Memeticists trying to sell memetics as something more than it is have hurt the field's reputation among scientists. It's like doing a mass immunization against memetics using weakened strains of memetics.
~~ Aaron Lynch [1]

Steal This Idea!

During a recent interview, I asked Douglas Rushkoff what he thought of Seth Godin's book Unleashing the Idea Virus. "That book that bastardized Media Virus?" replied Rushkoff.

Touted in a Fast Company article, Unleashing the Idea Virus had applied a weakened form of memetics--the science of how discrete units of information propagate themselves across our ecologies of mind--to the areas of one-to-one and persuasion marketing. Godin's thoughts found a receptive corporate audience, fascinated with the latest scientific research into marketing and interface design techniques. An audience, Rushkoff believed, that was unaware of the counterculture legacy of his early books Cyberia (1994) and Media Virus (1994), and also unaware of some crucial literary precursors to memetics.

Although the zoologist Richard Dawkins is usually credited with coining the term 'meme' in his book The Selfish Gene (1976), the idea of a cultural unit of information had been proposed by others, including sociologist Gabriel Tarde [2] and Belgian essayist Maurice Maeterlinck. [3] Dawkins later expressed surprise at the growth of the meta-meme of memetics, which has inspired Internet subcultures like the Church of Virus, explaining that "the original didactic purpose of the meme was the negative one of cutting the selfish gene down to size." [4]

The True Roots of Viral Marketing

Somewhere in the twilight zone of the Internet, the nascent science of memetics morphed from a Kuhnian scientific revolution into just another marketing tool to sell Nokia phones, Pokemon trading cards, and Speed Seduction to the masses. This is because advertising executives aren't usually aware of the scientific research that preceded their 'latest' business idea (if they are aware, the research is applied without its public disclosure). Steve Jurvetson of the investment firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson is widely touted in the business press as the creator of Viral Marketing. At the height of the late-1990s Dotcom era, Jurvetson refused to give venture capital to any firm that did not feature a viral marketing component within its business plan. Along with the 30% Tipping Point and the 80/20 Rule, the concept of Viral Marketing came into the business vernacular as lightweight science for the post-Fordist manager. Yet the self-replicating structures and viral properties of memes and chain letters was discussed by Douglas Hofstadter in a Scientific American column (January 1983), long before Jurvetson had ever heard of memetics or viral marketing. [5]

Counterculture and Literary Precursors

In-depth research into the countercultural precursors and literary parallels to Dawkins' memetics unearths some intriguing historical metapatterns.

Historical romance novelist Robert W. Chamber's short story collection The King in Yellow (1895) was the model for H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon, a fictional book that has inspired countless horror books and films, role-playing games, and rumor panics. Chambers' stories explored the unsettling psychological effects wrought by a mysterious tome that "spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists." [6] The mysterious tome spread itself via a memetic basis: also note Chamber's viral metaphor.

George Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson (1950) explored Sumerian and Zoroasterian mythic constructs beneath complex neologisms assembled from combinations of Armenian, Russian, French, and English dialects. Anthony Starr suggested that this 'artificial language' was a sign that "we hover on the borderline between confidence trickery and psychosis," [7] unaware of Gurdjieff's familiarity with avant-garde literary styles and neurophysiologist Vladimir Bekhterev's research into the brain and conditioned reflexes at Kars Military Academy. [8] Gurdjieff conceived memetics as part of a biopsychosociospiritual system, proposing the 'legominism' as a form in which "ancient wisdom is [culturally] transmitted beneath a form ostensibly intended for quite a different purpose." [9] Anticipating Dawkins' examples, Gurdjieff suggested that these truths encompassed architecture, archaeological artefacts, dance, and mythic folklore. [10] He believed that this knowledge was "not preserved in books but in the experiences of people." [11]

The Virus-Eye View

Perhaps the most well-known literary precursor to Dawkins' definition of memetics is the Algebra of Need formulated by William S. Burroughs. Although his cavalier lifestyle and counterculture status has overshadowed his multimedia experiments, Burroughs studied with Alfred Korzybski (who formulated General Semantics and E-Prime), and was a fierce critic of Scientology's psycho-linguistic games. Burroughs' interest in epigenetic (brain) and cultural (memetic) evolution as the basis of contemporary advertising techniques anticipated Howard Bloom's research that the co-evolution of language and brain contains viral elements. [12]

William S. Burroughs proposed the theory, during a 1968 interview with French journalist Daniel Odier "that in the electronic revolution a virus is a very small unit of word and image. I have suggested how such units can be biologically activated to act as communicable virus strains." [13]

By acknowledging the importance of "the virus-eye view", [14] Burroughs also anticipated how 'meme warfare' advocates like Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn would fight the post-millennial deluge of advertising and public relations imagery. Burroughs called upon social activists to "mix your own linguistic virus." [15] Like a postmodern Mad Scientist, his early experiments with scrambling patterns, lifecycles, and laboratory-made viruses also embraced early neurology research. [16]

In 1959 the author CP Snow warned, during the annual Cambridge 'Rede' lecture, that society was divided between the Two Cultures of humanities and the hard sciences. As the strange metamorphosis of memetics also shows, the postmodern business environment faces another divide: the academic and scientific research into human behavior and motivations, and the misapplication by managerial elites for mass behavioral coercion and niche-market control. Unauthorized biopsychosociospiritual systems applications--from Dr. Michael A. Aquino's creation of the Yuggothic language for Anton LaVey's Satanic Rituals (1972) and Genesis P-Orridge's perceptual engineering career to John Shirley's stories and Living Universe Foundation's long-term vision--have created a shadowy Third Culture that has acted as a buffer between these two bipolar extremes.

Hopefully the next 200 years will see the Faustian promise of memetics is fulfilled by those who can identify the core memes and self-replicating structures within a culture, and then ethically use this knowledge of our cultural memepool to regenerate a dynamic planetary civilization (but perhaps I've fallen prey to over-selling the meta-meme of memetics). We must overcome our retreat into image-junk.

Endnotes:

[1] Aaron Lynch (personal email, September 22, 1999).

[2] Paul Marsden. "Forefathers of Memetics: Gabriel Tarde and the Laws of Imitation." Journal of Memetics – Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission (June 2000, Vol. 4, No. 1).

[3] John Laurent. "A Note on the Origin of 'Memes'/'Mnemes'." Journal of Memetics – Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission (June 1999, Vol. 3, No. 1).

[4] Susan Blackmore. The Meme Machine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. p. xiv.

[5] Douglas Hofstadter. Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern. New York: Basic Books, 1985. pp. 49-69, 53.

[6] Robert W. Chambers. The King in Yellow. New York: F. Tennyson Neely, 1895. p. 5.

[7] Anthony Storr. Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinners, and Madmen. London: HarperCollins, 1996. p. 36.

[8] James Webb. The Harmonious Circle: The Lives of G.I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers. London: Thames & Hudson, 1980. p. 82.

[9] John Godolphin Bennett. Gurdjieff: Making A 'New World.' New York: Harper & Row, 1973. p. 22.

[10] George Gurdjieff. Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950. p. 16.

[11] John Godolphin Bennett. Ibid. p. 66.

[12] Howard Bloom. Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2000. pp. 61-62.

[13] William S. Burroughs with Daniel Odier. The Job: Topical Writings and Interviews. London: Calder, 1984. p. 14.

[14] William S. Burroughs with Daniel Odier. Ibid. p. 12.

[15] William S. Burroughs with Daniel Odier. Ibid. p. 106.