Mutant Memes 1.1

by Perry Hoberman



A Prelude to a Discussion of Memesis; or: Remember the Meme!

Before we continue with the demolition derby known as the "Memesis Network
Symposium", I would suggest that we slow down and clear up some fairly
serious misconceptions about the term "meme" before it too gets totally
lost among the wreckage. Starting with the original "Memesis" statement,
and continuing on though most of the commentary to date (both pro and con)
the concept of the meme has been subjected to such extreme mutation that
its progeny have become almost unrecognizable. I would like to try here to
isolate two particularly misshapen mutant memetic children.

On the one hand, we have what might be called the "Living Meme" (as in Dr.
Frankenstein's cry of "it's ALIVE!", or perhaps as a distant relation to
the Playtex "Living Bra"). Here the meme is cross-bred with the rhetoric of
(strong) Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence, and the wide-eyed
notion of global networks achieving both autonomy and consciousness. The
Living Meme will no longer settle for being a mere analogy with the
biological gene; no, it has now become a "gene-equivalent" for the emerging
networks, a territory not inhabited by human beings, but by agents,
avatars, AIs, all fighting for survival in a brave new neo-Darwinian
cyberjungle.

The "ultimate habitat" of the human mind is now to be "the infosphere of
global networks" (I was under the mistaken impression that the mind's
"ultimate habitat" was the human body) and the Living Meme is to be the
building block of the "post-biological, cyborganic line" of evolution, made
of "universal binary code systems", its "cognitive pixels" found "only in
network interfaces".

Here the meme is bucking for a promotion from its (admittedly much more
modest) job of offering a framework for the understanding of human culture
as phenotypic; the Living Meme is ready to run the whole show. All we
humans had to do was give it a little jumpstart, creating the right
conditions for a steamy primordial cybersoup that allowed these "first
protozoans" to climb out of the muck and onto the shore (no doubt howling
"I want to LIVE!"). And these babies are precocious; critique and theory
are useless in their path; forget "caution" and "vigilance" (which are
somehow equivalent to "a winding down of the cultural engine"); what's
called for is a "'let her rip' attitude" to "serve nature in its
evolutionary goal" (funny, I always thought that one of the prime tenets of
evolution was, in fact, the very absence of any goal).

Then, on the other side, we have the Living Meme's shifty, pathetic cousin:
the "Imposter Meme", which is forever being unjustly compared to its big
(very big) brother Gene, and always found grossly wanting. The Imposter
Meme has been taking the rap here for just about every social ill of the
twentieth century. It stands accused of claiming to be every bit as good as
big brother Gene, but without any of his epic sweep, his arsenal of
chemicals and proteins, his claims of scientific evidence and historical
fact.

In fact, the Imposter Meme stands accused of wanting to replace big brother
Gene altogether, of claiming to render biology obsolete! A front man for
Social Darwinism and Final Solutions, the Imposter Meme is so loathsome
that it has encouraged some respondents to jettison any thought whatsoever
of applying evolutionary principles to culture. It stands accused of
"willfully obscur(ing) the process of human innovation and creativity under
a mass of dodgy biological metaphors". Further, there seems to be a
tendency to assume that even positing the idea of the meme is equivalent to
the morally suspect idea of what might be called "memetic engineering" - as
though to talk about about culture in this way contains an agenda to
"manipulate, recondition and alter" it.

Obviously the Living Meme and the Imposter Meme are in fact identical
good-and-evil twins (both played no doubt by Bette Davis or Patty Duke),
and both are the grandiose mutant offspring of the meme as originally
coined by Richard Dawkins in chapter 11 of "The Selfish Gene" in 1976. The
meme is presented there neither as the building block for some eventual
autonomous realm that would supplant biological evolution, nor to imply
that the direction and development of human culture are completely out of
our hands (although certain aspects of it certainly are).

The meme is posited instead as a unit of cultural transmission, analogous
to the gene; it explains why certain ideas and fashions take hold,
regardless of any perceivable merit or conscious choice. Memes are not
purposeful; but just like "selfish" genes, they can't help acting as if
they were. Certain memes are seen as being better at surviving and
propagating than others, often in spite of their obvious flaws. Dawkins
presents many convincing examples of possible memes; my favorite is
religious faith, a meme which "secures its own perpetuation by the simple
unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry". In other words,
the meme "blind faith" survives largely because the human brains that it
inhabits are immunized by the meme itself from any possible challenge.

I realize that I have been addressing here only one aspect of the Memesis
statement; I also recognize the possibility that the word "meme" as defined
by Dawkins may have since mutated, and anyway may not be what most
respondents have been referring to. But I felt it was important to bring up
these issues for two reasons; first, because if we're going to use a term,
we ought to have a reasonable understanding of it; and second, because I
find it a bit incredible that a discussion of this kind could get as far as
it has without any mention of Dawkins (other than in the original list of
invited speakers). The meme is only one of many extremely useful concepts
found in Dawkins; I would hope that some of his ideas might find their way
into our discussion here in a less distorted form.

Perry Hoberman, 12 May 1996