Dear coin-flip battlefields,
It’s been a busy week.
Last weekend, Lindsey and I got our first overnight trip without Paige since before she was born! We visited Santa Cruz and did all the things we like to do—eat, drink, browse the bookstore, buy all the books, read all the books by the ocean, and walk along the bluffs.
Sunday morning we took a hike through the redwoods in the Land of Medicine Buddha. They had rock cairns! And since I had just sent out last-week’s email the day before, I had the insight that maybe I should take a picture of some of them. It was a wonderful, relaxing weekend, and our thanks to Lindsey’s parents for babysitting.
Thursday was Lindsey’s birthday! We celebrated, of course, because all of us who know here are so grateful she was born.
My new job is all-consuming, at least for the moment. I have faith it will settle down in a couple weeks, but in the meantime I’ve had little time to write or even think about anything else. Which means that this installment of The Giant Cultural Parasite was thrown together this morning with little time for editing, rethinking, or clarifying. Not the way I like to send these out, but I have plans to restructure and tighten the whole thing when I’m done, so you can consider this a look “behind the scenes” for now. Okay, enough excuses, let’s get to it.
Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
The Giant Cultural Parasite, Part 11
Based on what we know of the 4 parts of the meme cycle, we can make someinferences about what sorts of memes are most likely to propagate.
1) Memes that are able to break through mental filters and gain attention. (Impression)
2) Memes that cause the host to rehearse and repeat them internally, either through obsessiveness, usefulness, or repeated impressions. (Internalization)
3) Memes that inspire the host to take action in the external world, such as a desire to talk, build, create, or otherwise express a meme into the world (Expression).
4) Memes that are situated to encounter potential hosts, which we might call visibility or presence. (External)
Now we have a list of resources that memes “battle” to control. (It’s worth reiterating here that memes, just like genes, don’t actually have any intentions of their own. It’s simply that memes that propagate survive, and memes that don’t, die. The survivors have propagation built into them, so it looks like they “want” to propagate.)
The “fittest” memes will be the ones who can effectively commandeer resources at all four stages of the meme cycle and create copies of themselves. Returning to our rock cairn as an example:
Impression: The cairn meme gains attention by its distinctiveness (stacks of rocks don’t happen by accident, and the host/hiker allows it through the mental filters as potentially meaningful).
Internal: The cairn meme is repeated in the host/hiker’s brain as they search for other cairns in the wilderness (obsessiveness). If there are many cairns, the repeated impressions reinforce the meme and point to its possible usefulness to the host/hiker.
Expression: The usefulness of the cairn meme might encourage the host/hiker to build their own cairns, in order to allow others with shared genes (other humans—99% gene overlap) to find their way through the wilderness to safety.
External: The cairn meme is visible to a host/hiker. It’s most useful if it’s visible from where the host/hiker is likely to feel lost. If it’s hidden under a bush or on the other side of a mountain, the chances of a host/hiker finding it go down significantly, and the cairn meme is unlikely to spread.
Let’s look at another example. A few years back, there was great outrage among certain people during the holiday season because Starbucks didn’t make their cups “Christmasy” enough. Why did this become such a big deal and how did the “War on Christmas” meme spread so far and wide?
Impression: The lack of a Christmas scene on the cups struck some hosts—particularly the ones who were already infected a particular system of memes that caused them to identify strongly as “Christian”—as a threat to their cultural supremacy or a “War on Christmas” (threats to power and status are a particularly potent way for memes to gain attention and harness mental space).
Internal: The “War on Christmas” meme harnessed outrage and fear in its hosts, leading them to rehearse and seek out other examples of threats to their religion and identity.
Expression: In an attempt to reestablish cultural control and to confront the threat, the hosts took action and spread the “War on Christmas” meme to try to engage allies.
External: The meme began to show up in spots on highly-visible news programs, where it was able to make impressions on people who had never thought to be offended by a red cup before.
A related cycle happened in the backlash—hosts who had an interest in ending the Christian cultural hegemony also spread the “War on Christmas” meme, but with an opposing outrage over the fact that some Christians felt they had a right to define the culture for everyone. The controversy created heightened outrage and anger on both sides—a perfect storm for a meme, whose only “intention” is to spread itself far and wide.
Of course, some hosts (and their collections of memes) stood to profit from the outrage and anger: the talking heads on news shows who advance their careers and status by stoking emotions, the television station executives and employees who profit from the advertising money they gain from holding attention of the minds of millions of potential meme hosts, the politicians who benefit from a populace that rehearses a selected set of memes and thereby forms an identity that is strongly related to a particular political party.
The Starbucks “War on Christmas” meme is one example of how memes can harness opposing forces to spread themselves. It’s a classic case of “Heads I win, Tails you lose.” As each side of the political divide screamed their arguments louder and louder, the meme continued to spread. It was only when something else came along to steal our attention (a bigger, newer threat), or when enough people realized that the “War on Christmas” was no real threat at all and it lost its potency, that the meme finally died away and our cultural attention went somewhere else.
The “Giant Cultural Parasite” refers to the way that these systems expresses themselves in our culture. We see it in the way that we—as a culture—take on (or are “infected” by) identities, engage in politics, handle debt and questions of value, tell and spread stories, dole out laws and punishments, and spread religions. Each of these systems is built to spread itself, regardless of whether we as humans want it to spread.
In the coming issues, we’ll take a look at the way that memes have come together into these larger systems, how memes make use of existing systems to propagate themselves (like how the “War on Christmas” meme made use of existing religious, political, media, and economic systems), and how the meme systems themselves have become self-propagating “intelligences.” And we’ll eventually talk about why we, as their hosts, have so little power to change them. Stay tuned.
Articles
In the latest example of “my unfounded beliefs are just as valuable as your expertise,” the US Forest Service has banned controlled burns. Is there a War on Science?
Economists Must Grapple With Climate Tipping Points Before It’s Too Late
“Civilization-ending changes are not likely, but they’re not a zero probability either. Legendary Harvard economist Martin Weitzman called these low-probability, high-impact possibilities ‘tail risks’ and was famous for warning that economists are not taking them into account — and thus are underestimating the need for rapid decarbonization.”
Quote
“All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.”
—John Steinbeck
(Including the culture wars, I’d add)
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading! Please leave a comment or a like if you enjoyed this, and please share with someone if you think they’d enjoy it.
Nick