a minimal outlay of capital. At last, an
easy-to-subvert tool that potentially could make all of their tanks
and financial instruments look positively stupid. The more complete
the System's domination of the meme ecology, the less diverse it must
become. This uniformity is the relentless product of all civilization
- uniformity enhances governability - but it is also its Achilles heel.
For uniformity is easy to wipe out. An ecosystem that allows a few
species to dominate soon becomes desperately fragile; even a minor change
in the environment, and all life is wiped out. Our biosphere did not
evolve to produce UNIFORMITY but rather DIVERSITY. This diversity means
that "if the forest burns down, life begins anew". I view the loss of
this diversity - witness the cancerous growth of Wal*Mart - as a historical
trend that shows no sign of slowdown. If what we have to do is engineer
a new paradigm, we must use the uniformity of the society that
capitalism has created to our advantage, else it will smother us prematurely.
Memetically, the System is in just such a box. As people become simpler
to program - which is the Prime Directive of the System - they become
less able to resist ANY new memes; their memetic "immune system" has
been compromised by their relationship with the most intrusive and involving
culture ever known to man. As the above document labels them, these
"Hollow Ones" have relinquished their autonomy in favor of blindly obeying
instructions from those perceived as authorities. These instructions
must be carefully crafted - an enjoyable 30-second spot with a comedian
rather than just "buy more Ruffles" - but can largely be counted on
to modify the behavior of the target population. Additionally, the backdrop
of conditioning against which the modern American consciousness must
struggle makes for a stunning uniformity of thought along educational
lines. The steadily increasing rate with which memes have been flooding
the modern consciousness makes the discrepancy between natural behavior
and conditioned behavior more and more obvious.
As the absurdity of this causal connection dawns on the population
- an easy task for radicals to achieve by memetic means - perhaps the
entire paradigm used by capitalism and the State will collapse. While
this outcome seems hyperbolic, remember that this kind of change may
be most effective when pursued along generational lines. Also consider
the logarithmic spread of correctly devised memes and memeplexes. If
we are clear and unwavering about our intent, we can alter huge swathes
of society - assuming we're clever enough and have predicted the historical
moment accurately! Cue Han Solo - "Never tell me the odds"...
The point is that TEDIUM is the unintended consequence (or "externality")
of our increasing jadedness towards the memes beamed at us by the System.
The price paid for all that advertising is greater than the cost of
the actual ad - in the zero-sum game of the attention-span pie, every
additional ad suffers from diminishing returns as we get more inured
to the constant stream of commercial bleating. Radicals can help boost
the mimetic "immune systems" of our countrymen by encouraging people
to pay attention to the brainwashing, watch their spending behavior
and entertain each other with memes generated by the grassroots rather
than corporate ones with their baggage of advertising.
The point is that this tedium is truly a great opportunity for anyone
who wants to see the System vanquished. This tedium represents a
resistance to mass-broadcasted memes and a correlating interest in subversive
memes. This tedium IS a message for all of us who wish to instigate
nonviolent change. This tedium, when accurately charted, will yield
to us a map of memetic control and countermemetic opportunity; for every
meme, there is a countermeme (Kumar's First law). As a thought exercise,
a group of us could piece together a potential future history in which
we manage to elect a Green President in 12 years through the use of
memes and other easy-to-implement interpersonal tools (the internet,
tribalism, collective purchasing to lower consumption thus freeing up
time for political activity, raves for fundraisers, knitting together
a diverse coalition of support, appealing to libertarians and cynics,
etc.). It is the shift in consciousness that I witness in the kids I
work with on Unamerican that leads me to believe that this generation would
be excited for a memetic revolution and would gladly support one.
All that remains is the determination of what countermemes we can
spread. We have the opportunity to become the memetic equivalent of
the Center for Disease Control. We simply need to begin engineering
VACCINES, as well as their means of distribution. I like to think of memes wielded by radicals
as needles. The System is an enormous balloon. Its memes are stretched
so tight that you can see through 'em. Pop, pop goes the weasel, the
weasel.
Exciting times, ladies and gentlemen. Apologies if my prose seems
overflorid or if i otherwise offended. Thank you for reading! :)
!!!s
|
| This is the second of the two posts on memes; someone brought up the Jesus mythos in response to the first post, I think that's why I went into the Jesus story... |
| WHAT WOULD JESUS DO?
Now what would be a funny thing to do would be to delete that entire post
(which i've revised slightly, by the way) so that wade's the only person
with the meme. this would make wade's meme dissemination an interesting
exercise in apocrypha. in other words, since the original post is no longer
there, wade's copy in his outbox would be the only one left, and he could
take it and modify it however he wanted to (as long as i didn't care to
try and combat the modification). regardless of whether he chooses to
modify the meme, he now is no longer just another propagator of the meme
- he is the Keeper of This Meme, and perhaps would choose to take the
job of its propagation as a personal mission.
Obviously this example of memetic manipulation is intended as instructional;
for it to work, ideally we'd keep Wade in the dark as to our intent.
Interesting tidbit to chew on. This is largely how Christianity was
propagated so effectively. Christ didn't write anything down himself.
This was by design; he wanted his 12 disciples to take on the burden
of passing along the flame, understanding full well (nay; EPITOMIZING)
the marketing (eg "memetic survival") value of martyrdom.
Of course, Saul/Paul stole the momentum from Peter, merged it with
the Roman pagan religion, and turned it into the Catholic Church, which
was a control mechanism - a far cry from the relative anarchism spoken
of by Jesus. In fairness, Paul might have seen it as a matter of ensconcing
the meme of Jesus into the largest empire the world had ever seen -
selling the meme's fidelity out in exchange for immediate reach. whatever.
300 years after the death of Jesus, the Bible finally came out (who
KNOWS the distortions that were permitted by this gap). 1200 years later
Dante and Milton incorporated hellfire into the mix. (No, I'm not Christian
- I just think the story of Christianity is an excellent example of
a "memeplex" and has a lot to teach those of us who are in the biz.
Plus, there's got to be SOME explanation for the Fundamentalists.)
So here is a quick overview of how to start playing with memes. The
movement is accomplished in six phases, and the seventh brings return:
1) CHOOSE A VENUE: finding a test population or environment
- a "lab" as it were. some examples would be a rave or bar or punk show,
or "every vending machine in the city" or "all the mcdonalds drive-throughs
in town" or "at the mall". determine what it is you want to DO to the
target population. What is the behavior you seek to impel by your campaign?
Can you measure its effectiveness?
2) DESIGN: learning enough about some form of design to create
a meme that disseminates some form of THERAPEUTIC or ANTI-TOXIC information.
In other words, either choose a message that is intended to HELP the
propagator or the receiver (an example: an article called HERE IS HOW
TO GET A KICKBALL GAME GOING IN YOUR TOWN) , or a meme that strikes
against some TOXIC meme (an example: a sticker that says DRINK WATER
NOT COKE). this is not a hard game to play. obviously some pretty retarded
shit gets propagated. as smart meme-savvy people we ought to be able
to configure some choice cuts. Don't forget humor and that size matters
(listen to the minutemen if you get stuck). Remember: turn your AUDIENCE
into an ARMY.
3) INFECT: distribute the meme. get some friends. hell, just
hand it out to friends and watch them hand it to others. magazines,
in their ad kits, boast of "pass-along readership" - every actual issue
of Spin gets READ by perhaps 2.3 people. This is the behavior you're
gunning for.
4) REGROUP: Learn. Wait. Learn some more. Philosophize. Ask
yourself - "am I really so important that I should have such power?
are my memes accidentally causing people harm?" Question yourself until
you go schizo - and justify your insanity by pointing at the ever increasing
accuracy and longevity of your campaigns. Convince yourself that God
is talking to you so you don' t dare give up. Get really, really good.
Go head to head with corporate memes and intuit whether your experimentation
is making a difference or just making you look stupid in the moshpit
(not the best place at the show to be handing out stickers - try the
lobby instead).
5) STRATEGIZE: Talk to other people playing the game. Form
a meme tribe. Merge mafias. Brainstorm a future chronology (for instance,
here's mine - "3 months: found meme-related startup. 6 months: publish
book. 9 months: travel across country to do 'zine. 2 years: make Bush
look stupid during the midterm elections. 4 years: get Nader up to 15
percent through organizing and clever memes distributed peer-to-peer
rather than over corporate media. 8 years: Nader's successor does even
better. 12 years: Nader's successor wins.") Take the necessary steps
to engineer the veracity of this chronology. Of such simple stuff are
prophets made. Create the future and predicting it is a piece of cake.
6) ATTACK: implement 5, above.
7) REVIEW: are we in Utopia yet? if not, back to work, you!
But don't just automatically toss out your previous work and start from
scratch. Many of the most effective memes and memeplexes have long heritages
and it's almost expected that a meme go through several mutations before
spasming out into the mainstream. Learn from your "competition" and
establish memetic synergies with other memes, and steal whatever works.
If all you're after is ego-gratification, plaigarism may be the way
to go, although it couldn't satisfy those of you who pride yourselves
on your creativity.
hope that helps.
!!!s |