oyuki

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Devil's Dictionary Update

2011 nominee for the Devil's Dictionary:

Meme - A concept that spreads via the Internet. A mental virus that once it infects a person causes that person to strenuously resist any counter-memes. On the progressive leftist side of the political spectrum, memes have almost completely eradicated any hint of cognitive thought as evidenced by postings seen on such sites as Democratic Underground and Daily Kos.

Factoid - In Neal Stephenson's book Snow Crash it is postulated the existence of a neural-linguistic piece of code dating back to Babylon that would rewire Internet users brains to make them obedient slaves. Thus the meme was born along with the counter-meme that would inoculate users from this insidious code and it was based on the Nam-Shub of Enki, also from Babylon.

2 comments:

Rose said...

is THAT where it comes from!!??!!

Anna said...

I seem to be in the minority who still remember that book. So me making the cognitive leap in linking the two is easy.

The parallels between Rife's attempt to control the brains of his programmers via code that spreads like a computer virus and how message memes also spread like virii stiffling critical thought ,is pretty persuasive though.