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

A chance mention in the Arthur Machen book The Three Impostors reminded me that there used to be a British corporation, based in London, that sold "aerated bread". The full story is astonishing: the founder, a Scottish doctor from Edinburgh named Dauglish, thought that yeast fermentation destroyed some of the nutritive value of wheat flour, and also felt that kneading bread by hand was unsanitary. Therefore he devised his "aerated bread" which was mechanically mixed and leavened with carbonated water. The resulting bread was low on flavor but highly uniform in its physical properties, so it was a big hit in Britain! Of course.

The process was cheap and quick and thus eminently adaptable to mass production, and eventually there were "A. B. C." (Aerated Bread Company) shops and tea houses everywhere, selling bland bread and other highly processed foodstuffs, popular for their convenience and ubiquity. We still have tasteless mass-produced bread but now they use different methods to get a highly uniform product.

Isn't mass production wonderful?

~Chara of Pnictogen

Both Frisk and I are considering how we might want to publish (online) longer-form writing. Ghost? Medium? We have only a few glimmers about this whole business. It's hard to know how to make longer-term decisions when it seems like the world might come apart in six months... ~Chara

One of the most remarkable technological developments of the last few years has been straight from the pages of H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness: the elite nerds of corporate technology have constructed themselves something that's very much like a shoggoth, a practically shapeless mass of technological promises that's sold as the solution for literally every conceivable problem. It's almost become "superintelligent" (any moment now!) and sure, maybe it'll decide to kill us all, but presumably this catastrophe will be prevented so long as OpenAI gets a bigger share of the public treasury. Meanwhile the AI shoggoth, like Lovecraft's, is struggling to learn how to mimic speech and painting and other human skills.

In the backstory of At the Mountains of Madness, the alien beings who once occupied Earth before humanity did, the radially symmetrical "Elder Things" or "Old Ones", created and trained the shoggoths as technological servants (slaves, really) and, as the Elder Things' civilization sank into decadence, they grew increasingly dependent upon the shoggoths' abilities, and eventually there was rebellion and war, wiping out the Elder Things' society. Only the shoggoths remain as living survivors of their civilization. Lovecraft regards this as horrific of course but really it's fascinating: the implication is that the shoggoths, who are capable of learning, might one day build a civilization of their own.

The very shapelessness of the shoggoths, both the Elder Things' shoggoths and the modern-day AI versions of them, seems almost symptomatic of decay.

(cw: discourse about the decayed state of human technology leading to speculation about humanity's possible extinction)