Memetics

The Meme is mightier than the Nuke.
Finnegan "Jerry" Dann
[Interplanetary Age Social Engineer, Avalon Orbital]

Ideas have power, they insinuate themselves, perpetuate, reproduce, subvert, mutate. How much more so those ideas deliberately seeded in order to engineer social trends and both mass and individual opinion?

Were it not for the memetic engineering of the superbrights and hyperturings over the mass of society, the galaxy would schism into warring factions, chaos, intolerance, bigotry, and superstition. Applied Memetics is what holds interstellar civilization together over vast distances. It is also (along with the Distributed Information Net) one of the most important inventions of the information age.

Memes are socially inherited ideas that determine what people think and believe; memetics is the social and cultural sphere what genetics is to the biological. Sophont beings adopt a conception of God or deity, or social biases and prejudices, or particular fashions, because their peers and the media do or their parents and society did, and so on back through the generations. Prior to the first singularity memes were selected via Darwinian processes of "natural selection"; some religions, fashions, ideologies, fads, cultures, and languages proved stronger than others and hence flourished.

The rise of superbrights and hyperturings saw the domestication of the meme, and the memetic engineering replacing cheap propaganda or advertising or political or military power as the ultimate instrument of persuasion and subversion. Thus the superbrights and transapients - either on their own or working through the medium of or as an instrument for religions, noetics, polities, and megacorporations - manipulate the consciousness of sentient beings under them, and are in turn manipulated by higher transingularity AIs above them, in a noospheric ecology of great complexity.

At the same time, memetics does not confer absolute control. It works with large populations; directs public opinion and understanding in the way the memgineer desires. But there are always those who don't fit in, who can't fit in, who don't want to be apart of the collective consciousness. These are the outsiders, the innovators, the rebels, the individualists, the alternatives, the malcontents, the enlightened, the social retroengineers, the reformers, the reactionaries, the eccentrics, the criminals, the cynics, the artists, the self-isolationists, those wise and satisfied in themselves, those angry and satisfied neither with themselves nor with society; all these diverse individuals are the ones who are less affected by the structures erected by the memegineers.

The existence of these individualists in no way threatens the established order of the ruling powers (which may be anything from a a small orbital state or a huge empire) . The nonconformists are too diverse to form any cohesive opposition, because often they disagree among each other more than they disagree with the authorities. A few themselves gather followings, and some even set off to found their own polities and utopias. But most remain in society, either among the rest of the populace or in enclaves, where they add to rather than detract from the diversity of society as a whole.

Memetics A-Z

Repetition Implantation - Exposing a sophont to a given meme increases exponentially in effectiveness with arithmetic increases in exposures, as measured in net number of occurrences as well as in net number of contexts.