In a brilliant interview with Wired, SuperGenius Susan Blackmore reveals how we are no longer in control of our memes:
You can in the early stages of a new meme
drag it back and stop it. If you know that only two or three other
people know something you can stop them from spreading it. Or if a book
has been written, you can burn the paper that it’s written on. But once
a meme has been let loose in the population, you can’t take it back.What culture is doing, what the memesphere is doing, is taking
a human being and infecting it with masses of new information and
exploiting its tendencies. We are being turned from ordinary
old-fashioned meme machines into what I call “teme” machines –
machines for copying technological information, spreading photos and
printed words and digital files.We can choose to turn our computer off if we want to (stop
from absorbing and spreading some memes). But we as a species are not
in control of the internet. We are not in control of the growth of new
media. And we are getting less and less able to control what goes on
out there.What I believe is happening now is that true teme machines are
arriving — that is, machines that copy and produce variations and then
select. That’s what you need for an evolutionary process; that’s
natural selection.Up until very recently in the world of memes, humans did all
the varying and selecting. We had machines that copied — photocopiers,
printing presses — but only very recently do we have artificial
machines that also produce the variations, for example (software that)
mixes up ideas and produces an essay or neural networks that produce
new music and do the selecting. There are machines that will choose
which music you listen to. It’s all shifting that way because evolution
by natural selection is inevitable. There’s a shift to the machines
doing all of that.We’re not there yet. But once we’re there, there’s going to be evolution of memes out there that is totally out of our control.
If
what Blackmore argues is coming true — how fast will the “malicious
meme” come into being to infect, and destroy, the mind and body?
How soon will the “malicious meme” be militarized for use as the ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction?
