It's easy to get caught up in information flows, and assess how the state of the world aligns with your values. It's much harder to propagate your values into the world. Just worrying sometimes feels like you're doing something, when you're not. It's a shame that most of us are so disempowered that tuning out is probably the best option for our individual wellbeing.
I realised Social media was a memetic parasite right from the start when I could feel the urge to take a photo of something, rather than just enjoy it rising in my consciousness.
People felt the urge to take pictures rather than just enjoying things long before social media. Many of us enjoy the photography process itself, and we like to share our art with friends.
I just made a dark room in my bathroom last week to try black and white photo paper developing. The slow hard treacherous process is giving me a new appreciation for photography of the past.
I guess I do remember people talking a disposable camera to a party and then personally giving the prints to their friends weeks later. What I found in the mid 2000s was this new thought of 'what photo to take' and 'what caption to write' , Like I was my own publicist. always in an imaginary conversation with people who weren't actually around, which is more a hallmark of loneliness than of touted 'being connected to the things and people I love' ...
Observe, that today memes do not require the host to be alive. One could boast of a diet on YouTube, die of it a few days in and the videos would happily live on.
In your example at least the recipient is alive, but in fact I wonder if one could argue that with machine learning models training on web data, a meme can now perform an entire reproductive cycle without a human in the loop.
If not now, in the future yes. I believe I've discussed just that possibly on HN. The creation of a virtual social media around a person that drives them to extreme or insane positions. Just imagine a set of bots that gives a very positive response to oddly coloured cats. At first you post 'normal' cats with odd patterns, but then then you find that unnaturally coloured cats get an even better response. Could we actually see a person dying their white cat cyan for fake internet responses and positive affirmations that are completely disconnected from human reality? I believe yes, and that its probably already happened.
The videos age as well though. They aren't necessarily always in their prime, so its impact does tend to get reduced over time. so not "happily living on".
Interesting model. I have found the meme model a useful thing in the past but have not distinguished things except by their transmissibility and energy consumption. The meme parasite model is an interesting way to distinguish "harmful" memes from good ones.
Currently, I suspect parasitic memes have lots of room to flourish because we keep people alive who are hosts. There is very little selection pressure.
But that is because we are in a time of unbelievable prosperity, a Stable Era. I believe that as other countries catch up, we will enter a Chaotic Era. The real pressures will pop up then and either a massive gap will yawn between those with many meme parasites or the ones with meme parasites will follow their directive to eat those without.
Not to sound like an accelerationist but since I'd prefer that parasitic memes die out, I hope that the chaos comes fast, so that even if I am heavily infected the coming purge wipes me so that Clean Humanity may survive. If we wait too long, too many of us may be infected, and we may win but doom us all to a local optimum.
And as Toby Ord argues in The Precipice, that would be a terrible end.
Connection refused is likely that the site was "nullrouted" (not really, but don't have a better term) by a hosting provider after HN hug and not crumbled under load itself (usually you experience very long response times, which would then often be a 5xx error). Wall of shame: https://www.whoishostingthis.com/#search=apxhard.com (Dreamhost).
What surprises me about habits like watching news or scrolling Facebook is that people don't get bored by it. Because this is our failsafe mechanism for not falling into repetitive loops.
And I get the appeal of most of these things. When I was an adolescent I had this or other 24h info network on most of the time on a tv in my room. I spent nights arguing with people on Usenet.
But after a few months or maybe a year or two, I would get bored with them. Yet people can keep going for decades. Why is their memetic immune system not firing up?
Casual social interaction argumentative or otherwise is natural. I mean it's not like we're by nature solitary animals who sit in our rooms and ponder the mysteries of the universe for ten hours. That's just a nerdy hobby of a minority of people who write blogs like that.
Every day when I go to work (pre-covid anyway) I used to chat with the middle-aged lady living next door and we'd talk about the weather or the news or whatever, and there's nothing new about it but it's enjoyable. I've heard someone argue it's like a low-key reality check, sort of like people pinging each other checking if everything's still in tune.
Not too long ago we used to congregate in large communities and extended families for much of the day, and for the last few decades we've locked ourselves in cubicles and single family homes. My grandmother had 8 siblings and three generations living in one home, there was always something to talk about or get in a fight with. It's no wonder most people are yearning for a sort of casual background chat.
The other side never tires, and it always offers something new. This novelty is different to a conversation with a real (or virtual) human that will tire or run out of new content which leads to natural boredom.
The effort is also smaller. Bite size interactions are easy to digest and "just one more" whereas starting a new movie or TV show has a larger mental hurdle.
It also has elements of gambling. What's in the news feed mystery box this time? Refresh and see. It does not have to be good every time. Intermittent reinforcement takes care of that. In this respect it has a lot in common with many video games.
Those who are alive have genes that have survived billions of generations due to our ancestors' habitual vigilance for predators, prey and mates. We are hardwired to scan the world for those, whatever the channel. Our predecessors who got bored too quickly by massively repetitive scenery were less likely to become our ancestors.
I agree with much of this article. I looked at the twitter output of an acquaintance a couple of days back and after literally 60 seconds I felt my mind becoming a stew of frustraion and anxiety -- i agreed with many of the points and retweets and slogans but to what end? On the other hand I'm dubious of effective altruism as a model for improving the world it seems to me it has very little chance of creating necessary structural change. Charitable giving is great but why as a society should we be subject to the whims of individual philanthropists -- often gross benneficiaries exisiting power structures.
> Charitable giving is great but why as a society should we be subject to the whims of individual philanthropists -- often gross benneficiaries exisiting power structures.
This is an interesting framing. What form of social organization would make it so that altruistic behavior was not a result of the whims of people in extant power structures? It seems tautologous that if someone has the power to allocate funds, they are the current beneficiary of the extant power structure.
> why as a society should we be subject to the whims of individual philanthropists
Well, what do the alternatives look like? It's not like powerful politicians aren't self-aggrandizing; I'm sure many of them would like to effect structural change, but the structural change they want is probably pretty suspect. Nor is it the case that "political majorities", writ large, have an untarnished reputation for gentleness and decency.
I dont really believe the altruism model will work myself, at least with our current society and the power memes have over people.
CGP Grey's, This video will make you angry really gives a lot of insight into the nearly biological nature of memes and the selection process that goes into the ones that we end up seeing.
Readit News
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Currently, I suspect parasitic memes have lots of room to flourish because we keep people alive who are hosts. There is very little selection pressure.
But that is because we are in a time of unbelievable prosperity, a Stable Era. I believe that as other countries catch up, we will enter a Chaotic Era. The real pressures will pop up then and either a massive gap will yawn between those with many meme parasites or the ones with meme parasites will follow their directive to eat those without.
Not to sound like an accelerationist but since I'd prefer that parasitic memes die out, I hope that the chaos comes fast, so that even if I am heavily infected the coming purge wipes me so that Clean Humanity may survive. If we wait too long, too many of us may be infected, and we may win but doom us all to a local optimum.
And as Toby Ord argues in The Precipice, that would be a terrible end.
Deleted Comment
And I get the appeal of most of these things. When I was an adolescent I had this or other 24h info network on most of the time on a tv in my room. I spent nights arguing with people on Usenet.
But after a few months or maybe a year or two, I would get bored with them. Yet people can keep going for decades. Why is their memetic immune system not firing up?
Every day when I go to work (pre-covid anyway) I used to chat with the middle-aged lady living next door and we'd talk about the weather or the news or whatever, and there's nothing new about it but it's enjoyable. I've heard someone argue it's like a low-key reality check, sort of like people pinging each other checking if everything's still in tune.
Not too long ago we used to congregate in large communities and extended families for much of the day, and for the last few decades we've locked ourselves in cubicles and single family homes. My grandmother had 8 siblings and three generations living in one home, there was always something to talk about or get in a fight with. It's no wonder most people are yearning for a sort of casual background chat.
The other side never tires, and it always offers something new. This novelty is different to a conversation with a real (or virtual) human that will tire or run out of new content which leads to natural boredom.
The effort is also smaller. Bite size interactions are easy to digest and "just one more" whereas starting a new movie or TV show has a larger mental hurdle.
It also has elements of gambling. What's in the news feed mystery box this time? Refresh and see. It does not have to be good every time. Intermittent reinforcement takes care of that. In this respect it has a lot in common with many video games.
This is an interesting framing. What form of social organization would make it so that altruistic behavior was not a result of the whims of people in extant power structures? It seems tautologous that if someone has the power to allocate funds, they are the current beneficiary of the extant power structure.
Well, what do the alternatives look like? It's not like powerful politicians aren't self-aggrandizing; I'm sure many of them would like to effect structural change, but the structural change they want is probably pretty suspect. Nor is it the case that "political majorities", writ large, have an untarnished reputation for gentleness and decency.
As a society we can be changed by individual people. I would prefer to retain that, yes.
CGP Grey's, This video will make you angry really gives a lot of insight into the nearly biological nature of memes and the selection process that goes into the ones that we end up seeing.
https://youtu.be/rE3j_RHkqJc