That Mind Virus Wants to Suck the Attention Out of Your Brain But Has to Call Itself a Meme Before You'll Let it Do That

If I remember correctly, when Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" he was not thinking about Facebook. Dawkins was trying to find a way to describe the cultural equivalent of a gene as a way to talk about practices that become a part of a culture. He thought it might add a little formality to the notion of social evolution as companion to species evolution, the mutation of memes changing peoples and cultures in the same way that the mutation of genes changes species. Practices that spread, like democracy and blue jeans, are memes. It's a great idea, and meme itself has become an incredibly pervasive meme. It's also radically mutated to look a bit like a virus.

Now, every bright shiny object on the Internet has become a meme. Or at least it gets called that. Of course a video of the world's smallest monkey eating elbow macaroni does capture consciousness, just like the Bill of Rights or the idea that we ought to drive on the right side of the road. But it doesn't actually inform behavior, doing less to inform who we are than distract us from that. Instead, it's just a distraction, a way to transform consciousness  into page views (which, in turn, can be transformed into advertising revenues). 

Consciousness is under assault. It's odd. Never before has humanity been more free to live as they wish and yet never before has the world offered so many alluring enticements from one's own thoughts, making it difficult for the individual to define novel ways to live. From movies and TV shows to books, art, museums, and lectures, the world offers thousands of options for structuring our consciousness for us, even outside of work. Worse, many of these same memes can become viruses, not so much structuring consciousness as distracting it. 

But I digress. To be distracted is to be human in this Information Age. We all do it. Trust me that I daily exceed the average quota of things found fascinating. But the notion that we're being distracted by something as sexy as a meme is a form of self-delusion. These aren't memes: they're badly mutated versions of Dawkins' original meme, something more akin to a mind virus than gene. I'm not suggesting that we stop being amused, intrigued, shocked, and entertained; I just that we owe it to ourselves to properly label the sources of all that.

[This blogger will leave you to determine if the preceding rant was a public service announcement, something akin to a meme, or was itself a mind virus, the blogging equivalent of a onomatopoeia.]

Six Word Meme

Holly (HRH) hit me with a meme. It sounds simple. It is not.

Those hit with this meme need to describe their life in six words. Not less. Not more. Here I go.

As if I had a clue.

If I Had 3 Trillion Dollars

I’m offering a meme that tests the limits of imagination. What would you do with $3 trillion? This is not “take your family to Disneyland” money. This is "buy the whole Disney company" money – and then look around for another 50 companies with similar market cap.

The Bush Administration initially estimated that the Iraq invasion and occupation would cost $50 to $60 billion. White House economist Larry Lindsay said it would cost $100 to $200 billion and was fired for his effrontery. The total cost of the invasion and occupation is now estimated to exceed $3,000,000,000,000 - $3 trillion.

To put it in perspective, this would be equivalent to a car mechanic estimating a repair at $739 and then charging you $44,340 when you came to pick up the car. (“$3 trillion! For that much I could have bought a NEW country!”) To miss an estimate this badly is ludicrous; to miss it on such an astronomically huge amount is insane.

$3 trillion is a staggering sum. If you magically got $1 million each time you sang the chorus of Barenaked Ladies’ “If I Had Million Dollars,” you would have to repeat that chorus 3 million times. Assuming it took you 20 seconds per go and singing 12 hours a day, you would need 1 million minutes, or nearly 4 YEARS of singing just to generate $3 trillion.

Here are some things I could do with that much money.

I could buy the world coke – at the current street price of $137 a gram, I could buy everyone on earth one gram – and then have money enough left over to put 1 billion people through rehab at $2,178 each.

I could buy a million dollar McMansion for 3 million homeless people. If I forced them to share the homes in groups of four, say, I could house about 12 million.

I could end the hunger that kills 6 million children around the world each year – for a century.

I could retire to the south of France. Actually, I could buy the south of France.

What about you? What could you do with $3 trillion? As you answer this meme, let me know: I’ll add the links to your responses below this post. Meanwhile, sing along with the Barenaked Ladies, substituting this blog post title for their song title. It's not easy work, spending $3 trillion. You'll need some inspiration.

What Are You Reading? (The Page 123, Line 5 Meme)

After an intense week on site with a client, my brain feels like flan. Cce offered this irresistible meme, a way to rally the brain cells back to the process of writing.

The meme is this: grab the book nearest to your left elbow, open to page 123, and then copy the sixth, seventh, and eighth sentences. As it turns out, this seemingly innocuous meme makes me look hopelessly nerdy. I would have so preferred to look hip to the jive.

First, this from Richard Bookstaber's A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation, a book I found myself drawn into on the flight out and back last week.

The most recently issued bond, termed the on-the-run bond, becomes the standard for trading. When traders enter orders to buy or sell the 30-year, the on-the-run bond is the bond they mean. This trading demand means the on-the-run bond enjoys a liquidity premium - that is, it trades at a slightly higher price than its less interesting older brothers which, though once on-the-run bonds themselves, are now beyond their six months of fame.

As I write this, two things become clear to me. One, why it is that when I first began this book months ago, I put it down. (And yet this week, his story about how our financial markets have become so volatile snapped through the definitional necessities to engage me.) Two, why I developed a sense of humor. Any young man who finds such ideas fascinating is sure to become a social pariah if he can't also tell a joke. I learned early in life that most people did not share my interest in the arcane world of underlying social constructs that give us the visible but that most everyone finds ill-timed bodily functions like farts or erections a great source of humor.

In an attempt to prove that I also read less dense fare, I tried the meme on another book, the second book taken on my recent trip. The Best American Nonrequired Reading, edited by Dave Eggers, is full of whimsy. It includes the story that Hemingway wrote when challenged to write a complete story in six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never used." And yet, the meme brings me directly to yet another fascinating to me, yet almost intentionally dense, bit of prose - this one from futurist Ray Kurzweil, writing about longevity.

If we factor in the exponential advances in computation and communication (price-performance multiplying by a factor of a billion in twenty-five years, while at the same time shrinking in size by a factor of thousands), these scenarios are highly realistic.
The apparent dangers are not real, but unapparent dangers are real. The apparent dangers are that a dramatic reduction in the death rate will create overpopulation and thereby strain energy and other resources and exacerbate environmental degradation.

Now feeling self conscious about the kind of stuff I read, I turned to the next book piled on my left and find a dry excerpt from one of George Washington's speeches, elaborated upon by Gore Vidal in his book Inventing a Nation. One more time I try the meme, drawing from Marty Lefkoe's Re-create Your Life.

Now Frank described a pattern that bothered him: "I use sarcastic, flippant, glib humor to mask my insecurity. I use it to take the offensive. I use it to negate compliments. If I get loving, supportive comments, I do this to deal with the fear that it will be taken away."

Or perhaps Frank is just dealing with the fact that his interests are oddly esoteric and his acceptance into any group hangs by the thin thread of humor.

Life Hiker, Thomas, HRH, Dave, and jen, if you would like, try your hand at the meme. I'm curious about what you're reading.

The Me!Me! Generation Popularizes the Meme

I have been remiss. Tagged with a meme by two delightful people (and bloggers), I’ve taken my sweet time to craft a response. I’m the kind of guy who loves words but can never find a word that matches my tiles in Scrabble. I love ideas but am flummoxed by an imposed subject. Hence, the long delay in responding to these particular memes.

First, from Tisha, a meme that seems rather like a game of “tag, you’re it!” Tisha, the Puerto Rican Belgian from New York, doesn’t really write a blog. She hosts a party. For every one word she writes in her posting, about 1,001 words get written in her comments. She was gracious enough to tag me with the “Thinking Blog” meme, the rules of which are simple: tag five more bloggers who make you think. (And as I think about this, it occurs to me that, like all pyramid schemes, this one must eventually break down. “Sorry sir, but your meme has broken the law of exponential growth. That’s why we had to pull you over.”) Here are five blogs that regularly tickle my brain cells:

Living next door to Alice
Thomas draws from a diverse array of sources that always feel fresh and charmingly subversive.

Life Hiker
The confessions of a retired executive, a former Republican who feels betrayed by Dubya, LH writes a blog much more thoughtful than the subject who frequently incurs his disgust.

Rather Than Working
A lawyer who fully realizes that there is no law requiring bloggers to “stay on topic,” Dave opines about the law, politics, and UPS delivery snafus.

There is No One Right Answer
Michael Kaufman and I once served together on the San Diego Deming User Group executive team. Michael has a great and interesting mind that patiently points out how inane are the policies that govern our schools and corporations.

Barbara (Ehrenreich)’s Blog
Including Barbara on this list is rather like adding Elle McPherson to the list of the cutest girls in your school. Barbara is a real writer, author of Nickel and Dimed and, more recently, Dancing in the Street. She’s even been interviewed by my favorite radio host, the BBC’s Andrew Marr. She’s big time and about as likely to pass along this meme as Queen Elizabeth is to use her sleeve as a handkerchief.


Then, from Cody McKibben, a young ecopreneur, this meme of answering the question of five goals I’ve never taken seriously. Cody has the kind of mindful optimism that will eventually save civilization from staggering from catastrophe to catastrophe like a drunk in a dark room. One can only hope that his generation pulls off this neat, but thus far elusive, trick of inoculating the general populace from insanity.

Five Goals I've Never Taken Seriously

1. The goal of staying fashionable. My sense of fashion is only slightly more developed than that of a dog in a sweater.

2. The goal of growing up. I still find young people (between the age of 0 and 25) more fascinating than most of my peers because they are still so full of possibility. For them life has yet to become a habit of expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies. I find that open-ness utterly charming.

3. The goal of getting organized. Other people seem to have a portion of their brain able to sort and categorize. To me, everything is related to everything else and I quickly become overwhelmed with the task of sorting or categorizing. Sigh.

4. The final goal of the World Cup. I can’t help it. I’m an American and actually think that the World Series is aptly named even though none of the teams competing have yet come from outside of North America.

5. The goal of fitness. Someone once asked Steven Wright how he was doing. He said, “You know that feeling you have when you’re leaning back in a chair and you start to tip but at just the last moment you catch yourself? I feel like that all the time.” My fitness program is like that. I’m always teetering on the edge between running-in-a-marathon shape and full-fledged stay in your bed all day obesity, never quite able to completely kick the exercise habit or ever actually make exercise a habit.

I’d be intrigued to hear the following bloggers answer this same question about five goals never taken seriously.
Chesca at Ex-skin diver
Cce at Madmarriage
Damon's Wacky Thoughts
Eric Byers
Paula at Escape from Cubicle Nation

There. I've passed along two memes. This must be what a petri dish feels like.