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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>And as Toby Ord argues in <i>The Precipice</i>, that would be a terrible end.
Google Cache:
<a href="https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Yo3J8VEjX2kJ:https://apxhard.com/2021/03/17/are-you-hosting-a-mimetic-parasite/" rel="nofollow">https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Yo3J8V...</a>
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.<p>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.<p>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?
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.
That was a wonderful article, and an important concept from someone who found wisdom through suffering.<p>The central idea reminds me of the quote by Jung:<p>"People don't have ideas; ideas have people."<p>It's pithy, and maybe not entirely true, but it's something we see every day, and can all resonate with.
Gad Saad, professor of evolutionary psychology, recently wrote a book called “The Parasitic Mind”, that develops a similar set of ideas: <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/the-parasitic-mind-how-infectious-ideas-are-killing-common-sense/9781621579595" rel="nofollow">https://bookshop.org/books/the-parasitic-mind-how-infectious...</a><p>Saad also appeared on the Jordan Peterson podcast recently, explaining his framing and terminology around ideas infecting minds: <a href="https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/gadsaad/" rel="nofollow">https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/gadsaad/</a>
> One answer would be that “I care about the world and when I see things that are wrong I get upset, which is good and reasonable.” But that’s the parasite speaking.<p>I think it's a social mechanism to weed out traitors. It's a necessary part of the process, not just a parasite meme.
Not working for me, try <a href="https://archive.is/20210319065509/https://apxhard.com/2021/03/17/are-you-hosting-a-mimetic-parasite/" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/20210319065509/https://apxhard.com/2021/0...</a><p>I recommend the Web Archives Firefox extension by the way. Useful not just for archive.is but also for e.g. Google cache (googlebot is often allowed pass paywalls).
What about the other parasite, M0?<p><a href="https://www.datapacrat.com/Opinion/Reciprocality/r1/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.datapacrat.com/Opinion/Reciprocality/r1/index.ht...</a>
> More intelligent people can play host to far more sophisticated parasitic memes. Educated adults are less likely to believe that lizard people rule the world<p>There's evidence that highly educated people are _more_ likely to believe in the Qanon conspiracy.<p>Belief isn't just shorthand for "checking out the evidence and making claims about the world on the basis of the probability of that evidence." There can be a will to believe whatever supports your social or material interests that trumps reason. We are now living in post-epistemological times.<p>Interestingly, at the end of the article he brings up pro wrestling and remarks on not believing it anymore. But this kind of credulity is almost the opposite of what pro wrestling is all about - you have to buy in to take part (kayfabe). Everyone does, everyone knows it.
I don't believe (hardly) anyone in academia uses the term meme. Perhaps there's a good reason for that?<p>It's not clear any clarity is added to the world by replacing the term for culture or thoughts with whatever the term meme is trying to accomplish.