A comment section on YouTube once again reminded me why us humans are so successful as organisms.
Evolution rewards being adapted to your ecological environment, and normally that happens through biological inheritance, mutation and selection. But instead of having advantageous biological traits, homo sapiens as a species is maximized for learning and incorporating taught behaviors. We don't have good protection like a shell or even thick fur, we don't have natural weapons like claws, and while we do have teeth, they kinda suck for defensive purposes. We're also not that fast in terms of top speed, so running away from predators isn't really an option either.
What we do have, though, is the fact that thanks to our ability to teach and learn so well, we essentially outsourced our evolution from biology to culture instead. And as we are all aware, culture evolves way faster than DNA ever could. So evolution rewards adaptation, and we just went and evolved not to adapt to a specific environment, but to be able to adapt really fast in general. Yeah we require tool use and community, if you set out a lone human infant in the wild they'll just straight up die. If you leave an adult without any tools or clothing, they will either attempt and succeed to make them, or die as well. But if we have both, we are the absolute champions of adapting to environments, by adapting our culture and tools to it, instead of needing to adapt our bodies.
The idea that language and genes have evolved in tandem seems trivial in the sense that you would expect genetic drift and language drift to be affected in a similar manner by the geographic separation of different human populations.
Cognitive dissonance at it's finest is just a part of our memetic (mental) Evolution process
"Asking what we would do if there is no God is like a slave asking what would we do with no master." From what I understand it's no coincidence that God usually agrees with you. Because your understanding of God and your expectations of God are coming from you. It's a mental way to master the world around you. You'd worry about not being happy without God's wisdom and advice but when you think you get an "answer" to your problems when you pray that's your cognitive dissonance giving credit to something outside of your brain rather than realizing that your meditation or prayer and your subsequent 'resolution' or 'epiphany' or that "answer" is actually coming from you ...not an outside force. It's like you give credit to angels or aliens for your own personal intuition. For all you know you already are operating without a God but it's just that what you choose to believe about a God is actually what you use to help you navigate yourself through the world. Which is fine for you, but as I realized this I couldn't just keep doing it anymore without feeling like I was in a sense being highly irresponsible. The trouble I see with this use of ...'faith' is that we are able to use it to give ourselves less responsibility concerning how we deal with the world but in the same vein we are denying ourselves our own due credit. To me it's an amazing form of mental evolution that allows ourselves to psyche our selves out when things get to hard by saying it's not in our hands...but I think there is trouble for all of us in our future if we keep using these ideas to relinquish the truth about our actual control of our own reality.
Remix, Intellectual Property and Copyright: The battle between capital gain and the common good
If you were to ask an artist about a piece of their work or what inspired them to create said piece, they would most likely cite influences from other artist’s work or an experience they have had. As “Rip! A Remix Manifesto” observed, no one creates in a vacuum—creation and inspiration comes from something else. Creation, in fact, requires influence because our education system is set up as a system of copying and emulation. We learn the fundamentals, copy and memorize the “greats” of each field and then are set out into the world to develop our own ideas and inferences. This is the driving force of social change—copying, transforming and combining ideas, behaviors and skills to create and drive culture forward. This is memetic evolution. Throughout the history of life, genetic evolution has been the driving force of change within a population. However, now instead of genes we have memes (ideas/behavior/skills), and we, as humans, have used them to alter the natural progression of genetic evolution. As creation and technology has advanced, it has moved forward faster and faster due to the memes building upon one another. With the development of the Internet, this has further complicated social and cultural change. Remix, at its basic level, is a prime example of memetic evolution, for it is the copy, transformation and combination of memes.
However, in order to preserve the sanctity of the creator and allow them to make some profit from their meme, humans decided to restrict this evolution slightly (at first). Because of the creation and development costs, original works are more expensive than their copies. This is the basic idea behind copyright. The government intended for copyright to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts” and therefore allowed for the inventor/creator to have ownership over his/her ideas for a short period of time in order to make a profit before it was released into the public domain. Yet this concept morphed into what we think of today as intellectual property. Somewhere along the line, the belief developed that you could own or control ideas/concepts—that if you “created” them, they were your property. Essentially, somewhere along this line, copyright got out of control. Mass media wanted ownership of everything, and wanted this ownership to never expire. Before technologies became highly interactive and the audience was more passive, this model worked to an extent. Conversely, with the digitization of culture, this model could really no longer work. The Internet is built on concepts of collaboration, sharing and interaction. It is incredible easy to copy, mix, transform, connect, combine, create and recreate content through the use of digital technologies. So what does this mean for copyright laws and regulations?
Well, it seems that there are two types of “copying” in the digital world: direct copying, which I would classify as stealing or piracy, and remixing or sampling, which takes other people’s ideas or creations and makes something new from them. Yet, big media companies would probably argue that there really is no difference, that it is all stealing and an infringement on copyright law and intellectual property. The thing is, is that big media companies are charging obscene amounts of money to use their content. “Rip! A Remix Manifesto” calculated that it would cost 4 million dollars for Girl Talk to put out one album if he were to pay what the producers were asking, and, honestly, his songs don’t even sound like the originals anymore. In recent years, the media industry has followed a trend of consolidation, where only a handful of companies have complete control of the media. Unfortunately, this means big media is just getting bigger and bigger, and therefore richer and richer. To me, these companies seem incredibly greedy. The video stated that almost none of the money paid in royalties for the use of songs is given to the artist; instead, it is paid to the media companies that own the rights. Does any of this seem fair? How is what is happening even close to the original intention of copyright? Our public domain is in crisis. Private companies are restricting the public’s ability to create and invent. The bottom line is everything is centered on profit, and there is no way that this can be good for culture and the people. The video “Rip! A Remix Manifesto”, spoke about how Brazil created HIV medicine that was affordable to its citizens, even though a large healthcare company had patented this medicine. The company was furious that their formula was being created for cheaper, and claimed their intellectual property had been compromised. Still, this medicine helped a great deal of Brazilians live more comfortable and longer lives. This brings up the battle between the common good and capital gain.
If we really are suppose to be a government that operates “by the people for the people”, shouldn’t our laws reflect the interest of the common good? Though I am nowhere near claiming making a profit is not essential for a healthy economy, our society’s focus on capital gain has escalated to new levels. Big corporations and the wealthy are constantly searching to gain more control, ownership and profits. In fact, in the United States, ten percent of Americans control seventy-five percent of the wealth. That means there is twenty-five percent of the US wealth for ninety percent of its citizens. Additionally, I imagine these big companies and copyright laws are restricting development of inventions and scientific advancements (as seen in the HIV medicine example). Where would medicine and technology be if their sole purpose were to serve the people and the environment? If big oil companies were not as rich, powerful and profit-driven, is it possible that we would have a consumer car that ran on water? Creative commons is a concept that was developed by Lawrence Lessig with the intention of setting culture free and promoting the common good. This would allow people to sample and build on previous works to create a better and more creative world. Though I do believe piracy and complete plagiarism should be viewed as crimes, I think that we must consider returning to intellectual property system more similar to the original idea of copyright. Sampling and remixing in an online world is the folk art of the future and is necessary to drive memetic evolution forward into a future where we can find a balance between capital gain and providing for the common good.
I'm one of those obnoxious old-schoolers who twitches when the world "quote" is used as a noun. I'm the one filling the "quotation" tag on tumblr. I think "quotation" is a lovely word, I think the "-ly" deserves its place at the end of adverbs. I get confused when "they" means just one person (though I think a gender neutral pronoun is a great idea). My writing is riddled with "one might" or "one could" because of it. I love the subjuntive, I think "whom" is lovely.
But language evolves. And "quote" is a noun here on the internet. Even I don't capitalize "internet." Because language evolves.
The slenderman meme is growing. A Google Image search brings hundreds of results. The Youtube channels devoted to him are starting to reach into the double digits. The blogs are numerous. Why?
The word ‘meme’ was invented as a sister word to the word ‘gene.’ A meme is, quite simply, an idea. A unit of information. It could be a word, a symbol, a melody, a concept, a memory. The word meme was created in order to introduce the concept of memetic evolution. Such evolution is equivalent to genetic evolution. Memes, like genes, evolve, adapt, mutate. Successful memes propagate. Unsuccessful memes die out. Clusters of memetic populations live in our heads, directing how and what we think, adapting to the intellectual environment in which we find ourselves, thriving, going extinct, shifting, evolving.
Slenderman is ‘just’ a meme. We all know this. Everyone knows this. He started out as a joke on the SomethingAwful forums. And still he is terrifying. This seemed nonsensical to me, until I realized that it is actually his memetic value that makes him more real than any character dreamt up in a horror movie or video game. It is what makes him non-fictional.
He had no creator. Not really. One person placed his image in a couple pictures, but his identity was constructed by a thousand minds, working separately and yet in conjunction with each other to breed him into existence.
There are other similar, faceless characters out there. Tall Man, from Yahtzee’s games. Terrible Trivium, from the Phantom Tollbooth. But these characters are the product of one creative mind each. Slenderman is the product of many, and his identity is expressed in hundreds of forms all over the internet. Fan-art. Marble Hornets. TJAProjects. EverymanHYBRID. Several others.
As a non-living organism, as an entity, as a self-perpetuating creature, he is real. Among the frenzied memetic life in our brains, he is a parasite. To some, he is a predator. And he is immortal. As long as we are captive to the ideas and thoughts that shape our consciousness, he will be there behind our eyelids just before we open them. He will be waiting for us behind that closed door. He has escaped from the confines of the digitized world to live in our minds.
Thus the constant urge. The constant seeking, the need to create, the constant desire to write, to visualize, to think, about him. The meme is spreading, like an infection, like swarming insects, an overabundant logarithmic population of malevolence.
And none of us, once we have been infected, wants to stop him.
