meme magic Archives

I’ve encountered some delightful little creatures called memeballs, and apparently these ones represent different strains of anarchism. You can tell by the colors. My partner showed me the first specimen for reasons that will become obvious immediately:

when your crush hooks up with some diskhead jock with poorly optimized security software so you replace all of his childhood memories with a boot prompt for an industrial paint mixer

He had it coming, right? Besides, future industrial paint mixers could lead happy lives. Our protagonist might have done the diskhead jock a favor.

When you send your son to his room for being naughty and he creates his own state and attempts to annex your fridge so you fire a tomahawk missile at him

This also seems completely justified and not an overreaction in the slightest.

My resolution for 2017 is to look at more anarchist memes. (Does it matter how well they hew to the actual philosophy? Probably not.) I’ll get my partner to curate them for me, since I can’t stand 4chan myself.

Jokes aside, I do think that memes are important. Both in the original Richard Dawkins sense — the meme as a knowledge unit that reproduces — and in the “humorous captioned image” sense. RIP Harambe.

I don’t know much about their impact in other countries, but memes were important to the US election. “Meme magic” is truly potent — Tara Isabella Burton wrote a great article about this. Reality is a mutual social creation.

What remains to be seen is whether the mainstream can harness meme magic to fight the insurgent fringes, or whether their efforts will remain consigned to /r/FellowKids.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ tfw asymmetric information warfare is a feature, not a bug

“Strange dueling subcultures and their own narratives, folk beliefs, superstitious techno-animism, language-games — to the extent that any kind of ‘database culture’ can be called a narrative as opposed to simply just a collection of memetic primitives — have taken control of the means (perhaps now memes) of knowledge production.” — Adam Elkus

“Ambience, they realize, is really a subset of a stronger power. The power of narrative. The literary tropes declaring that, given A, B is sure to follow.” — Scott Alexander’s Unsong

The stories we tell ourselves — and the stories that we tell each other — are important. Many of these everyday narratives are guesses about the future. We fixate on the outcomes that we’re yearning for. Maybe wishing will make it true! (See also: meme magic.) Alternately, we worry about the possibilities that we’d like to believe are impossible. Donald Trump being elected this autumn — that can’t happen, right? Right? Please?

Photo by Matthias Ripp.

On February 25th, Longreads published an excerpt from Paradise Now, an overview of American utopian movements written by Chris Jennings. I was struck by the similarity between attitudes in the mid-to-late 1700s and Silicon Valley’s prevailing mood over the past decade:

“New technologies of mass production augured a future in which scarcity would become a dim legend. […] The new faith in limitless, human-driven progress merged with the old faith in an imminent golden age. Perhaps human genius — manifested in new ideas, buildings, machines, and social institutions — would be the lever by which the millennium of fraternity and abundance was activated. […] The idea of a New World utopia was born in the fever dream of religious revelation and the waking nightmare of early industrialization.”

Our current nightmare, at least in America, is de-industrialization. It’s been going on for longer than I’ve been alive, and I suspect it’ll keep going for a while. The dual impacts of the internet and true globalization have hardly gotten started.

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Heed the Memes

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