Memetic Extermination
When your psychological home is infested with parasitic ideas and the landscape of your consciousness is overrun with fast-breeding informational rodentia, you stop playing nice and go on the offensive. It's time to exterminate the vermin and get back to that austere, neo-Germanic Bauhaus baseline that defined your formative years.
The first step is to gather intelligence on the enemy, in this case the meme, which Glenn Grant defines as "a contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern." Richard Dawkins, who coined the term, offers the following:
- Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches...When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.
It's important not to panic, though, because what we need here is a fine-toothed cognitive comb. After all, some transmitted knowledge is benign—like language—and what we're really after are the sort of fast-replicating lab-engineered brummagems like advertising jingles and academic flim-flammery. You want to come down on these things hard, and be as ruthless as a 50-foot-tall outerspace robot blasting away with energy beams and bellowing out that "resistance is impossible!"
Sometimes, though, we go too far. Which brings up the following:
Reductive Logic
Some real villains have emerged among the heirs of the Outdoor Advertiser company. This San Francisco poster firm operated from 1912 to 1970, and the warehouse still has a few gems left over.
 Like this rare six-sheet poster for the Jane Russell flick The Outlaw. You might recall that this was a rather scandalous film when it opened in 1943, and didn't clear the censors until 1951. So the grandkids of the owner of Outdoor Advertiser decided to put this 7-foot-wide poster up for auction at Christie's in London today, where it's expected to go for around $20,000, give or take.
The story got weird when the rare poster community took exception with Christie's listing for this item, which specified that it is "the only surviving copy." This wasn't true, since the sellers owned two of these posters and everybody knew it. Then the owners released this statement:
- "After initially discovering 'The Outlaw' poster that was sent to Christie's, a second complete poster was found. Having considered the various options open to us, we have made the determination that we would destroy the second copy, and can confirm that this has been done."
A poster expert observing the story called this act "truly insane," but you can see the power of memetic preservation at work.
Bad Ideas
The security people at Crossgates Mall in Albany, NY, don't want anybody spreading unwanted memes on their turf. Stephen Downs, 61, and his son Roger were shopping and decided to pick up a couple of T-shirts that read "Peace on Earth" and "Give peace a chance." For some crazy reason, they thought they could actually get away with putting these shirts on and wearing them while they were at the mall. Can you imagine? Fortunately for the other shoppers, security was all over these two peaceniks like bling on a pimp:
- The two said they were asked to remove the shirts made at a store there, or leave the mall. They refused.
The guards returned with a police officer who repeated the ultimatum. The son took his T-shirt off, but the father refused. "I said, 'All right then, arrest me if you have to,'" Downs said. "So that's what they did. They put the handcuffs on and took me away."
Hauled off in cuffs. Y'know, something about all this doesn't feel right. There's some spark down in the core of my being, a hard diamond of independence that wants to be free and tells me I'm an American, and right now it's telling me that my enemy isn't praying in a mosque, it's working in a mall and it wears a uniform.
Digital Patriots
Speaking of the spirit of independence, it's under attack in its very birthplace, the state of Pennsylvania, where the state's supreme court is hearing arguments in a "chat room libel case." The ACLU and some ISPs are lined up defending the identity of an anonymous individual who made some remarks in a political chat room on the Net. A judge who was the target of those statments wants America Online to hand over the name of the typist so she can prosecute him or her (or it—could be a dog) for defamation.
- Attorneys for Superior Court Judge Jane Ore Melvin say the chat-room message, insinuating she illegally lobbied then-Gov. Tom Ridge to appoint a friend to a vacant spot on the Allegheny County bench, was defamatory.
As this story points out, Internet speech is highly protected by the First Amendment, and especially so with respect to government officials who must show clear evidence of harm before they can pursue charges of this nature. The defendant in this case is being likened to a pre-Revolutionary War pamphleteer using anonymity to avoid possible government retaliation, which has obviously occurred. I'm renewing my ACLU card today.
In a Related Story...
Over in Brussels the EU's justice ministers have drafted laws directed at curbing computer hacking and virus dispersal. Only problem is, the language is fairly loose and legal experts over there are pointing out that the new measures "could also outlaw people who organize protests online, as happened recently, en masse, with protests against a war in Iraq."
- The agreement, reached last week, obliges all 15 member states to adopt a new criminal offense: illegal access to, and illegal interference with an information system. It calls on national courts to impose jail terms of at least two years in serious cases.
It's that "illegal interference" bit that ropes in protesters with the hackers and I'm just bringing this one up because this is exactly the kind of law we can expect from Ashcroft's office. In fact, I'd be very surprised if we don't already have something of this ilk on the books already.
Now go squash a meme, if you can catch one—they're quick.
11:44:46 AM 
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Wednesday, March 5, 2003
