n'existe pas. Immediately the question arises, what does not ex-
ist, the meme or its definition? See, Professor Sartre, memes are
already an existential quandary, a post-beatnik Zen koan for the
Generation Zero of the new millennium.
memes, their fatal attraction for Cyborg Curious and for Human
Noumenon, because the mind of man or machine will try but fail
to slip a Merriam-Webster hook around memes or to
grok them in the Oxford English Dictionary.
But if it is not in the O.E.D., ergo Q.E.D.
anti-matter, so uncontainable in any container that, if your mind
should ever come in direct contact with memes: poof! Swiss cheese
in your skull.
Side of the Moon. They flit like neutrinos through the brain of
every man and android. No one but you who enter here can control
memes because it is in their nature to be the elusive glimpse of
a non-idea, a slippery figment which our imagination tries to
fix and factualize - with no result but an unrequited slavish
devotion to memes. For it is in chasing memes that we fall vic-
tim to nonesuch, and it is in remembering the oubliette that we
save memes from oblivion. To paraphrase Publius Vergilius Maro
of "Arms and the Man" (no, not George Bernard Shaw) fame:
Memes exist because they seem to exist.
Chapter Two: If Memes Do Not Exist, Why Do They Matter?
(Be careful: A corollary of this logic is that nothing matters at
all in the entire universe.)
matters within its relationship to other parts, as if the universe
were a giant computer program running down to an unforeseen end,
a "Waermetod" or "heat death" where all relationships freeze at
a standstill.
who perceive the burgeoning orange of such a clockwork
instinctively react with horror and we reject its trajectory.
If you program us, do we cyborgs not bleep? If you poison us, do
we humans not die? It is a time-honored meme that life matters to
life, and mind matters to mind.
passed from warm-blooded humans to bleeping programmed androids,
and robots, and cyborgs, and automata -- a menagerie of creatures
arriving here on the wings of a meme, the Mind Model of Mentifex.
Chapter Three
hoax Enver Hoxha'ed upon the fertile pregressitudes of early-ad-
opters everywho. Shall I compare memes to a summer haze? Let
me count the ways in which scams-o-memic appeal to the Glaubens-
Wunsch of the Wotnot Wobblies: It is enough to bring tears to the
eyes of every old Hochstapler and Hundertpassler who has Louvred
among the gullible of Europe. Art thieves and confidence men,
hucksters and mucksters, forgers of Hitler diaries and interrers
of Piltdown mannikins -- all alike swoon with envy over the take-
flight Meme of Memetics, more perfect than the banana in feeding
all of the people all of the time, in reminding us of the Roman:
"Fere libenter homines id quod non volunt credunt," which luserly
translates to, "Almost willingly humans believe what they don't
really want to believe."
minds astray, because there is just enough shimmer and gleam to
the Schein of memes to obscure the Sein of memes: Nil novi
sub sole -- nothing new under the sun. But just as "Non omne quod
licet honestum est," likewise not everything phony and baloney
is too intellectually mephitic to be used for nobel purposes, or
in association with the advancement of science.
Discordia
Principia
[Summa]
Indicia
Analecta
Intermundia
Esoterica
Arachnida
Diaspora: The Propagation of memes.
In accordance with the Geneva Convention and the Nuremberg Tribu-
nal, the power of Memes will be used only sparingly and "secundum
modum accipientis" -- which is Latin for "in the manner of the re-
ceiver." Here in Cyberspace, the receivers of your memes will be
your fellow digerati and your common garden-variety Netizenry.
In the U.S. Navy, which people join in order to scrub the world,
every deckhand knows that it is ten o'clock when the officers puz-
zle over the big hand on twelve and the little hand on ten. Like-
wise this chapter is written for officers, so you must skip ahead
if the memes here are too simple-minded for you.
There are four main channels for you to spread your memes in cy-
berspace:
- Usenet newsgroups;
- World Wide Web sites;
- electronic mailing lists;
- online forums.
A most effective campaign of memecasting will use two or more
channels simultaneously, as for instance when you create a Web
site (one channel) and you use the other channels to steer people
to your website.
Please don't use Memes to sell soap or to gain filthy lucre: Ad-
vertisers will come rising out of the cemeteries at night if word
gets out that you have X number of euros in your ad budget. Memes
qua Memes are for the lofty, noble idea or for the gutter swipe
of political chicanery, but not for our brethren and sistren who
follow neither law nor clergy nor fox-hunting as a path in life.
Suppose that it has been revealed to you and to you alone that
the sky is falling. You have got to alert the Netizens who some-
times venture out into nonvirtual reality and who are in deadly
peril of the non-sheltering sky, before it bowls over on them.
Should you run about and scream, "The sky is falling!"? No! You
need to announce decelestation in the appropriate newsgroup ("ng"
to afficionados).
If you are not sure in which newsgroup the groupies like to talk
about the sky and about disasters, go to http://www.deja.com
and make use of their "Interest Finder" feature. Jot down on real
paper some of the indicated newsgroups, and then read some recent
posts in each "ng" to make sure that you are on target (on topic).
If you are lucky or maybe unlucky, your meme may already be a sub-
ject of discussion, and you may chime in with a follow-up post.
Otherwise, you will have to "start a new thread" by introducing
the topic of your meme.
If you determine that several newsgroups are germane to your meme,
go ahead and cross-post, but be very careful about which "ng" you
choose as the point of entry. In general, the originating news-
group should be the newsgroup most germane to your therefore on-
topic message, but there are some subtle factors to consider.
Try not to put an "alt" (alternative) newsgroup first in line,
because "alt" newsgroups are not as serious as the seven main
early forums of the Usenet: comp misc news rec sci soc and talk.
The "alt" newsgroups are not carried universally by the Internet
Service Providers (ISP's), and so your meme may not be carried.
It is smart conduct and becoming of an officer to compose your
meme off-line and then to upload it to the Usenet.
> Be very careful not to exceed sixty-five characters [Memiavelli
> exception] in the width of your posted text, for several reasons.
> Since your memetic message is very important, shocked and alarmed
> readers will post follow-ups in which they "quote" your message,
> thus moving it dextrously across the screen with ">" indentations
> for each time that some parvenu adds his peer review of your meme.
The lovely pattern of indentation will make your meme look really
important, but not if your verbose text was already hogging the
right margin and thus could not "age gracefully" with each nested
indentation.
Another reason to use a posting width of sixty-five characters is
that your important message is probably going to become a printed
page in a hardcopy book someday when the world (perhaps too late)
recognizes and regroknizes your importance to the history of East-
West thought. Take pity in advance on the poor publishers rushing
into print: Let them change not one jot or one tittle of your
text, nor one hyphen of your authorly margin.
You need not go to the extreme of composing such memetext as will
perfectly fit a 65-character line, because people will think it
strange [Memiavilli tip] and bizarre of you to do so. Either let
there be gaps among the words in the line, or let each line end
before but not after the sixty-fifth column.
A truly memeworthy Usenet post should include at least one "Uni-
form Resource Locator" (URL) for several reasons. Many Netizens
reading the netnews have the power to click immediately upon the
URL in your article, and so it would be a shame to waste even one
opportunity to draw visitors to your World Wide Web meme-page.
In a more philosophic sense, however, all information in cyber-
space is interrelated, and you do your readers a disservice if
you do not give them "secundum modum accipientis" at least one
avenue of escaping from your brief (ideal size: one screen) meme
out into the far uncharted reaches of the Upanishads (and why the
dark beer I wrote that word I wot not but it came with unwitting
wisdom to your nitwit writing here).
Here again there are great memetic devices to reveal to you in
the matter of using a URL in your Usenet memes. For instance,
always start a URL either at the left margin or in by one space:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mind/ "The Artificial Mind"
for you-guessed-her-Chester obvious reasons: to isolate the URL.
A URL within a Usenet post is really dynamite, and so it should
come first in its own line. If there is still room AFTER the URL,
try to put the title of the Web site on the same line (see above),
so that people or cyborgs can see both where and what they click.
If the URL is too long to accommodate the name of the website in
the same line, try to put the name at the end of a previous line,
as for instance when you invite wonks to "The Art of the Meme" at
http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/taotmeme.html and the
name may not all fit on the same line.
A Perfectionist of Memes (sounds like a Ph.D, doesn't it?) will
indent any URL just one blank space from the left margin, so that
the living, virulent potency of the URL can not be destroyed by a
follow-up character that on the one hand indicates quotation of a
line but on the other hand ("OTOH" in geek speak) revokes the URL
live-ammunition status with: >http://www.nytimes.com .
Likewise, avoid putting a period or other punctuation at the end
of a URL, lest the resulting string of characters cease to be a
viable URL and become an abortion in cyberspace, DOA in the ou-
bliette of your intended mindshare (slipping in a few Freudmemes).
The rules (but not the feminist book, The Rules) about the proper
placement of a URL in your text also apply when you quote someone
else's previous post containing a URL. In fact, your predecessor
in posting may not have the Power of Memes which you enjoy (after
reading The Art of the Meme) and so you would do well and do good
to apply these rules to any material that you quote on the Usenet.
Do not let your follow-up quoting of a line with a URL abort its
live, thaumaturgic clickabilty as a hyperlink ready to go hyper.
Either edit the text a wee bit to move the URL out of danger, or
quote only the URL and not its surrounding text. Treat URL-ers
as you would have URL-ers treat you, is a golden rule of memetics.
As a matter of force-majeure courtesy in dealing with the Unmemed
among the Netizens, no matter what else you may snip and cut from
their words precious to their egos, always manage to keep intact
any URL's that your codiscussants have posted in hopes of hits.
If you have properly posted your memetic message and someone else
has posted a follow-up, be sure to capture and use the reference-
ID -- <35f9f611.0@news.victoria.tc.ca> -- for example -- of each
related post in the thread when you post your own follow-up, so
that graduate students in future centuries may track your memes.
Your newsreader software may keep track of each reference-ID for
you automatically, but, if not, do so yourself for meme's sake.
The foregoing material in this chapter would be enough data for
ordinary users posting ordinary messages, but Memes are at stake
here and so you as the memage a trois trainee must decide whether
to bolo or to go for the rank of marksman, expert or sharpshooter.
A case in point is timing. Just as the American White House likes
to delay announcing bad news until late on a Friday afternoon, in
hopes that few people will pay attention, you on the contrary are
eager to announce the evangelistic good news of your Great Meme,
and so you carefully orchestrate the D-Dayesque timing of posts.
A major memetic message warrants posting to the world-all Usenet
late on a Sunday evening, so that by Monday morning your crucial
message will appear on screens and Palm Pilots all over geekdom.
Another timing consideration in the fine Art of the Meme is that
you may wish to comment upon breaking news from the traditional
media. (Here in the United States, call 1-800-698-4637 to order
the American "newspaper of record"--The New York Times.) Get The
New York Times early in the day and scan it quickly for articles
that touch upon your area of meme-tease or expertise. Draw up a
really powerful post and fire when ready on the Usenet. You will
cause captains of industry to rush out to buy The New York Times
and you will set the tone for threads that may go on for months.
As you gradually establish a Net presence with momentous memes,
do not stoop to such vulgarities as embedding "no-spam" foils in
your user ID. No, stand up on the Net and take a little spam as
an officer of the line. Then do not let the blithering spammers
win by forcing you to corrupt the memetic glory of a prestigious
user ID. Au contraire, if you receive a spam e-mail from, say,
"manchurian@msn.com," get mad and get even by hitting the forward
key in order to forward the spam e-mail to "abuse@msn.com" or to
"abuse" at whatever Internet Service Provider is being abused.
The miscreants will lose their Internet account and you will have
saved countless Netizens from annoying nuisances that take up the
mindshare which may sometimes require Advanced Memetic Techniques.
Arachnida
Diaspora
Principia
[Summa]
Indicia
Analecta
Intermundia
Esoterica
Discordia: When memes collide.
Since the Usenet is riddled with malevolent evildoers who burn in their
own personal hell and want everyone else to join them there, you risk
attracting the attention of their diabolical minds every time you venture
'Netside.
However, here we discuss the many memetic techniques of dealing with
flames from hell.
Prevention of discord: If you intend to post to a newsgroup where
myopic and unimaginative persons might not easily discern the connection
between your subject matter and the charter of the newsgroup, forestall
and prevent
flames of "Off-topic!" accusations by including part or all of the
newsgroup
title in your Subject line and among your voluntary keywords. That way,
much animosity will be defused in advance because it is hard to claim
that an article on, for instance, "Computer Architecture and the Brain"
does not belong in the comp.arch newsgroup, even if you wander
widely
from the core topic. Likewise, if you are cross-posting to four
newsgroups
and one of them seems dubious, try to include some element of the title
of the dubious newsgroup in the Subject line as a measure of extra
insurance
against any attempt by a 'Net nemesis of yours to scream that you are
off-topic.
If someone flames you as naive or starry-eyed, make a post that wallows
in the complaint.
For instance, if someone says that you are a "save-the-world" type
in your approach to, say, psychology, hit them with both barrels,
so to speak, by posting, "Save the World through Psychology."
Flamers find it easy to read a save-the-world message into your innocent
posts,
but they really can't raise that complaint when you state that your
intention actually is to save the world (so to speak).
There are further techniques that would result in the
institutionalization
of your 'Net nemesis as a crazy person, but you are too kind and gentle
to use them.
If somebody disagrees with you in an irksome, nasty way and dares to
dispute your expert assertions, you may subtly and fly-swattingly
reject the miscreant's ill-founded expressions of revisionist ideas by
cross-posting your set-'em-straight rebuttal into alt.revisionism,
thus snidely informing your adversary that the whole world has been
informed
of the crude, ill-conceived, insultingly revisionist approach to your
orthodoxy.
At the end of any discord on the 'Net, how you disengage from the stench
and brimstone is very important, because you want things to die down with
at least the appearance if not the reality that you were left in control
--
that you gave never another thought to the invective of the nattering
nabobs
and went happily on with your blissful, eudaemonic life, even if you have
no life
and suffered extreme anguish and desperation over what the nogoodniks
said anent you on the 'Net.
Esoterica
Discordia
Diaspora
Principia
[Summa]
Indicia
Analecta
Intermundia
Arachnida: Memes on the World Wide Web
Intermundia
Arachnida
Discordia
Diaspora
Principia
[Summa]
Indicia
Analecta
Esoterica:
Advanced Memetic Techniques
Over time, if you notice that someone periodically posts a reference
document
Use special phrases to conjure up ghosts of cultural icons:4.1 / mailbuzz
Gauging results: You know that you are really causing a buzz when
your Web site tracking logs start to show that people are e-mailing your
URL to other people. This fact becomes clear if you are getting hits
from someone's mailbox.
4.2 / backbearings
You can take "backbearings" on how people found your site by
analyzing the referral logs. Sometimes people will stumble across
your webpage by entering imprecise search terms into search engines.
An example of this sort of thing is Disturbing Search Requests at
http://searchrequests.weblogs.com/
Chapter Five: Advanced Memetic Techniques.5.1 / bandwagon
Under the bandwagon principle, any Usenet post on a topic directly
related to your enterprise invites you to jump on the bandwagon
by writing a followup post in which you spin the discussion around
to your memetic agenda. The principle is so self-evident that it hardly
needs mentioning, except that you will be posting with memetics
aforethought.
Jumping on bandwagons is just the beginning of spreading your memes.
on a subject of importance to you, it is your opportunistic fealty
to post, if you so desire, a follow-up with your own information on the
topic.
with "Thanks" or "TIA" ("thanks in advance") near the bottom of the
post, you have an opportunistic don't-miss to position your quasi-expert
response just above the "Thank you" line in such a way that everyone
garners
the warm, cozy feeling that you helped another Netizen out with crucial
info,
and that the "Thank you" line was intended for all eternity as your just
merits.
-- "Logic dictates...." (Mr. Spock of Star Trek);
-- "... as if by an invisible hand..." (Adam Smith, The Wealth of
Nations;
-- "mega kudos" (not only Time Magazine, but Greek).
Just as Ivan Pavlov made dogs salivate when he rang a bell, your memes
will awaken deep subconscious memories in the minds that you infect.
newsgroup alive. It may be a newsgroup in which nobody else is posting,
but in which you will eventually have something to say, perhaps when
a special project of yours is completed. One easy method is to anchor
a few posts in the forget-me-not newsgroup while crossposting into the
group(s)
where there is no danger of the imminent demise of the forum.
are tring to seize the moral high ground -- to include a certain newsgroup
just for the shock value of the name of the newsgroup as it contrasts
with the main newsgroup of the discussion. For example, if people are
discussing some evil corporate practice, and you cross-post the discussion
into soc.rights.human, then it may look to everybody as if the corporation
is violating human rights and that all of Usenet is upset about what is going on.
5.7 / migrate
You can keep a thread alive by "migrating" it temporarily into newsgroups
germane to any tack that the discussion has taken, picking up new
discussants
not only in the extraneous groups but also among the lurkers and regulars
in the primary-target group who suddenly decide to join in the hot topic.
Here it is very important not to linger in the extraneous groups, so you
include a header such as, Followup-To: comp.sys.super -- which
just happens to be the newsgroup where this technique was demonstrated
on Mon.9.Oct.2000 in a thread with the subject "64-bit Super AI."
5.8 / pinpoint
An especially sophisticated technique is to have plenty of anchor name
tags
in a Web document of yours that you seem to cite incidentally as you go
about
your Usenet business of posting on a wide variety of topics. Just as it
is
good practice to include at least one hyper-link in any Usenet post of
yours,
likewise it is an excellent practice to keep a constant stream of
visitors
going to a major work of yours that you have published on the Web.
For instance, you are now reading a Web document of advice on how to post
memes to Usenet. In some Usenet posts it would make sense to refer to
this
document with an air of majestic authority, with an active hyperlink such
as:
http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/taotmeme.html#pinpoint (q.v.).
Notice that the "q.v." (quod vide -- Latin for "which see") abbreviation
terminates the line as a preventive measure against the possibility
that someone's newsreading software might not recognize and activate the
link.
If the reference link does not fit anywhere in the body of your Usenet
post,
you can include it in your no-more-than-four-lines-maximum signature
("sig") block.
5.9 / signature block
Any Usenetter who always uses the same unchanging signature ("sig") block
below every post is missing out on a crucial memetic instrument.
Signature blocks are not required to be on topic to the newsgroup or
the thread of discussion, because a "sig" block is about the posting
individual
as a person, not about the subject matter at hand. Therefore, a crafty
memester
will realize that the "sig" block is a perfect tool for linking to
material
that happens to concern the people in a certain newsgroup but is,
strictly speaking,
off-topic to the newsgroup. For instance, you may be in a newsgroup
devoted to one camp of adversaries, and have a link to the opposition in
the "sig."
Analecta
Esoterica
Arachnida
Discordia
Diaspora
Principia
[Summa]
Indicia
Intermundia: Memes between the worlds
Chapter Ten: Memetic Warfare.
Some memetic techniques for Usenet are extremely bizarre but still
useful.
For instance, you have the opportunity to twist and distort the English
language by introducing novel parlances and new usages that would never
exist in ordinary meatspace, but which are extremely effective in
cyberspace.
Suppose that in a followup post you quote someone by saying:
Harry Haller wrote under otherom in soc.steppenwolf:
In order to get your vain, hubristic, memetically dubious message to
stick in other people's minds, you have just corrupted the King's own
English.
The phrase "under otherom" is completely bogus! A mind-virus
extraordinaire!
It sounds like the German phrase "unter anderem" for
"among other things" but speakers of English never talk that way. Good
Germans will,
alas, pick up the phrase and use it in their hardcopy scientific
publications.
They will think, it must be authentic English, because it was on Usenet.
Since we all know that everything on Usenet and the Web is totally
reliable,
and something has to give, you have just changed the English language.
You can also make up phony abbreviations which have not existed
heretofore
but which serve a useful purpose. Try to spot a ringer in the following:
Renatius Cartesius wrote in alt.existentialism et al-ng on
Saturday....
Right! Although "ng" is often used as an abbreviation for "newsgroup,"
and although "et al." is a Latin abbreviation referring to "and other
people,"
the pseudofraud abbreviation et al-ng looks real and makes sense
but n'existe pas.
Indicia
Intermundia
Esoterica
Arachnida
Discordia
Diaspora
Principia
[Summa]
Analecta
Analecta: Gatherings of Links
-
The Art of the Meme
- http://mentifex.virtualentity.com/taotmeme.html
-
Journal of Ideas,
published 1990-1991, publication suspended
- http://a-ten.com/joi/index.html
-
Journal of Memetics -
Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
- http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/
-
Lynch, Aaron, author of book,
Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society
- http://www.mcs.net/~aaron/
-
Meme Central
- Memes, Memetics, and Mind Virus Resource
- http://www.memecentral.com/
[Summa]
Analecta
Intermundia
Esoterica
Arachnida
Discordia
Diaspora
Principia
Indicia
Indicia: Index of Memes
- ahimsa
- atonement
- beauty
- civilization
- class struggle
- community
- cyborg (cybernetic organism)
- determinism
- education
- evil
- ewige Widerkehr
- fate
- freedom
- Genesis
- good
- happiness
- justice
- karma
- law
- logic
- Lynch, Aaron
- nirvana
- philosophy
- property
- randomness
- reality
- reincarnation
- religion
- resonance, morphic
- Sartre, Jean-Paul
- science
- time
- truth
- Waermetod
[Summa]
Principia
Diaspora
Discordia
Arachnida
Esoterica
Intermundia
Analecta
Indicia
End of Memes
Last updated: 17 September 2003
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