Meme
The Selfish Gene (1975), the ‘meme’ is the study of ideas which replicate and transmit themselves via the human mind the way a virus does in a biological host. Important early scientific studies were conducted by Daniel C. Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter in the 1980s, before a climate of viral metaphors (Ebola, AIDS) and a rapidly growing hedonistic cyberculture helped popularize the memetics field in the1990s.
Memetic engineering developed from diverse influences, including cutting edge physics of consciousness and memetics research, chaos theory, semiotics, culture jamming, military information warfare, and the viral texts of iconoclasts William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Genesis P-Orridge.
The memetic engineer is able to isolate, study, and subtly manipulate the underlying values systems, symbolic balance and primal atavisms that unconsciously influence the individual psyche and collective identity. A highly educated but susceptible intelligentsia, worldwide travel, and information vectors like the Internet and cable television means that hysterical epidemics and disinformationcampaigns will become more common. This warfare will be conducted using aesthetics, symbols, and doctrines as camouflage that will ultimately influence our cultural meme pool. These contemporary ‘life conditions’ are explored in books like Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World, & John Brockman’s The Third Culture. Fictional descriptions of memetic engineering include Isaac Asimov’s seminal Foundation series, G.I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales To His Grandson, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and Robert W. Chambers’ unearthly The King In Yellow tome.
Cultural evolution, including the evolution of knowledge, can be modelled through the same basic principles of variation and selection that underly biological evolution. This implies a shift from genes as units of biological information to a new type of units of cultural information: memes.
