this is post 3 in a 3 part series.
please read parts 1 and 2 first.
lying with taut talking points or evocative images is easy. hell, that’s what they’re for.
but memes that lie mostly do not work.
they are not funny or evocative because the analogy fails. it’s code that won’t compile. only that which draws valid comparison sets off the associational informational cascade that leads to the vast enhancements in informational density that make this modality special.
and without that your meme loses its potency.
you can only tell people so much in a brief span.
that’s why they call it an “attention economy.”
the true meme gets you to run code you already have installed.
that’s why it is so powerful and why its effect cumulate.
we are just starting to see the capability of this jump in communication evolution.
it will shake worlds.
and this is a glorious thing.
it skewers everything.
no one is safe.
(not even if they were promised that there would be a monkey to help them)
the speed with which this can pour a spicy glass of “shut the hell up” and provoke real thought by eliciting and evoking analogy is unprecedented as is the sublime, anarchic free market to select and spread the best means of doing so.
once, the powers that be needed fear only a few cartoonists and voices and could easily suppress their spread. now you must fight against the full force of the insight and creativity of the global myriads and the relentless upvote of the informational instantiations which best work to convey meaning as infallibly adjudicated by an audience of billions that play off one another like jazz night at birdland.
welcome to the world of multimedia metaphor.
there is no escape from this new reality.
it’s the new art and every public figure and ideologue has to play because the game does not need your permission to include you.
everyone is going to get tested.
and many will not pass.
and the gom jabbar is ignominy, inefficacy, and irrelevance.
the receding paradigms experience memes as nothing but pain and bafflement. it’s a language used against them in which they cannot become fluent because they are emotive thinkers and that is the opposite of shape rotation.
emotive cognition/presentation is a process the opposes rather than enables logic.
and so they recoil in terror, but they cannot pull away.
no wonder they fear it.
because to meme is human and our language has evolved.
notions of “malign creativity” are, in fact, just excuses to malign emergent creativity put forth by those who no longer possess such generative force in meaningful form.
the balance of power has become something altogether new and that which could so avidly carry lies now can carry truths that are stronger still.
you can cry all you like about it.
but the rules are the rules.
and you can hate a playah,
but you gotta love this game.
this is a medium and an art form in its infancy.
it’s only just discovering what it can do and gathering the power of cumulative effect and accumulated trust.
it sounds funny, but memes are more trustworthy than prior modalities.
invalid shape rotation does not parse.
if the meme makes sense, the underlying logic does too.
this does not make it true but at least it makes it consistent and that internal consistency when mapped to evoked salients that you already possess and accept as accurate allows the extension and extrapolation of logical structures that at least demand internal integrity and resist the claims of convenience and tactical morality that have become so prevalent.
as this grows up, old structures will fall away and the new pervade.
things are going to change.
forget the revenge of the sith, the rise of the meme is the revenge of the shape rotators, the high G crowd who have been long buried beneath prolifically spreadable fallacies and appeals to emotion because they had no medium that could express information rapidly or broadly enough to compete with imagery in the attention economy of past media.
well now they have one.
and the gap is going to widen at dizzying speed and reason shall become further ascendant.
and this will become our time.
and this is going to be fun.
So what you're saying is that, between venerating cats and communicating via hieroglyphics, Ancient Egypt was ahead of the curve?
I have written many times over the last decade- ridicule is extremely potent against tyrants of all types. They do not like being mocked, and memeing does this like no other form I have seen.