5 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2024
    1. Asimov’s Foundation series, which is fascinating because of the spoiler that you first need planetary scale populations to model the future, but then a mutant mule appears who can change behavior and must be opposed by Second Foundation operators leveraging his own emotions against him to get the project back on track

      Asimov in his fiction was fascinated by the advent of statistics, so let's not read things into it wrt predicting futures. We know that's not what statistics do, and still are committed to the waving of invisible hands like it's the 18th century. Connecting this to memetics is likely a fruitless path.

    2. A journal of memetics was founded by Daniel Dennett and others decades ago but didn’t succeed, potentially because we lacked social networks and data to really study how memes and ideas spread and take hold of minds

      Journal appeared 1997-2005 http://pcp.vub.ac.be/jom-emit/past.html

  2. Jul 2023
  3. Feb 2023
  4. Jun 2022
    1. It builds alliances as it travels, provokes translation or mistranslation, and creates new publics and debates. By losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new aura around it.

      This reminds me of those trad memes that have been widely circulated, often with zero regard to or knowledge of their origins in rightwing and white supremacist/nationalist spaces. Rather, the context has sometimes been completely rewritten to something less politically charged. What does it mean for someone to laugh at a meme, someone who the meme's original creators probably hate?? The image sparks these debates too, across social networks!