My dear status-incentive slot machines,
Hey there…
It’s been a minute.
Perhaps you thought I’d given up and ended my two-year run of weekly newsletters?
No, I simply needed to pause for a bit. My new job includes a hefty commute and a packed-to-the-brim schedule of responsibilities, and there’s simply no slack left in my days. That’s not a complaint—my days are full with purpose, meaningful relationships, and plentiful opportunities for personal growth—but it does mean that this newsletter will likely go out less often.
Nonetheless, I plan to continue, and I’ll send it as often as I can.
Also. I apologize that I haven’t been able to upload the past few articles to my website, as I know many of you prefer that reading experience. It’s a problem that I’m trying to remedy, but the web services meme ecology (and the corporate meme ecology) did not evolve with human hosts in mind, and it’s basically unusable for us mere mortals. Perhaps someday I’ll evolve into a tech wizard or even just learn to navigate an automated phone system, but in the meantime its a lot of begging on the phone to IT departments in India and slow plodding through overly technical explanations on the web. I’m tempted to just scrawl my articles on a napkin and text you all a picture each week, but I still hold out hope that I can figure it all out. As the great cellist Pablo Casals said when asked why he still practiced his scales in his 80s, “I feel like I’m making progress.”
He may have had more reason to believe it.
This week:
-Part 12 of the ongoing Giant Cultural Parasite series, An Ecology of Ideas
-Articles about dopamine addiction, new climate models, and rational thinking.
Enjoy! And if you like reading this email, please share it with someone.
An Ecology of Ideas
The Giant Cultural Parasite, part 12
I’m riding a strange idea just north of Tomales Bay, watching swells that formed from a storm some time ago, long past the horizon. They file past, intent like a procession of somber pilgrims. One by one they pass. They lift me with a breath, set me down with an exhale. Behind me, they collapse in a sob, exhausted, and return to the sea. The sky is heavy and soft.
A taller swell approaches, unlike the others. Confident. Good enough, I think. If the perfect wave ever comes for me, better to greet it as an experienced suitor. Virgins fumble and bore. Besides, I wouldn’t recognize the perfect wave if it picked up my board and clobbered me over the head. All I know is that this is a wave I have a chance to catch. I swipe embarrassingly at the water in an awkward attempt to turn my one-man craft.
Just in time I align myself nearly perpendicular to the incoming swell, plunge my arms deep and pull hard, lats straining against fatigue as the sharp suck of water pulls me back and up. The board tilts forward, steep, and I hesitate between caution and aplomb.
Too late for caution. We slide face-first down the wave together, the board and I, and a sharp surge of exhilaration floods me as the wave breaks to foam on my left. I shove up from the board and throw a leg forward. It holds. I’m standing! I could grin, I could throw my arms in triumph, but I’m riding a wild bull. I’d hold on for life if there were anything to grasp.
I lean forward slightly to stay in the crux of the wave. Too much. I try to correct, but it’s too late—I suck a breath as the mottled face of the ocean rises up fast, slaps me, embraces me, tumbles me over. I fall under, throw my arms over my head, curl into a ball and feel the tug of the strap on my ankle. The desire for another breath tugs me too, but it’s too soon and I don’t really need it. I watch the feeling pass as the water around me turns calm. I surface. I reel the board back, catch my breath, and paddle out to try again.
Surfing is a strange idea. Stand up on a flat board, balanced on water, and harness the power of the ocean? You must be joking. How did such an idea ever come about? Was it a single person’s brave inspiration or the result of tiny cultural changes over time? Was it a thrilling accident, repeated for pleasure, a flash of insight and invention, or is it the artistic outgrowth of a more utilitarian endeavor?
The actual origins are lost to time, but we can invent a logical progression of the “surfing meme system” that shows us how different individual memes can combine into new systems. For the sake of our memetic arguments, it’s not even necessary that our invented origins are strictly true—they’ll simply be one model of how memes might combine into systems. We’ll use surfing to see how variations naturally emerge from meme systems, how meme systems share and distribute resources just like a natural system, and how the system creates massive advantages in fecundity, longevity, and adaptability.
But first, let’s return to the natural world. If, as I’m asserting, the evolution of memes is an extension of Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection, then we ought to be able to see a parallel in the evolution of ecological systems.
Over the past 50 years or so, ecologists and other scientists have discovered surprising natural networks that go far beyond what anyone ever imagined. Rachel Carson describes in beautiful detail, in The Sea Around Us, the interdependence between ocean currents, volcanic vents, and the weather systems we all (used to) take for granted. Many of these currents are directly affected by the cycles of alignment between the sun and moon, as well as the rotational direction and tilt of the earth. At this highest level, the slightest shift can completely upend the organization—and perhaps the basic sustenance—of all life on earth. The resiliency of all our ecosystems, and life itself, is dependent upon stable, recurrent patterns. Shift a current in the South Pacific, trigger a massive drought in Brazil.
More recently, ecologists discovered that forests “communicate” and share nutrients through underground fungal networks. A special fungus called mycelium spreads in long tendrils through the soil, bores into tree roots, and distributes nutrients between the trees. The mycelium depends on the trees to provide carbon and other nutrients. In turn, they can pass sugars and water to saplings, who often can’t photosynthesize effectively in the shade of older trees, and whose taproots don’t reach groundwater. At this level, too, predictable, stable patterns emerge, and damage to one part of the system can put the entire system in danger.
In the 1950s and 60s, the US Forest service gave permission for massive clearcutting in California forests, and then hired workers to replant saplings in the place of the old-growth forest. One of those workers, Malcolm Terence, wrote about his observations working in Northern California’s Trinity Alps in his book Beginners Luck: Dispatches from the Trinity Alps.
We started the tree planting with the highest of ambitions. I armed myself with Chinese reforestation statistics, told our city friends we were off to restore the planet, and left for Hoopa. Our one misgiving was that we might be stealing jobs from the local Native population. Few Native Americans, though, we found when we got there, would touch the work….
When we got to the rain-swept site, our apprehensions swelled. It was a sea of mud, smashed trees, and tractor tracks. “Where do we start?” we asked bravely.
But none of our bright preconceptions could survive the three weeks we spent in that wreckage. We’d plant a slope in the morning, and by afternoon it would have slipped, trees and all, toward the muddy creek. The next day it might be gone.
What we know now about mycelium and the mycorrhizal networks they create explains what was happening: without the living trees, particularly the old growth “hub” trees (with deep taproots and large protective canopies), the mycorrhizal networks likely died, with the result that the newly planted trees had no support system from which to draw nutrients, and the steeply-sloped soil had no living structure with which to hold on.
So these networks often make or break an ecosystem. When they function well, they are resilient, with many overlapping functions. Damage or obstacles to one part of the system (such as shade blocking a younger tree from sunlight) can be made up by another part of the system (the mycorrhizal network). But damage too much of the system, and it can be impossible to recover. By pointing out the complete destruction that comes from the collapse of systems, I mean to highlight their intrinsic power. When a system functions effectively it can have a lollapalooza effect, where each part gains far more than it would have alone, and the benefits to the whole system are far greater than the sum of each of its parts.
Systems arise in the same evolving counterpoint that we have observed throughout this series: a river and its canyon shape each other, a tree adapts to the landscape and also shapes it, an animal and its food co-evolve. This co-shaping leads to interdependence, where each member of an ecology is dependent upon and provides benefits to the other members.
In fact, we find three types of these relationships in nature. The trees and mycorrhizal networks are mutualists, which work together for mutual benefit. Relationships where one organism receives benefits from another without causing it harm are called commensals. And parasites cause damage to their hosts by exploiting them for resources. We’ll eventually take a look at how each of these relationships shows up in the world of memetics, but for now we’ll focus on mutualist systems and the lollapalooza effects that they can create. Let’s begin with a return to surfing.
As a self-replicating meme, surfing has had remarkable success over a long period of time. And it’s easy to see why—all four parts of the meme cycle are strong. It has a remark-able (ie, worth mentioning—or sharing in video) form of expression. It shows up in the external world in highly visible ways (eg, surfboards strapped to cars, surfers in the waves performing extreme and remarkable acts). It takes place at the beach, a natural theater where the surfing performance has a chance to make repeated impressions on a large audience of beach-goers. Those repeated impressions become internalized, often through the empathetic thrill and awe that the beach-goers feel, and may even be rehearsed in the minds of the audience, as some watchers imagine what it might be like to slash and weave across the waves (italicized words refer to specific stages in the meme replication cycle, explained in an earlier article). The loop is closed when some of those watching decide to try it out themselves, and members of the audience become the performers. This is exactly what I was playing out when I tried to stand up on that strange idea.
What makes surfing so interesting as a meme is that it has developed over time into a whole complex system of ideas, infected the culture at large, and evolved over time. It has developed its own language patterns, from technical jargon like “hang-10,” “duckdive,” and “double overhead” to unique slang like “kook” and “chunder.” It has spinoffs, like skateboarding, kite boarding, and snowboarding. And it has spread into the wider culture, with apparel (boardshorts), music (the Beach Boys), movies (Endless Summer), and even language (“hella,” “stoked,” and “gnarly”), all of which has developed and changed alongside the culture. The fact that some people have created an entire identity as “surfers” is an example of how deeply meme systems can entrench themselves in their hosts.
Since surfing requires a board and a single rider, it’s fair to say that there was likely a “first” surfer. Whoever that person was, it seems likely that they didn’t come up with the entire idea out of the blue. Bottlenose dolphins regularly play in the surf, swimmers bodysurf, and it’s likely that many Polynesians and other ocean-faring peoples had experienced the exhilaration of riding a canoe in the waves before anyone got the idea to actually surf standing up. Maybe he (I imagine it was a young male, because standing up on a piece of wood in the ocean seems like the sort of dumb idea that young males seem particularly evolved to pursue) had already had a lot of experience bringing different canoes in under the power of the waves, and in a fit of bravado he decided to show off for his friends by standing up. An idea was born.
Even at this early stage of the surfing meme, we should note that the idea was born of a network of memes in concert with one another: harnessing wave power, riding in boats, showing off with acts of physical prowess. It’s possible that surfing was born with different specifics, but this memetic network effect stays intact regardless of what set of particular circumstance you may use to explain the origins of surfing.
Already in this early stage of surfing, the seeds are present to create a lollapalooza effect in cultural transmission and evolution. Specifically, surfing was immediately highly replicable and variable.
Its replicability can be explained by its performative aspect, which brings up a question. We’ve seen how performance assists transmission of memes through visibility and repeated impressions on an audience, but why do performers feel the need to express the memes in the first place? Why would someone take up surfing, with the accompanying discomfort, drain on physical resources, and potential for danger and even death?
We don’t have to think too hard to find an answer. Incentives abound. Anyone who has ever been or known a young person knows the attractions of bravado and thrill-seeking: status, self-confidence, the feeling of self-mastery that comes from conquering fears. From the human point of view, the incentives are nearly self-evident.
And what about from the meme’s point of view? A meme that is able to use or exploit a host’s incentive system has an automatic advantage over one that does not.
From these two perspectives, the host and the meme, we have a co-arising cycle:
1a) Memes that increase a host’s status are more likely to survive and spread than memes that do not.
1b) Through the process of natural selection, the memes that survive are the ones that “want” to exploit status.
2a) Humans that express status-increasing memes are more likely to survive and spread their genes than humans who do not.
2b) Humans seek out and “perform” status-increasing memes.
3) Humans and memes co-evolve to seek increased status for the host AND to replicate status-increasing memes.
This is, in general, a mutualist relationship with benefits to both human and meme. The same logic can be applied to other incentives like autonomy, mastery, connection, attention, and power.
In the case of surfing, this all leads to an incentive trap: if several young men are competing for status by riding their canoes through the waves, it quickly becomes unremarkable, and the status incentives disappear. The way out of the incentive trap is obvious—simply go to the edges. Ride bigger waves. Create and perform new and more spectacular tricks. Ride faster. Hang 10. Assert dominance. Each innovation increases the visibility of the sport, and by extension, its ability to replicate into new hosts.
Or if you can’t dominate, aim for a different type of status: earn respect by teaching others to surf; become a craftsman renowned for original or beautiful surfboards; create in-group status with specialized jargon; bring unique insights or knowledge to the group, such as a predicting the quality and size of the waves. While none of these are replications of the meme itself, each helps support the original meme. They are, in effect, mutualist memes.
The incentive trap forces the surfing meme to become more extreme, and at the same time, expands the meme into a vast web of related variations and niches, each of which comes with its own arms race. From this basic problem of memes competing to exploit human incentives, we now have an environment that looks very much like a natural ecology: interdependent systems where similar niches are in competition and different niches work to mutual benefit, all of which work toward the goal of replicating the keystone meme “surfing.”
Another co-arising cycle has emerged:
1) Hosts can win the status game in one of two ways:
a) Dominate (by being the best, fastest, most creative)
b) Create a new niche (specialty) where they can dominate
2) Hosts have a status incentive to pursue activities with high creative potential
3) Memes with a high “niche value” (potential for creative expression) create self-supporting networks, and are likely to be much more successful than more rigid memes.
4) Hosts and meme systems co-evolve toward greater creativity and complexity.
It’s in this vast web of meme variations and niches where we can begin to see the lollapalooza effect of what we call “surf culture” or in more general terms, a “meme complex”.
Out of these meme complexes and networks, humans seeking out status begin to organize themselves. A master surfboard craftsman may earn the respect of a lawyer who appreciates beauty, but that status pales in comparison with the status he could hold among elite surfers who understand the details and challenges of his particular niche, and so he desires to spend more time around other “surf-culture” meme hosts.
From this need to self-organize into interest-based tribes comes a need for group members to find one another by signaling who they are and what they stand for. That signaling, which includes jargon, clothing, haircuts, and even behavior, is the beginning of how we construct our identities and beliefs about ourselves, but it’s also how we reinforce the spread of meme complexes and supercharge their ability to replicate and adapt.
These systems of identity are what we’ll get into next time.
Articles…
Digital Addictions Are Drowning Us in Dopamine
Above, I touched the tip of the iceberg in reference to how memes exploit incentives to influence human behavior. Dopamine is the ultimate incentive, and this is an example of a meme system that looks like a mutualist but is really just a parasite.
Computer Models Of Civilization Offer Routes To Ending Global Warming
Some positive news on the climate front, even if they’re only Hail Marys.
Why Is It So Hard to Be Rational?
Here’s the TL;DR—rational thinking is a skill, not a talent. It can be developed, but only with sustained and significant effort. Those who put in the effort have a material advantage over those who don’t.
Farnam Street is my favorite blog for developing critical thinking skills. You can look at this article in two ways: to better understand where we are and where we’re going in this pandemic; or to better understand how to use mental models as a way to think critically about novel situations. The first way is interesting. The second way is invaluable. Either way is enlightening.
Quotes…
“I’m just a surfer who wanted to build something that would allow me to surf longer.”
– Jack O’Neill, inventor of the neoprene wetsuit
That’s all for now, thanks for reading. Please share with someone you think would enjoy this!
Nick