Soul Bound

1        Soul Bound

1.1      Finding her Feet

1.1.3    An Eventful Journey

1.1.3.6  Sharpe Lecture: Memes

She was a meme now? She wondered how it would change over time. She remembered back to the lecture when she’d first really learned about them. When she entered the lecture theatre there had been a picture on the projector screen of a cat underneath the title “I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER?”. Alderney was wearing a cat ear headband that day, and Kafana remembered the way she went and sat in the front row. Even then, she’d been so full of energy and enthusiasm. She hadn’t changed a bit since then. If anything she’d become more intensely and exaggeratedly herself, almost a self-parody, as though sticking a big finger up at reality saying “I’m going to live my life my way, come what may.” Kafana had admired that about her, and made a point of getting to know her better. They’d become firm friends, although never roommates. Kafana wasn’t that brave. Alderney’s room tended to be an unintentional death trap, and the walls frequently vibrated to her speaker system which she frequently tinkered with and ‘improved’.

Dr. Sharpe arrived and started speaking:

“Today we’re going to talk about something you think you know, but which most of you don’t. Memes. That image on the board?” he clicked onto the next slide, a rat-a-tat-tat sound filled the theatre, cartoon red bullet holes appeared in the image which split in two and ‘fell’ to the bottom of the screen. “Forget that image. Forget, for the moment, the whole idea of pictures posted on the net. Instead, let’s talk about biology.”

“172 years ago, back in 1859, the English naturalist, Charles Darwin, published a book On the Origin of Species. He didn’t protest in a street, he wasn’t violent, but nothing that you or I do will ever have as profound an effect upon society and the status quo, as that one action of his. Provable truth is, in the end, more powerful than any slogans, deceits or spin.”

“Darwin introduced the concept of evolution in the biological context of how new species come into being. But the concept is more general than that. It applies to every system that matches the following tenets.”

Variation : The system must contain members who do not all have identical values for all their properties.

Inheritance : New members must be generated from a subset of the existing members in such a way that, on average, the property values of a new member are more strongly correlated with the property values of the particular existing members used to generate that new member than they are with those of the existing members not used.

Selection : Some of the property values that can vary between members must have a chance of affecting the expected number of ‘offspring’ that the value gets passed onto.

Mutation : A mechanic must exist within the system for generating new variants of property values, or even new properties.

“We can look at biological evolution from several different perspectives. Think of a herd of horses. Not all the horses in the herd look the same. Variation! Foals mostly take after their parents. Just by looking at a herd, you can often work out which horses are mostly closely related to which other ones. Inheritance! Not all horses are equally good at running away from danger. The faster foals are less likely to get eaten by predators and so live long enough to sire foals of their own. Selection! Sometimes random molecular activity during DNA replication leads to horses being born to a herd that have properties which none of their ancestors have. Mutation!”

“We can also look at it from the point of view of the individual stretches of DNA called genes, and the variations in those stretches called alleles. We can think of affecting the phenotype of a horse as being an allele’s way of creating more copies of itself. Imagine a science fiction film in which cities use giant robots to fight against each other in battles lasting hundreds of years. Robots so large that, when the cities were destroyed, the people started living inside the robots, the Jones family controlling the left foot, the Davy family controlling the left knee, the Barnes family controlling the left hip, and so on.”

“If the families didn’t cooperate sufficiently, their robot would get blown up and they’d all die. But, within those constraints, if the Jones family wanted to expand, they’d have to displace some of the Davy family members. So, when the annual maintenance shutdown occurred, they might try to persuade the council of all families in that robot that they could do a better job of controlling the knee than the Davy family could.”

“When you get deeply into the biology, you can actually see genes in a body competing against each other, organs working together but also sometimes taking over the jobs of others which then shrink. Only, instead of the decision mechanism being a rational decision by the council, their means is trial and error - children are born with mutations. Give birth to them and then see which die. Everyone here is a mutant. Most mutations are neutral and, of the rest, only a very few turn out to have some advantages in specific environments over previously tested designs.”

“It is a bit like Ferrari creating a new model to sell by telling the designers: ‘draw a thousand new designs by making random alterations to our existing top selling production model; we’ll construct them all, drive them, and see which crash. Of the ones that don’t crash, we’ll pick three survivors then repeat the process.’ Incredibly wasteful, and not cost effective for car manufacturers, but if you did it 100,000 times, you might just come up with something slightly better selling in one market than the current best seller.”

“On a larger scale, whole groups of organisms, such as ecosystems, can be seen as competing against each other. A jungle of trees and tigers and birds and insects, whose collective behaviour serves to spread the trees to nearby areas and protect those trees from invaders.”

“On a smaller scale, the smallest biological gene-carrying organism capable of evolving isn’t a mouse or even unicellular organisms such as marine diatoms. The flu virus has just 8 genes. It doesn’t carry the code for its own replication machinery. Instead it is a parasite that invades the cells of other organisms in order to steal time on the cell’s own replicator.”

He paused, and took a sip of water.

“Has everybody here heard the term ‘computer virus’? Yes, good.”

“Well computer code being hosted and executed on a network of computers is a system in which we also see evolution take place. Not all computer viruses are the same. Variation! A computer virus infiltrates a computer and replicates, spreading to others computers. Inheritance! Computer viruses get changed, whether through chance or due to crackers fiddling with their code. Mutation! Not all variations are equally good at infiltration and replication. Selection!”

“But the system obeying our four tenets that I’m going to focus upon today is 'ideas that people think about'.”

“There is more than one idea. Variation!”

“Ideas can be passed on, from the mind of one person to the mind of someone else; whether through conversation, writing a book or many other means. Inheritance!”

“Some ideas are better than others at affecting the minds of people in ways that result in the people wanting to pass the ideas on. Some people like to tell their friends about ideas they find amusing. Others pass on ideas they think will help their friends. Or shock them. Or make them respect the sender. Or cause them to take an action the sender approves of, such as giving to a worthy charity. The more categories an idea ticks, and the more strongly it ticks it, the more people an ‘infected’ individual is likely to pass it onto. The simplest ‘viral’ ideas are ones which explicitly say “Pass me on”, such as chain letters that threaten the person with bad luck if they don’t pass the letter on. Selection!”

“People receiving an idea often don’t pass it on in precisely the same form. They spin it differently. They simplify or embellish it. They add data, or combine it with other ideas to form a hybrid. It’s like playing Chinese whispers with a shaggy dog story. Mutation!”

“And, just like with biology, we can look at this phenomena in a variety of ways. One person quipped that people are just books way of creating new books. What is a book? A narrative composed of tropes. What is a manifesto? A collection of policies. Just as unicellular organisms can benefit from grouping together, and eventually form symbiotic links so strong that multicellular life appeared, memes can group together in mutually beneficial packages (such as belief systems) that act as a vehicle for reproduction in the same way that an individual horse acts as a way for that horse’s genes to reproduce.”

Sharpe stopped abruptly and paused until everyone had realised he’d stopped.

“By now many of you are wondering why I’m wittering on at such length about biology in a lecture about effective political action. Is it really that necessary to know all this background, that the word ‘meme’ was coined in 1976 by the British biologist Richard Dawkins as a parallel to the word ‘gene’, which it rhymes with?”

“There’s lots more I could tell you but instead let me show you the value to you of knowing the history, and then you can go find out more about it in your own time.”

“Two weeks ago, we started an experiment that made use of simple stand-alone memes: an image plus a tag line. Make the combination interesting enough, and people who see it may decide to spread it for you. It was hard, wasn’t it? It if was easy, everybody would do it. You are competing for mind-share, for people’s attention, against other lolcat-style memes that have already ‘won’ in competition against millions of others that are now no longer remembered. That’s like a goldfish trying to fight a team of sharks. The goldfish might get lucky at first, but the odds it will win in the end are low.”

“But now suppose we apply what we’ve learned here today. Suppose each week the teams on the left hand side of the room got together to compare which variants of their memes had increased their propagation by the highest percentage over the previous 6 days, then took the three most successful and created hybrids and slightly mutated variants from them, before re-launching that next generation. Suppose the right hand side of the room looked for existing successful memes, and picked several they thought were compatible with the ‘payload’ message they wanted to deliver, then tried combining them into a package which hit the big three ‘keep the package intact’, ‘spread the package’, ‘be influenced by the payload’. Suppose we draw inspiration from the way the flu virus takes particular care to affect the nose because the nose can be made to sneeze so it is extra-good at spreading the virus - suppose we design the infiltration aspect of the meme to appeal specifically to a particular group of individuals known to be in the habit of spreading memes onwards such as journalists or popular bloggers or members of parliament, by adding in a ‘win’ that applies to such groups.”

“The process I’m talking about here is sometimes known as ‘memetic engineering’. The first country to consciously make practical use of these techniques over the net to alter the course of politics was Russia, more than 20 years ago. It can be learned. It can be effective.”

“Next week we’ll talk about controlling the narrative, setting the agenda, network effects and tipping points. Why politicians fly kites, and how to turn the tables on them.”

Drat. She was a meme now. Or at least, there was an image of her out there, a narrative about her and her meaning in the context of society, that was spreading and probably already starting to change. Kafana sighed.