Here’s a video that ironically (and wonderfully) registers and deconstructs a scene genre within action films: the Stoic ice-hero who walks, calm and unblinking, away from explosions:

But wait. Isn’t the above YouTube itself a genre piece (the ironic song about cookie-cutter scene genres)?! Here’s the Ur-experiment in this form of filmic deconstruction (originally from Team America):

Explaining the Linguistic Diversity of Sahul Using Population Models.
Reesink G, Singer R, Dunn M (2009)
PLoS Biol 7(11): e1000241. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000241

The region of the ancient Sahul continent (present day Australia and New Guinea, and surrounding islands) is home to extreme linguistic diversity. Even apart from the huge Austronesian language family, which spread into the area after the breakup of the Sahul continent in the Holocene, there are hundreds of languages from many apparently unrelated families. On each of the subcontinents, the generally accepted classification recognizes one large, widespread family and a number of unrelatable smaller families. If these language families are related to each other, it is at a depth which is inaccessible to standard linguistic methods. We have inferred the history of structural characteristics of these languages under an admixture model, using a Bayesian algorithm originally developed to discover populations on the basis of recombining genetic markers. This analysis identifies 10 ancestral language populations, some of which can be identified with clearly defined phylogenetic groups. The results also show traces of early dispersals, including hints at ancient connections between Australian languages and some Papuan groups (long hypothesized, never before demonstrated). Systematic language contact effects between members of big phylogenetic groups are also detected, which can in some cases be identified with a diffusional or substrate signal. Most interestingly, however, there remains striking evidence of a phylogenetic signal, with many languages showing negligible amounts of admixture.

If you’ve already deprogrammed yourself, then you will enjoy the Daily Bell as it tracks the evolution of the “monetary elite” and “dominant social memes”. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then this pub is probably not for you. Try Reason Magazine.

Here is the Daily Bell’s analysis of Lou Dobbs’ dismissal from CNN:

“If CNN truly wanted to offer an alternative to Fox (which wishes to use the power of the state for military and domestic intel purposes) and MSNBC (which wishes to use the power of the state for further socialist leveling purposes) it would position itself as a free-market libertarian alternative … But instead, CNN’s idea of “neutrality” is to position itself BETWEEN Fox and MSNBC … in such a way as it seems less EXTREME than either of the other networks. CNN will then characterize this position as neutrality. It is not.”

While Dobbs is no friend of liberty (especially if your skin-tone happens to be brown), the Daily Bell is correct that his dismissal is not a positive sign for CNN.

Those who have broken free from the left-right mentality do not always do so in a libertarian directions. From Mike Bloomberg to John McCain to Olympia Snowe to Joe Lieberman, we find that being neither Red nor Blue can sometimes mean turning Purple — the worst of both worlds.

(Classical) Liberalism is an ideology; it just happens to be the right one. Being bi-partisan does not a liberal make. Being opposed to coercion in all its forms does a liberal make. We don’t need a bi-partisan news channel on cable, we need a truly liberal channel. Oh, and in case you are so uninformed as to suggest MSNBC is the ‘liberal’ channel, check the dictionary — they are socialists.

So far, it seems Fox Business is the best candidate for a libertarian partisan outlet. And for actual neutrality, Bloomberg News. Kudos to them.

This idea just sprung to my mind when I was staring at the TED logo and I immediately started to collect all the logos/icons which somehow had an influence on my life (at least for one year), be it a commercial brand, an institution, a tv series, a band, a software or a website. I spent a whole day searching, scanning, editing, sometimes recreating these things, and it was a strange experience full of surprises and nostalgia. It made me smile when I saw the chronological connections between some icons that I had not thought of before.

The final surprise to me was to see how good icons are at defining a person, and I’m not talking blunt capitalism here (the piece on its own takes care of that job plainly without any need for my blabbers). For one thing, just the commercial products wouldn’t be enough. And although I am fully aware of a more interesting definition of capitalism which includes all the modern mythologies from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Harry Potter, I think that there are icons there that you still can’t fit in that definition and without which this piece wouldn’t be strong enough; strong enough to make me want to look at this thing for hours like a vain girl looking at a mirror – this may sound weird, but you probably would understand what I feel if you were to look at your own version of this. It is also worth noting that towards 2009 appear some items that I myself created as a designer, which in turn started to define me – like the icon of my band or the logo of our design collective Fevkalade.

Some of the old items – like Cicibebe, Nutella or Remeron – are still wholly present in my life, by the way. I placed those things according to where they first made appearance. There are some old items I’m still looking for, so this is not the final version. I also plan to update it as years go by.

Update My friend Ece made her own with a clever twist on the layout. If you also plan to make your versions, please send me links so that we can build an archive.

First Came Chris Daughtry, Quickly Followed By Weezer, MGMT, Eric Cartman, And Now, IMO, Topping Them All (Except Maybe Cartman’s Rendition, It’s A Tough Call) The One & Only Christopher Walken. What Do They All Have In Common? They’ve All Spoofed Lady Gaga’s Hit Single “Poker Face.”

So…What is it about Lady Gaga, and this song in particular, that lends is self to such memetic mimetics? There is something undeniably unique about The Lady & Her Music. Her Style, Performance, The Catchyness of the tune…all of which make for User Generated Recreations. But it’s rare, and a privilege, when other artists or media producers spoof one’s work. Even in jest, most blatant mockery subtly suggests some degree of respect and admiration. If Family Guy or South Park ever made fun of one of my creations, I’d take it as a compliment.

Marketers & Advertisers Strive To Impart These Qualities On Their Content. To Provide A Template On Which Consumers Can Build, a Body of Material Ripe For The Creative Masses To Restructure, Remix, Reinterpret, Re-contextualize…and spread.

So what is it that she (or her team of producers and publicists) does, to lend her brand to such virality?

My Good Friend Rachel Feigenbaum, A CUNY PhD Student, Has An Interesting Thought:

When a person hears it [Her Music] you can’t help but admit that it’s catchy and fun. But when you realize what the lyrics are, what you’re singing, it’s embarrassing that you actually enjoy something that sophomoric, so to cope we make fun. [It's a] Social Defense Mechanism. People find that humorous it’s why she’s successful. She’s crazy and out there, but its fun and funny. It’s being so ridiculous, that it’s entertaining. For Her, Tactful Talentlessness becomes true talent and she’s thus she brings  a new dimension, and with it success, to an otherwise superficial music career & by superficial I mean a lack of lyrical and musical depth.

When I asked My Friend & Colleague Jess Greco that same question, she responded:

Historically, pop culture is pop culture for a reason- it is constantly being referenced. She’s original, shes doing things that are slightly ridiculous, and thats what is getting her attention. And these are the things that often turn into the internet memes that we’re so obsessed with nowadays. And a big part of this are the the references, just like The Office and The JK wedding dance video. Why Other Artists & Producers? Maybe Because they want to be part of the phenomenon? I dont know. They want to play off someone else’s attention to get their own? But I  feel like that applies to any person, not just celebs.

Personally, I get excited when celebs reference other celebs. It compounds the impact on the consumer/viewer and makes them feel like they’re part of this inside joke.

Could it be that simple? Is this authentic originality engendering producer-to-producer parasitism? Or is this something much more a psychologically complex? Is her brand Built, from the top down, to be so well suited for spoofing and these cultural memes, arguably one of marketing’s holy grails?

Watch The Videos…& Please Let Me Know What You Think!

And MGMT at 3:15 into the clip…

When you see books that consist of famous designers’ answers to the question “What is graphic design?”, you get tempted to formulate your own answer. Here is mine, a humble addition to the literature:

Graphic design is to spend hours to choose between Baskerville and Mrs Eaves for a poster targeted at people who are just confident that Comic Sans is the best.

— Deniz Cem Önduygu, 2009

Yes, the more I talk to non-design people about design, the more I lose my faith in the fancy definitions about “providing creative solutions” and “answering to people’s needs.” No, there is just one bloody need, and its solution is Comic Sans! Wake up! We all work hard to look good to ourselves and to other designers! And that’s pretty enough of a definition if you ask me, I’m not at all nihilistic about this whole thing. We are a happy little community, and I love it. (I have a memetic explanation I plan to elaborate on my MA thesis, by the way. It’s top secret for now.)

To any fellow designer depressed by these thoughts: don’t be. Keep doing your thing, at least for me. Know that I, for one, care about your kerning. I care about your grid. I care about your en dashes.

I dedicate these to all my past and future clients:

And I dedicate the beautiful white space above to the Turkish court who banned Youtube.

This week, in discussing Sigmund Freud’s views on homosexuality with a class of A-Level Psychology students at Guiseley School in Leeds, the question was raised as to just how ‘normal’ gay and lesbian relationships are. When I stated that most recent surveys – ie: in the past 10 years or so – have tended to average around 2-4% of the adult population in the Western-ish world clearly identifying as gay men or lesbian – ie: verging on the statistically abnormal – I was quite taken aback by the sheer vociferousness of the class that the true number was at least 10% and, therefore, normal.

2 things struck me about this response:-

• How accepting the class were that homosexuality was ‘normal’ – quite a contrast with a Psychology class in Goole 3 years previous, in which the class had insisted that Evolutionary Psychology proved that homosexuality was abnormal and a perversion
• Where this mythical number of 10% of the population had come from and how strongly it was entrenched amongst the Guiseley students.

In and amongst the praise heaped on my book, ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’, by Integral Review in 2007, I was castigated for ignoring homosexual relationships; I had 3 chapters on male-female relationships and none on same-sex relationships.

To be honest, it simply hadn’t occurred to me to include homosexual relationships. I have only come across a couple of handfuls of openly gay men, lesbians and bisexuals in my 55 years. Compared to the hundreds of heterosexual relationships I have encountered, same-sex relationships seemed so few in number they just didn’t register as a social fact I needed to write about.

Nonetheless, my RED vMEME’s pride stung by Integral Review’s criticism, I set out to discover if it was possible to find out just how many gay and lesbian relationships there might be.

What the surveys tell us
I found the following surveys carried out from 2003:-

• 2003: The largest and most thorough survey in Australia to date was conducted by telephone interview by the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health & Society with 19,307 respondents between the ages of 16 and 59 in 2001/2002. The study found that 97.4% of men identified as heterosexual, 1.6% as gay and 0.9% as bisexual. For women 97.7% identified as heterosexual, 0.8% as lesbian and 1.4% as bisexual. However, 8.6% of men and 15.1% of women reported either feelings of attraction to the same gender or some sexual experience with the same gender. 50% of the men and 66.66% of the women who had same-sex sexual experience regarded themselves as heterosexual rather than homosexual or bisexual.
• 2003: In the United States Tom W Smith’s analysis of National Opinion Research Center data states that 4.9% of sexually active American males have had a male sexual partner since age 18, but that “since age 18 less than 1% are [exclusively] gay and 4+% bisexual”. In the top twelve urban areas however, the rates are double the national average. Smith adds that: “It is generally believed that including adolescent behavior would further increase these rates.”
•  2003: According to the Durex Global Sex Survey for 2003, 12% of Norwegian respondents have had homosexual sex
•  2003: The Canadian Community Health Survey of 135,000 Canadians found that 1.0% of the respondents identified themselves as homosexual and 0.7% identified themselves as bisexual. About 1.3% of men considered themselves homosexual, almost twice the proportion of 0.7% among women. However, 0.9% of women reported being bisexual, slightly higher than the proportion of 0.6% among men. 2.0% of those in the 18-35 age bracket considered themselves to be either homosexual or bisexual, but the number decreased to 1.9% among 35-44 year olds, and further still to 1.2% in the population aged 45-59. Quebec and British Columbia had higher percentages than the national average at 2.3% and 1.9%, respectively.
•  2005: HM Treasury and the Department for Trade & Industry completed a survey to help the Government analyse the financial implications of the Civil Partnerships Act (such as pensions, inheritance and tax benefits). They concluded that there were 3.6 m gay people in the United Kingdom – around 6% of the total population or 1 in 16.66 people
•  2005: The American Community Survey from the US Census estimated 776,943 same-sex couples in the country as a whole, representing about 0.5% of the population.
•  2006: A study by Nathaniel McConaghy, Dusan Hadzi-Pavlovic, Carol Stevens, Vijaya Manicavasagar, Neil Buhrich & Ute Vollmer-Conna found 2-3% Australians identified as homosexual while 20% of Australians reported having same-sex attractions

More recently Joseph Fried’s 2008 analysis of General Social Survey data looked at the percentage of American males, categorised as either Democrat or Republican, reporting homosexual activity for three time periods. Democrats admitting homosexual activity rose from 2.8% in 1988-1992 to 5.8% in 1993-1998 and then 6.6% in 2000-2006. Republicans admitting to homosexual activity peaked at 2.2% in 1988-1992.

A CNN exit polling showed self-identified gay, lesbian, and bisexual voters at 4% of the voting population in the 2008 US presidential election.

While the surveys present quite a mixed picture, by and large the percentages of openly gay people are well below the 10% figure the Guiseley students threw at me. An average would be around the 2-3-4% mark, depending just how it was calculated (as the surveys do not all measure like for like) – and that is verging on statistically abnormal.  In a normal distribution of population – such as that shown in the graphic for IQ (copyright © 2001 Psychology Press Ltd) – the vast bulk of the population (95%) falls within 2 standard deviations of the mean. Therefore, what is beyond 2 standard deviations is considered statistically abnormal.

There are, of course, huge problems in collecting this kind of data, due to the large amount of prejudice & discrimination against gay men and lesbians still in many parts of the Western world. Many people who are gay undoubtedly try to conceal it to avoid being discriminated against. Thus, for reasons of social desirability bias (wanting to appear in the best light), political and social prudence, and perhaps just sheer fear, people responding to these surveys may not always have told the truth. The real number of gay men and lesbians in the samples used in these is almost certainly higher than the official figures produced. The problem is we have absolutely no idea how much higher. Slightly higher or a lot higher…? We simply don’t know and we have no way of finding out. The best guestimates are just that: guesses. As most researchers into heterosexual relationships will admit, it’s incredibly difficult to get at what really goes on behind closed doors. Enter the murky underworld of homosexuality and it’s that much harder. We have Gay Pride Festivals in New York City and London; but in places like Goole it’s still very much a secretive, barely-admitted underground scene.

The best we can say is that the official responses to surveys tend to average out somewhere in the 2-4% region – verging on the statistically abnormal – but the real figure is almost certainly higher. Just how much higher we don’t know.

The meme of the 10% figure
The myth that 10% of the population are gay appears to have developed from the work of Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy & Clyde Martin whose notorious bestseller ‘Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male’ (1948) – see The Sex Reports – was the first widely read neo-scientific attempt to study sexual relationships, orientation and practices. (In 1942, shortly before the Hierarchy of Needs construct made his name, Abraham Maslow had published an investigation into female sexuality and dominance but it was not widely read at the time.)

What Kinsey et al actually wrote was that, of the American males surveyed, 10% were “more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55″. Whether this meant the men surveyed were homosexual as a permanent sexual orientation or had merely gone through a homosexual phase is unclear. In any case, there are serious validity problems with Kinsey et al’s sample groups. Firstly, they included an unrepresentatively-large number of prisoners and male prostitutes when set against the ratio of such persons in the general population. Secondly, his responses may have been coloured by personality bias – as they were self-selected and it can be argued it takes a certain type of personality to volunteer to talk about ’taboo’ subjects.

Whatever Kinsey et al actually intended and whatever the flaws in their studies, the 10% figure has stuck – and this demonstrates the power of memes – ideas that can spread from mind to mind like infectious viruses. No wonder a whole new psychological sub-science of memetics has developed over the past 30 years, concerned with understanding the what and how of memetic infection. Just what kind of ideas propagate best and in what kind of circumstances. Susan Blackmore (1999) has investigated those qualities of memes which make them most likely to propagate; but Don Beck & Chris Cowan’s 1996 concept of Spiral Dynamics is even more pertinent as it links the successful propagation of different memes to which motivational systems (vMEMES) are dominant in the minds of the receptor – collective grouping or individual.

Thus, we can link the decline in influence of the BLUE vMEME in North American and Europe – particularly in terms of strict Christian teaching – over the past 40 years or so and the emergence of GREEN with its libertarian and egalitarian values. Thus, the rise of GREEN has facilitated the spread of the ‘homosexuality is OK’ meme.

Of course, with growing Muslim populations in many parts of Europe, we may well be in for a new wave of BLUE thinking that could challenge GREEN’s ‘anything-that-liberates-the-human-spirit-is-OK’ ethos. I deal with this in my post on the Right to Be Blog, ‘What will Islam do for homosexuals?’

So is homosexuality normal?
Statistically it might be verging on the abnormal; but is it abnormal in any other way?

Certainly it’s not an illness, as the American Psychiatric Association finally recognised in 1973 when they withdrew its entry in the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. There is no credible evidence it is injurious to psychological well-being provided the gay man or lesbian can accept they are what they are and they have effective strategies for dealing with the discrimination they are subjected to. There are some concerns about the sheer level of promiscuity among gay men – not only in terms of sexually transmitted infections but also potential emotional instability brought on by such behaviour. However, according to Celia Kitzinger & Adrian Coyle (1995) promiscuous gay men tend to protect themselves by being more distant with their partners.

If the evidence indicates that, by and large, it’s not psychologically harmful, why then do so many people find the mere concept of homosexuality so offensive?

The ‘it’s not natural’ argument falls down on 2 points:-

• Firstly, it’s natural for most homosexuals – yes, it doesn’t fit with Evolutionary Psychology’s motif that sex is all about procreation and passing on your genes but then neither does contraception or some heterosexual couples choosing not to have children. Besides which, we have so many men with so much sperm, it’s hardly a survival-of-the-species issue if a small minority choose to waste it on other men!
• Dean Hamer’s (1993) attributing of the genetic marker Xq28 on the X chromosome to homosexual preferences may mean some men really don’t have a choice in sexual orientation. Hamer’s work has yet to be validated to the point of complete acceptance but it’s certainly setting the lead on investigating causes of homosexuality – see: Homosexuality: Nature or Nurture?. (Of course, no one’s yet come up with a potential biological determinant for lesbianism!)

What is much more likely to be behind such a dislike for homosexuality is the PURPLE vMEME’s distinction between those it identifies with/belongs to and those who ‘are not of our tribe’.

PURPLE uses all kinds of markers for discriminating between those who are in its in-group and others who are in the out-groups. It can be race, nationality, religion, gender, etc, etc…and, of course, sexual orientation.

To go back to our example of Goole which is a largely traditional white working class inland port, with lots of social and economic deprivation. In such communities, PURPLE tends to dominate much of the culture, propagating and enforcing its memetic taboos and rituals. Undoubtedly there is something of a BLUE vMEME harmonic left over from the days when Christianity really was the religion of the land. Christianity paints homosexuality as sinful – eg: Leviticus 20:13, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 – and this lends legitimacy to PURPLE’s categorising of homosexuals into the out-group.

Small wonder the homophobic Goole students found support in Evolutionary Psychology’s stance of sex-is-for-procreation. It’s a BEIGE level argument, about as basic as you can get…but higher up the Spiral the arguments are much more complex. Eg: the homosexuality-accepting Guiseley students are from one of the more affluent parts of Leeds, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the UK, with substantial ethnic minorities. In that mix of money, commerce and diversity, they will be exposed to just about every vMEME – every way of thinking – there is. So it is no surprise that they may have absorbed some of GREEN’s values around sexual orientation.

In reflection, then, the argument about whether homosexuality is ‘normal’ or not is more a question of differing values held by different vMEMES. As to just what proportion of the population is homosexual, we don’t really know; but it’s probably more than 2-4%. What we shouldn’t do is unthinkingly accept memetic ‘urban myths’ like 10%.

Converging technology, transhumanism, and our future in the making. The cutting edge group known as transhumanists see a beautiful future brought about by artificial intelligence, life extension, and cybernetics. What one must realize before getting carried away with such utopian dreams is that transhumanism was born out of the elitist pseudo-science eugenics. This documentary provides vital information on the history of eugenics and its new cutting edge transformation. Please show this documentary to a friend!

If the video doesnt work for you please follow the link below to view it on its orignal page at google video.

The general idea is that people can read words with jumbled letters as long as the first and last letter are in the correct order.

Try this one-

“Arocdnicg to rsceearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pcale. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit pobelrm. Tihs is buseace the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.”

Susan Blackmore at TED, sharing her knowledge about the 2nd and 3rd replicators. A very interesting, passionate and well defined explaination of the replicators.

Someone has written a video game that, when played, deletes files from your machine. Each file is associated with an ‘invader’ and each time an invader is killed the corresponding file is deleted from your system.

Okay, the game is pointless. Or rather, dangerous to play on your own system. That is not the reason I am writing about it.

About five years ago, while working for a large organisation implementing a configuration management process, I was wiling away a lunch time discussing with one of the developers sitting nearby trying to devise an ‘evil’ game. It was during this conversation that I suggested just such a game; a game in which as you shot down your enemy (in my game it was a World War II dogfight) a file was deleted from your system. Enemy planes were assigned a score based on the size of the file with which it was associated; bigger file, higher points value. This system encouraged the player to pursue higher point scoring targets and consequently unwittingly delete larger files from their system. To allay suspicion the game would avoid system files until the end of the game – like I said, this was intended to be an evil game.

We were, of course, just batting about silly ideas and had no intention of actually writing the game, but I cannot help but wonder whether the meme created during that conversation has escaped and managed to get itself implemented.

The game, along with a video of it being played, can be found here. Credit for putting me onto it goes to GamePolitics.com.

Hello Connectivism & Connected Learning 2009,

I took the course last year. I just finished reading an article by Andrew Sullivan on memetics and how it applies to strategic communications to counter terrorism ideologies (his article). I immediately thought of how to relate this to Connectivism. The Sullivan talks about how the broadcast medium and the internet are the focus of counter-terrorism message sending, however, among the Islamic community, people do not listen to the message because the counter ideology to Islamic ideology is a head-on attack to the teaching of the Koran. Thus, no one listens to Voice of America etc for their counter-terrorism ideological message. Sullivan argues, that to be effective, strategic communications needs to occur at the grass roots levels.

In many cultures, our values, beliefs, and ideology is formed through those we have close contact with. Therefore, to be successful in Iraq and Afghanistan, NATO must take its message directly to the people. And counter terrorism message cannot be a direct assault on Islam. Instead it must be what he calls “oblique” or what the English Interwar period military strategist, JFC Fuller calls, the indirect approach to defeat your enemy.

So what does this talk of strategic communications and counterterrorism mean to connectivism? Well connectivism is partly about how the social web allows many disparate people from all over the word connect with those of similar interests. Sullivan argues that technology will have little impact, instead you have to get the “oblique ideas” into peoples heads through verbal and personal discussions. (I guess that is why the Provincial Reconstruction Teams are so important.) So, Connectivsm and connected learning do not appear to be valid in this case. Read Little Boxes, Glocalization and Networked Individualism for another viewpoint that may support Sullivan’s thesis.

However, in support of connectivism and connected learning, I would argue that the broadcast and internet communications have to be more subtle. Rather than be a “bulldozer” you have to be a “gardener” to cultivate change in ideas. This is a principle of Facebook and Twitter. Companies that try to force their message out there, do not do well. It is better to have a conversation. So NATO and the US would be well advised to take advantage of the social aspects of the web to counter terrorist ideology.

In Afghanistan, the context of communication is the personal dialog. Therefore, the message must be carried by real people. In Afghanistan, maybe Connected Learning is the personal. So the trick is to get the message out to as many areas as possible and that it be consistent, but local. Perhaps NATO’s use of information technology allows the messengers (the PRT team) to be rapidly responsive to changes and to disseminate that information to all the military forces, to the Afghan government and ultimately onto the Afghan people.

Ugh. Kanye.

He’s an idiot. We all know this. What he did to Taylor Swift at the VMA’s was ridiculous, inconsiderate, egotistical, mean, blah, blah, blah, and blah. Just ask Obama.

Thing is… I don’t care anymore! None of it is funny anymore. At least to me. Right after it happened, I laughed at the images on I’mma Let You Finish.com. Now, I just look at them and sigh, “Ugh, Kanye”.

This is the problem with memes that spread too fast. They get old. We don’t like being bombarded with the same story from all angles, especially when it’s something as meaningless as a childish act at the completely irrelevant MTV Video Music Awards. If you don’t understand what I’m saying and you just finished Rick Rolling someone, I suggest you watch this video about the Christian Bale rant from Rocketboom’s brilliant Know Your Meme series.

It’s the end of the week and I’m asking that this post marks the end of KanyeGate. Stop caring, immediately. May this be the last thing written about the incident. It’s clear the best take on the matter has already been written, anyway.

Poker Without Cards. A Consciousness Thriller.

I have made numerous attempts to write a review of Poker Without Cards and have come to the conclusion that it is a task much harder than I first anticipated. I will, however, make another attempt in the hope that this will do it justice as I feel that anyone who reads it will benefit greatly! But please don’t take my word for it!

A Joseph Matheny (Is he real?) has written the intro to Poker Without Cards and is of a different opinion to quote the final line of the introduction: “Since you have gotten this far I suppose you are going to read the transcript. Far be it from me to try and stop you.”

I failed to follow his advice and did read it. In fact, I have so far read it 4 times and always found it difficult to let go of it. Have I been infected?

The first time I read it I was somewhat bewildered and baffled at what this particular transcript was all about and yet I found it difficult not to carry on!

The format of Poker Without Cards is a transcript of the recording of a conversation beteween a Dr William Fink and a Howard Campbell, which takes place during 7 sessions in which Dr Fink is trying to understand what led his patient, Richard Wilson (Bucky) to be admitted to his mental hospital!

Well, that is the very basic of it and is really nothing more than the sceleton. It is the content of the conversation that takes you on what I can only describe as a “Mind Journey” and if you manage to read the whole book without giving in to the urge of googling certain stuff then you have done far better than me, who failed that part miserably. To take that a step further, I have compiled a reading list based on the stuff referenced in Poker Without Cards (Call me insane!)………..

Kanye’s idiotic rant during the MTV VMA sparked a new meme, which has been thoughfully exposed by the Daily Mail. I knew about this, but don’t read the Daily Mail, my wife does.

In this blog I am simply going to recommend that one watch the following four videos, along with reading a book, written by William Sargant, entitled “Battle For The Mind.” I will let your own good sensibilities deduce what you may from them…

If you have not already viewed “Another Take On Reality – Meme, Myself and I,” “Evidence For Humans Being Meme Machines,” “Infectious People Spread Memes Across The Web” or “Probably The Best Optical Illusion I’ve Seen I Quite A While” then I recommend you take some time out to do so, as they’re all highly pertinent to the ideas presented in Adam Curtis’ “Century Of Self.”

For more in formation on Adam Curtis and his work, please click here.

One last thing… Ever looked up the definition of the word “politician”?

I particularly enjoyed numbers 2 and 6… But enough said about that.

by Colin Barras, New Scientist

The way that certain images, videos or concepts can suddenly spread like wildfire across the web, using email and social websites to propagate, is one of online culture’s most unique phenomena.

Now Spanish researchers claim to have found a way to accurately predict how quickly and widely new pieces of information, or “memes” as they are called, will spread. The ability to forecast this “viral” behaviour would be of great interest to sociologists and marketeers, among others.

The secret, they say, is to recognise the fact that people vary in how “infectious” they are when it comes to sharing content online. While some people pass on things they receive right away, others do so after some delay, or not at all.

Read on…

ABSTRACT:

Decolonization has often been presented as an idea that is antithetical to Western culture. However, although it is an emergent, latent, response to the inhumane transgressions of the past 500 years of Western Colonialism and cultural hegemony it should not necessarily be viewed as a destructive force. Rather a reconstructive one. As is noted by Bruce Lincoln there are only two fundamental ways via which culture is challenged and changed, or how it evolves if you prefer. These two ways are force and discourse. The West’s long history of colonialism is without doubt a prime example of how force is used to change culture, and the ethos of decolonization – emerging as it does from within, and as a response to that legacy of forceful oppression – can be seen as a form of discourse, or an attempt at initiating a discourse. Decolonization speaks via ideas and philosophies not dogmas and laws. Decolonization is spread from outside the mainstream cultural authority structure and speaks directly, and primarily, to the aesthetic consciousness. In this way it circumvents the accepted cultural beliefs and seeks to supplant them with alternative ideas that challenge, not only the legitimacy of the common cultural mythology, but the relevance of it as well. Nowhere is this emerging discourse more obvious than here in the American Southwest. The late Gloria Anzaldúa described the dual cultural nature of the Southwest as being a Borderland (La Frontera) and eloquently explained how that struggle emerges in the collective consciousness, and unconscious, of the people of this area. “Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world,” she writes, “unless it first happens in the images in our heads” (Anzaldúa, Pg 109). Decolonization, then, like all forms of discursive cultural rebellion (or re-imagining) emerges first in the mythological conscious and only after the idea becomes part of the psycho-cultural memeplex does it begin to manifest itself in the “real” world, and when it does it is via the form of discourse, not force. Living here in the Southwest I am very aware of how this discourse emerges from, and manifests itself within, Latin American culture – particularly the culture and aesthetic consciousness of Mexico. It is this relationship, this cultural hybridization and evolution that I’d like to focus on.

Decolonization as a Mythic Response

All of modern Latin American art, literature, and philosophy can be seen as a unique syncretization of Western and Indigenous modalities. Yet, in modern Latin American art, literature, and philosophy we see a strong critical eye turned toward Western Culture, and our legacy. In fact, throughout Latin American cultural expression, beginning at the moment of contact, we see these same recurring themes of indigenism, a more indwelling spirituality, and antipathy towards modernity (as represented by the cultural institutions of the West). It can be seen in the archetypes and motifs of Magical Realism, and the anti-capitalist ideology of Marxism. This unconscious focus represents both a syncretization of cultures and the reaction to Western cultural hegemony, but also an emerging reconnection with a traditional, indigenous, cultural – and spiritual – identity. These themes of ‘decolonization’ are not only a reaction to Western culture and the legacy of colonization, but they are clearly also a catalyst for cultural syncretization.

In terms of the relationship between the Latin American cultural estate and America, the consequence of forced cultural marriage has been coupled with the emergence of the modern media torrent and the homogenizing agent of globalized consumerism and has resulted in a unique coevolution of cultures in Latin America and the Southwestern portion of the United States. The ways in which organizations, and cultures, adapt to their environments has been a well-documented historical phenomenon (Lewin). The modern world, the media-saturated global culture that is emerging from the fertile soil of the “information age” is one predicated by customization, brand identity, consumerism, and, in an ironic sense, individuality. The human condition, so confused by the barrage of stimuli that it is today, has been left – this is especially so in the case of Westerners – bereft of a true cultural tradition other than pictures and platitudes. The greatest marker of this phenomenon is the modern institution of capitalism. Gitlin describes it in the following manner,

“capitalism is rarely a simple tyranny of capitalists or merely an economic system for generating capital. Like a brain, it needs an entire body. It thrives within, and requires, a society whose people adapt – and, to a great degree, want to adapt – to its requirements for producing wealth. Capitalism, in other words, requires a way of life – sooner or later, a consumerist way of life” (Gitlin, Pg. 77).

A great example of this phenomenon can be seen in the popularizing of indigenous shamanism as an alternative spiritual system in American culture, and the tying of indigenous spirituality to that alternative modality. New Age spiritual movements, and the cottage industries that have sprung up around them, have entwined the postmodernism, and indigenous spirituality of Latin America, and the Native American Indians as a means to legitimize their alternative spirituality. What it did, however was inject an entirely different metaphysical philosophy into secular American (hence Western) culture.

The Emergence of a New Aesthetic Consciousness

Must I depart only in this way.

Like the flowers that perish?

Will nothing remain in my name?

Nothing of my fame here on earth?

Flowers, at least, and songs!

What can my heart do?

We have come here in vain,

We have sprung up on earth in vain.

“Flower and Song”

Traditional Mexican folk song/poem

(Horcasitas, Pg. 267).

Geographers, Anthropologists, and Sociologists have long noted the ways in which populations and their environments interact, and that they exist in a symbiotic relationship. The success of a given society (or culture) arises from the interdependent outcome of leadership actions, institutions and traditions, and changes outside the scope of control (whether they be new technology, sociopolitical upheaval and schism, or environmental phenomenon of either a negative or positive physical impact). Because of this it is obvious that cultures – their collective belief-systems, organizations, and adaptational strategies – coevolve with changes in the environment, and that subsequent new cultural memes can mutate and emerge from this. The above Mexican folk song points out how poignantly the effects of colonization affected the Latin American cultural perspective. Effectively severing a people from their cultural heritage, and forcing them to create new cultural identities ad hoc from the lopsided information shared with them via imperialist cultural homogenization created a new culture of malaise and cynicism that made for instant, and natural, bed mates with existentialist dialectic of postmodernism. This perspective has colored the ways in which Latin America perceives itself (if Latin America can truly be perceived as a whole, complete unit, at all), and how interactions with the global world were conducted. One sees, as a response to Western cultural elitism, a burgeoning unconscious ideation toward self-esteem, reconnection, and political/spiritual self-empowerment.

M. T. Kato an author and activist for Hawai’ian sovereignty writes of this phenomenon as the emergence of the “popular cultural movement” and as a kind of grassroots movement of indigenous, colonized, and economically disenfranchised peoples the world over, saying:

“Globalization as the latest stage of colonization, not only in terms of territorial, economic, and political domination but also in terms of the domination over imagery and aesthetics. The popular cultural revolution therefore is also a decolonization struggle transcending the mechanical subjectivity of the globalization (Kato, Pg. 3)”.

This is why the ideas of decolonization, and the philosophy of postmodernism are best presented in the abstract expressions of art, literature, and music.  As a great example of this emerging dialectic he uses the Zapatista movement in Mexico. For M. T. Kato, language is a valid theater of operation in this global popular cultural movement, the aim of which is to decolonize more than just indigenous geographic territories, but to decolonize the aesthetic and spiritual spheres of consciousness as well. However, the two go hand in hand and where one is effectively freeing minds, bodies are sure to follow.

“By naming the indigenous social movement after Emiliano Zapata, the Zapatistas were able to conceive a new space of collective identity. The name links the singularity of the movement with the totality of the historic forces of campesinos and the people’s power in Mexico, while it is also rendered a symbol of their distinct indigenous identity. Zapatistas are both singular and collective, indigenous and national [and global], and involves material and spiritual forces without contradiction (Kato, Pg. 169)”.

As the former colonies become independent, and as the former colonizers and the world political system recognize their political rights, they suffer from a quixotic kind of autonomy. They are at once free and yet still enslaved. Their independence, as it is, a gift rather than an autonomous assertion of human rights, as well by taking a place at the world political table they are by nature further Westernizing themselves. Just as the events of that past have left a lasting legacy on the collective unconscious – the sphere of psychology and spirituality – so to has that legacy changed forever the futures of both the colonizer and colonized.

As evidence of this pervasive cultural/social/political and the ambiguous – new – cultural memes it is producing would be the emergence of the Zapatista movement as an economic one instead of just a social/political one. Since the late 1990’s they have organized many indigenous weaving and agricultural collectives, forming an effective base of economic support amongst the local indigenous tribes. As well, this coevolution shows itself in the resulting changes in gender roles and social organization in the nearby Zapotec people. It was the Zapatista rebellion of 1994 that championed indigenous rights in a changing, and shrinking world. Out of this initial cause many different, and unexpected changes occurred, not the least of which is the emergence of Zapotec women as a powerful economic and political force within a society that was traditionally very stratified with strict gender roles. Author Lynn Stephen describes it thusly,  “Zapotec women… are now gaining more social power and… traditional roles within their culture are now changing in ways that are generally beneficial to the woman. (Stephen, Pg. 12).”

In an odd sort of irony the Zapatista movement, and the indigenous peoples they defend, have been forced to operate, and find success within, the economic and informational system of the colonizer’s creation as their best means to procure cultural sovereignty. By this measure it is no wonder why the impact of American economic – and military – power, supplemented with the advancement of communication technology and informational infrastructure, such as the Internet, on the global secular world, but especially so on the poor and newly independent former colonies has produced “a deepening current of international resistance to cultural domination and communication dependency (Schiller).” Surely this is the energic drive behind indigenous decolonization, this burgeoning sense of cultural self-esteem.

Reconstructing the Cultural Mythos – from the Inside Out.

The literary genre of Magical Realism and emergence of Latin American cinema are two perfect examples of this coevolution, and how it not only encompasses the political and social spheres, but also the spiritual and cultural spheres as well. Well known Latin author Jose Luis Borges grew up in a household that was both English as well as Spanish. As child he did not even realize that the two were separate languages. In fact, he said to interviewer Rita Guibert, “When I was talking to my paternal grandmother I had to speak in a manner that I afterwards discovered was called English, and when I was talking to my mother or her parents I had to talk a language that afterwards turned out to be Spanish (Monegal).” For young Jose Borges there was essentially no difference between the two, they were just different methods of interacting with his family.

Author Isabel Allende has taken the method of deconstructing cultural memes via the powerful use of archetypes, metaphor, and current socio-cultural axioms to a brilliant level. She uses the tradition of marianismo to imbue her female characters with a wisdom and strength that usually far surpasses the male, but socially dominant, characters. Illustrating the concept that true power lies in the spirit and values of a people, not their outward appearance, traditional caste, or assigned role.  However, as much as her art and expression were colored by Latin American cultural history, mythology, and tradition, it was also affected by the ideas of the West, namely postmodernism and feminism.

This legacy of artistic openness, philosophical exchange and retribution, and mutual identification with the expression and creation of the other are simply the “flowers and songs” of our modern era. Fertile ideas, fecund philosophies, eclectic archetypes, the language and stories of this emerging world-culture of the disenfranchised and excluded. In effect the suburban American teenager wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt has, in a purely cultural sense, more in common with a Zapotec women than he does with his own grandparents. The cultural legacy, and newly-originated world views of the intellectually disenfranchised American youth and the traditionless Zapotec women are more similar than the bonds either share with their own ethnic ancestors just a one or two generations prior. This is the effect of media, and informational exchange on decolonization and the emerging “popular cultural movement”.

Rebellion and Cultural Discourse

After all, what is it about Che Guevara that draws disaffected Western youth? It is more than just pseudo-intellectual rebellion, Che Guevara stands as the idolized antithesis to all the values of Western capitalism, and those whom feel trapped and disenfranchised by the consumerist lifestyle will undoubtedly find common ground with the philosophy of Comrade Che. As author M. T. Kato describes it, “The popular cultural revolution thus offers a space in which [one can construct an] autonomous subjectivity alternative to the dominant mode (Kato, Pg. 3)”.

In this manner the decolonization and coevolution aren’t about history and politics as much as they are also about community, and creating, developing, and sustaining communities of human beings. Human beings who live together in an ever-shrinking modern world, and whose interests – both spiritually and physically – are less and less tied to nations and political systems, but to those other individuals with whom we share our commonality of philosophy and purpose. Our individual development is only important in how it promotes, or stymies, our ability to engage other people. To cross those perceived barriers and make connections. Community is not set in stone, just as individuals are not. Community grows and evolves, makes room for all participants, and ultimately becomes a culmination of the contributions of all its constituent individuals. We become what we do, where we live, how we live, and whom we live with. In the words of a well known Mexican saying:

Dime con quien andas y te diré quien eres.

(Tell me who your friends are and I’ll tell you who you are.)

The more we embrace our community the more we embrace ourselves. This is the true legacy of “flowers and songs”; those remnants of the past, and of those whom have passed, that continue to inspire us, to guide, to warn, and to push us in new directions politically, socially, culturally, spiritually, and existentially.

Works Cited

Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Borderlands – La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 3^rd Ed. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 2007.

Gitlin, Todd. Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our   Lives. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2002.

Horcasitas, Fernando, et al. Native Mesoamerican Spirituality. New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1980.

Kato, M. T. From Kung Fu to Hip Hop: Globalization, Revolution, and Popular Culture. New York, NY; SUNY Press, 2007.

Lewin, Arie and Chris P. Long, Timothy N. Carroll. “The Coevolution of New Organizational Forms.” Organization Science, Vol. 10, No. 5, pp. 535-550

JSTOR. Cline Library, NAU. 26 April 2008

<http://www.jstor.org>.

Monegal, Emir Rodriguez. “Borges, the Reader.”

Diacritics, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Winter, 1974), pp. 41-49

JSTOR. Cline Library, NAU. 26 April 2008

<http://www.jstor.org>.

Schiller, Herbert I. “Decolonization of Information: Efforts toward a New International Order.” Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 5, No. 1, Culture in the Age of Mass Media (Winter, 1978), pp. 35-48

JSTOR. Cline Library, NAU. 5 April 2008

<http://www.jstor.org>.

Stephen, Lynn. Zapotec Women: Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Globalized Oaxaca. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

Works Referenced

Colás, Santiago. “Of Creole Symptoms, Cuban Fantasies, and Other Latin American Postcolonial Ideologies.” PMLA, Vol. 110, No. 3 (May, 1995), pp. 382-396

JSTOR. Cline Library, NAU. 4 April 2008

<http://www.jstor.org>.

Casteneda, Carlos. The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge. New York, NY: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1968.

Kraemer, Joseph S. “Revolutionary Guerrilla Warfare & the Decolonization Movement.”

Polity, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter, 1971), pp. 137-158

JSTOR. Cline Library, NAU. 4 April 2008

<http://www.jstor.org>.

López, Ana M. “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America.”

Cinema Journal, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 48-78

JSTOR. Cline Library, NAU. 6 April 2008

<http://www.jstor.org>.

McGee, R. Jon. Watching Lacandon Maya Lives. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2002.

Porter, J. R. and R. E. Washington. “Minority Identity and Self-Esteem.”

Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 19, (1993), pp. 139-161

JSTOR. Cline Library, NAU. 6 April 2008

<http://www.jstor.org>.

Thomas, Clive Y. “‘The Non-Capitalist Path’ As Theory and Practice of Decolonization and Socialist Transformation.”

Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 5, No. 2, Caribbean/Bolivia/and Black Folklore (Spring, 1978), pp. 10-28

JSTOR. Cline Library, NAU. 4 April 2008

<http://www.jstor.org>.

Winks, Robin W. “On Decolonization and Informal Empire.”

The American Historical Review, Vol. 81, No. 3 (Jun., 1976), pp. 540-556

JSTOR. Cline Library, NAU. 3 April 2008

<http://www.jstor.org>.

Manipulating the field of perception . . . Shamanic trance postures, sending the unstruck note via written word into your blood stream . . .  Scrying the dark side of the brain . . . coaxing whispers from the spaces between the emptiness neurons . . . Buddhism

Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, Ray Bradbury. . .

“i think i was programed from birth to adore reading. With both of my grandmothers being librarians, there was never a lack of literature in my home. As I got older and began to develop my own personal appreciation of art, I found certain novels that pushed through me, and changed who I was as a person. Although I am always searching for a new bound copy of my dreams, it seems like I always go back to the same stories. These are the books that have changed who I am. These are the stories that diagram my life, these are the novels that i can recite every word from every page, the books that are like sex and drugs and raw emotion and life.”

Read this thread here . . . http://afropunk.ning.com/forum/topics/books-that-changed-your-life

I must admit, I’m not very convinced by Susan Blackmore’s notion of ‘temes’, third-level replicators as distinct from memes as are the latter are from genes. I think it would be more useful to see the emergence of memetic replicators – approximately with human beings – from genetic replication systems as the coming-to-light of the larger population of which genes are a part, rather than their emergence as a unique population unto themselves. Memes are too loosely defined, they can be signifiers, gestures, behaviors, routines, attitudes, objects, fashions. They aren’t ‘things’ unto themselves the way genetic materials are.

This doesn’t count against the concept of ‘meme’, but rather, calls the prior understanding of genes into question. The replicating function of genes begins to seem irreducible to the chemical substrate itself, in the simple sense that this material cannot act alone, it has to coordinate a massive public-works project, within each cell, tissue, organ, system, organism, and ecosystem.

Genes may be fundamental to the coordination of this process, but their persistence is purely tautological. Genes don’t ’strive’ to replicate and perpetuate themselves, not even in a metaphorical sense. Genes are indifferent blueprints that may or may not lead to successfully persistent implementations. If they program failure, they ’succeed’ in effacing themselves, and if they program reproductive fitness, they ’succeed’ in perpetuating themselves. There is really no benefit to ascribing sentience here. Genes simply do whatever; if they are good at sticking around, then they will indeed be around, whereas if they are good at dissappearing, they won’t be.

Ascribing such a metaphorical sentience does nothing but confuse the issue, which comes to a head when we begin talking about memetic evolution outpacing genetic evolution. The tendency of carrying the bad explanatory habit over to this second level obscures a crucial point: memes aren’t ‘things’ that compete with us, use us, exploit or endanger or help us. The problem is, once we introduce the meme category, it begins to errode ‘us’, drawing bit by bit everything that makes us who and what we are into its orbit. The sentience metaphor ultimately functions as a last-ditch defense against dehumanization.

Ultimately, you and I are made up of coordinated arrangements of memes – genetic/biological, linguistic, psychological, social, political, economic, and so on. The notion that there is some unitary causal nexus binding and directing this coordination, using it as a means to its own autonomous end – even if it is admitted that this nexus is somehow a natural product – seems increasingly unlikely. The singular nature of the person is generally a coordination of an individuated biological unit and an individuated linguistic unit, which together have a tremendous capacity to interact with an influence social, environmental, and other systems.

In other words, memes go a long way toward denaturalizing genes, to the extent that we are now entering the age of large-scale genetic engineering. In this regard, I don’t think its necessary to posit a third level of ‘temes’, which seems to depend on the autonomy of this level from the ‘all-to-human’ level of memes. Machinic life will no longer depend on man, so memes aren’t enough to explain it… The problem here is that, in accepting the radical implications of memetics, we aren’t left with anything like man to transcend. What once were human beings are now organic technologies with an especially high capacity to interface with non-genetic replicators.

Biological evolution retroactively becomes the early leg of technological evolution, the haphazard ancestry of technology constituted by ready-made natural-machines. As Kevin Kelly suggests, this preliminary stage is broken when genes no longer depend on the continuity of their transmission, becoming capable of revivification, the ressurrection of extinct forms, or the mining of the diagrammatic resevoir for exaptable artifacts.

The machenome is this diagrammatic resevoir which extends itself in the interpenetrating tendrils of the machinic phylum. This includes biotic as much as abiotic, the natural as much as the artificial. It is the junkyard of creation, whose parts might be seized upon, returned from the dead, at any moment.

Machines don’t use us, memes don’t use us, genes don’t use us, because there is no us. We are only artificial arrangements of them, avatars of their dynamic. Yet we are no less real for being artificial. You and I are more than ‘meme-machines’ designed to deludedly carry out the will of memes. We are memes, which amount to nothing but the machines that propagate them, be they genetic-biotic machines or technological machines. We can either push the phylum into ever new contortions, or fade into obsolescence, but there is no reason to prefer one to the other.

Youtube personality, TheAmazingAtheist, recently posted a video in which he predicts a not so pleasant future. Much of what he says regarding this is based in current scientific fact. The desire to predict and control everything with emerging technologies is well established. Understanding the motivations of individuals and entire societies is the task of socio-tech, which is a key point mentioned within the 2001 NSF/DOC report on NBIC technologies (refer to page 158). This is just one of many official reports which openly calls for a world of complete predictability. A world of “enhanced human performance.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NvOXpc20ZA