monkymind

Please Note: I love poetry, and my modus operandi is to write in a generally colorful, and an emotionally persuasive way. This was written with you in mind. Please be charitable. I believe that all societies, but especially those that can be modeled by a well-connected network, with edges with fast transmission speeds, are especially sensitive, and dependent on powerful signals. I define a powerful signal in this context as one that quickly propagates through the network. Unlike genes that transmit information at the slow speed generally determined by average/median lifespan, memes over the internet transmit information at nearly the speed of light. The LessWrong and greater intellectual community distrusts memes for good reason. They are typically characterized by their emotional power, irony rich nature, and their simplifying effects on good reasoning, and nuance. Unfortunately, I believe that it is these exact characteristics that make them powerful signals. I’ve struggled for a long time with the ironic and contradictory nature of memes. While most people can agree that memes typically contain some truth, few believe that they often contain all of the truth. I agree. Nevertheless, I believe that by mostly studying memes for their emotional context and content, we make it far too easy to ignore or undervalue their truth context and content. Ironically, I believe this cognitive move is to make the same error we criticize memes for exhibiting. In a network as dense as our global society, and as dense as the internet, we severely limit our ability to spread wide-reaching messages. Now, this wouldn’t concern me if a few things didn’t all seem likely to be true. 1. Gen-Z is the most digitally connected subset of the population 2. Gen-Z creates the most powerful memes 3. Gen-Z has massive distrust in our political system 4. Gen-Z has low voter turnout 5. Gen-Z has a massive distrust of the economically prosperous 6. Gen-Z has a smaller but still s