Memetic Essays LIST - Manga Index
Introduction
Before we go too far down the rabbit hole of immunomemes and how important they are, I should probably get into the concept of injection, or infection. Memes "infect" their hosts (agents) and in order to create an actual up-and-running memetic system, or memeplex, you have to "inject" the memes of that memeplex into some population.
I realized early on, and I'll get to that, that injection is a crucial process. It's all very well to think about how memeplexes behave, but you can't really engage in society-changing memetic engineering if injecting a memeplex into a population of agents is super-difficult.
Take for instance a large religion, like the Catholic Church, or a "religion-like" ideological system like Communism or Stalinism, or even selling a product like Coca-Cola to a consumer base of hundreds of millions of people. All of these took billions of dollars, required decades if not centuries, and caused the deaths of tens of millions of people.
My hope was that there was a better, easier, cheaper way to go about this, but at the start of my research, I had zero evidence that this might be the case. It was merely a hope.
Running Around like a Headless Chicken
I was motivated by a couple of things. The first was probably that even smart people do stupid things, cruel things, counter-productive things, and even when this is explained to them, a better way is shown to them, they nonetheless cling to their old ways and often make up silly excuses for why they should do this (1). Of course this resistance to reason and change at the individual level tends to scale to the group level, even to the organization level and society level. Why don't people do what we expect, what we tell ourselves, i.e., that if they are shown a better way, if they are shown a better mousetrap, they don't immediately buy it? The other thing is the human cost of all this. We suffer and waste, but sometimes we do change, and when we do it always seems to be at great cost in terms of activism, money, human lives, wars, and as often as not things are the same or made worse in the end.
In other words, the human progress situation looked rather grim.
I just blindly leapt into the fray and thought about a behavior I was doing when I would go out running in the morning. I would pick up one piece of litter I found on my way and throw it into the trash. I thought how wouldn't it be great if everybody in my town would do the same thing, just pick up one piece of litter, and then be done for the day. In short order there would be no litter, our town would be tidy.
So my problem was to inject this very simple memetic system into the population of my town. I had no clear idea as to how to do this. One problem was that I was out running in the mornings, and there were few if any other people around to see my do my "unlitterbug" activities (2). So I started attaching notes to bits of litter that I didn't pick up, saying things like "be an unlitterbug" or "join the unlitterbug bunch" or such. Later I started attaching money (3) bits of litter along with the notes. I would prepare a few notes, a few dollar bills, and some rubber bands before I went out, and distribute them.
There was a spectrum of expectations I had. One was that after a few days or weeks, I would begin to witness random people here and there tossing litter into bins, and calling each other "unlitterbugs" and slapping each other on the backs with warm bonhomie. The other was of course that nothing would happen. I even found bits of litter with the rubber bands still on, still in the same spot I'd left them, with the money gone.
The situation for an "easy injection" mode for memetic systems started to look grim. For some reason the image of it taking a "busload of orphans going off a cliff" to provide enough emotional impetus to galvanize people into adopting a new memetic system.
Here's an essay that summarizes some of my early efforts, and how things started to look up.
Summary
I should probably wrap this up for this week and get into my first forays into memetic injection later. Basically, I recognized that memetic injection was a critical first step. You can dream up the greatest kinder, gentler society, but it you can't "bootstrap it up" within a given population, it's all just a pipe dream.
That was my problem. Everybody has an opinion, and everybody has an idea that just won't work. The people of my town had shown themselves to be resistant to, maybe even apathetic toward, my idea of unlitterbuggery.
It's important to note that one is injecting memes, not memeplexes, into a population. Yes, when one is done with the whole process of "memetic engineering," the memeplex as a whole is injected. I didn't understand this at first, and only came to through my further research. I think I kind of got the idea that one meme by itself, like picking up some litter, needed other memes to support it, like the name "unlitterbug," and that they somehow had to be injected "together" but I didn't get how that was all supposed to work.
In short, the "Unlitterbug Meme Experiment" was a failed experiment in that it didn't give me much if any good data, except that it didn't work, didn't successfully inject anything, but I did know that I was connected with people since they were taking the money (and not throwing away the litter).
More next week!!
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(1) Alcoholics and addicts are notorious in their tendency to self-justify their dogged persistence in keeping on doing the same old thing and expecting different results, but it appears that everybody does it do one degree or another. It's just that most people don't die (though they may make others die) from their own bull-headedness.
(2) As I learned in my later experiments and research, my "unlitterbug" activities were poorly "marked" and had poor "closure," which I'll dive into later, in the sense that if somebody observed me they would not know what I was doing, or rather, what they would have to do in order to imitate me, and also to see a memetic reward for themselves for doing so, and the closure bit means that they couldn't be sure what they were expected to do, i.e., where the "action" or "meme" started and when it was fully completed and so forth. More on this later!
(3) My reasoning here was that in order to adopt a meme--and I had no clear idea what this meant at the time--some kind of what I termed a "libidinal reward" (4) would help to inject the meme.
(4) For "libidinal reward" I also use the terms "limbic reward" or even "bribe." As we'll see later with the Box-Binning Project as well as the Blue Shirt Tuesday and Prime Pizza Thursday projects, memetic systems can work with a bribe included, but artificial memetic systems may also be injected without any built-in material reward, and there are lots of implications for both of these.
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