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-- rcarty, Nov 10 2013 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".-- FlyingToaster, Nov 10 2013 All your brain are belong to us-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Nov 10 2013 I don’t think your penultimate symptom is much use, as it is too widespread in the general population.-- pocmloc, Nov 10 2013 // Morbid fascinations //
Not much of a selection criterion ...-- 8th of 7, Nov 10 2013 No relation to Memed My Hawk?-- not_morrison_rm, Nov 10 2013 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.
Stupidity:Facebook:memes :: mosquitos:swamps:malaria.
The MMO must be the first step toward draining the swamps.-- calum, Nov 11 2013 'Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.'
For instance, I'm Oscar Wilde...-- RayfordSteele, Nov 11 2013 How odd, we thought you were Spartacus ?-- 8th of 7, Nov 11 2013 I googled for antimassism. It gave me only one find: Memetically modified exc. exc.
This anno whats written with machine translation by.-- pashute, Nov 11 2013 Ok sorry, the next closest word is antipopulist.-- rcarty, Nov 11 2013 What I do?-- rcarty, Nov 11 2013 They are? What the hell does that mean?! Are you in a room covered in zombie posters?-- rcarty, Nov 11 2013 Yes.-- rcarty, Nov 12 2013 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.-- calum, Nov 12 2013 //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.
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?-- Zeuxis, Nov 12 2013 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.
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.-- rcarty, Nov 12 2013 A distributed immune system for ideas (well, the subset of ideas termed "memes"), where dominant or exhuasted ideas are identified and squashed?-- calum, Nov 12 2013 Yes, but not to state the idea so explicitly as to garner much criticism about censorship, repression of freedoms and the like.-- rcarty, Nov 12 2013 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.-- calum, Nov 12 2013 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.-- rcarty, Nov 12 2013 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.-- rcarty, Nov 12 2013 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?-- calum, Nov 18 2013 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.
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)-- rcarty, Nov 18 2013 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.
//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.-- calum, Nov 18 2013 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.
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.)-- rcarty, Nov 18 2013 //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.
//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.
Incidentally, I think this idea is undercroissanted. Very interesting.-- calum, Nov 18 2013 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.-- hippo, Nov 18 2013 //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.
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.-- rcarty, Nov 18 2013 I wasn't, no. Did I sound like I was?-- calum, Nov 21 2013 You're guilty by association. I smoke obfuscatory substances; :.therefore you do too.
Believe it or not "judge those by the company they keep" hardliners form a reified social machine.
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.
Even in this vague ethereal social relation the logic is applied. In a manner he is acting to marginalize the discourse.
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.
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.
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.-- rcarty, Nov 21 2013 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.
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.
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.-- rcarty, Nov 21 2013 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.
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.
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.....
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.-- rcarty, Nov 23 2013 What's that?-- rcarty, Nov 23 2013 Ok but what relevance does that have?-- rcarty, Nov 23 2013 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.-- rcarty, Nov 23 2013 //the ironic conflict between white and black supremacists when they achieve the consciousness that they above all are equivalents//
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.-- pertinax, Nov 24 2013 random, halfbakery