Author: John

The Meme meme

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“There’s no such thing as a meme. Pass it on.”

I don’t know when I first encountered the word “meme”; I suspect it was sometime around 1997. In any event I disliked it enough to lampoon it in a little thing called “Notes on the Source Code”, which I wrote during one frenzied all-nighter in the spring of 1998 (“notes” later morphed into the astonishing hallucination known as Cheap Complex Devices, the most brilliant book I ever wrote. But I digress.)

Suddenly “meme” was everywhere. It was like fractal redux, ten years later.

I didn’t like “meme” because I thought it added nothing to the perfectly serviceable word “idea” and was just a lot of newfangled pseudo pscientific poppycock. I’ve changed my mind since then, even to the extent that I see much human activity as the mere playing out of memes in meat substrate.

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My wife wants to run away with John Gilmore!

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Well, actually maybe that’s a bit of an exageration. But she does admire his stand for privacy and the principle that people should actually be allowed to read laws that they are required to follow. If you’re not familiar with John Gilmore, there’s a good account here of his suit against Mr. Ashcroft.

My wife also notes that Gilmore has $30 million, which is about $31 million more than I have. (She’s never met him, by the way; nor had she heard of him before reading the article.)

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Wetmachinery

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Wetmachine designer & webmaster Gary Gray and I met tonight to go over plans for tweaks to the site, coming Real Soon Now.

We have a couple of goals in mind. Firstly, we want to make “Tales of the Sausage Factory” and “Inventing the Future” more accessible to their readerships. So there will be separate RSS feeds for these series, and vectors into the archives by author/topic. There will be sign-ups for various Wetmachine mailing lists. It will be more obvious how to post comments and how to get in touch with the various Wetmachiners.

Below the fold: your chance to jump into the Gary-John brawl over the “feel” of the site.

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No on Gonzales

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Wetmachine is a technocentric place. We talk about, mostly, science and technology and their relation to society. My own particular hobbyhorse is unforseen side effects of technology, especially negative side effects. I guess you would say I’m a dystopian, happiest whenever some new technopolistic horror happens and I can say “See! See! I told you we never should have angered the gods by making fire!”

I don’t generally post political rants here. (I have a diary at daily Kos for that.)

But I’m going to add my puny voice to the chorus opposing Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General, because there are limits, after all, to my perverse delight in seeing technophilia run amok. Gonzales truly is an Orwellian character, a minion of Older Sibling and a cog in the machine that is hell-bent on turning my beloved United States of America into a high-tech Ociania–replete with a prole-filled gulag and a worldwide secret army of faceless enforcers brought up on videogames and armed to the teeth with gizmos, gadgets and all the latest in mind-fuck technology.

A vote for Gonzales is a vote not only for torture and the debasement of a proud American tradition that began, literally, with George Washington. A vote for Gonzales is a vote for the gulag, an the corruption of our republic that inveitably goes with it.

No on Gonzales.

Feynman Nine

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In my technoparanoid thriller Acts of The Apostles (which you can download for free by clicking on the left), two characters named Dieter Steffen and Pavel Isaacs develop a nanomachine for rearranging human DNA. There are implications for Gulf War Syndrome, and hints of a plot to lure the Americans back to Iraq for a second war, where they’ll be beaten. (Acts was published in 1999). They call the machine Feynman Nine.

Recently sometime-Wetmachiner Ron sent me these links:

Feynman Nine becoming reality, and and one of the leading bioinformatics molecular biology researchers around is indeed named Pavel in real life. He’s working on algorithms for rearranging genomes.

At some point in the future I’m gonna compile a compendium of all the stuff I made up for that book that has since happened.

Or else I’ll get Ron to do it — he’s been sending me “Acts of the Apostles technology sitings” for years.

An obstacle to human progress

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So I decided to ego surf the google usenet archives the other day and was kind of taken aback to see that the first entry for “John Sundman” was this little nugget from comp.ai.philosophy:

John Sundman

People like “John Sundman” are obstacles to the progress of human knowledge and

deserve to be put out of their misery

It was a comment I hadn’t seen before in response to this story I wrote for Salon about artifical intelligence, or more precisely, about how certain AI types could stand to, y’know, lighten up a little! (Why, the nerve of me!). God, seeing that comment cracked me up, I must thay.

I was tempted to try to make some kind of extrapolation from that comment to Godwin’s Law, but I’m somehow not really all that motivated. So in closing I guess it’s only fair that I should remind you that you’ve just wasted half a minute of your life with an obstacle to human progress. Now, I want you to go off and think about that before you make any more foolish mistakes today.

Confessions of a Reluctant Unitarian

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I’m a member of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Martha’s Vineyard. We have part-time minister and members of the society are regually recruited to fill in & give talks on Sundays. I was shanghai’d a while ago and finally gave my talk last Sunday.

The minister had originally suggested that I talk about “creativity” and “being a writer” or similar. Which is precisely the kind of crap I hate about Unitarianism: navel-gazing passed off as meaningful spiritual activity. So instead I delivered a rant about everything I don’t like about my own so-called religion.

Text below the fold. A few notes follow.

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Benevolent Older Sibling helps us remember who we are

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Here’s a story about government efforts already underway to develop national ID cards (that contain biometric info, natch).

Somehow this tidbit got past Winston Smith at Minitrue, in case yzall are innarested:

On Jan. 19, the agency will hold a public meeting at the Potomac Center Plaza in downtown Washington to discuss policy, privacy and security concerns associated with the development of the new ID card standard. Anyone who wants to attend must preregister by Jan. 11 by e-mailing Sara Caswell, a NIST official, at sara@nist.gov, according to a notice in yesterday’s Federal Register. Questions regarding registration can be directed to Caswell at (301) 975-4634.

Pixiated

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I saw an article about the Pixies in the freebie paper “Metro”.

The Pixies, of course, are the art-noise-punk-pop band out of Boston. They reunited after 13 years. (If you don’t know this band, by golly, stop reading Wetmachine right now and go find them.)

I couldn’t find the story online (but I did find a bunch of nifty stories by googling for “pixies metro”). So let me retype the interesting part relative to Wetmachine themes of the media ecology:

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