Let's start with a definition. What is a "meme"? What is "memetics"?
From the excellent Principia Cybernetica memes
page:
Meme: an information pattern, held in an individual's memory,
which is capable of being copied to another individual's memory.
Memetics: the theoretical and empirical science that studies the
replication, spread and evolution of memes
A meme can be anything - its a unit of information. 'Cooking your food' is a
meme,
as is 'hula-hooping' or 'talking on a cell phone'. A meme is an idea, any idea,
even the very idea of 'ideas'.
The interesting thing about memes is how they spread and evolve. Memetics is the
study of the evoloution and spread of ideas. In general, this is just something we
find interesting, something to enjoy thinking and reading about. Why did we choose
to have a section on Discordian.com for memetics, though?
Discordians are all about subverting the dominant paradigm, reality selection,
pranking, and seeing the fnords. By knowing all we can about memetics, we learn how
to make our information spread faster, go farther, and take better hold in those it
touches.
An interesting example: Back on version 2 of this website (2003ish), I decided
to try to start a new slang term. In the way that marijuana is often called
"420," I wanted to bring the Eristic explicitly into LSD by getting people to
call it "523." I wrote a thing about it, posted it all over the Discordian
forums, passed it out to friends. I thought it was a fabulous idea!
My new term was an abject failure. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out
why "523" never caught on. In what way did my meme lack evoloutionary fitness?
In retrospect, I think it was because I was trying too hard. Slang develops
organically, so while you can start new terms in the course of jokes, fiction,
and experiences... it doesn't work to come at it headlong, to just suggest
people substitute one term for another. If there's no reason to use the new
term, no funny story to remember or reason to obfuscate, why bother? LSD is a
perfectly useful word already, and there was no reason for people to prefer my
term beyond my desire that they do so.
I share this story to offer reasons to study memetics and information flow.
While it wasn't a big deal that no one used my new term, there are a lot of
situations where it could have been a really big deal. What about defending
yourself against pernicious rumors? What about teaching (anything)? What about
trying to get the word out about your new website, or a scary news item that
people should pay attention to? It's marketing, and it's very very useful.
Over the course of several experiments, I've learned a fair bit about
memetics. You can too. The best teacher is experience, so take a look at what
I've got below, and design your own experiments. Then join up on one of those
networking websites and tell everyone about it. If you've done it right, it
should snowball.
Back to the top.
Ritual:
A lot of my magic(k)al activities have lately been about imbedding information
within other information. I am particularly fond of using sigils to change
around my own head in an effort to reflect a different reality. Sigils are a
way of imbedding an intent into the subconscious.
This TOPY
page on sigils works as both an instructive website and cautionary tale.
Read it carefully.
Back to the top.
Technique:
See the sigils link in the ritual section.
Googlebombing is a technique for subverting Google's search results through
the text of the link you use. Read this article, and do us a favor: link to
Discordian.com somewhere using the text "memetic contagion" (we think this is beautifully
recursive) (and hey, it seems to be working - out of some sixteen thousand
hits, Discordian.com is number one on that search!).
One of the most potent forms of memetic engineering is simply to write your
own stuff. Put up your own website. Maybe nobody cares but you - but that's
ok. Just the exercise of writing your site is good for you. It causes you to
define your intent, work with your will, learn a little about the internet. It
causes you to spend time searching the web for links to things like sigil
magic(k) or Discordian tshirts for sale, and that leads to all kinds of brain
changes.
Back to the top.
Inspiration:
The Yes Men infiltrate
various companies and conferences and put forth dramatically fake information.
That's kind of a lame description. Visit the website, it's really fucking
awesome.
Back to the top.
Links: