Dangerous Contagion
A new ideology has infected the cyberculture. The so-called science of memetics is infecting the minds, explains at the same time, why mind contagion takes place, and introduces in the field of culture a darwinistic approach. Tim Druckrey tries to figure out what is going on.
If patterns of ones and zeros were like patterns of human lives and death, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer by a long string of oones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?
Thomas Pynchon
Kevin Kelly concludes the introduction to "Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-biological Civilization" by saying: "Yet as we unleash living forces into our created machines, we lose control of them. They acquire wildness and some of the surprises that the wild entails. This, then, is the dilemma that all gods must accept: that they can no longer be completely sovereign over their finest creations. The world of the made will soon be like the world of the born: autonomous, adaptable, and creative, but consequently out of our control. I think that's a great bargain."
This kind of unabashed Faustian bargain doesn't just come from the popularizers of synthetic biology, synthetic evolution, or the artificial sciences, but from its researchers, its philosophers, and sycophants as well: "I don't want to download life into computers, I want to upload computers into life," says Tom Ray, "The advent of artificial life will be the most significant historical moment since the emergence of human beings" says Chris Langton. The lengthy Magna Carta for the Information Age is no less engaged in the systemic mutation of the data stream (Dawkins calls it the "river out of Eden"): "More ecosystem than machine, cyberspace is a bioelectronic environment that is literally universal."
Richard Dawkins himself could not be more blunt about the retrofitting of algorithmic ideology onto historical biology: "Genes are pure information...Our Genetic system, which is the universal system of all life on the planet, is digital to the core."
Despite all the aura of "universality" that surrounds genetic research, the questioning of its cultural effect is often lost in the haze. Yet the metaphors abound in the languages of the viral and eco and network. Indeed, the collapsing border between physical science and genetic science suggests that systems ideology establishes a kind of unified field in which the so-called "universal" language of molecular or genetic technology operates as the software in a mechanical world. Scientific practice then becomes more instrumental than analytical, more interactive than observational, and more engaged in engineering than epistemology. But the complex issue of scientific systems thinking aside, the dispersal of genetic metaphors into social criticism, media art, economics, politics, and philosophy is well underway. Though manifested on many fronts, several recent events and publications bear some scrutiny.
The first is the military court martial of now ex-marines Joseph Vlacovsky and John Mayfield. Both refused to provide samples of their DNA to the Department of Defense's DNA registry without sufficient reason. In essence, they became genetic conscientious objectors to a policy of collection that holds one of the largest pools of DNA in the world. Rationalized by the military authorities as a reliable identification system, the DNA samples are held for 75 years, obviously far longer than the active military term of most soldiers.
Vlacovsky and Mayfield's court marshall trial was defended in two ways. First on the basis of the fourth amendment that prohibits "unreasonable searches," and second on the basis of the Nuremberg Codes established after Nazi experiments on human subjects. The unequivocal principle of the code is: "the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential." Considering the privatization of military r&d, there is, according to Bruce Chadwin (writing in the Village Voice) "no legal precedent to stop the military from converting the DNA samples to commercially profitable uses."
Aside from this, the DNA information could invisibly affect everything from future job applications to the rejection of insurance based on what has been called "asymptomatic illness," that is, the genetic potential to illness. And to think that the innocent military use of DNA is shallow and well-meaning, remember that it was this same military that distributed sun glasses to the troops watching the explosion of atomic bombs, that experimented with LSD, sprayed field soldiers in Vietnam with agent orange, and "immunized" gulf war troops with devasting anti-chemical weapon drugs.
Surely the debate about DNA registry raises the spectre of what might be called the science of eugenetics, a subtle version of the more perverse manifestations of race theory and superiority and whose effects establish the foundations of "normalcy" not in the physical being but in the code that operates them. Mechanistic in its principles, these assumptions formulate the notion of individual and agency as systemic, performative, and symptomatic. Nowhere is this as problematically evident than in the emergence of what is being called the science of memetics.
Already inflecting the discourses of art (the 1996 Ars Electronica conference focused specifically on Memetics, sociology (in a number of recent books, particularly Thought Contagion - How Belief Spreads through Society, and philosophy (particularly the work of Daniel Dennett), the troubling assumptions, ambiguous bonds, and often ahistorical relationships between biology, cognition and culture are having far-reaching consequences on the way in which algorithmic thinking is grounding contemporary thought.
The relationship between "memes" and cliches, mass psychology, doxa and a host of other formulations of 'replication' have a long history in cultural theory. An important book by Zijderfeld written some years ago characterizes cliches in the following ways: "The supersedure of meaning by function." The cliche has an "acquired status of naturalness," managing "to stimulate behavior, while it avoids reflection" They are"speech no longer morally tied to behavior." "We could" he continues, "view cliches as micro-institutions, while the institutions of modernized society tend to grow into macro-cliches."
The history of mechanisms we use to respond to predictable experiences, however is now related to systems theory in a way not fully convincing, especially as we confront the frenzy of algorithmic predictability. I'm reminded, for so many reasons of the caution in a remark by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Mystification consists in the mis-understanding of the difference between an individual symbol for a universal one."
On the web site for the Ars Electronica forum on Memetics, Geert Lovink outined several of the urgent questions:
"The concept of the 'meme' seems to be objective and neutral. After the fall of the Berlin Wall certain aspects of the communist tradition (for example) could metaphorize into 'memes'in order to continue their travel through history. And why not? Or is this just a silly idea and will we face a so-called 'natural order' in order to reduce diversity, complexity, noise and resistance? And is the meme-concept useful if we want to study the way collective memory is formed? Will the Holocaust memory emigrate with us in cyberspace? Digital culture is a voyage into the realm of the artificial, borrowing metaphors here and there, with little or no reflexion on the implications of the cultural patterns in which interfaces, databases and gadgets are shaped."
The elaborate and extended contributions in the forum are a rich resource for speculation and criticism of the issues of memes as central to the ideology of electronic culture.
Aaron Lynch's book "Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads through Society" (Basic Books, 1996), defends a specious assumption that the "science of memetics" that "renders apparently arbitrary currents of culture freshly comprehensible." Thouroughly partisan, Lynch's book outlines the programming and replication systems of Dawkins and Dennett without a plausible grasp of the trajectory of social or philospohical history in which these systems appear. So characteristic of sloppy rationalizations, Lynch simply assumes that "programming," "transmission," "epidemiology," "contagion," and memetics itself are legitimated cultural categories whose foundations need not be established despite almost unbelievable problems.
Bombastic and ill-conceived conclusions abound:
"Like psychohistory, the memetic equations can even predict "future history" given some well-measured parameters and starting conditions." (p.39)
"And whenever one of the meme's hosts marries someone who continues to refuse sex, the host has a memetic basis for dissolving the union ..." (p.95)
"Because Nazi memes combined with hostilty with extreme nationalism, the Second World War arose as the product of thought contagion." (173).
Though this sort of unreflected popularization will no doubt replicate exponentially over the next few years, the more urgent issues of systems ideology seep into the discourses of cultural studies and philosophy, most prominently in the work of Daniel Dennett. His adoption of Dawkins' memetic suppositions is increasingly rooted in a revaluation of Darwinian reasoning. At odds with Steven Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, Roger Penrose and others in the critical post-Darwin camp, Dennett is adapting Darwin to cognition and intelligence in a way that is extraordinarily well argued and complex. Yet the retrofitting of Darwin's natural selection to the notion of algorithmics is an epistemological stretch of great magnitude. But Dennett is compulsive about the philosophical relevence of Darwin's "Dangerous idea" as a way of legitimating spurious notions of progress in contrast to his less convinced opponents. Criss-Crossing from the development of biology to synthetic epistemology by way of studies of computation, artificial intelligence and other technologies that have found their way into philosophy, Dennett finds himself legitimating the work of Dawkins as a system as clearly rooted as natural selection even though the premises of cultural evolution are in no way as certain.
Meme evolution is not just analogous to biological or genic evolution, according to Dawkins. It is a process that can be etaphorically described in these evolutionary idioms, but a phenomenon that obeys the laws of natural selection quite exactly.
Daniel Dennett
By extension, Dennett takes this actuality for writ and moves freely into every aspect of memory and social development. The viral metaphor indeed subsumes the work. Memes "leap promiscuously from vehicle to vehicle, and from medium to medium, and are proving to be virtually unquarantinable." Memes "are potentially immortal." (348). "Moreover, when memes come into contact with each other in a mind, they have a marvelous capacity to become adjusted to each other." (355).
Just hinting at the range of implications of memetic thinking as it disperses into cultural study will suggest the challenge to the develoment of normative systems thinking that is profoundly to affect everything from advertising to biogenetics, Establishing a critical relationship with the field will be no small task but one that will require a radical rethinkingof the history of programming, cognitive science, and the growing implications of the growing number of 'sciences of the artificial.'
The disturbing legitimation of pseudo-scientific discourse to legitimate media art, network based computation, social behavior, or politics comes as the infosphere is being assimilated into the genosphere and the cognisphere. The danger arises when the boundaries between speculative philosophy, cultural studies, the bio-sciences, neuro-technology, or social agency become so intertwined that any porous unified theory mends a deeply fragments system.