Shadows for Breakfast

Selfish memes and stranger things: Fiends or friends?

by Wes Biggs

If genetic engineering is the process of creating new genetic material through artificial means, then memetic engineering--to take the counterpart proposed by Richard Dawkins and others--would be the process of creating memes, units of cultural information that have no biological basis but live in the collective consciousness.

And while genes find their way from host to host, at least in homo sapiens, via transport of sperm and egg, memes have come to depend on the least likely of carriers in their travels from one host's neurons to another's: vibrations in the air, vegetable dyes and dead trees, and silicon, lately.

The bumbling genetic engineering of Frankenstein has given way to the memetic engineering we associate with mass communication, the analogue (or digilogue, if you prefer), of the fictional scientist's woeful creature. The latter's cries of "I was benevolent and good, but misery made me a fiend" are assumed by the technocracy with nary the batting of a Droog's toothpicked eye.

Media (in it's most general sense) are the sex cells of culture, and if you're feeling like you're getting screwed in the head, you're at least metaphorically right. In the information age, memes take de facto precedence over genes; information is the key to much more power than mere propagation of a bloodline can hope to entail. So we sew our cerebral seeds furiously in the time we are given, spooge our non-genetic jism haphazardly from medium to medium, and plumb the informational depths (with aplomb) in hopes of penetrating the populous. For though the sexual reproductive instinct still holds sway over the species, the procreative urge is easily sublimated into the creative urge.

The connection is conspicuous in the very words we use to speak of creation. Authors' memes fill out bodies of work, golems to persevere long after their organic creator has met his or her maker. Pecuniary intents flesh out corporations, literally embodiments, to continue their memetic legacies.

Yet creation has generally entailed as much economic exertion as procreation does physical exertion. Sweaty is to lingerie as, historically, starving is to artist, and in the past, one had to be a step away from royalty to even get a shot at producing a memetic masterpiece.

But now the Frankensteins--and Shelleys--of technology have given us new golems free of many of those worldly concerns, and any two-bit loser with something to say can say it, with certain restrictions. Victor and Mary's latest spawn is the Internet, where millions of unvisited homepages pop up memes left in the rut of the juggernaut of electronic evolution. These are bodies given a host, and eight hexadecimal digits decode through domain-name-server magic into the equivalent of a human name. These are memetic carriers in the kilobits per second, and a harsh ASCII "NO CARRIER" is the end to a dream.

These are bodies, yes, but can they ferry a soul? Is information destined to exist, zombie-like, in a state of perpetual animation, or can these electronic memes grant the same kind of immortality that fuels procreation? When we reach a point of memetic saturation, with all ideas on the table of collective consciousness, will we enter a new paradigm of evolution, or are we, like Frankenstein, destined to have our creations haunt us with unrelenting demands for life that they cannot have?

It is ultimately the creature who must answer and this fiend born of misery may be both our demise and our salvation.