h a l f b a k e r yGuitar Hero: 4'33"
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The Internet and electronic mass media has made possible the
widespread dissemination of 'memes' into the collective
consciousness. The dubious nature of of the 'meme' as a real
object, rather than a mere reconceptualized fad or trend has
apparently allowed new malicious memes to go viral before
they
could be taken seriously. These are no doubt the work of mad
scientists in undeground laboratories who were undoubtedly
attracted to 'meme' for its low overheads, and the free
abundance
of experimental subjects. It's obvious these undeground
scientists
have been studying memes since the early 1990s and are now
unleashing plagues upon the masses.
The current meme of greatest concern is the one that causes
zombies. This meme is fargone, and the originator likely has
accumulated much useful data from tracking its spread which
will
inevitably be used for the next 'memeration' of malicious
memes.
The zombie meme is of greatest concern because the idea has
laid
dormant for years, and only recently has it become so intensly
popular to be suspected. Like a zombification disease, this
meme
has spread and infected the minds of countless people who in
turn
help spread it as a popular culture phenomena. Although a
meme
is only an idea, it has an impact on the realm of idea as a
disease
does in the realm of biology.
A resistance to this plague must be formed by conscientious
people. The concept of MMO or Memetically Modified
Organizations has to become a real social concern, as memes
begin to have an impact on our everyday sociocultural lives.
Those
who are vulnerable to memes, and in high risk meme
environments such as the Internet have to take serious
precautions
or risk becoming infected by the meme, and infecting others.
Signs of advanced meme infection (Zombies)
Antimassism
Survivalism
Increased interest and talking about zombies
Books, posters and other media about zombies
Morbid fascinations
Hoping for or expecting zombies
Being a very annoying and/ or stupid person
Being infected by the zombies meme as a zombie is infected
with the zombie disease
[link]
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I was in a sporting goods shop soaking up the ambience awhile ago, and some guy came in and wanted anti-zombie shells as a present for somebody. He felt so self-conscious he actually said "I know it's a joke". |
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All your brain are belong to us |
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I don’t think your penultimate symptom is much use, as it is too widespread in the general population. |
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// Morbid fascinations // |
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Not much of a selection criterion ... |
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No relation to Memed My Hawk? |
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I think the main reason that memes - internet memes, that is - proliferate is that they rush in and fill the thought-vacuum that exists in the brain pans of a goodly majority of internet users. Memes rebound like pinballs in these abandoned spaces, and after bashing around for a good few minutes come out of the mouths of the dim, who, surprised by this "thought", consider it in some way their creation. Lacking the smarts to identify this self-deception thus the user permits the parasitic thought to be set free to repeat its facehugger-chestburster number on each of the lackwit's lackwit Facebook friends. |
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Stupidity:Facebook:memes :: mosquitos:swamps:malaria. |
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The MMO must be the first step toward draining the swamps. |
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'Most people are other people. Their thoughts are
someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their
passions a quotation.' |
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For instance, I'm Oscar Wilde... |
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How odd, we thought you were Spartacus ? |
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I googled for antimassism. It gave me only one find:
Memetically modified exc. exc. |
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This anno whats written with machine translation by. |
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Ok sorry, the next closest word is antipopulist. |
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They are? What the hell does that mean?! Are you in a
room covered in zombie posters? |
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Thinking more about the malaria parallels, an MMO would not be akin to swamp-draining. An MMO would be akin to a mosquito net: essential for obtaining a foothold in hostile territory but not, of themselves, sufficient to wipe out the disease. I suppose the thing that is missing from this idea is how an organisation can be construcrted such that it is both impervious to memes and attractive to the meme-susceptible. Perhaps it could take the form of a particularly ascetic cult. Yes very much to the idea that the only way to counter the deluge of inanity is to shave yr head and be hit with sticks each morning at 3 by a grumpy monk. |
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//In that case I'm not sure what you are on about.//
Whenever I read and try to understand an [rcarty]
idea, basically exactly this. |
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Wasn't the whole zombie thing in the 1980s transmitted
by video-nasties? Or going back to the 1880s, and the
Spiritualist thing, wasn't that spread by pamphlets and
social mediums? |
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It seems that the main problem with the spread of these
infectious ideas is that there is no solution. The harm is
only endured by those that are uninfected, while those
who see no issue with adding to the momentum of a
years old fad keep it going long after many people have
grown sick of it. This is a serious problem, and
something must be done, something akin to early
morning stick beatings, but on the larger scale that can
be applied to a large virulent mass. I've been
contemplating a software solution like an antivirus
program for popular culture, that scans computers for
the memes and quarantines anythng offending. Popular
culture has to stay fresh, I was running circles away from
zombies in video games over three years ago, and still
today, everyday, see or hear something new about
zombies online or on TV. Scan the computers, and run
updates to keep culture fresh, zombies are not that
interesting, and the cat pictures climaxed with cieling
cat. The internet is becoming stagnant with mass
uniformity, and nobody is willing to say enough is
enough. |
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The spirit behind MMO, Memetically Modified
Organization, is that it is indeed also massively
multiplayer online, and that it is transformed by memes
as a body is transformed by genes. This body needs to
develop a resiliency to memes that like the HIV virus
dominates the bodys resistance to fight infection, and
totally dominates until the body virtually dies of
stagnation. Now these are memes, so the stagnation
will be intellectual, and this puts the entire domain of
creativity at risk. With the masses satisfied with the
same old fluff about lurching brain eating fiends, its as if
their brains are literally being eaten by zombies.
Without brains, the incredible inventive engine of
creation that is the internet is nothing more than, as
you say, a stagnant swamp full of biting flies and
floating, bobbing turds. So the major consideration in
this halfbake is the MMO, the body in a sort of Hobbesian
sense, is memetically modified and perhaps the culture
that unifies all of these acting parts is in danger. |
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A distributed immune system for ideas (well, the subset of ideas termed "memes"), where dominant or exhuasted ideas are identified and squashed? |
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Yes, but not to state the idea so explicitly as to garner
much criticism about censorship, repression of freedoms
and the like. |
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I think that the censorship argument is wobbly at best, tbh: the idea here is not to eradicate a specific meme or thought (as you might want to eradicate a virus or disease) but to require the idea to mutate and adapt to the quasi-immunological attacks of the MMO. Ideas must be kept fresh. It also doesn't help the censorship argument that the memes complained of are trivial (though arguably deleterious to deep thought), artificially stopping the expression of complex ideas has failed, historically, as there are many ways to express a well considered idea, but less many ways to say lol butts. |
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The central idea is the analogy, that by now has been
clearly elaborated meme=disease. What is most striking
is how the zombies meme is perhaps a parody of itself.
Mass infected with small groups of survivors that want to
get rid of the zombies, or at very least the zombies
ethos that has infected the masses. Its disturbing how
totalizing the meme is, as it absorbs even those who are
resistant into the zombie slaying fandom, in even a
much more real way. If indeed the near paranoid
speculation that the recent zombies 'outbreak' was an
engineered hoax on the masses by high minded media
professionals, who undoubtedly look at their earnings,
the scrum, and the mobs of fans delerious over
nonsensical rhymes and personalities, booty meat,
dogeared copies
of Comte who promised sociologists would be gods, and
this emerging field of memetics, then the science has
been proven and they have ascended to become gods.
If indeed this wild speculation is fact, then an immune
system for the masses would not be an infringement on
liberty, but a necessity for it. Some of the earliest
mental diseases, obsession and idee fixe, are now the
tools of the media trade. These are the mechanisms of
popular culture, that while benficial for industry, should
have limitations lest everyone's affection for mindless
zombies becomes the sole aspiration, as have large
buttocks, and a democratically validating number of
online friends to 'like' them. |
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Well yes my understanding is memes account for just
about all cognitive content except for daydreams for
example. But I think despite what Hitchens would have
liked, his social death will be postponed by the concept of
meme surviving in the sense of a popular fad, and not as
the dominant ethos of ethea. |
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Another thought: it's difficult to encapsulate an idea in a machine readable format, so early stage MMO activities would likely be pointed towards identifying, for example, black-bordered Impact font on jpeg, which will lead to the memes presenting in other formats, encouraging a strain of MMO-resistant memes with presentationally-independent core content strong enough to withstand attack. Do we really want to bring about derpMRSA? |
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I'm not sure what the alternative would be. Without
intervention memes will continue to proliferate. Single
panel memes started with demotivational posters if
memory serves. Let's say an MMO scanner was introduced
at that point in 'memevolution', then that same form
that has replicated with new internal 'dna' or 'genes' or
ultimately 'memes' may not have reached such a
criticality point. The 'form' replicated in so many hosts
resulting in so much varied 'content' that those who
became 'immune' or 'resistant' to one type of content
could again become reinfected with the same viral form
with the varied content that mutated in other hosts.
That's how this particular meme form bypasses resistant
systems, or more explicity people who got sick and tired
of one, but found something funny and original in the
next, and the next. On the software level, you're
possibly right to suspect that some outrageous mutation
might occur that will produce perhaps a formless
content, or a contentless form that is undetectable. It
might result in a kind of madness of unexplainable
laughter, at vague referents. The current generation will
think they just got too old to 'get' the new generation,
but really, the new generation, and this is hypothetical
of course, will be living in a cultureless vacuum
destroyed by the reflexivity of meme and antigen. |
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On the other hand, if memes continue to proliferate it's
possible that these external objects to the mind will
become the dominant originators of Ideas, and the very
essence of what makes human beings human, and homo
sapiens sapiens sapiens will be lost: minds. We're going
to lose our fucking minds! (Dramatization: actual panic
may not have happened) |
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Yes, I suppose that memes – particularly joeks memes – are individually self-limiting on a user or user grouping basis (e.g. the rise and demise of custard themed ideas on the halfbakery), so there isn’t much to fear from them. In the virus metaphor, they are a headcold. But resistance to one memecold doesn’t give you biological resistance to others, though it may make you more likely to reduce your risk of exposure. It’s the political memes that are more problematic, as they are (I’m guessing) cumulative in their effect: the more often you see Facebook macros which indicate something Benghazi Obama something Crying Eagle, the more likely you are to believe the broad trope – the idea. This cumulative effect unhooks the idea from the specific delivery mechanism and makes the work of the MMO all the harder. |
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//the new generation, and this is hypothetical of course, will be living in a cultureless vacuum destroyed by the reflexivity of meme and antigen//
Well, this is what we’re aiming for here anyway, isn’t it? A means of atomising social thinking to eliminate the propagation of memes and instead drive each human back into his or her own mind, to consider the world and its form independent of outside influence. The question is whether we would want to, for example, time-limit the application of the MMO, such that the sharing of thoughts can happen in some mental greenfield site of the future, or if we want instead to ensure that each human delves as deep as possible into their own condition, achieves enlightenment but is prohibited by your invention (muah ha ha) from sharing the path to enlightenment with others. Each must find his own path. |
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That's really at bottom, the issue. That the mass
intersubjectivity of the Internet can propogate such a
consistency of thought throughout vast populations
across vast space in minute time. It's memes that carry a
political payload like 'zombies' that are worrying. As a
metaphor
it's antipopulist, health epistemic, 'fascist', survivalist,
etc. Or maybe it's just an innocent fun monsters fad,
that has reached epidemic proportions. Apart from that
your lattermost statements capture the spirit of what I
read about '68 in France. It was those exact conditions
of social alienation you allude to that were so
revolutionary. The worldwide absurdity that spirit
descended into, the free love clusterfuck of the mass
movement, the porn of that inter-net, liberal feminism
into glass ceiling neoliberal
corporatism and a final allegiance with neoconservatism
probably exemplifies the literally meaningless- absurdity
of what
internetworking finally achieves. |
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Hipsters of the next generation will, if this invention
succeeds, will try in vain to produce a simulacra of
memes they can only understand from portrayals of this
present
culture in the mass media, MMO suppressing anything
actually memetically revolutionary, similarly or
otherwise toxic to the corpus' functions; those lessons
already learned by 'the system', the new generation too
deadened by the sanctioned memetic pop culture to
know. An MMO of this nature likely already exists in the
minds, nay mandates, practices and procedures of
universities and college administrators and
ultimately funtionalist professors worldwide and no
doubt
suppresses revolutionary student ideas with knowing,
nay, automatonic
nudges. (The MMO leviathan, keeps its head by
moderating the memetic mental disease of all its
heads.) |
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//The worldwide absurdity that spirit descended into, the free love clusterfuck of the mass movement, the porn of that inter-net, liberal feminism into glass ceiling neoliberal corporatism and a final allegiance with neoconservatism ...//
If you haven't read it already, you might want to read Vineland. Inasmuch as it is about anything, it is about this very thing. |
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//An MMO of this nature likely already exists in ...//
And this is the other thing, isn't it? If the MMO is automated and directed at jimmie rustling or whatever then it is not scary, it is a useful tool. If the MMO is organically-grown, made of people and the rules that people establish, then it is a conspiracy, a playground for paranoiacs and their fantasties of persecution and targeted marginalisation. On the whole, then, I think you and I should keep the MMO concept as secret as possible. Don't want the loonies to get wind of this. |
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Incidentally, I think this idea is undercroissanted. Very interesting. |
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A Homeopathic approach might work* - the subject would be exposed to a meme which contains conceptual material from the original 'zombie' meme diluted to such an extent with other ideas that no part of the zombie comcepts are left.
* - at least as well as homeopathy usually works. |
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//Jimmie rustling// laughs, but can't help thinking that
'liking' with a single jimmy rustle finger mouseclick is a
massively distributed nudge to shape culture. |
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I wouldn't worry about anyone finding out, there's reading
in the way and it's not two or three lines on a picture. |
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I wasn't, no. Did I sound like I was? |
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You're guilty by association. I smoke obfuscatory
substances; :.therefore you do too. |
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Believe it or not "judge those by the company they
keep"
hardliners form a reified social machine. |
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Interestingly that's the reification fallacy in logic, not
the total idea of reification, that if one is part of
something one is the same as another part of the thing. |
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Even in this vague ethereal social relation the logic is
applied. In a manner he is acting to marginalize the
discourse. |
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Reification which is the idea of acting analogously, or
analogizing to something, or becoming similar until
becoming the same is part of the dialectical social
process. Irony is when the analogy is not pure, and the
elements that are unanalogous cause breakdown. That's
dialectical materialism. |
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Often I am like a crazy person because few can
understand what I'm thinking, but I'm ironically often not
a crazy person because some people can actually
understand complicated things beyond confirming their
own farts by the smell, but only if they feel and hear
them first. |
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The Idea that [calum] just so simply understands is that
zombies fad is a meme parody of itself. The popular
idea destroys your brain and you go around trying to
spread the infection and kill/eat/destroy other
unifected peoples brains with it. |
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The dialectical materialsm here is if I say calum was
thinking "like" me analogously as me you see, and he
says
he was not thinkng that, a breakdownn will occur in the
solid social relation you had observed, but if he is not
thinking that way, you are still wrong because we were
never the same to begin with, but the harmony of the
continued discourse is evidence of what you're trying to
deny. |
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Anyway back on subject, the mememoor, or MMO and
not myself, thank you v.much, the idea of meme is only
an analogy, so while the science of memes is
effective because the analogy seems sound, it actually
will breakdown after a while as the phenomena departs
from the likened noumenons. Or in other words the
breakdown and rendering towards meaninglessness of
"zombies" will build consciousness towards the mass
infection its become and there will be a revolutionary
change in consciousness. Something like that. |
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No wait, the idea of memes like genes will breakdown as
inherent dissimilarities in the analogous functioning of
the two arise. The meme zombies will breakdown as
people stop the active dialectic of representing zombies
and wanting to kill zombies. |
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Allow me to further clarify, these poiints on
composition, reification and dialectical materialism.
The composition fallacy is important to reification in
sociology because once something is reified in terms of
an ideology, system, or metaphor, then it's important to
know exactly when something is the same as its parts, or
when its not. Hobbes' leviathan may be the ultimate
example of composition/ reification fallacy, and memes
are also an analogy in this manner. MMO is the immune
system, or antipsychotic medication for the leviathan. |
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Here is a clearer rundown. Bigsleep observed a solid
social relation occuring based on the intersubjective
phenomena of the Idea. He interpreted the solid as a
reification of Idea and made fallacy of composition in
relating a quality of one part to the whole, and the
whole to all parts. Now, this is important because
indeed in reifications like the leviathan analogous
behaviour between parts is important. That is the
dialectical materialism. In Marx' capitalism capitalit
ideology reifies in terms of capital, the system or mode
of production which is alienating, and the works become
an analogy to the machine. He posits ironic breakdown
where the parts begin to not act analogouslly, and then
form another analogy. Anyway that's not at issue. |
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The MMO, or memes are also analogy so subject to the
same process. Analogy binds everything together.
Everyone in the reified meme culture acts analogously. I
propose that the ironic breakdown will occur when
antithetical aspects of the meme to the meme allow it
to be cured almost immediately by the will of the
infected fans. That is a meme is not deeply analogous
infecting gene. This idea proposes another analogy of
the immune system, that people could act in
correspondace, or analogously to, reifying it. This would
result in a marxist style conflict where two opposing
analogies clash..... |
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In fact this whole subject of MMO relates to dialectic
materialism. The composite reification of analogously
acting parts, whereiin internal inconsistencies, or
ironies, and unanalogous formations lead to conflic,
breakdown and new synthesis. |
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Ok but what relevance does that have? |
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Basically, although it should manifest into a material
form. For example white supremacist aspire to the ideal
of the aryan. It doesn't exist, so they become an
analogy to the thing. Ironies, like some white
supremacists are actually from historically lower
category white denominations, can lead to breakdown of
the ideal. Or that white supremacists are considered
marginal people even within whites in general is another
- not superior, but marginal. As blacks are not analogous
with the white ideal, they possibly form another
supremacy ideal, or the ideal of equality and act
analogously until pratfalls etc lead to ironic breakdown.
For example a black man who believes in equality
becomes an olympic competitor and becomes gold
medalist in five sports. Or a black power adherent sells
drugs in his community and reduces the life chances of a
dozen black youths. Or perhaps the ironic conflict
between white and black supremacists when they
achieve the consciousness that they above all are
equivalents. |
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//the ironic conflict between white and black supremacists when they achieve the consciousness that they above all are equivalents// |
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I think that point was reached as long ago as the 60s, when the Nation of Islam started negotiating with the Ku Klux Klan about exactly how the US should be divided along racial lines. |
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