Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
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Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All
"LOVE LOVE LOVE your futorological brickbats! Love them! You are in fine company with Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary with these." -- Paulina Borsook
"Devoted to highly rhetorical nitpicking, but it is fun to read." -- Chris Mooney
"Rather close but correct reading." -- Evgeny Morozov
"Mean, but true." -- Annalee Newitz
"Dale Carrico's skewering of the salvific pretensions of Silicon Valley's soi disant savior/founders never disappoints." -- Frank Pasquale
"Pretty breathless, but I guess it had to be said." -- Bruce Sterling
"An essential reality check for those who are too entranced by transhumanism to notice the sordid reality behind the curtain." -- Charlie Stross
3 comments:
Wouldn't you say today's state of the concept "meme" is like that of the "gene" in the 1890s; there's hints that there is a mechanism of information transfer, we just can't figure out any specifics?
> the word "meme". . .
Not to be confused with
http://www.whimsicalarchives.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/mimi.jpg
Wouldn't you say today's state of the concept "meme" is like that of the "gene" in the 1890s; there's hints that there is a mechanism of information transfer, we just can't figure out any specifics?
Memetics isn't some promising fledgling discipline. It's a futurological neologism -- with the usual wannabe guru huckster PR in play -- through which ignoramuses have been pretending to re-invent the wheel of rhetoric for a generation. Rhetoric has always been the analysis of discourse, and much contemporary critical and cultural theory is best understood as its ongoing elaboration. I do not include much if any "memetic" nonsense to that body of criticism, since memetics brings nothing actually new or useful to the table, it is a far clumsier analytic vocabulary for historically situating discourse or specifying its stakeholders or dynamisms than philology of over a century ago -- indeed apart from the pep of its initial neologism memetics adds idiocy of a reductive mis-analogization of signification to a biology itself already idiotically reductively mis-analogized to computer programming. There are plenty of ugly ideological reasons that digi-utopians and market fundamentalists would consider this a feature and not a bug of the meme qua cult-bug -- after all, most of them disdain and fear the insights arising from proper rhetoric in any case.
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