“Great weirding” is my only from-the-future meme because it’s gained some currency even though I’ve never actually explained it. I went public with it in passing in 2016 in my Atlantic Harambe essay and have been using it without defining it ever since. theatlantic.com/technology/arc
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I do have a fairly extensive account of what I mean by it. It’s the title of my endlessly redrafted unpublished opening essay for breaking smart S2. It’s not unpublished because I’m blocked because the referent of the idea moves faster than I can think about it. Very appropriate.
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I think of the meme as a tachyon meme. Moves faster than the speed of thought and travels backwards in time from future discourses to shape current ones.
We’re going to see more tachyonic memetics in the future...err in the future-present from the future-future.
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When I first used the phrase, btw usage of “weird” was on the rise. For eg to talk about weird mysterious planet crashes. Also for a decade “global weirding” has been an alt for climate change that never quite caught on (coined by Hunter L0vins, popularized by Tom Friedman)
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I did write an obliquely related longer post, but it does not explain the term great weirding, just the related notion of writing with a weirdness epistemology
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Of course in the past too, writers have talked about vaporware future works that end up either unpublished or underwhelming, but the difference here is that the future-work in my head is not actually that important.
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If/when I do publish some version (probably podcast form) it will just be ceremonial, and may not be that good or canonical ordefinitive a treatment of the concept. The interesting thing is how easily tachyonic memetic effects can happen and meaningfully reshape conversations.
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Even if I never publish anything on this and nobody else does either, it has already had a causal effect. It’s at least a meme from the adjacent possible future. Not quite from a fictional universe but not quite from factual future either.
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You ought to take a look at High Weirdness by mitpress.mit.edu/books/high-wei which among other things is a deep dive into a particular historical/cultural slice of the weird.
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There's Bill Murray as Hunter S. Thompson in the closing monologue of "Where the Buffalo Roam", for one of my favorite weirding quotes.
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