The Riddle of Memes
Tomorrow’s events:
Collective Presencing W/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Friday @ 8:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing W/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
An event to get excited by:
Becoming a Randonaut W/ Joshua Lengfelder. May 3rd @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Joshua Lengfelder, the founder of the Randonautic app, visits The Stoa to discuss the strange practice of randonauting. We will collectively go on a randonaut exploration after the event.
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April 15th, 2021
The next revolution – World War III – will be waged inside your head. It will be a guerrilla information war fought not in the sky or on the streets, not in the forests or even around scarce resources of the earth, but in newspapers and magazines, on the radio, on TV and in ‘cyberspace’. It will be a dirty, no-holds-barred propaganda war of competing world-views and alternative visions of the future.
That was from “Culture is Our Business” by Marshall McLuhan, published in 1970. Man, McLuhan knew. What a genius. That paragraph above predicted all of our culture war happenings, and it nicely sums up what I called the “warfare crisis” in my memetic tribe white paper.
I have written and talked about this before, but this time Conan the Barbarian is coming to mind, specifically the riddle of steel, which was central to the plot in the 1982 Conan the Barbarian movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the movie, Conan’s father tells him that he must learn the riddle of steel on his own. He then thrusts out a newly forged sword, and mysteriously announces to Conan:
This you can trust.
Conan’s father and others were killed shortly after by an evil sorcerer, Thulsa Doom. This sets Conan on a quest for revenge, and a spiritual quest to answer the riddle of steel. Years later, Conan tracks down Doom, who captures Conan and says he will tell him what the riddle is. Doom then tells one of his cult followers standing above him on a cliff to come to him, which prompts her to fall off a cliff to her death. He turns to Conan and says:
That is power, boy, a power stronger than steel.
He goes on to say that flesh is stronger than steel, and if you can control flesh, you can control steel. In our current warfare crisis, we have a slew of Thulsa Doom’s trying to control our flesh, without consideration for what is best for it.
In the final meeting with Doom, Conan manages to resist his mind control power, and chops his head off with his father's broken sword, which he soon discards. The scene conveys that Conan solved the riddle of steel, but the movie never explicitly tells us what the answer to the riddle is.
We may have our own riddle to contend with today, and that is the riddle of memes. Like steel, it can be used as a weapon, but unlike steel, it has Doom’s sorcery abilities, as it can directly control the mind. The riddle of memes differs from the riddle of steel in this way, and perhaps if Conan’s father was real and alive today, he would point to a tweet and say:
This you cannot trust.
Our minds are serving as a memetic battlefield for a “no-holds-barred propaganda war of competing world-views” as McLuhan foreshadowed, and most of the memes attempting to enter our minds do not give a shit about us having a heavenly life. How can we trust ourselves, if we cannot trust the memes in our mind, and cannot live without them?
The question mentioned yesterday might help: How do we fucking live our lives? This might not only serve as an honest starting point towards something new, but it might also serve as an antidote to memetic infection. Aporia is a wonderful memetic disinfectant.
The answer to the riddle of memes could be us asking this question, attempting to answer this question, and most importantly, living with this question unanswered.
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