Tag: Memetics

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Post-Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production

I am proud to announce that I have a chapter in Alfie Bown and Dan Bristow’s collection, Post-Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production, coming soon from Punctum Books. The book also includes pieces by Angela Nagle, Dominic Pettman, Scott and McKenzie Wark, the editors, and many others. Here is the cover:

My essay, “The Memes is Dead, Long Live the Meme,” argues that Dawkinsian memes have been supplanted by internet memes and are therefore dead. Here’s an excerpt:

If memes are indeed analogous to genes, then the real power of memes is that they add up to something. I’m no biologist, but genes are bits of code that become chromosomes, and chromosomes make up DNA, which then becomes organisms. Plants, animals, viruses, and all life that we know about is built from them.24 “The meme has done its work by assembling massive social systems, the new rulers of this earth,” writes Howard Bloom. “Together, the meme and the human superorganism have become the universe’s latest device for creating fresh forms of order.”

Perhaps that was true two decades ago, when Bloom wrote that, or three decades ago when Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene, but the biases and affordances of memes’ attendant infrastructure has changed dramatically since. After all, memes have to replicate, and in order to replicate, they have to move from one mind to another via some conduit. This could be the oral culture of yore, but it’s more and more likely to be technologically enabled. Broadcast media supports one kind of memetic propagation. The internet, however, supports quite another.

Get your copy here.

Many thanks to Alfie Bown, Dan Bristow, and everyone at Punctum.

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Operation: Mindcrime — Inception

In his book Speaking into the Air (University of Chicago Press, 1999), John Durham Peters points out that if telepathy — presumably the only communication context more immediate than face-to-face interaction — were to occur, how would one know who sent the message? How would one authenticate or clarify the source? Planting an idea undetected into another’s mind, subconsciously in this case, is the central concept of Christopher Nolan’s Inception. [Warning: I will do my best to spoil it below.]

Looking down on empty streets, all she can see
Are the dreams all made solid
Are the dreams all made real

All of the buildings, all of those cars
Were once just a dream
In somebody’s head
— Peter Gabriel, “Mercy Street”

The meta-idea of planting an idea in someone’s mind, known to some as memetic engineering, is not new; however, conceptualizing the particulars of doing it undetected is. Subconscious cat-burglar Dominic Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) specializes in extracting information from slumbering vaults. After a dream-within-a-dream heist-gone-wrong, he’s offered a gig planting something in one: and idea that will grow to “transform the world and rewrite all the rules.” Cobb reminds me of Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid) in the 1984 movie Dreamscape. Gardner is able to enter the dreams of others and alter their outcomes and thereby the outcomes of “real” situations. Cobb and his team do the same by creating and sharing dreams with others. The ability to share dreams — or to enter other worlds together via dreams, computer networks, hallucinations, mirrors, lions, witches, wardrobes, what-have-you — seems to be a persistent human fantasy. Overall, Nolan does a fine job adding to that canon of stories.

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff gets theory-checked mid-film when Cobb’s partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt — standing in for Heath Ledger?) explains inception with the “don’t think of an elephant” ploy. What are you thinking about right now? Exactly. The problem is that you know why you’re thinking that right now. Successful inception requires that you think you thought of the idea yourself, independent of outside influence. It’s the artificial insemination of an original thought, “pure inspiration” in Cobb’s terms.

For better or worse, this concept (which takes the entire first act to establish), its mechanics (designer sedatives to sleep, primitive “kicks” to wake up), and the “big job” (a Lacanian catharsis culminating in the dismantling of a global empire) are just the devices that might enable the estranged Cobb to return home to his children. His late wife Mal (Marion Cotillard — standing in for Brittany Murphy?), or rather his projection thereof, haunts his dreams, jeopardizing his every job. Mal is a standout strong character and performance in a cast of (mostly; see below) strong characters and performances. She is beautiful, scary, and maintains an emotional gravity intermittently missing in this often weightless world. She is the strange attractor that tugs the chaos along. Whenever the oneiric ontology of Inception feels a bit too free-floating, Mal can always be counted on to anchor it in anger and affect.

The first time through, I thought that over-explaining the “idea” idea was the movie’s one flaw, finding myself thinking, “Okay, I get it” over and over. The second time through though, I honed in on it: The one thing preventing the concept from fully taking hold in the holiest of holies in my head is Ellen Page. Sure, she ably carried the considerable weight of Hard Candy (2005) and manhandled the tomboyish Juno (2007) to breakout success (admittedly with Michael Cera’s help), but her character and performance in Inception is the splitting seam that unstitches the dream into so many threads of sober consciousness. She’s supposed to be a brilliant architect yet simultaneously unaware of the ins-and-outs of inception and extraction, but she only believably excels at the latter. Where Keanu Reaves’ bumbling and understated Neo made The Matrix (1999) work by asking questions and pulling the viewer into the second world, Page’s clueless Ariadne drags us, the pace, and the other actors down. With the inexperienced patron Saito’s (Ken Watanabe) cues and clues to guide us through the intricacies of dream-theft, Ariadne is rendered all but unnecessary. She’s mostly redundant.

The seed of every story is a conceit, an unrealistic event or idea that the rest of the story sets out to explain. The survivors of a loved one who has committed suicide can never really know why he or she did so. The living can always see another option. If nothing else, Inception succeeds in explaining the suicide of a completely rational person, but I think it succeeds at much more than that.

Note: This post greatly benefited from discussions with and thoughts from Jessy Helms, Cynthia Usery, and Matt Morris.

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Dreaming Out Loud: Transubstantiation

Dreaming Out LoudIn 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006),* Daniel Pinchbeck extends Heisenberg’s idea that observation influences the observed into a Hegelian wordview that consciousness constitutes the core of reality, as if the physical world and our perception of it are merely two sides of the same phenomenon. Taken wholesale, it’s not quite solipsism, but it’s close. Either way, the veneer between the two is definitely permeable, but one needn’t believe in magic to see how.

The world is inseparable from the observing subject and is accordingly not objectifiable.
— Arthur March

I’ve written before about the Burkian designation of literature as “equipment for living.” As Richard Rorty puts it, “the point of reading a great many books is to become aware of a great number of alternative purposes, and the point of that is to become an autonomous self.” Virtual reality started with the first story told. Literature is a workout for your mind.

The prosifications of the greats are no more use than dumb bells under the bed if you don’t pump them. — Eddie Coffin in Tibor Fischer’s ‘The Thought Gang’

When different situations exist in your world, your brain is different. New knowledge and new stuff physically and chemically changes the make up of what’s in your head. Howard Bloom uses the example of bags used to carry things. In his “Jack the Pelican presents” lecture from 2003, he explains transubstantiation (i.e., things moving between the spiritual realm and the material world) by saying that our brains are different when different inventions exist. That is, we have different thoughts and dreams after certain ideas and innovations exist in our world (the material to the spiritual). Before bags were invented, one could only carry what would fit in one’s hands. After bags, well, it depends on the bag and one’s fortitude for carrying.

Looking down on empty streets, all she can see
Are the dreams all made solid
Are the dreams all made real

All of the buildings, all of the cars
Were once just a dream
In somebody’s head
— Peter Gabriel, “Mercy Street”

Howard also explains a dream invention that he’s had since he was a boy and how a computer company set out to make it, saying that one of his lifelong dreams will be a reality (the spiritual to the material). It’s not What the Bleep Do We Know? or The Secret, but it can be powerful — if not magical — stuff.

My first memory of something passing through the spirit/world barrier was one of my moms’ friends telling me she had a dream about a balloon tree. She managed to remember the idea and executed a version of it for her daughter’s birthday party to great effect. The next time I paid attention to the idea was when I first met Paul Barman.

Paul takes his dreams very seriously. “I always try to make my dreams come true,” he told me. “When I dream about something, if I can possibly make it happen… I mean, what better instructions could you be given?”

References:

Fischer, T. (1997). The Thought Gang. New York: Scribner.

Gabriel, P. (1986). So. Geffen Records.

Kain, P. J. (2005). Hegel and the Other: A Study of the Phenomenology of Spirit. New York: SUNY Press.

Pinchbeck, D. (2006). 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. New York: Tarcher/Penguin.

Rorty, R. (November 2, 2000). “The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture.” Retrieved from Richard Rorty’s Homepage.

* I’m finished reading it, so this is the last post about this book, I promise. Also, his is sort of a companion piece to the last post, Pumping Irony: Technology and Disconnectivity, albeit from the opposite extreme.

[“Ballon Tree” drawing by Roy Christopher]

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Reality Sandwich and Disinformation Present A Sneak Preview of 2012: Science or Superstition

From my friend Gary Baddeley at Disinformation:

Come out for a night of thought-provoking cinema and conversation on one of the most fascinating subjects of our time. On December 21st, 2012, the “Long Count” of the ancient Mayan Calendar comes to an abrupt end, finishing off a grand cycle that spans 5,125 years. Some believe it portends an apocalyptic End Times of earth-shattering cataclysms; others disagree, claiming the date as the start of a new era of enlightenment and advanced human consciousness. Continue reading “Reality Sandwich and Disinformation Present A Sneak Preview of 2012: Science or Superstition”

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Building a Mystery: Taxonomies for Creativity

In a 2005 Daniel Robert Epstein interview, Pi director Darren Aronofsky likened writing to making a tapestry: “I’ll take different threads from different ideas and weave a carpet of cool ideas together.” In the same interview, he described the way those ideas hang together in his films, saying, “every story has its own film grammar so you have to sort of figure out what the story is about and then figure out what each scene is about and then that tells you where to put the camera.” Continue reading “Building a Mystery: Taxonomies for Creativity”

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The Just Noticeable Difference

Marié Digby was lauded as the internet’s next big find, a phenomena that had grown organically through digital word-of-mouth, but the media’s multi-roomed echo chamber told on itself. Maybe it was too much, too quickly, but just after Digby’s couple of homey, simple YouTube videos started spreading online, she was featured on radio stations, MTV, iTunes, announcing that she’d been signed to Disney’s Hollywood Records. The official press release headline read, “Breakthrough YouTube Phenomenon Marié Digby Signs With Hollywood Records.” What didn’t come out until later was that her name appeared on that dotted line a year and a half previous. Her online “discovery” was orchestrated from around long, conference-room tables.

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Digby wasn’t unlimited bandwidth’s first phony phenom. YouTube’s avidly watched Lonelygirl15, a high school anygirl with a webcam, turned out to be nineteen-year-old aspiring actress Jessica Rose. She’d answered a Craigslist ad for an independent film, landed the part, and — after the “directors” did a bit of explaining — became Lonelygirl15. There was no product attached to the project, but all involved made names for themselves and are now well-represented in Hollywood.
lonelygirl15
These two stories are postmodern-day examples of what it takes to break through our media-mad all-at-once-ness and get noticed, to float some semblance of signal in a sea of noise. To experience the new is really just to notice a difference. In psychophysics it’s called the just noticeable difference (the “jnd”). Creating that difference is becoming more and more difficult as the tide of noise rises higher and higher.

Where Hollywood records and the Lonelygirl15 crew manipulated an emerging media channel, Miralus Healthcare took the opposite tack with their HeadOn headache remedy. They took one look at new media and ran the opposite direction. The original HeadOn television spot, which some ironically claim induces headaches, looks like a print ad and sounds like a broken record. But it worked. The commercial stood in such stark contrast to everything else on TV that the product is known worldwide.

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It is sometimes claimed that technology makes it so that anyone can perform a certain task, like Photoshop made everyone an artist or Pro Tools made everyone a record producer. We make or tools and our tools make us (as Marshall McLuhan once said), but our tools do not make us great.

The idea that the internet and Pro Tools and — whatever else the advent and proliferation of the computer hath wrought — enables anyone to be an artist is both true and false. True, everyone has the tools to do so, but so few people have the talent. The latter is and always will be the case.

New technologies are normalizing events. Think of it like a crosstown street race where the traffic signals are normalizing events. One might be in the lead for a good bit of the ride, but as soon as everyone is stopped at a traffic light, the race effectively starts over. By way of convoluted analogy, one might be “ahead” in the home production process until Soundforge’s new software hits the scene.

Sure, there are people making money producing music who are not that good, but that doesn’t mean that anyone can compete with Dr. Dre just because he or she sets up a MySpace page and posts some loops from Acid. I’ve heard this argument so often lately, that anyone can cut-and-paste a record together and become a producer. If that were true, then why does Dr. Dre even have a career? Simple: Because he’s good at what he does. Let everyone try it!

Yes, building a name is a huge part of this and one person’s bloated name can overshadow someone else’s immense talents, but the proliferation of tools and channels does not dilute the fact that it takes talent, skills, work, and chance — as an artist and a marketer — to get noticed. Computers, the internet, weblogs, and everything else haven’t made everyone a great writer and killed authors’ careers.

DJ Scratch nailed it when he said, “The reason we respect something as an art is because it’s hard as fuck to do.” Good production, good writing, and good marketing are still hard to do — and it’s getting harder and harder to get them noticed. New tools and new channels don’t change the talent and effort it takes to capture the attention and the imagination of the masses, but a new twist here or there can make the just noticeable difference, and that can be all the difference in the world.

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Commercial Art: Belvedere Vodka

Something about this Belvedere Vodka commercial has haunted me since its constant airing during the holidays last year. I must’ve seen it fifty times. I’m not shilling for Belvedere here. Hell, I’ve never even tasted the stuff, but I can’t get this ad out of my head.

Vodka

Directed by the chronically flannel-wearing fashion photographer Terry Richardson, the spot is set in a self-consciously “downtown” party featuring Richardson himself snapping pictures of fellow party-goers, including actor/director Vincent Gallo and graff artist Earsnot. The soundtrack, which sounds drunk itself, was composed by Gallo and The RZA.

It’s obvious by the parties involved that Belvedere is trying to position itself as the hippest vodka at the party. So obvious in fact, so over-the-top, that it ceases to matter. The ad-overdosed cynic in us all sees Gallo greet guests and scrawl a face on a painting with a marker, Earsnot saunter in with a hottie on his arm, Richardson blatantly snapping his point-and-shoot, Gallo under the piano with some woman, RZA mumbling over a drunken bassline, and it’s all so contrived…

…but, it’s also so cool. there is something qualitative about this ad that nails exactly what I think Belvedere was shooting for when they conceived it. Somehow all of this pretense, all of this obvious posturing, gives us a thirty-second glimpse into the world of cool. Somehow, the ad works.

The problem with advertising in general is that it’s ineffective. That’s why it’s everywhere. As much as the industry tries to quantify and coordinate dollars to sales, theirs is a qualitative enterprise. Did Belvedere sell more vodka because of this commercial? No idea, but it’s rare occasions like this that we see the art of advertising shine.

Here’s the commercial in question (runtime: 0:30):

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Amen, Brother

V. Vale sent this out in his most recent newsletter (thanks, Vale). It’s a mini-documentary of a six-second drum break from the B-side of a Winstons’ record, a track called “Amen Brother,” that’s been sampled, looped, and reapproriated — by everyone from N.W.A. to car manufacturers — since its release in 1969. This is Nate Harrison’s meditation on that break, the “Amen Break.” It is “Amazing Grace” to his Bill Moyers, and this is a deep monologue on the ownership of cultural artifacts, the legality of sampling, and this six seconds of recorded history. Continue reading “Amen, Brother”