In today’s world, memes are more than just viral internet content; they are the unseen building blocks of thought, identity, and culture.
We live in the cusp of a new world being accessed. This world is part of our world, it’s a parallel reality. The world of ideas; memes. The term “meme” was an attempt to signify the atomic nature of ideas and to highlight their replicative nature. What if there are more complex memetic structures we can analyse and understand? What if we can map the whole behavioural genome (memome) of a person? What if we can look at a society/culture through the lens of population memetics? How does inbreeding affect memetic drift? Do all memes code for some kind of expression or behaviour or are there non-coding memes?
Memetic Engineering was taken to the next level with the development of infinite scrolling content streams and content recommendation algorithms. Never ending streams of content, each piece picked by an algorithm that can predict what you like to watch and when you’d like to watch it, optimised to monopolise your attention and sell you things. With LLMs, the content doesn’t need to be produced by humans anymore and can be customised to your personalised psychological profile.
We input our whole lives into these AIs, we are handing them our whole identities and inner worlds. Psychoanalysis and therapy, often tools for understanding the human condition, are now supercharged and made available for cheap to a much wider slice of the population, raising concerns regarding the potential of population control and memetic warfare. Those effects being either intentionally designed in by the creators of the AI’s, or in an even scarier scenario, they could be emergent behaviours.
We need to build open source defences so the owners of techno-capital do not use it to psyop the population and pushing their agendas and prescribed culture. We need to take over the tools of healing and use them to heal ourselves and to heal collective organisms that we create. Cooperatives, research collectives, worker unions. We can’t have such power wielded exclusively by the elite. We need to democratise the data collection, the training algorithms, the data centres, and the inference.
A new dangerous term has emerged in the field: eumemics. The cultivation of memes only approved by a specific authority through control of how ideas spread. With more and more people getting their information through conversing with AIs, we risk facing unprecedented levels of wide spread censorship and semantic narrowing of the population’s memome.
People will only read generated material soon. News filtered through models. Emails filtered and turned into bullet points. Books summarised by models. Even this Manifesto is partly generated. Models have such power over us. Whoever controls the models controls the letters in your typewriter. Humans have one and only one card to play left. Keep evolving language. Find ways to accelerate language evolution faster than the models can keep up. Our last line of defence: Illegibility.
This is an area of research way to big for any single person to explore alone, especially because we need a new working theory asap. I believe that the development of a theory that governs internet communications based on memetics and cybernetics will be central to the development of synthetic intelligent life and to the understanding of the individual and collective human psyche. We can not build what we do not understand.
Memetics is the new frontier of science, and battles will be fought around it. The stakes are high. Memetics can be used for evil and it can be used for good.
Choose good.
-emergentvibe