Meme abuse!

It seems like everyone has heard of "memes" nowadays - the term is a real buzzword because of so-called "viral videos," annoying email pyramid-schemes , and post and re-post blog-blob lists. Now I'm not William Safire (or William Shatner), but I think the term is being widely misused. This is upsetting because it has the potential to be a word that helps us understand how we think. I especially dig not the term "meme engineering" - which is usually used to describe the practice of making videos and advertisements so annoying that people can't help forcing all their friends to watch them. This really appeals to the unseemly shop-til-you-drop popularity-contest side of human nature. This theory has a lot more to offer than just "the person who is most willing to exploit others becomes the silverback..."

I was working with memes when I designed RELAY, the project in which I had people use words to copy a drawing over and over again. This was a flirtation with meme engineering, but what it really revealed to me is that we are still a long way off from understanding memes in the concrete, experimentally verifiable, and effective way we understand genes - nobody can do "meme engineering" because nobody understands the basics of the science. This is verified by the fact that NOBODY can predict what inane video will go global. Well, except for the Britney Spears stoned video. But it doesn't take a fucking meme-engineer to tell you that. The best meme engineering advice is the same a generic advertisement advice -food, sex, money, fame, bright colors, loud noises and repetition seem to engender a response in the monkeybrain.

Before I go any further, I just want to say that I am not a meme fanatic. Well OK, I am, but I have a lot of doubts that the theory is testable. It needs to get a lot more specific. We are still in the blood, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm stage at this point.

When Richard Dawkins coined the term in 1976 he cited as examples of memes, "tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothes fashions, ways of making pots..." These are all very accurate, and are exactly what the general internet public thinks when they say "meme" nowadays - an idea that propagates itself like a virulent strain of flu. The common use of meme actually means "extraordinarily successful meme." But the theory is much more subtle than this: The contents of thoughts can be regarded as a replicator that functions somewhat similarly to DNA. It follows the evolutionary algorithm: replication, mutation, and selection and therefore becomes more adapted to its environment - for the memes this means the human mind and our spheres of communication.

The clearest way to experience memes is to close your eyes and do a simple meditation - try not to think of anything - especially verbalized thoughts (this is how Susan Blackmore seems to have arrived at her ideas - which is her stroke of genius). If you are like me, thoughts will pop into your mind one after the other. Some of them are really halfassed - "When did 'Spawn' come out? I wanna see that." And I can brush them off. But others are really persistent and can sometimes distract me to the point where I actually get up and go do something. These would be the successful memes. So in fact, all of these thoughts are memes. Not ALL thoughts are memes - only ones connected to imitation and therefore language - sensations are not, but muscle-memory is. After all, most of the content of our language can be traced back to simple imitation (not all - the sounds of the words fit into a preinstalled grammar structure in the brain). The more distance you gain from your native culture, the more you see yourself as a product of your cultural environment - the large aspects of culture are collections of memes - a memeplex - so something like "I am lonely" or "I hate when cops tell me what to do" are memes. Artifacts made by imitation can also be seen as a physical expression of the information encoded in a meme - if I show you a hat you can copy it. If you're a hatter.

The memes only "care" about their own self-interest - they are not around to help us. But they exist in the context of the survival of the human brain. The worst ones - i.e. "I can fly off this building if I just BELIEVE hard enough" - get eliminated pretty quickly, and useful ones - i.e. "Cooking potatoes makes them edible" - tend to flourish, but sometimes useless ones survive because they exploit our irrational nature - i.e. "step on a crack, break your mother's back." Memetics has a lot to say about language, about what it means to be conscious, about how free will is largely an illusion, and about how humans evolved. It has problems too - the information in a meme is not encoded in a physical replicator like DNA. This means that it is much harder to analyse. Due to our as yet poor understanding of how the mind works, there are very few satisfactory experiments that can be designed to test the theory in a way that moves it into the realm of "hard science."

Now that I have explaned the idea in more detail, I'd like to talk about another problem I have with the abuse of the term "meme." If used to describe a computer virus that automatically sends itself to your email contacts the term is misapplied because it is outside of the environment of the human mind - there are no factors for evolutionary selection. Things like massively popular video content are also borderline - they certainly copy themselves and are selected for by humans, but they don't change. Without mutation there can be no evolution. Of course, evolution doesn't mean a march towards perfection, but simple success in adaptation to environmental conditions. Evolution is a strange phenomenon - it uses energy to create a local anti-entropic tendancy (although the rest of the universe is still falling apart - boo-hoo!). When I created RELAY the drawings quickly and decisively "devolved" because there was little competition or selection. By recopying the drawings to make them presentable, I introduced an element of selection (chosing round circles rather than potatoes, correcting symmetry by chosing the "better" half) - and this seems to have generated the most interesting elements in the project - the indescribable element in the forms that "said" something about how humans communicate (not to say I was displeased with how it demonstrated entropy). But if it were an attempt to display "memetic engineering" it would be judged a failure. For that, we will have to see 3 things - a decrease in entropy as time passes, increasing efficiency or adaptation to a specific condition, and, of course, it would appeal more to people - it should be "popular."

In the meantime, I don't really care whether memetics is considered hard science or pseudo-science. It has given me a method of understanding my thoughts that I find highly accurate and revealing, and it has been fertile ground for my artistic investigations. I am writing this post because I would like other people to understand that this idea provides a simple alternative to a lot of superstitious ideas. I don't want people to confuse a fascinating theory with spam and fart jokes (though these have their place too...).

Some good starting points for further investigation:
Susan Blackmore's homepage is worth a look if only for the hair...
The Meme Machine on Amazon, where all kinds of wackoes go on for ages about their crackpot ideas - my kind of place.