That person would be correct on both counts. The world has changed enormously since that time, and radicalism has become so common as to be passed over as just unusual. Chaos is no longer a term used to describe a state of confusion, but is rather a highly rigorous mathematical discipline.
The time traveler might wonder what possibly could have happened in just fifty years. What kind of powerful effect had transformed the world so profoundly? What kind of people were these? It is unlikely that the traveler would truly understand what had happened because he would lack the necessary context. The people he would encounter would be virtually unintelligible to him. Indeed, that time traveler would meet a new kind of human, an organism that is immune to ideas that the traveler could not tolerate. That evolved human would be a meta-radical.
What is a meta-radical? How did this organism evolve? Let’s begin with the notion of chaos. Chaos theory has changed the way we think about everything. It is a sophisticated mathematics which describes complex systems in a way that was impossible in 1969. In his book Chaos, Making a New Science, James Gleick describes how chaos and the geometry of a mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot altered thinking about everything forever:
“The patterns that [were] …discovered in the early 1970s, with their complex boundaries between orderly and chaotic behavior, had unsuspected regularities that could only be described in terms of large scales to small. The structures that provided the key to nonlinear dynamics proved to be fractal. And on the most immediate practical level, fractal geometry also provided a set of tools that were taken up by physicists, chemists, seismologists, metallurgists, probability theorists and physiologists. These researchers were convinced, and they tried to convince others, that Mandelbrot’s new geometry was nature’s own.” (Gleick, 114)
Gleick also describes how the ubiquitous pattern seen in trees and the human body came to be seen by scientists as a universal characteristic of nature:
“As fractals, branching structures can be described with transparent simplicity, with just a few bits of information. Perhaps the simple transformations that gave rise to [natural] shapes…have their analogue in the coded instructions of an organism’s genes. DNA surely cannot specify the vast number of bronchi, bronchioles, and alveoli or the particular spatial structure of the resulting tree, but it can specify a repeating process of bifurcation and development. Such processes suit nature’s purpose. …Mandelbrot glided mater-of-factly from pulmonary and vascular trees to real botanical trees, trees that need to capture sun and resist wind, with fractal branches and fractal leaves. And theoretical biologists began to speculate that fractal scaling was not just common but universal in morphogenesis.” (Gleick, 110).
This new approach to understanding natural systems makes apparent many heretofore unnoticed similarities between seemingly unrelated systems. This new perspective shows that everything that we encounter in the universe has a unifying similarity, and that similarity is a result of relatively small bits of information which have the ability to replicate in patterns. Gleick makes clear the impact of chaos theory on a wide variety of theoretical disciplines:
“Now that science is looking, chaos seems to be everywhere. A rising column of cigarette smoke breaks into wild swirls. A flag snaps back and forth in the wind. A dripping faucet goes from a steady pattern to a random one. Chaos appears in the behavior of the weather, the behavior of an airplane in flight, the behavior of cars clustering on an expressway, the behavior of oil flowing in underground pipes. No matter what the medium, the behavior obeys the same newly discovered laws. That realization has begun to change the way business executives make decisions about insurance, the way astronomers look at the solar system, the way political theorists talk about the stresses leading to armed conflict.” (Gleick, 5)
Once scientists and theoreticians began to recognize that fractal self-similarity was a universal quality, they began to look at other systems from a new perspective. Human culture came to be viewed as a chaotic organism, and the science of memetics was born. Richard Dawkins defines the meme for the first time in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene:
“What, after all, is so special about genes ? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of physics are supposed to be true all over the accessible universe. Are there any principles of biology that are likely to have similar universal validity ? When astronauts voyage to distant planets and look for life, they can expect to find creatures too strange and unearthly for us to imagine. But is there anything that must be true of all life, wherever it is found, and whatever the basis of its chemistry ? If forms of life exist whose chemistry is based on silicon rather than carbon, or ammonia rather than water, if creatures are discovered that boil to death at -100 degrees centigrade, if a form of life is found that is not based on chemistry at all but on electronic reverberating circuits, will there still be any general principle that is true of all life ? Obviously I do not know but, if I had to bet, I would put my money on one fundamental principle. This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.(1) The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity that prevails on our planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain other conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process.
But do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other, consequent, kinds of evolution? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.
The new [primordial] soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. `Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like `gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to `memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with `cream'.
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.” (Dawkins, 191-192)
As electronic communications grew out of telephone into every kind of video and sound imaginable transmitted globally by randomly delivered packets of data, the propagation of memes became virtually instantaneous. Soon virulent ideas could infect the entire planet in a matter of just hours. This tendency for self similarity and replication of information transcended the gene analogy and moved into the viral realm by the nineteen-nineties.
In his 1994 book, Media Virus, Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture, Douglas Rushkoff discuses how memes have begun operating as viruses:
“If we are to understand the datasphere as an extension of a planetary ecosystem or even just the breeding ground for new ideas in our culture, then we must come to terms with the fact that media events provoking real social change are more than simple Trojan horses. They are media viruses.
This term is not being used as a metaphor. These media events are not like viruses. They are viruses. Most of us are familiar with biological viruses like the ones that cause the flu, the common cold, and perhaps even AIDS. As they are currently understood by the medical community, viruses are unlike bacteria or germs because they are not living things; they are simply protein shells containing genetic material. The attacking virus uses its protective and sticky protein casing to latch onto a healthy cell and then inject its own genetic code, essentially genes, inside. The virus code mixes and competes for control with the cell’s own genes, and, if victorious, it permanently alters the way the cell functions and reproduces. A particularly virulent strain will transform the host cell into a factory that replicates the virus.
…But instead of traveling along an organic circulatory system, a media virus travels through the networks of the mediasphere. The “protein shell” of a media virus might be an event, invention, technology, system of thought, musical riff, visual image, scientific theory, sex scandal, clothing style, or even pop hero--as long as it can catch our attention. Any one of these media virus shells will search out the receptive nooks and crannies in popular culture and stick on anywhere it is noticed. Once attached, the virus injects its more hidden agendas into the datastream in the form of ideological code --not genes, but a conceptual equivalent we now call “memes.” Like real genetic material, these memes infiltrate the way we do business, educate ourselves, interact with one another--even the way we perceive reality.” (Rushkoff, 9-10)
Rushkoff continues with a definitive example of the cultural viruses that permeate our environment:
“A popular animated childrens’ show is the perfect virus. It spreads for one reason, then releases potent memes that do not seem evident on the surface. “The Simpsons” works as a media virus because its functioning is dependent upon its media context. It exhibits self-similarity in that its episodes are media about media, and it promotes an interactive spirit because its main character is a self-styled media activist. As long as its memes stay shrouded in “kids” comedy, the cultural immune apparatus remains unprovoked and the virus is free to run rampant” (Rushkoff, 116-117).
The self-similarity of the Simpsons, in that it replicates the media of which it is a part, is perfect example of replicating memes that have chaotic scalar symmetry. The Simpsons have been translated and are in syndication to countries all over the world. As a result, the viral memes of American culture have been delivered across the planetary organism via every possible form of electronic delivery. It is no coincidence that the design of the worldwide communication network is perfectly fractal in its shape. It makes perfect sense that this extension of human neural tissue would display the same organization as organic structures inside the human body, as well as other naturally occurring structures.
In his book Virus of the Mind Richard Brodie describes how cultural viruses have been with us since the beginning:
“Viruses of the mind have been with us throughout history, but are constantly evolving and changing. They are infectious pieces of our culture that spread rapidly throughout a population, altering people’s thoughts and lives in their wake. They include everything from relatively harmless mind viruses, such as miniskirts and slang phrases, to mind viruses that seriously derail people’s lives, such as the cycle of unwed mothers on welfare, the Crips and Bloods youth gangs and the Branch Davidian religious cult. When these pieces of culture are ones we like, there’s no problem. However, as the Michelangelo computer virus programs computers with instructions to destroy their data, viruses of the mind can program us to think and behave in ways that are destructive to our lives.
This is the most surprising and most profound insight from the science of memetics: your thoughts are not always your own original ideas. You catch thoughts—you get infected with them, both directly from other people and indirectly from viruses of the mind. People don’t seem to like the idea that they aren’t in control of their thoughts. The reluctance of people to even consider this notion is probably the main reason the scientific work done so far is not better known (Brodie, 14).
We can now make the assertions that human culture is an organism, that ideas operate as organisms, and that the datasphere is an organism which behaves as an extension of the gestalt human consciousness. Put more simply: “Ecologists now understand the life on this planet to be part of a single biological organism” (Rushkoff, 7). We can assert as well that memes behave like viruses which can infect the organism of human culture.
Let us now return to the early sixties when electronic media was coming into ascendancy. In 1960 Richard Nixon ran against John F. Kennedy. This election featured the first televised presidential debates. JFK looked good on camera. He was smiling and seemed relaxed. Richard Nixon sweated under the hot lights, appeared to have a five o-clock shadow, and was later compared in a campaign ad to a used car salesman. At that moment, memes had evolved in a very important way. The message no longer was as important as the image. As the sixties progressed, memes of counterculture and war protest replicated themselves millions of times in magazines, newspapers, and TV. One image, published on the cover of Time Magazine, of a young Vietnamese girl running naked down a road after a napalm drop by American forces probably did more to bring the war to an end than any single meme, and there was an enormous proliferation of them.
During this time, America experienced what the subculture itself identified as a revolution. Vietnam was the flashpoint issue for many young people, and the “establishment” of parental America was the enemy. Viral memes of drugs, communism, antiestablishmentism, free love and others replicated unchecked. However this uncontrolled release of radical ideas had a downside. By the seventies, society began to recognize some of the results of the unsuppressed expression of these cultural viruses. In a trend that continues, cultural icons were dying of drug overdoses or suicide. Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Elvis Presley all died prematurely. Radical social experiments that had begun in the sixties began to produce progeny and these children were more evidence that there was a problem. In 1976, two young journalists, both single parents, went on the road to discover how the children of radical societies were faring. The resulting book, The Children of the Counterculture, examines a wide range of communes, rural and urban. Although they try to maintain an upbeat tone, the chronicle is one of gross neglect, poverty and despair. Modern society would certainly jail these radical parents and place their children in foster homes. In their introduction, they set the stage for their journey of discovery:
‘Where had they gone, all those judge-taunters and war-busters and parent-worriers and armies of the night? It is some what ironic how the counter culture dropped off the back pages of the newspaper just as the front page began to print verification of what once were called hippie fantasies. Government bugging, the telephone company spying, the corruption of megacorporations, cheating in the Soap Box Derby, VD in the Girl Scouts, the dissolution of the family, couples fighting not to take custody of the children after divorce, the whole weird crumbling country you read about in the East Village Other or The Fabulous Freak Brothers comic books, you can now read about in Time, or hear about at Rotary Club luncheons.” (Rothchild, 2)
But it soon became clear that parents who spent all day stoned on LSD were not really parents. The father of a ten year old boy is described as he has an inappropriate exchange with a child at his son Ben’s school:
“Ben’s relationship to sex became more understandable one day at the free school, when Nemo came to pick him up in the Mercedes. Nemo, who somehow managed to come off as the most concerned parent at the parent meetings, liked to hang around the school during the afternoons. On this particular day, he motioned for one of the girls on the playground, and eight-year-old named Penny, to come over and talk to him. He was standing next to the fence wearing blue Bermuda shorts and a smoke Colombian t-shirt. He started up a conversation with this little girl, and she began to laugh, and Ben, who always wanted to know what his dad was doing, walked over to join the conversation. By this time, Nemo was talking loud enough to be heard by the whole playground “I was just telling your girlfriend that you couldn’t be queer, because you ball chicks”. Ben was completely taken aback: he started to fidget and look down as if he wished to be swallowed. “What do you mean?” he mumbled as if to plead with Nemo to stop, but Nemo kept on, he was smiling and enjoying himself. “You know what I mean,” he said to the growing crowd of free school kids. “What about the time with Margo in the sailboat?” The little girl smiled and somebody behind her called Ben “sex maniac”, which was one of his school nicknames.” (Rothchild, 22-23)
This was 1976, when there was still a feeling that the radicalism of the sixties would bear fruit. Yet, these young liberal journalists had come up against something quite distasteful, something today we call a sex offender. Maybe the notion of free love, lots of drugs, and no responsibility was inconsistent with the nurturing of children. There are more examples, far too many to mention here, but it can be fairly said that the cultural viruses of the sixties had begun to injure the organism. It would take another twenty years for the momentum to begin to shift, but that shift would be inevitable.
In the fifties, conservatism was in control of the American establishment, and it wielded memes as well as arms to effect immunity against threats, internal and external. Communism was the primary attacking virus, as well as a physical armed entity. Today, conditions have changed considerably. A descendant of sixties radicalism, liberalism, has become entrenched within the establishment. Many sixties radicals are now members of the establishment they once so reviled. Carried along by their viruses they moved predictably into positions of power by mimicking their antagonists. It is important to remember that these viruses are real living entities that use people to gain their ends. “It may seem strange to call a meme ambitious, but the mere shape of a successful meme dictates its acquisitive behavior. In fact, the evolutionary race between concepts guarantees that those that develop the cleverest lures are most likely to survive.” (Bloom, 179)
But just as the radicals of the sixties have achieved the power they sought, they find themselves besieged by a familiar mechanism. Conservatism has become an attacking viral meme. Utilizing modern media constructs like the internet and talk radio, conservatism is now in the role of attacking the liberal establishment. Although one might point out the administration now in office is labeled conservative, George W. Bush would probably be considered a socialist by the establishment of 1960.
And certainly things which are radical by modern standards would be wholly unimaginable to even the most radical of thinkers of that time. Today, radicalism has lost it’s cultural merit and has become, as a result of the popularization if it’s messages, a loosely organized network of individuals seeking only the extreme, without any sense of social responsibility. Conversely, radicals of the sixties were working to bring about a revolution; they were determined to change the world for the better. Radicals of today are more interested in pushing the envelope and out-extreming the popularized media.
In this environment of rampant viral memes, a new form modern radical has emerged. Radical by fifties standards, and conservative by today’s standard, the meta-radical enjoys the benefits of a more open and unstructured society, without falling prey to the pitfalls experienced by radicals of the sixties. Post sixties generations have increasingly become more and more immune to radical ideas.
Like the yuppies before them, many GenXers have embraced the suburban bourgeois American Dream, but with a much different experience than their fifties era grandparents. They enjoy watching South Park and Ren and Stimpy, spend summer vacations at Burning Man, and work in demanding IT, graphic design and advertising jobs the rest of the time. GenXers are the first generation of meta-radicals, but they retain some of the angst of their forbearers of the sixties. Caught in the transition, the X is perhaps more aptly associated with a crossroads.
Generations after the GenXers are returning to more fifties-like values, with the immunity conferred by their predecessors’ exposure to viral memes. Playgroups and babysitting co-ops have replaced the commune, women are free to work, and men are free to stay home with the kids. Marital fidelity is starting to return to vogue, and family values aren’t an effete joke anymore. Extreme and radical ideas and images are commercialized, are proliferating, yet have become mundane.
Because people have begun to develop an immunity to all this radicalism, a greater cultural freedom is possible. This immunity is a result of exposure to more and more ideas. After all, anything from a casual remark to a focused propaganda campaign, from a pair of jeans to a nuclear weapon can operate as a virus. We can see that every moment of your experience carries the potential to irrevocably alter your life. Indeed, this paper is itself a collection of viruses. Have you been infected? Or do you have immunity? Are you evolved, or are you like the traveler that cannot ever understand?
Works Cited
Bloom, Howard K. The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History. New York, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995
Brodie, Richard. Virus of the Mind The New Science of the Meme. Seattle, Washington: Integral Press. 1996
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. 1976
Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York, New York: Viking Penguin,
1987
Rothchild, John and Wolf, Susan. The Children of the Counterculture. United States of
America: Doubleday, 1976
Rushkoff, Douglas. Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture. New York, New
York: Balantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1994
What is a meta-radical? How did this organism evolve? Let’s begin with the notion of chaos. Chaos theory has changed the way we think about everything. It is a sophisticated mathematics which describes complex systems in a way that was impossible in 1969. In his book Chaos, Making a New Science, James Gleick describes how chaos and the geometry of a mathematician named Benoit Mandelbrot altered thinking about everything forever:
“The patterns that [were] …discovered in the early 1970s, with their complex boundaries between orderly and chaotic behavior, had unsuspected regularities that could only be described in terms of large scales to small. The structures that provided the key to nonlinear dynamics proved to be fractal. And on the most immediate practical level, fractal geometry also provided a set of tools that were taken up by physicists, chemists, seismologists, metallurgists, probability theorists and physiologists. These researchers were convinced, and they tried to convince others, that Mandelbrot’s new geometry was nature’s own.” (Gleick, 114)
Gleick also describes how the ubiquitous pattern seen in trees and the human body came to be seen by scientists as a universal characteristic of nature:
“As fractals, branching structures can be described with transparent simplicity, with just a few bits of information. Perhaps the simple transformations that gave rise to [natural] shapes…have their analogue in the coded instructions of an organism’s genes. DNA surely cannot specify the vast number of bronchi, bronchioles, and alveoli or the particular spatial structure of the resulting tree, but it can specify a repeating process of bifurcation and development. Such processes suit nature’s purpose. …Mandelbrot glided mater-of-factly from pulmonary and vascular trees to real botanical trees, trees that need to capture sun and resist wind, with fractal branches and fractal leaves. And theoretical biologists began to speculate that fractal scaling was not just common but universal in morphogenesis.” (Gleick, 110).
This new approach to understanding natural systems makes apparent many heretofore unnoticed similarities between seemingly unrelated systems. This new perspective shows that everything that we encounter in the universe has a unifying similarity, and that similarity is a result of relatively small bits of information which have the ability to replicate in patterns. Gleick makes clear the impact of chaos theory on a wide variety of theoretical disciplines:
“Now that science is looking, chaos seems to be everywhere. A rising column of cigarette smoke breaks into wild swirls. A flag snaps back and forth in the wind. A dripping faucet goes from a steady pattern to a random one. Chaos appears in the behavior of the weather, the behavior of an airplane in flight, the behavior of cars clustering on an expressway, the behavior of oil flowing in underground pipes. No matter what the medium, the behavior obeys the same newly discovered laws. That realization has begun to change the way business executives make decisions about insurance, the way astronomers look at the solar system, the way political theorists talk about the stresses leading to armed conflict.” (Gleick, 5)
Once scientists and theoreticians began to recognize that fractal self-similarity was a universal quality, they began to look at other systems from a new perspective. Human culture came to be viewed as a chaotic organism, and the science of memetics was born. Richard Dawkins defines the meme for the first time in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene:
“What, after all, is so special about genes ? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of physics are supposed to be true all over the accessible universe. Are there any principles of biology that are likely to have similar universal validity ? When astronauts voyage to distant planets and look for life, they can expect to find creatures too strange and unearthly for us to imagine. But is there anything that must be true of all life, wherever it is found, and whatever the basis of its chemistry ? If forms of life exist whose chemistry is based on silicon rather than carbon, or ammonia rather than water, if creatures are discovered that boil to death at -100 degrees centigrade, if a form of life is found that is not based on chemistry at all but on electronic reverberating circuits, will there still be any general principle that is true of all life ? Obviously I do not know but, if I had to bet, I would put my money on one fundamental principle. This is the law that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.(1) The gene, the DNA molecule, happens to be the replicating entity that prevails on our planet. There may be others. If there are, provided certain other conditions are met, they will almost inevitably tend to become the basis for an evolutionary process.
But do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other, consequent, kinds of evolution? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.
The new [primordial] soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. `Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like `gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to `memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with `cream'.
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: `... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.” (Dawkins, 191-192)
As electronic communications grew out of telephone into every kind of video and sound imaginable transmitted globally by randomly delivered packets of data, the propagation of memes became virtually instantaneous. Soon virulent ideas could infect the entire planet in a matter of just hours. This tendency for self similarity and replication of information transcended the gene analogy and moved into the viral realm by the nineteen-nineties.
In his 1994 book, Media Virus, Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture, Douglas Rushkoff discuses how memes have begun operating as viruses:
“If we are to understand the datasphere as an extension of a planetary ecosystem or even just the breeding ground for new ideas in our culture, then we must come to terms with the fact that media events provoking real social change are more than simple Trojan horses. They are media viruses.
This term is not being used as a metaphor. These media events are not like viruses. They are viruses. Most of us are familiar with biological viruses like the ones that cause the flu, the common cold, and perhaps even AIDS. As they are currently understood by the medical community, viruses are unlike bacteria or germs because they are not living things; they are simply protein shells containing genetic material. The attacking virus uses its protective and sticky protein casing to latch onto a healthy cell and then inject its own genetic code, essentially genes, inside. The virus code mixes and competes for control with the cell’s own genes, and, if victorious, it permanently alters the way the cell functions and reproduces. A particularly virulent strain will transform the host cell into a factory that replicates the virus.
…But instead of traveling along an organic circulatory system, a media virus travels through the networks of the mediasphere. The “protein shell” of a media virus might be an event, invention, technology, system of thought, musical riff, visual image, scientific theory, sex scandal, clothing style, or even pop hero--as long as it can catch our attention. Any one of these media virus shells will search out the receptive nooks and crannies in popular culture and stick on anywhere it is noticed. Once attached, the virus injects its more hidden agendas into the datastream in the form of ideological code --not genes, but a conceptual equivalent we now call “memes.” Like real genetic material, these memes infiltrate the way we do business, educate ourselves, interact with one another--even the way we perceive reality.” (Rushkoff, 9-10)
Rushkoff continues with a definitive example of the cultural viruses that permeate our environment:
“A popular animated childrens’ show is the perfect virus. It spreads for one reason, then releases potent memes that do not seem evident on the surface. “The Simpsons” works as a media virus because its functioning is dependent upon its media context. It exhibits self-similarity in that its episodes are media about media, and it promotes an interactive spirit because its main character is a self-styled media activist. As long as its memes stay shrouded in “kids” comedy, the cultural immune apparatus remains unprovoked and the virus is free to run rampant” (Rushkoff, 116-117).
The self-similarity of the Simpsons, in that it replicates the media of which it is a part, is perfect example of replicating memes that have chaotic scalar symmetry. The Simpsons have been translated and are in syndication to countries all over the world. As a result, the viral memes of American culture have been delivered across the planetary organism via every possible form of electronic delivery. It is no coincidence that the design of the worldwide communication network is perfectly fractal in its shape. It makes perfect sense that this extension of human neural tissue would display the same organization as organic structures inside the human body, as well as other naturally occurring structures.
In his book Virus of the Mind Richard Brodie describes how cultural viruses have been with us since the beginning:
“Viruses of the mind have been with us throughout history, but are constantly evolving and changing. They are infectious pieces of our culture that spread rapidly throughout a population, altering people’s thoughts and lives in their wake. They include everything from relatively harmless mind viruses, such as miniskirts and slang phrases, to mind viruses that seriously derail people’s lives, such as the cycle of unwed mothers on welfare, the Crips and Bloods youth gangs and the Branch Davidian religious cult. When these pieces of culture are ones we like, there’s no problem. However, as the Michelangelo computer virus programs computers with instructions to destroy their data, viruses of the mind can program us to think and behave in ways that are destructive to our lives.
This is the most surprising and most profound insight from the science of memetics: your thoughts are not always your own original ideas. You catch thoughts—you get infected with them, both directly from other people and indirectly from viruses of the mind. People don’t seem to like the idea that they aren’t in control of their thoughts. The reluctance of people to even consider this notion is probably the main reason the scientific work done so far is not better known (Brodie, 14).
We can now make the assertions that human culture is an organism, that ideas operate as organisms, and that the datasphere is an organism which behaves as an extension of the gestalt human consciousness. Put more simply: “Ecologists now understand the life on this planet to be part of a single biological organism” (Rushkoff, 7). We can assert as well that memes behave like viruses which can infect the organism of human culture.
Let us now return to the early sixties when electronic media was coming into ascendancy. In 1960 Richard Nixon ran against John F. Kennedy. This election featured the first televised presidential debates. JFK looked good on camera. He was smiling and seemed relaxed. Richard Nixon sweated under the hot lights, appeared to have a five o-clock shadow, and was later compared in a campaign ad to a used car salesman. At that moment, memes had evolved in a very important way. The message no longer was as important as the image. As the sixties progressed, memes of counterculture and war protest replicated themselves millions of times in magazines, newspapers, and TV. One image, published on the cover of Time Magazine, of a young Vietnamese girl running naked down a road after a napalm drop by American forces probably did more to bring the war to an end than any single meme, and there was an enormous proliferation of them.
During this time, America experienced what the subculture itself identified as a revolution. Vietnam was the flashpoint issue for many young people, and the “establishment” of parental America was the enemy. Viral memes of drugs, communism, antiestablishmentism, free love and others replicated unchecked. However this uncontrolled release of radical ideas had a downside. By the seventies, society began to recognize some of the results of the unsuppressed expression of these cultural viruses. In a trend that continues, cultural icons were dying of drug overdoses or suicide. Marilyn Monroe, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Elvis Presley all died prematurely. Radical social experiments that had begun in the sixties began to produce progeny and these children were more evidence that there was a problem. In 1976, two young journalists, both single parents, went on the road to discover how the children of radical societies were faring. The resulting book, The Children of the Counterculture, examines a wide range of communes, rural and urban. Although they try to maintain an upbeat tone, the chronicle is one of gross neglect, poverty and despair. Modern society would certainly jail these radical parents and place their children in foster homes. In their introduction, they set the stage for their journey of discovery:
‘Where had they gone, all those judge-taunters and war-busters and parent-worriers and armies of the night? It is some what ironic how the counter culture dropped off the back pages of the newspaper just as the front page began to print verification of what once were called hippie fantasies. Government bugging, the telephone company spying, the corruption of megacorporations, cheating in the Soap Box Derby, VD in the Girl Scouts, the dissolution of the family, couples fighting not to take custody of the children after divorce, the whole weird crumbling country you read about in the East Village Other or The Fabulous Freak Brothers comic books, you can now read about in Time, or hear about at Rotary Club luncheons.” (Rothchild, 2)
But it soon became clear that parents who spent all day stoned on LSD were not really parents. The father of a ten year old boy is described as he has an inappropriate exchange with a child at his son Ben’s school:
“Ben’s relationship to sex became more understandable one day at the free school, when Nemo came to pick him up in the Mercedes. Nemo, who somehow managed to come off as the most concerned parent at the parent meetings, liked to hang around the school during the afternoons. On this particular day, he motioned for one of the girls on the playground, and eight-year-old named Penny, to come over and talk to him. He was standing next to the fence wearing blue Bermuda shorts and a smoke Colombian t-shirt. He started up a conversation with this little girl, and she began to laugh, and Ben, who always wanted to know what his dad was doing, walked over to join the conversation. By this time, Nemo was talking loud enough to be heard by the whole playground “I was just telling your girlfriend that you couldn’t be queer, because you ball chicks”. Ben was completely taken aback: he started to fidget and look down as if he wished to be swallowed. “What do you mean?” he mumbled as if to plead with Nemo to stop, but Nemo kept on, he was smiling and enjoying himself. “You know what I mean,” he said to the growing crowd of free school kids. “What about the time with Margo in the sailboat?” The little girl smiled and somebody behind her called Ben “sex maniac”, which was one of his school nicknames.” (Rothchild, 22-23)
This was 1976, when there was still a feeling that the radicalism of the sixties would bear fruit. Yet, these young liberal journalists had come up against something quite distasteful, something today we call a sex offender. Maybe the notion of free love, lots of drugs, and no responsibility was inconsistent with the nurturing of children. There are more examples, far too many to mention here, but it can be fairly said that the cultural viruses of the sixties had begun to injure the organism. It would take another twenty years for the momentum to begin to shift, but that shift would be inevitable.
In the fifties, conservatism was in control of the American establishment, and it wielded memes as well as arms to effect immunity against threats, internal and external. Communism was the primary attacking virus, as well as a physical armed entity. Today, conditions have changed considerably. A descendant of sixties radicalism, liberalism, has become entrenched within the establishment. Many sixties radicals are now members of the establishment they once so reviled. Carried along by their viruses they moved predictably into positions of power by mimicking their antagonists. It is important to remember that these viruses are real living entities that use people to gain their ends. “It may seem strange to call a meme ambitious, but the mere shape of a successful meme dictates its acquisitive behavior. In fact, the evolutionary race between concepts guarantees that those that develop the cleverest lures are most likely to survive.” (Bloom, 179)
But just as the radicals of the sixties have achieved the power they sought, they find themselves besieged by a familiar mechanism. Conservatism has become an attacking viral meme. Utilizing modern media constructs like the internet and talk radio, conservatism is now in the role of attacking the liberal establishment. Although one might point out the administration now in office is labeled conservative, George W. Bush would probably be considered a socialist by the establishment of 1960.
And certainly things which are radical by modern standards would be wholly unimaginable to even the most radical of thinkers of that time. Today, radicalism has lost it’s cultural merit and has become, as a result of the popularization if it’s messages, a loosely organized network of individuals seeking only the extreme, without any sense of social responsibility. Conversely, radicals of the sixties were working to bring about a revolution; they were determined to change the world for the better. Radicals of today are more interested in pushing the envelope and out-extreming the popularized media.
In this environment of rampant viral memes, a new form modern radical has emerged. Radical by fifties standards, and conservative by today’s standard, the meta-radical enjoys the benefits of a more open and unstructured society, without falling prey to the pitfalls experienced by radicals of the sixties. Post sixties generations have increasingly become more and more immune to radical ideas.
Like the yuppies before them, many GenXers have embraced the suburban bourgeois American Dream, but with a much different experience than their fifties era grandparents. They enjoy watching South Park and Ren and Stimpy, spend summer vacations at Burning Man, and work in demanding IT, graphic design and advertising jobs the rest of the time. GenXers are the first generation of meta-radicals, but they retain some of the angst of their forbearers of the sixties. Caught in the transition, the X is perhaps more aptly associated with a crossroads.
Generations after the GenXers are returning to more fifties-like values, with the immunity conferred by their predecessors’ exposure to viral memes. Playgroups and babysitting co-ops have replaced the commune, women are free to work, and men are free to stay home with the kids. Marital fidelity is starting to return to vogue, and family values aren’t an effete joke anymore. Extreme and radical ideas and images are commercialized, are proliferating, yet have become mundane.
Because people have begun to develop an immunity to all this radicalism, a greater cultural freedom is possible. This immunity is a result of exposure to more and more ideas. After all, anything from a casual remark to a focused propaganda campaign, from a pair of jeans to a nuclear weapon can operate as a virus. We can see that every moment of your experience carries the potential to irrevocably alter your life. Indeed, this paper is itself a collection of viruses. Have you been infected? Or do you have immunity? Are you evolved, or are you like the traveler that cannot ever understand?
Works Cited
Bloom, Howard K. The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History. New York, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995
Brodie, Richard. Virus of the Mind The New Science of the Meme. Seattle, Washington: Integral Press. 1996
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. 1976
Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York, New York: Viking Penguin,
1987
Rothchild, John and Wolf, Susan. The Children of the Counterculture. United States of
America: Doubleday, 1976
Rushkoff, Douglas. Media Virus! Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture. New York, New
York: Balantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1994
