My co-author, Wes Unruh, and I were interviewed by Joseph Matheny about our book The Art of Memetics on Alterati’s Podcast G-Spot #30 The Art of Memetics.
We discuss how our book came to have a pirate edition and many other issues AROUND the book.
Direct download link for: The Art of Memetics Podcast
Purchase the Book: The Art of Memetics
“The Art of Memetics is a much needed text on memes and how ideas grow might and power and spread as if by magic. There is more actual magic in memes than I ever saw before reading this master text by Edward Wilson and Wes Unruh. If you want your ideas to spread, you’ll read this book twice.” Jay Conrad Levinson
For a limited time (up until we get the first edition ready) we will be making a slightly cheaper version of the book available
This book will not have an ISBN number, will not be available on Amazon or in bookstores, and our reasoning for making this available is here, on my irreality biolog. If you are interested in reading this book, and don’t want to wait another month for the text to be laid out properly, the graphics professionally set, and teh copyeditor to change misspellings like teh into the, then this is the edition you want. (Plus it’s like almost two bucks off the first edition’s projected price.)
“’The Art of Memetics’ flows through every version of who you were, are and will be, with a strength and purity of signal that is eager to assist you in becoming all you were born to be.” John HarriganArtistic Director
“Not since Philip K. Dick and Robert Anton Wilson have I read a book that fundamentally altered the way I see and process media. The Art of Memetics extends the work of Marshall McLuhan into a media ecology of sympathetic coexistence, a model worthy of exploration if a sustainable equilibrium is valued.”
Ben Mack
Magician, Memeticist
Author: Think Two Products Ahead
“In the next 30 years our global existence is going to change as much as in the previous 100 years. We in the human community are going to experience radical shifts that will pull us in to more dangerous and enlightening places than ever before. It will come from thousands of profound actions, that together will boldly embody the deliverance of our new world. The Art Of Memetics written by Edward Wilson and Wes Unruh is one of those profound actions where science and art come together in a deeply historical union. I recommend this book highly to any creative, “traveler,” artist and potential visionary who wants to connect more fully with their own transition forward and better understand the intricacies of the unknown.”
Chuck DeWolfe
Artist, Art Coach, Entrepreneur
Let Wes and I know what you think, and follow up on the bibliography if the book is not enough. Buy two copies of the physical book now though, because once the First Edition gets back from the copy editor and graphic designer, this Mastermind Edition will be phased out…
Wes says this on Key64.net: “Eventually we’d like to publish a revised, expanded second edition based on the feedback from this Mastermind Edition. Reading the Mastermind Edition brings you in on the discussion toward creating the revised, second edition, which will (we hope) become something of a fool-proof cookbook for personal branding, manipulation of egregores, and trans-media narrative magic… Buying this book gives us much needed funds to purchase an ISBN and work out a distribution method via booksurge while printing up promo copies to land a Revised, Second Edition publishing contract getting this out into more places. “
Any person is a component in a cybernetic system of the social situations and contexts that they generally interact with. What component will have the most influence on the outcome of an interaction depends on what cyberneticists call requisite variety. Requisite variety is the number of options available to the component as a response to an input. The component, and therefore the person, with the most options available is at a distinct advantage in an interaction. This holds in social situations.
Let us take as a hypothetical situation two men competing for the attention and affection of a woman. The first has three basic tactics talking about shared experiences, physical sexuality, and violence. The other is additionally capable of intellectual conversation, mocking, and flirting. The second male can vary his response to the female or the first male more often and with greater subtlety. With his greater number of conversational gambits he can maneuver the other male into situations that he simply doesn’t have a response to or that he’ll make the wrong response to and he can engage the woman’s attention for more of her possible moods. Recently I witnessed an interaction very similar to my simplified description above. The more flexible male shut down his competitor to the point the competitor developed a new option, he drank until he passed out and didn’t have to compete anymore.
Another example of requisite variety at work is in the job interview situation. The interview questions are essentially setting the variety necessary to succeed. If the interviewee does not have enough options in their behaviour to answer all of the questions offered satisfactorily then his application is rejected. Requisite variety in largely expressed here by being able to recognize the questions behind the question and in being able to reframe your experience to be relevant answers.
There are three points in the response process that we can concentrate on increasing our variety in a useful way. We can work on our inputs, our processing, or our output. If we choose to concentrate on our input than what we would do is increase the subtlety of the distinctions we make. We would work on increasing the number of patterns we recognize. If we concentrate on our output then we increase the number of responses we can make. Increase the subtlety of our output and learn new ways of expressing ourselves.Finally, we can work on our processing. This is perhaps the most difficult to do. What you would want to do with the processing is to arrange the connections between the input and the best possible output in relation to it. In this what you are trying to do is look at the input you are getting in terms of what input you want from the other person and output. The processing phase is in this way the most complicated.
The processing step is most related to the idea of feedback loops. You have to have some model of the response you are looking for from the people you are communicating with. You have to make some kind of comparison between the signal you are getting and the one you want. Then you have to have some idea of what action on your part is likely to lead to the other people making their signal more like the one you want. In general we all do this naturally but it is quite possible to improve how well we do this. The number of potential processing steps is equal to the number of inputs you are capable of recognizing multiplied by the number of outputs you can do multiplied by the number of outcomes you want. The internal processes can quickly get unwieldy. Thankfully most of them are operated almost entirely unconsciously.
When engaged in this kind of fine tuning work on your responses the goal is not to make all of these options conscious for you. But to engage in a standard learning cycle. We want to move from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence. In general all of your processing and most of your input and output are unconsciously competent at what they are doing and unconsciously incompetent at what you are not doing. One way of going about this is to watch what other people are doing that you are not. Or looking for where the output you are doing is leading away from the response you are looking for. Once you have identified where you are incompetent you have already moved into phase two. Now what you need to do is find out what someone competent in these particular patterns do. Practice this until you are competent. Then keep practicing it until you are doing the more effective pattern without thinking about it.
The Political situation isn’t a matter of loss of freedom but of loss of power.
Thinking about it in terms of power rather than freedom does not change much in the experience but a lot in the avenues of response. Power is a percentage. Simply put it is the percentage of influence that a single participant, be it a person or a corporation, has over the outcome of the situation. Given the infinitesimal amount power held by individuals in modern societies, even tiny improvements could lead to great changes in the experienced power of a person or group.
There are always multiple avenues for power to be expressed. If we are losing power in one we can shift focus to another. More importantly we can leverage our power from one to improve our power in another. This is what the corporate elite have been doing for decades. They’ve used their concentrated wealth power to gain control of media’s reality framing power to disempower us and gain control of the political power.
If we want to empower ourselves we have to work on these three fronts and work to sever the corporatists ability to leverage their financial power over the other two fronts. Thanks to the internet, the media and communications realm is the one in which we have the most opportunities for power. The strategies of the corporations, centralization of their power and separation of the population into individuals is perhaps one of the best strategies that we could take. Division for the corporate power blocks and concentration of popular power.
If we wish to enact this strategy in the political realm we need to rally behind the only slogan that matters at the moment, “Power to the People.” We need to remember that the mainstream media is owned by the same corporate interests that have taken our power so we need to ignore their attempts to create wedge issues. Wedge issues are merely how the corporate elite divides and conquers the public. After people have more say in the running of their countries then we can work out the other issues.
I call my worldview Pragmatic Phenomenology. Phenomenology is a scientific or analytic approach to reality as embedded in subjective consciousness. A pragmatic philosophy is one that endeavours after functionality or affect rather than truth. Pragmatic Phenomenology then is a self rigorously pursuing subjective functionality. Pragmatic Phenomenology does not seek merely to observe reality from the subjective lens but to adjust and change the subjective experience of reality to ends decided upon by the individual. This approach is justified by its usefulness. That is to say we aren’t looking to see if some believe or approach is ultimately true but rather looking to see if it is justified by its use.
As a Pragmatic philosophy we don’t build a theory and then find the practice. Instead we start in action and refine the practice through what we call theory. Theory arises out of action and informs it. We start our acts of theorizing already engaged in actions to maintain and improve the conditions of our experienced existence. For this purpose the test we apply to information is not whether it is ultimately true but rather are we justified to believe it by its usefulness. If we assume a particular belief are our actions in relation to it successful?
Reality is the result of a process of perception and interpretation. We can never know from our subjectively embedded position what exists as really true. We only know what we perceive, how this affects us and how what we perceive is affected by us. We are only ever in contact with the noemata or targets of mentation. In this context it can be just as useful to alter the noematic contents of our awareness or the noetic process of our awareness as it is to attempt to alter what is normally considered external reality. External reality is experienced as a special sort of mental content.
We have through a process of pragmatic exploration formed a distinction between the physical and the mental but we only ever experience either as mental content. The distinction between external reality and internal experience can not be concluded to be true from this fact but rather that this distinction is useful. The usefulness of this assumption is not necessarily absolute but rather is useful in some applications. A noetic process that does not assume a distinction between internal and external sensations could still be useful and therefore justified for certain situations.
A primary part of this process of exploration is the formation of distinctions. Language is predicated on the formation of distinctions. If you have two different words you are forming a distinction between what those words are used with. Generally this is an indication that you mean the two words refer to different objects in the physical world. Sometimes the two worlds refer to the same object but what has shifted is the connotation. In the case of connotation the distinction is not between the objects but between how you think about the objects.
Connotative differences denote a distinction between different noetic processes. For an example consider the difference between a ‘slut’ and a ‘sexually liberated woman’, both words can be used to refer to the same woman but the distinction is in how we are thinking about or judging that woman. This formation of distinctions in response to experience is theory emerging out of action.
This matter of connotative distinctions crosses over into another meaning of pragmatic, the linguistics subcategory of pragmatics. Pragmatics investigates language’s ability to communicate through implicature and the speaker’s ability to use language to get things done rather than strictly looking at communication as communication. Pragmatics looks at what language is used to accomplish rather than assuming it is always pure communication.
The Phenomenological concept of intentionality is that the processes of mind are pointed at or acting on some mental object. This mental object could be a thought, feeling or sensation that we normally distinguish as external to ourselves. There is no reason to conclude that we can’t point a noetic process at another noetic process. This meta-cognition is a powerful tool of Pragmatic Phenomenology.
The system of distinctions that you have formed in the process of exploration and through education is what Kenneth Burke calls the terministic screen. The terministic screen forms the assumptions that guide our mental processes. Placing the distinctions that form our terministic screen as the target of our intentionality would be a way to quickly and powerfully affect our experiences. Some things are divided only because we think they are and by changing the distinctions you have shifted your ability to act on things. Other times making a distinction allows you to increase your options for dealing with them.
On thing to realize while you examine the distinctions that your terministic screen is made of is that every distinction represents a choice. Every distinction was a choice made for a purpose, a solution to a particular existential challenge. The conditions of that particular choice may no longer be in effect. There may be more sophisticated distinctions that you could use now given your greater experience to pull from in navigating your existence.
Pragmatic Phenomenology is the study of the subjective, the intersubjective and the experiential world from a perspective embedded in subjectivity and in terms of functionality and goal achieving. While the mental frame work of Pragmatic Phenomenology is relatively easy to establish, the actual practice would be a highly personal unfolding. This process of exploration is such that the act of exploration opens up further territory to explore. That is, the start is well known but the end point is individual and possibly unknowable.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Burke
While I don’t necessarily fall under the aegis of the term pantheist I do tend to see life or intelligence at play all over the place. I tend to posit a kind of emergent intelligence in systems of sufficient complexity. The city itself is certainly complex enough for emergent properties to take on a semblance of intelligence. Additionally traffic takes on this kind of complexity. The different kinds of interacting components in the system of traffic includes cars, the roads, traffic lights, the weather conditions, pedestrians crossing streets, and so forth. Traffic is a system that communicates in terms of speeds and timing. Clearly if Traffic has an awareness it does not think in human terms.
Delays can propagate very quickly through the system. As each car slows earlier in sequence than the one in front of it the car at the end of a line must brake quickest and go slowest. If any car brakes later in sequence than the one in front of it it crashes into it. This slow down tends to be more total. Groups of cars will also tend to clump and group as close together as possible while avoiding impacts and then a gap and another clump.
Reading the traffic system is largely going to be about the behaviour of cars. Looking at the speed they are traveling, looking at the relative density and clumpiness of the traffic flow. Most lights are relatively fixed features ignoring the pedestrian controlled crossing. To start working with Traffic you start by watching it. Find a place where two busy streets interact or maybe where the regular road system meets the highways. Watch it. Watch it at various times of day so that you see varying repeated patterns. Learn to feel the difference between rush hour, weekdays, weekends, and the middle of the night. Find other places to watch traffic from. Look for what stays the same what changes depending on changes in time or location. What you are trying to do is internalize the language of the streets. Don’t try to look for words, traffic may not be speaking at that high of level of complexity. Try to learn how to feel the MOOD of traffic. Not the mood of people in traffic but the mood of the beast itself.
Once you feel like you can read the mood of traffic its time to try to talk to it. In order to talk to it you need to place yourself where you can have an effect on it and read the reaction. My suggestion is a pedestrian controlled traffic light that changes rather quickly. The quicker it changes the closer you can control the timing. As the effect of your triggering the crossing will create delays behind the cars that stop for the light, you can watch for the changes where you are. I do suggest you cross the street if you used the signal. It seems disrespectful to do otherwise and you don’t wish to draw ire from people in the cars you have stopped. Try to vary the timing of your signaling. Spend all day there saying hi. Look for patterns and differences in the effect or response to your signal.
Another way to talk to traffic is to get in a car and enter the system. This allows for much richer signaling on your part than the binary switch of the crosswalk. However this places you as much more subject to the system of traffic. If you have gotten the attention of the traffic dragon, if you have angered the beast this might be a dangerous time for you. My suggestion is to drive around the streets with no direction or schedule in mind. This will allow you to see a wider range of street conditions and frankly if traffic has noticed you, getting to anywhere on time may be difficult. During this time it might be a good idea to use the car only for communicating with traffic and use public transportation if you need to get anywhere.
Up to this point we’ve been acting as if all cars are the same. Common sense tells us of course that they are not. Emergency vehicles are an interesting special case, they have greater effect on traffic conditions than it generally has on them because the law legislates that other vehicles must get out of their way. However, the emergency vehicles can be summoned by traffic when a vehicular collision occurs. Another special case is that of public transit vehicles. They have a set path through the networks of roads and should in general have a consistent effect on the traffic around them and could operate as a system clock to show how much the traffic is slowing down their predictable circuits.
The traffic dragon has millions of little sense organs, they are called drivers. The nervous system of car drivers includes the ability to recognize certain types of vehicles and to discern colours. Try watching traffic for certain colour or colour combinations. The more you watch traffic the more you will see intelligent acts of sortilege. Creations of patterns that you can read and interpret.
The purpose of the foregoing work was to build up an adequate model of traffic behaviour in your brain. Once you have done this there are many other ways to access the traffic entity. An important step to take is to start acting or thinking about traffic as if it is a person or person like. The reason for this is we have much more brain circuitry available when we are thinking about people or people like things than we do if we seem them as inanimate. Asperger’s Syndrome folk may find the other way around easier. For an assistance for reading the mood of the roads, is to after looking at the conditions visualize the face and body language the traffic dragon would be making. In general it will be easier to read the mood of this visualization than the streets themselves. If you have built up an adequate model of traffic operations in your brain, you will find your traffic face to give you very useful information.
Traffic Dragon Image by Ray Carney
A little known fact is that the expression “whatever doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger” was actually written by Nietzsche. He didn’t mean that anyone who faced something became stronger for it, some people are emotionally crippled by facing criticism. Criticism didn’t kill them and it didn’t make them any stronger either. Nietzsche was talking about himself and his nodal concept the Ubermensch.
The Ubermensch is not perfect. He is perfecting. Whatever doesn’t kill him makes him stronger. He is engaged in a process of becoming perfect but he never arrives. Perfection is a limit, you can approach it but you can never be it. Nietzsche didn’t consider himself perfect (most of the time) but he was working very hard in that direction. His philosophy is an eminently practical one. He advises his reader to figure out what climate, diet and routines makes them the strongest, healthiest and happiest. His superman is perfecting because it faces the situations it encounters and learns from them, compensates for them.
The Nazis all other confusions aside were not supermen, were not ubermensches. The Ubermensch was not prone to following orders but to deciding on a course of action and applying themselves to it. Nietzsche’s was a philosophy of nobility not slaves. Hitler was even more definitely not an ubermensch. He was incapable of handling negative feedback and failed to learn from his, or anyone else’s, mistakes.
To be ubermensch is to be a self-correcting, self-perfecting, organism. We can play our own becoming-uber if we face the world, set our own goals, and take negative feedback we are offered, from failure to rejection, and learn from it, grow by it. Accepting our natures as imperfect beings we can still be perfecting ones through cybernetic self-correction.
“Whatever doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.”
Pagan Ritual was deeply embedded in the rhythms of their existence, the seasons of a farmers life. With festivals directly linked to cycles of nature and the social activities that related to them. The life of a modern city dweller is lived by very different rhythms than the pagan villagers. In many ways the rhythms we participate in are much faster than theirs were. It behooves us as sorcerers to understand the cycles we are subject to and to take them into account when constructing our rituals and practices. We do ourselves a disservice if we perform rituals based on the longs forgotten assumption that the either festivals of the wheel of the year are relevant.
Our lives relate much more to the twenty-four hour newscycle, the work day, rush hours, the television season, the two seasons of fashion, and the various overlapping sports seasons. The other thing to take into account are the rhythms of the body, the circadian, ultradian and digestive cycles as well as the timeing of various phases of attention and memory.
Only if we start working with these cycles and their interactions do we start to make truly contempory systems of sorcery. The archaic technologies still hold their value but we need to apply them to our lives as we live them not in terms of a cycle that is irrelevant to our existence.
According to Arlington County District Court, the Michael Bay adolescent action-packed orgasm Transformers is worth $30,672. Precisely how they derived this figure I’m not certain, but they’ve just ruled that one Jhannet Sejas, a 19 year old college sophomore, must pay for the unthinkably heinous crime of wanting to do, for free, what advertising and marketing firms get paid obscene amounts of cash to do: promote a movie. On the eve of her 19th birthday, Sejas and her boyfriend were taking in the giant robot free-for-all at a local theater. Sejas loved the movie, and thought that seeing a few seconds of the action might convince her heretofore recalcitrant younger brother into paying full price. So she whipped out her pocket-sized Cannon PowerShot, engaged the video mode, and filmed 20 seconds of one particularly brutal battle, the better to whet the little bugger’s appetite for mechanized destruction.
Before the movie ended, she was under arrest. That 20-second clip cost her a $71 court-ordered fine, the birthday photos in her PowerShot, the right to ever set foot in that movie theater again, and a clean police record.
For the sake of convenience I’m going to ignore a great deal of what is in Snow White but if you are interested the piece is filled to the brim with great material to work with. Really I just wanted to give an example of the type of work that can be done with pop culture tropes. I actually think I bit off more than I could chew due to this stories much longer history as a folk tale.
I’m going to look at the primary characters of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as a psychological model.
The Seven Dwarfs are components of a human bioregulating nervous system and brain. Happy is the positive emotions, Grumpy the negative, Sleepy is the sleep-wake and other cycles, Sneezy is the body’s health monitor, Bashful is the social emotions, Dopey is prelinguistic playfulness and, finally, Doc is the directing intelligence. The person represented by this is unique, someone else might have had a Mopey instead of a Grumpy and a Flirty instead of a Bashful.
And while this person is able to feed, clothe, and make it to and from work, a look at their cottage/mind tells you they don’t have it all together.
Then Snow White enters the scene. Snow White is Royalty, comes from the castle and can communicate to the animals. Put simply she is the Soul or in Jungian terms the Anima.
At first the Dwarfs are resistant to this new influence on their lives but before long they are cleaned up and ship shape, and generally working together better then ever before. She gives them a reason for being, a purpose.
More later when I talk about the Queen and the Prince… and at least one way to work with this for self-change.
