Category: Fiction

Memetic Hygiene

Humanity needs basic meme hygiene. Currently we do not regulate the spread of memes in any way. Like the apocryphal dark ages peasant throwing feces in the street and obliviously walking through it, we are completely blind to the cognitive version of germs all around us.

Like real germs its not that all memes are bad, just some of them. And the vectors for the bad ones need regulation.

We need the memetic equivalent of basic hygiene in this context to take back the planet from the PR technicians the image above is referencing.

Facts don’t matter. The nuclear power industry has proven this exhaustively. But really it should be obvious from the continued existence of religious debate. If one of the religions were correct, and facts actually had bearing on what people believed, then we’d all share the same one or a lack of it. We all realize that fiction is promulgated as fact everywhere across every possible topic.

We lament it in others but are blind to it by definition in ourselves. I’m no exception. There must be facts I’m blind to. And this is because like that bucket dumping peasant, we have no real understanding of the germs crawling all over every surface of our mind.

It takes research and training to combat pathogens of every stripe. And we need both. Our current methods are crude and basically ineffective. We block ads and filter content, but that’s just blunt quarantine. We need hygiene and antibiotic equivalents. We need a way to disinfect a mind.

We must change what Max lamented…

We must take steps to prevent pathogenic memes from further unhinging belief and reality. Convincing fantasy can be glorious, but it must be qualitatively consensual, we must not continue to allow the unregulated and invisible use of what amounts to a mind control virus.

I don’t mean religion. Overt religion has a place and a purpose. That debate I now leave to others. I mean all the other beliefs people have that function exactly like religions. The ones that people get angry at you for the exact same way if you offer them evidence or facts that attack their belief system.

As always I don’t complain until I have some solution to offer, and my solution is this: Fund memetic pathogen program at the CDC. (I’ll be emailing them this link, maybe they have something interesting to share.)

Canary

An ancient ship. Metal pitted and the brown of dried blood. It was so peaceful here. Encased. Actuated. Meat coiling around padded sensate hinges. Amplified in every way. The hands given power to flatten iron or pluck a hair. The feet given power to walk through lava or enjoy the feel of the carpet.

Trapped some might say in this miracle of ancient technology. But to me it was home. And I was a shut in, despite constant travel.

They put me in places like this first. A staggeringly well armed canary. I was never in real danger. They’d have to drop me in a gas giant or sling shot me into a sun.

Even then I had options. Balloons and ram scoops. I released a cloud of sensory spores. The data manifested emotionally. The area felt more and more familiar. An engineered dejavu. I looked around and soaked up the layout and tried to imagine its logic.

What made sense around the next corner?

Softball Questions

TYT, It sounds to me like you are complaining about bishops being interviewed for the job of pope, on the grounds that they are not being harassed about being religious. A town hall isn’t the place for that. You guys are missing the point of a right wing town hall.

The right wing mutilates the crap out of itself on terms it can understand during debates. Why would right wing audiences want to see the same in the town hall? Softball is the only way right wing voters get to see an example of them being given everything they want without direct personal opposition. Which is what they would get as president.

Think about it, no one ever really got in Bush’s face while he was president. Because he was the freaking president. Softball questions are actually a pretty great way to preview what each candidate as president would look like.

Also you guys are talking like it’s the media’s job to basically interrogate the right about why they are right wing generally, and that’s fair out in the world in the context of problem solving, but that’s unfair in the context of a town hall given that in other contexts you accept the existence of the right wing.

You never for example overtly and seriously argue that the right wing should be banned. You never overtly argue for a one party system. Think about what that means. It by definition means that you agree that the existence of the right wing is legitimate, in which case you must also grant it is legitimate for it to explore itself in some contexts unchallenged. This is one of those contexts.

Everyone knows everything there is to know about the right wing. These candidates are virtual clones of each other. There’s no new information to extract from them from either side. Just like everyone knows that those bishops all believe the same things, we know all these regressives believe the same things, wrong or not.

The function of the press as a watchdog is to challenge them on this stuff, true, which they don’t, but a town hall is supposed to be partisan friendly. This is actually like the one place where where softballs kind of are fair play.

Now, you cry but what about the left getting hardballs, how is that fair? Well it’s fair because that’s what the left wants. Progressives have a lot bigger decision to make intrinsically when choosing a direction and a leader.

This is about the fundamental difference between conservation and progress. There’s only one past, but there are many possible futures. Wanting to regress is a unidirectional goal, but wanting to make progress is an infinitely more complicated hypothetical because you can go in any direction except back.

This town hall is exactly what was expected, exactly what it should be, and that’s why I didn’t watch it.

TYT seems to understand this when they comment on the fear of being called liberal media. That’s exactly what the media are afraid of because that’s exactly what it would be if they were to ask hard (IE, how dare you be right wing) questions, in the context of a town hall.

The time to ask them that sort of question is out in the real world when their policies fail. That’s the kind of question you ambush them with while they are getting off a bus or otherwise have them cornered. Like if you catch them drinking some water you ask them how they’d feel if you told them deregulation put lead in it.

Even TYT must realize fairness isn’t it’s actual goal. Yes you are saying ask both hardball questions, but that’s what you want them to do. That’s even but it’s not fair. You’re asking to get your way in both cases, but another form of fair is to not get your way in both cases. Would you rather the left get softball questions too in the context of debates and town halls? Of course not. Because that’s not the function of a town hall for the left wing.

Realize. This is what the right wing wants and expects from partisan contexts that already agree with them. It is not what the left wing wants and expects. The right in these contexts wants easy mode, the left wants to be challenged. Conversely, in a left wing debate everyone in civil, in a right wing debate they tear eachother’s throats out. The media is right wing biased, no question, but this softball town hall is not in my opinion an example of it.

Chip Assisted

Everything flows now.

They told me I’d lose myself.

They told me it was death.

Fools.

I’ve never been more alive.

An empire of one.

Exhaustively optimized on the fly.

Imagine being an RPG character with all your stats maxed.

Everything flows.

Vision and action are one now.

I know instantly if a plan will fail.

I see the narrowest channel for success and never falter.

All anything ever costs is time.

And I have an eternity to spend.

Let’s go shopping.

Why not make it free?

I would be nice to make everything free, but some things are defined by their resistance to distribution.

Why I Oppose the “Venus Project”

Still, that being said we can acquire a high degree of ubiquitous material wealth if we do three things:

1. Reform IPL to make all code free as in speech and beer. Privacy could still easily be respected. In fact copyright enforcement and privacy of correspondence are mutually exclusive. (To program the robots.)

2. Deploy nuclear reactors quickly to provide the bottom of an anthropocentric materials economy food chain. (To power the robots.)

3. Develop an open source humanoid robot, recharged by the reactors, and instructed by ever evolving shared open code above, to automate any labor task we need done yet are unwilling to do personally. (To have the robots.)

With those things accomplished, essentially everything would be free. Certainly anything that could qualify as a basic human need.

In the mean time we absolutely could deploy a UBI and give everyone a piece of their human inheritance.

One Possible Solution