When you cast a high-falutin’ abstract debate into say the American Chopper, expanding brain, or distracted boyfriend templates, you’re asserting the supremacy of phenomenology over abstractions. The concrete frame subverts the abstract content to varying degrees.
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Memeing *is* how you do philosophy and polisci now. If you don’t get why or how, you’re destined for dismissal and marginalization. To those who take your abstract frames seriously you may be a genius. To those who meme-pwn you, you’re a lolcow. Guess which perception wins?
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Memeing is more powerful than mockery. Where mockery merely imitates and exaggerates the contradictions and incoherencies in your abstraction from the POV of a competing abstraction, a meme juxtaposes your abstraction against a phenomenological ground.
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To be mocked is to merely be drawn into a beef with a competing ideology that is itself vulnerable to mocking. But to be memed is to have your abstraction sucked into the gravity well of nihilism that is the phenomenological ground. Memes pull head-in-cloud ideas down into mud.
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Memes are not nihilistic. They merely hold up a mirror to the latent nihilism in any abstraction that aspires to be an operating system. Memes are the Ghost of Abstraction Future in a An Abstraction Carol. The future farce in the current tragedy.
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The best memes don’t destroy ideas. They show you how ideas are doomed to destroy themselves. Also — and this is more personal taste than an objective part of meme aesthetics — the best memes simply subvert without judgment. They don’t explicitly ridicule the fallen.
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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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Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao
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 …
Venkatesh Rao added,
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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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