From: Walter Watts (wlwatts@cox.net)
Date: Wed Apr 10 2002 - 13:11:19 MDT
Welcome home, Matt.
Walter
Arcadia 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/
-- Walter Watts Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc. "No one gets to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not no how!"
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