We live in a time with a growing phenomenological, object-level (or as I prefer to call it, log-level) bias. Patience for abstractions of any sort is at its lowest in my living memory. If you argue at an “ism” level, you are presumed stupid until proven worth listening to.
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There’s almost a Two Cultures divide (cf the C. P. Snow one) growing between people who get this at gut level and people who don’t. Memes are at the heart of the new science, unironic trafficking in abstractions is the new humanities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures …
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Bolder statement cf morning thread: Despite the ism in it, capitalism is not an ideology but a meme about ideologies. Including ideologies that presume to theorize it. It turns abstractions from sources ranging from Karl Marx to Ayn Rand into... schwag. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1269657013010575361?s=21 …https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1269657013010575361 …
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Memes are to narrative markets what dollar prices are to financial markets. They impose a relative transactional value on ideas. A publisher puts both Ayn Rand and Karl Marx into book and tee-shirt form-factors pricing them at $15 or whatever. Memes do the same.
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Think about it: everything cast into the distracted boyfriend meme template has a certain narrative price tag and implicit valuation on it (marking its worth relative to other ideas, and its current position on its inevitable journey to farce status).
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Take the same au courant abstraction like say “defund the police” and apply the following meme templates to it: Distracted boyfriend American chopper Butterfly man Expanding brain Doge Harambe Money printer go brrr The one that sticks the best is the “price” of the idea
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Hell you could arrange memes on a nihilism spectrum from doge to harambe perhaps and apply them to lots of ideas and literally price them by likes/ratios and create an actual prediction market based on memes, a formal version of what we do on Twitter anarchically
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