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MEMETIC DIVERSITY
Memetic Diversity aims to maximize the variety of the memepool.
Memes are small thoughts capable of being transmitted between individuals. They may spread very rapidly; frequently they are curtailed and simplified by laziness in a bizarre, electronic version of Chinese whispers. Some are interesting; some are dull; some are insidious and evil; some concern daiquiri ice cream (of which, more anon).
It is my sworn purpose to ensure that the ideodiversity of the web is maximized -- that memes are mutated and modified and enhanced and bloated until the internet's information capacity is overloaded with magic and tomatoes.
This is not just an excuse to be random.
In the early 1990s, Mike Godwin noticed that the Nazis were being invoked repeatedly in discussions whose seriousness in no way justified the use of so extreme a metaphor. He realized that this tendency was spreading, and decided to craft a meme to counteract this tendency towards unpleasant hyperbole:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
He posted this everywhere he saw gratuitous invocation of Nazism to describe, say, overzealous taxation or some such triviality. It started to spread on its own, bifurcate, and become an independent entity -- and, magically, the number of gratuitous Nazi-references began to dwindle.
He conjectures that memetic engineering could make the net (and, I hope, the wider world) a kinder, saner place. Well, that is my aim here.
NEWSFinally, the memetic diversity project is launched, rickety and unstable, on an unsuspecting world. Whither will she sail? What shall she encounter on her voyage?
Who cares?