2021-07-26

模倣子 Public Ownership of Equities, Board Seats


Memetic Essay Index

What do think of the idea of the US government taking delivery 🚚 of stock of corporations they “bail out” like Chrysler in the 80s, the Big Three automakers at other times, the Big Banks 🏦 after the 2008 housing crisis, and so on, and also one or more seats on the boards of directors of said corporations, say, to be filled by employees of the departments of transportation, labor, energy, or such? The stocks and the board seats 💺 are two separate things, but both have the same effect, ie, control over corporate decision making, whether the corporation is “taken over” by other entities, and visibility for the government and the People à la “piercing the corporate veil” (1). 


Of course, the government could potentially sell off such holdings, giving the government treasury access to equity market growth profits. The treasury could also get dividends (and vote for them as stockholders and board members), and even borrow against market holdings, as a supplement to tax revenues.

Keynesian theory holds that we should “tax and save during boom times and borrow and spend during bust times”. As we all know, the feds basically borrow and spend all the time. One cool thing with public holding of equities and board membership is that such good economic practice might actually happen, since the treasury might be, say, motivated to unload valuable equities during boom times when they are most valuable, which would bring in big federal revenue and rein the booming market in through supply pressure. 

Good stuff, (John) Maynard (Keynes)?

My original thought was punitive in nature, ie, corporations that screw up should lose some of their self governance and as a political move the taxpayers should be mollified by the fact of “getting something for their money.”

Then I looked at the economics and the socialism-in-capitalism ramifications, and it seems interesting. 

To the argument that the government “doesn’t do that” or “doesn’t own stuff like that” I’d retort, “yeah, they do, and have (duh),” and that they easily could and possibly should. 

For bonus homework, what are the macromemetic implications of this idea? What kind of acceptance or resistance would be met initially? What kind of macromemetic leanings would result in healthy functioning, and which might lead to bad results and settling into dysfunction and deadlock ☠️?

What sort of macromemetic engineering might be required to make this work? 

Obvious memes which would have to be addressed are “socialism is bad” and “government control is bad.” The obvious take is to promulgate the immunomemetic subsystem (immunomeplex) that public equity ownership is neither socialist nor interventionist. 

Trying to inject (introduce a meme into a memetic fabric, or cohort of memetic agents) that says (2) “our new thing is not the bad thing you think it might be” is not good macromemetic engineering. 

The macromemetic engineer looks at the potential objections (immunomemes) and fabricates her own immunomemeplex to give agents the tools to bully other agents who might try to deploy those preëxisting immunomemes which would rip the sails of the new system she is trying to build. These should harness existing values (memeplex especially), naturally. 

Total first pass brainstorming 🧠 ⛈ 

“Socialism? Hey, those guys screwed up, we bailed them out, and we should get our money back.”

“Government interference? Hey, we'll give the stock back once they pay us back.”

“Hey, those guys blew it, this is a democracy, I’m a voter, and I want to know what’s going on and what they’re doing with my money.”

“Too big to fail? Okay, great, but as a voter I want to know what’s going on. I don’t want those people screwing up again and wasting all our money again.”

“They’ve proven they can’t be responsible, and that we need to be able to keep an eye on them.”

These are all pretty negative. Positive ones are good, too. I don’t have a complete theoretical model of the relative effects of negative and positive immunomemes. I could brainstorm up some more positive ones. That’s all part of the process. 

I’ll leave positive memes/immunomemes for this idea as homework. 

Polyvariable design (creating sets of memes that target 🎯 disparate groups) is needed for congressmen, the population, and corporate executives, and board members, to make everybody accept it in their own way à la “great taste, less filling” and this is a good point to design a lot of “packing the meme space” and “designing the revolution” and “engineered memetic polarization” and “pseudomutative design” and so on (3). 

It’s possible to start now. Getting memes out there among voters and legislators that the US government should receive ownership for future (and past!) massive bail-outs of banks and other industries. 

2021-07-12

模倣子 A First Look at Memetic Alliance Theory

Memetic Essay Index

Introduction

Allies perform a couple of useful functions: enabling a beneficiary to successfully deploy memes they could not otherwise, and thwarting attacks from other agents. I'd like to explore how these functions might be described using the macromemetic notation I've developed and which I've been using throughout my essays.

In future writing, I hope to explore the motivations, the memetic benefits which allies might enjoy for being allies, and also how to cultivate them, i.e., how to build a network of allies for oneself. I also want to fairly soon explore how having allies changes the structure of a memetic system.

Before all that, I want to get some solid notational principles down, which I hope will inform these further investigations and provide rigor.

Simple Example: Getting a Job

Effect of an Ally

Anti-immunomemetic Behavior

Appendix

Notational Subtleties

There are three or more ways to represent things like an ally intervening on behalf of a beneficiary in




 

Application to Immunomemes

The aforementioned notational subtleties apply to immunomemetic notation as well, since there's also the concept of a "hidden state" or a "compelled state" (1)

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(1) Compelled State: See also "hidden state" (2). The first law of macromemetics states that the deployment of a meme results in a state change in the system. Effectively this takes all agents to the new state, whether they want to go or not. The major effect of a state change is that it potentially changes the set of memes which are available to each agent for deployment. A compelled state is special in that some or more agents are compelled to deploy certain memes, e.g., there is no "stay on the pot and continue not to shit" (do nothing) option, i.e., one must "shit, or get off the pot," or in poker one must check, raise, or fold (and if there is a bet outstanding, only the last two). Another real-world example is the passive-aggressive matriarch at the family High Holiday of Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter or other stopping everybody from eating and forcing them to pray. The "we have to say grace before we eat" meme creates the compelled state where everybody must immediately put down their forks and knives, drinks, stop talking and listen to the matriarch offer the prayer. Compelled states happen all the time in human affairs, and people dislike them, try to avoid them, and chafe greatly if they are abused.

(2) Hidden State: This is similar to a "compelled state," and indeed a compelled state may generally be thought of as a type of hidden state in that it doesn't really exist, or need to be explicitly displayed in a state transition diagram or in a list of deployment descriptors, because other agents are "compelled" to deploy memes in response to the meme initiating the change of state, so that state effectively does not exist. We have a meme which immediately triggers another meme. The first meme would send us to a given state, but this never happens and we immediately go to the state triggered by the second meme. This can happen by the action of an ally. For example:

1. protege.recite! => Obscurity

2. enemy.bully(protege.recite!)! => Humiliation

3. protege.recite!ally.support! => Recognition

4. ally.defend(enemy.bully(protege.recite!)!)! => BullyEmbarrassed

These all start in some Start state. In #2, the protege would go from Start state to Obscurity, but they are "intercepted" by bullying memes (immunomemes) from the enemy agent, and so they go directly to Humiliation. In this sense, Obscurity is a hidden state, since the protege goes there first, and then the system immediately transitions to Humiliation. This is not a "compelled state" since nobody is forced to deploy any memes for this transition to take place. We see here the action of immunomemes (3) in this notation and description, i.e., that an agent deploys a meme which they expect will result in a transition to a given state, e.g., Recognition (or even Obscurity, if this fails) and yet we end up at Humiliation by the action of another agent, deploying a meme, in this case an immunomeme. In #3 above we see a kind of special case of a compelled state, if we think of the ally being compelled by the protege (beneficiary) deploying her recite! meme to rush in and help.

(3) Immunomeme: a meme whose function is to override the first-law transition of a memetic system to a given state determined by a memetic deployment, by "intercepting" that memetic deployment and directing the system to another "safe" state or back to the original state. The effect of an immunomeme is to curtail the deployment of or blunt the impact of deployment of novel memes, or memes deployed in novel circumstances, or agents doing new things, in other words, to put a brake on memetic mutation. The deployment of an immunomeme involves a hidden state, possibly a compelled state, before the system reaches the immunodiverted destination state.