This Memes ArtWar (Sneak Peek to The Mondo Interviews)

Art by Jamie Curcio

In an age of weaponized memetics, This memes ArtWar!

As I mentioned in The Untold Story of SatoriD, I am working on a series of Interviews with RU. Sirius for Mondo2000. The first two interviews are related but also separate. The First one we are working on is with Author, Visual Artist and Cultural Hacker Jamie Curcio, who wrote the book Narrative Machine: Modern Myth, Revolution, & Propaganda and he did these series of Art/Meme work that am using for this blog. Its the line This Memes ArtWar that really sticking to my mind. As some of you can tell I am playing around this this idea, and my feed will reflect this. I just want to give the context on which I am playing around with.

Also the next Interview we are doing is with Douglas Rushkoff, David Pescovitz and Jake Dunagan who wrote this research paper "THE BIOLOGY OF DISINFORMATION: memes, media viruses, and cultural inoculation". I recommend this paper, very interesting and important information for the time in which we live. The Sneak Peek that I am highlighting is from The Biology of Disinformation Interview.

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RU Sirius: OK gentlemen. Let’s start at the guts of the matter and then double back. In a sense you’re offering a different model then the one most of us usually think in, as regards memetics. Instead of fighting bad memes with good, or their memes with ours, are you suggesting that we look at memes themselves as viruses attacking us. Is that right?

Douglas Rushkoff: Yeah, that's the simplest way of looking at it. That's why I called memes in media "media viruses". Even if they end up forcing important ideas into the cultural conversation, and even if they ultimately lead to good things, they do infect us from the outside. They attack our weak code, and continue to replicate until we repair it, or until we come to recognize the "shell" of the virus itself.

I think what makes our analysis unique, compared with a lot of what's out there, is that we're not proposing yet another technosolutionist fix. Mark Zuckerberg wants to fight fake news with artificial intelligence. Great. He's already over his head in a media environment he doesn't understand. He doesn't know why his platform has led to so many unintended effects. So what's his solution? Build yet another technology he understands even less to solve the problem with yet another black box.

Even those with the best intentions see all this as a technological problem, when it's really more a cultural or biological one. The difference in our approach is that we still have faith in the human organism and human society to rise to the occasion and increase their resiliency. So we're writing for people, not tech companies.

David Pescovitz: I first read about memes in Richard Dawkins's book The Selfish Gene (1976). But Doug's book Media Virus (1994) really brought the concept to life for me because he used memes as a way to connect the dots between my personal interests at the time: culture jamming, cyberculture, DIY media, Timothy Leary, McLuhan, psychedelia, guerrilla art, postmodernism, media spectacles, etc. The Web was only a year old and our biggest concern with memes was that big advertisers would use them to manipulate us into buying crap we didn't need or want. In fact, I used a TV ad to explain the concept of memes to people! Once you're infected with a meme, you tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on, just like the old Jhirmack shampoo ad which itself is a long-living meme. Simultaneously, we were optimistic that memes could become a powerful new tool to spread ideas that would spark positive social change. Those were different times. The biggest battleground in meme warfare back then was television. As Rushkoff used to say, "It's not called 'programming' for nothing." These days, we program algorithms and they, in turn, program us.

David Pescovitz: I'm also interested in how our networked media environment has evolved to allow this nastiness to occur and, in fact, reward it. During the early days of Twitter and Facebook it was exciting that people were using the platforms to share ideas and "find the others." But I was also annoyed and later alarmed by the rise in narcissism, emphasis on "personal brands," and mob mentality. Maybe those people were always like that and social media just amplified those traits. Either way, to me it quickly felt like antisocial media.

Since then, it's become increasingly clear that the only real way to fix our social media experiences is by fixing ourselves. This is true when it comes to how we interact with other people online but also our own vulnerability to propaganda, disinformation, and coercion. Of course reconnecting with our own humanity is much harder than just giving in to the algorithmically addictive dopamine rush of another retweet or "like."

Jake Dunagan: there was an old Zuck who swallowed a virus, I don't know why he swallowed the virus. He swallowed AI to fight the virus...
I was struck by the psychologist Dannagal Young's point that we quoted in the article: “blaming readers for spreading fake news from a cognitive perspective …somewhat equivalent to blaming a baby for soiling itself. They can’t help it. ”

this is what Doug is calling our weak code, our vulnerabilities we've inherited from evolution and extended by culture. Humor, satire, memes, are exploiting our cognitive weaknesses, and lowering our defenses. I've always loved the Mad Magazine, SNL, and Yes Men ways of showing us how the messages we're hearing are full of shit.

This is a Good reminder about humor, that Jake brings up. Black comedy is certainly a powerful way to help people understand and deconstruct the narratives that bombard us. As the great philosopher Homer J. Simpson once said, “Its funny ‘cause it’s true.” If we don’t laugh, we’ll keep crying.

Jamie Curcio and RU Sirius use Dark Humor a lot to break up reality tunnels. It is what attracts me to both of their works. As you can see by The Meme/Artwork of Jamie, he uses Dark Humor slogans with stunning visuals to attack your weak codes.

Will the future be a Reality TV show where we compete to have human rights? Will you be popular and relatable enough to successfully crowdfund your healthcare?
Tune in 20 years hence and find out.

At one end Humor, satire, memes, are exploiting our cognitive weaknesses but also Humor and satire, Black comedy is certainly a powerful way to help people understand and deconstruct the narratives that bombard us. So on both ends Humor and Satire can be used to strength us and weakness us, to these media virus. I guess my question is something like, whats the line, or maybe the skill the individual has to hone into order strengthen our immune system

I think this point of immune system is important and powerful way to look at things. My last line of thought that I been thinking about. Is that we learned later that Hand Sanitizers weakens our Immune System. It would seem logical that over censoring(Sanitizing) our Media, will weaken our Immune System to these media viruses.

I'm not totally clear on this thought, but its a complex method to say develop super immunity. Its something like a steady diet of art, poetry, research papers and media theory are something like our fruits and vegetables. Also it will be able to have a capacity for humor, media critique and astuteness, perhaps this something like exercising. It's also important to have a healthy environment, people that you can freely exchange ideas, media and feelings, but at the same time challenge your ideas, bias and feelings.

And lastly I think the actual act of creating art and media is something like antibiotics, as one creates their own culture, as it where, you have to research and deconstruct, current and old cultures/art/media, and you remix and mashup ideas/art/media, and you begin to see something of DNA code of these media viruses, and you can perhaps fight off these viruses, if/when you get these colds and infections.

It's something am still working on, but was curious on your thoughts and comments on this?

Please leave comment, so we can have some fun on bouncing around these ideas and see what fruits we can bear.