From: Eva-Lise Carlstrom (evalise@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Apr 15 2002 - 23:21:00 MDT
Hi, Arcadia, and welcome! I'm an atheist pagan
myself, and also find magick and memetics to be so
closely intermingled as to be indistinguishable in the
middle.
--Eva
--- Arcadia <arcadia@lynchburg.net> wrote:
> Hello.
> I am new to the list, but not new to the ideas being
> discussed. My own
> interest might have begun in ninth grade biology,
> learning the way a literal
> virus works, and I began to think of viri not just
> as pathogens, but as
> mutagens - nature's way of stiring the pot and
> shaking the table.
> I am a revolutionary and heretic by temperment, a
> warped kind of structural
> functionalist by intellectual compulsion. I'm a fan
> of ontological anarchy,
> Hakim Bey, Robert Anton Wilson, but hopefully these
> influences have had some
> time to ground and mellow, and so I'm not so shrill
> with the rhetoric
> anymore.
>
> I'm convinced that the way some of us are interesed
> in manipulating memes is
> pretty much identical to some forms of "magick."
> After all, there are forms
> of magick that are entirely about manipulating
> perception, as is almost any
> form of art. To me, art, magick, and meme
> theory/practice are pretty much
> interchangable, and some of the 'tools' from one
> 'box' work well in other
> 'boxes.'
>
> I'm curious about what the goals should be. If we
> had control of all the
> tools we needed to rewrite the cultural
> 'programming' for at least some of
> the planet, with a strong chance that if our New
> Program was resonant
> enough, as it were, it might spread to become the
> new dominant cultural
> 'game' ... What should the new 'game' be? To me,
> this is the really
> profound question. To answer it, we have first got
> to get outside our own
> cultural 'game,' just to begin to think what the
> options are...
>
> 'Resonance' is an important concept in this
> business. A cultural virus, or
> memetic monkey wrench, has got to resonate with
> something else, some other
> energy that people are already generating on their
> own. It has got to be
> close to something that they already think, and they
> should feel good when
> they think it. This is why telling them 'the truth'
> doesn't work: it's not
> like anyhting they already think. They are pretty
> well impervious to it,
> since thinking too much on real issues calls too
> much of their own lifestyle
> into question. So the trick is to play off the big
> energy flows that are
> already there.
>
> So anyway, this is the sort of stuff I've been
> pondering and studying (some)
> for a long time.
>
> I'm 35, male, live in a shack on a mountain in
> Virginia. Really. I can't
> help it if I'm a charicature.
>
> Matt
> http://www.geocities.com/snap_d/arckat/
>
>
>
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