I feel, at last, like I understand something that other folks probably regard as quite obvious: the reason the "normal" people are so vindictive about identity and "identity politics" is because they have, in fact, no sense of identity. They might even be waking up blank every morning like Harry du Bois after a blackout, piecing themselves together with the help of their own papers and records and everything, and that's why the notion of changing any of that stuff offends them so much.

I, we, all of us have struggled with identity, "impostor syndrome", and everything...it's taken a while. We feel like we're finally stitching together a satisfactory sense of self. It took a while. Self-loathing was my predominant emotion for so very many years....anyway, if there's a large collection of people who are all "normal" in approximately the same way and they're all reliant upon external information for their sense of self, then...what does that make them?

I have a hypothesis to propose, a metaphysical one: some clever entity set up a false Heaven in order to make instant salvation possible, or the illusion of it rather.

(cw: wacky blithering)

There's an unanswered question in the back of my mind. Among many, of course. This one is a bit...unpleasant to think about. Because the question is: "Why, of all the fictive fathers I could have identified with and felt the most compassion for, did it end up being Emiya Kiritsugu?"

Not Asgore. I have very complicated feelings about King Dad, sorry to say. But, yeah.

I fear we have too much in common.

~Chara of Pnictogen

It suddenly occurs to me that alien-contact hypothesizing, at least everything that I've encountered in my various trawls through popular American Internet culture, tends to be excessively preoccupied with looking for deftly encoded signals. I've seen notions about how aliens might transmit mathematical series (prime numbers, say) that would be unlikely from an inanimate source. Well I don't know about that, but I'm wondering someone else: what about the carrier wave? Wouldn't that be remarkable in itself—a radio signal confined to a narrowly defined band? ~Chara

(btw I got to see Lily Tomlin act that in Portland, 2005 I think. now that was special. I like to think we're very very distantly related because of the similar surnames)

This is a question that I've wasted a lot of fruitless rumination on. Is it actually possible to exploit memetic power on the side of justice? I haven't answered this question yet, to my own satisfaction. There's a major problem: lies, indisputably, are more memetic than truths.

What's that saying? “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”, which apparently derives from Jonathan Swift and not from Mark Twain as commonly supposed, q.v. https://archive.is/T4JZb

There's an excellent reason why: deceit provokes comment. If you came across "sin θ / cos θ = tan θ" spraypainted on a concrete wall, you might smile to yourself and say there's a nerd in the neighborhood, or you might not understand what it was and think of it as only a curious graffito. This item isn't devoid of memetic value but it's...slight. Under the same circumstances, if you came across "sin is Hunter Biden's laptop" spraypainted on a wall, you might feel disgusted enough to do something about it. Lies and hyperbole about Hunter Biden's laptop are irritating partly because the lies are so obviously manufactured for mass appeal. The more outlandish the lie, the more comment is provoked.

Hence most reasonable persons, I would guess, stay away from memetic cesspits altogether. I've never been into the deeper places (4chan and its gazillion spinoffs, for instance) and I only lightly brushed the surface of SomethingAwful's memetic culture, so my chief exposure has been through Twitter, and that's bad enough for anyone. But I've always been reluctant about conceding this field to the enemy. I feel the same way about memetic literature distributed through physical means, such as fliers and pamphlets. Extremist Christians and other cultists dominate this space and it doesn't seem like they can be bounced out.

Or can they? That's the question I'm asking myself. Is it possible to meme on the side of justice?

It's a dangerous business because memetic popularity also means taking a flying leap down the road to perdition. To be popular is to be ensnared, tempted by the system's offers of help. "First I'll become a YouTube star, then I'll spread my message!" is an occupational hazard of breadtube celebrities. "Corruption" isn't just a buzzword, it's a real enough danger, and corruption has never been easier than now. There are so many technological interconnections that furnish a myriad pathways for the spread of corruption.

At worst you get stuff like...Barack Obama's memetic HOPE poster. I don't detest Pres. Obama exactly but he was a crushing disappointment partly because he really did seem like hope, once. After eight years of George W. Bush, maybe the nation was actually returning to civilized values! Unfortunately the ad campaign was cynical in the worst way. It's never a good idea to place all your hope in a single human being, whoever that person is, unless there's really nobody else around.

But surely there's some middle ground here? Some acceptable usage of memetic stuff? It rather goes against my nature (for some reason) but I can perhaps think of positive examples. Nothing wrong with Buddhist prayer-wheels per se, for example? Those are reasonable, right? That might be considered "memetic". But I'm also thinking of the left-handed uses of memetics, like...memetic poisons, in analogy to biological poisons or catalytic poisons, substances that deceptively mimic the structures of beneficial molecules and stop reactions from happening.

~Chara of Pnictogen