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Mutant Memes

Your base ARE belong to us...Goodbye!
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Creation of super resilient hybrid memes through cyber- and meatspace channels which won't die out in such a short period of time. The Game of Life meets Memetics.
dgeiser13, May 16 2001

Mutant Memes http://www.mutantmeme.com
Someone's getting ready to bake it [globaltourniquet, May 16 2001, last modified Oct 04 2004]

Jeff Noon: Nymphomation http://www.spikemagazine.com/1097noon.htm
Featuring blurbvurts, littly flying advertisments that mutate merrily throughout the story; romantic view of information "making love to itself", becoming nymphomation. Jeff Noon has a lot of strong subjective writing, so (unless you're familiar with his stuff) check whether you can stand him first; some people like it, some don't. [jutta, May 16 2001]

Mr. T. vs. CATS http://www.maficdesign.com/ayb/mrt.swf
[egnor, May 16 2001, last modified Oct 04 2004]

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       meatspace? Cyber-butcher, perhaps?   

       (Oh, I get it. "Meatspace" is itself a mutant meme...)
globaltourniquet, May 16 2001
  

       "Through cyber and meatspace channels". Sorry, but you're too hip for me.   

       If you mean that you'll mix up a bunch of slogans and try them out on people when you're talking to them in person and via the Internet, feel free, but I think this will make you a very boring person indeed.   

       As for the "super resilient" part, my guess would be that mixtures of outdated memes are outdated as quickly as any one of their constitutents, and thus perform worse than the original parts, modulo some sort of originality or wit derived from their combination.
jutta, May 17 2001
  

       Perhaps if we take the best parts of diverse memes and combine them, the idea is that they form more resilient memes, like survival of the fittest meme. If this is what is intended, why that's been being baked by religion for centuries.
globaltourniquet, May 17 2001
  

       Isn't that evolutionary aspect the core idea in the whole "biology : gene :: information : X" equation that led to the notion of "meme" to begin with?
jutta, May 17 2001
  

       I wasn't really thinking of pairing them up randomly. I was thinking of pairing up parts that naturally sound good together instead of retiring the whole meme permanently to the deadmemepool.
dgeiser13, May 17 2001
  

       re: jutta's link. Wouldn't information "making love to itself" be "masturmation?"
beauxeault, May 17 2001
  

       Good question. I guess the idea is that the little pieces of information are all making love to each other, analog to "humanity making love to itself" rather than each individual piece alone.
jutta, May 20 2001
  

       [dgeiser13], it sounds like you're talking about recombination, not mutation. I'm also not sure what this has to do with cellular automata in general, or the game of Life in particular, unless you're referring to a different "Game of Life".   

       In any case, the recombination of short-lived cybermemes happens -- see link. (Warning: it's badly done.) The result is no more long-lived than the originals.   

       Finally, the notion behind memetics is that we're not usually aware that "resilient memes" are memes per se. Consider Christianity, for example.
egnor, May 20 2001
  

       "All your base tone denotes a bad age."
jutta, May 26 2001
  

       The basic idea of memetics is that ideas ("memes") refine themselves for better durability/transmissability under environmental selection pressures. Clearly, this has been happening "in the wild" in the cases of e.g. religion and urban legends.   

       The basic idea of (the "general assembler" and "self-replicating/von Neumann" schools of) nanotechnology is that we can build more efficient, or at least more useful, life-like structures than evolution could create via random alteration and natural selection over 3.5 billion years (+- a billion).   

       Assert: that the time is ripe for a technology of memetics (as opposed to the existing science of memetics) which focuses on the same structure of accomplishment as nanotechnology.   

       Assert: that this has already been done, with shocking success, in the case of L. "Mother" Hubbard's little toy (NOTE: joke shamelessly cribbed from card game "Doomsday Cult 2000").   

       Assert: more research needed, quickly, lest individuals of ill intent advance faster in this most potent technoloy than individuals with a good sense of enlightened self-interest, i.e. those who place a sufficient value on repeat business (V. Vinge).
Meowse, Oct 06 2001
  
      
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