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On Memetics, Basic Income, and the Future
Our brains are hardwired for memetic resilience, cultural ecosystems that bounce back from perturbation and disturbance, shaped through natural selection. The success and continuation of a culture is rooted in it´s ability to absorb disturbance and re-organize. Our brains are parts of a larger system - our memes are not our own - and any change in our environment, such as the birth of a new technology, triggers a butterfly-effect of darwinian adaptation. Democracy was a natural response to a more complex social structure, and now in this present moment, when we´re all online, we´re seeing similar adaptations take place as those of the past. When everyone is as connected as everyone else, when YOU tube, we adapt to a more hyper-connected information ecology, one in which the ability to create and broadcast cultural value - memes - is in everybody´s hands. The tools that will allow us to leverage that full potential of the internet are here, on this site. Enjoy. Create your own realiTTy, YOU are the Future - join the reVoluTioN How to Create Resilience
The internet, and TCP/IP-protocols, are the perfect metaphor for social networks of brains, because that´s how brains work. The hardware that transmits packages of culture - memes - is a computer. We are information technology too. So, whatever feedback loops our internet-like minds exist within become reality and personalities. Chimpanzees and bonobo brains are the best analogy for how "changing the resource environment from artificial scarcity to abundance influences primate culture". (1) Chimpz live in scarcity, they´re hierarchical, memes spread down from central nodes. Bonobos live in abundance, they´re distributed, flat, TCP/IP, and their memes spread like internet-memes. "...I´ve argued that a basic income is really a memetic technology, that changes how we perceive the boundaries between ourselves, it decreases the costs of empathy and connectivity. It´s a p2p-technology that decreases the need for hierarchical narratives, and it will fundamentally transform a society´s memetic environment." (1) resilience.me
It´s almost impossible to plant an idea, as Chistopher Nolan says in Inception. It has to find its place in people´s reality, and the more alien the idea, the more complicated it is to get it in there. To get an idea like that which Darklight writes about to spread, it would have to be packaged. Then, as an artist, how can I inform your subjective experience ? How can I get you to see what I see ? How do I pattern a meme - a story - so that it spreads and reveals another truth ? "P2P-dividend protocols will do for neural information - memes - what the TCP/IP protocols did for digital information. That´s the pattern we´re dealing with." (1) The beauty of a meme is that once it´s found something of a character, it can mutate back and forth, but it will still retain that essence that the artist put into it. The story continues to reflect the patterns it came to reveal. The Birth of a Meme
If I could get one moment of global social media attention, one chance to speak honestly, to show others how I see the world, give them a chance to assimilate and mimic my ideas, knowledge, behavior - memes - I would share my almost visceral awareness that, "...a #basicincome will optimize the distribution of resources, and optimize our ability to co-create along the principles of #collectiveintelligence I need you to see what I see, feel what I feel, to assimilate my memes, learn, share, replicate. We are dealing with the medium of information, and we are but a brief expression of code set in motion long ago. The medium is the message, the message memes - neural patterns, perceptual experiences, visceral awareness.
Mimic me, feel with me, remember me. Think about it, talk about it, tweet about it, broadcast it, share it, establish it. Reality is made of Memes
I´ve been fascinated by the role of relationships in the neuro-architechture of our brain. Again, the brain is a "multi-cellular" organ, it only makes sense in a group-network perspective. The brain is not an encapsulated, isolated, autonomously functioning organ, but part of a group-network body. (1) That´s why people have used metaphors like that for like forever. I haven´t really bothered to manifest my thoughts, since the exponential rate of technological evolution will provide a lens into all this, eventually, as the singularity peers down on us from space, and broadcasts it´s visions into our minds, through our optic nerve. But, again, the mirroring capacity of social networks, a body of brains, is the pattern. That´s what we are. The evolution of mind is an ongoing process, and after a brain has stretched to accomodate an idea, expanded it´s conscious horizon, it won´t deflate back again. But the ideas need to be mirrored in others, it´s a selection system, a way to focus attention on what´s relevant, to create a reality - consciousness - that´s relevant. A body of minds is better at extracting and distilling the stream of information they face, then a single mind. Loneliness is deleterious, because the brain becomes disconnected from it´s protective body, an immune system of minds, meme-anti-bodies. That´s why - to tie into my work with http://resilience.me - conflict evolved to hurt so much. I´ve seen so many people brake because the world sacrificed them, and I don´t want to be part of that, because in each and every one of them, I saw myself. "A revealing pattern is how rejection can hurt so bad, that you literarily don´t want to live anymore. The social feedback that another person doesn´t want you in the world, elicits an apoptopic effect. The neural circuitry of your brain literarily deletes itself. References
(1) Nygren, Johan (2013), How to Create Resilience, SpaceCollective |
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