From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Mar 30 2003 - 23:15:47 MST
At 12:24 PM 3/29/03 +0100, Anders wrote:
Cory Przybyla:
>> What are recommendations for the best way to spread
>> transhuman memes to the more resistant population,
>> which also seems to be in the vast majority?
>The key is making the memes thinkable. [etc]
All this is true. However, here's a different and more cynical perspective
that appeals to me even as it appals me:
An interesting story in the 19th Year's Best SF ed. Gardner Dozois (2002)
is `The Real Thing' by Carolyn Ives Gilman. A woman from now goes 25 years
or so into the future, finds everything branded, copyrighted and
meme-marketed. A zeitgeist guru offers advice.
"...there's a nearly insatiable demand for certain kinds of information;
you can always sell more. Other kinds don't repay the costs of production.
To oversimplify, it's governed by the Urge Pyramid. At the broad base of
what people want are the primal urges: fear, sex, hunger, aggression, and
so on. Only when those are satiated do people want to be stimulated by
beauty, novelty, sentiment, and the other mid-level urges. And at the tiny
tip of the pyramid is desire for rational thought; it's the last thing
people want. Information is nutrition for the brain, same as food. We've
got to have it, roughly in the proportions of the pyramid."
...
"A successful meme is one that tweaks its host's urge pyramid, and makes
him want to pass it on. *True* memes are actually at a competitive
disadvantage... Because, oddly enough, the world doesn't work in a
memorable or interesting way.That's why fiction is so much more satisfying
than truth: it caters to our brains, and what they want. Reality needs to
be productized in order to be convincing.'
The woman from now muses:
"Most of what people could find there [on the Internet] was not information
at all, but processed information product--Velveeta of the mind--more
convincing than the real thing."
Damien Broderick
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