"Memes & Me" by Glenn Grant

I first encountered the meme about memes in Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, a collection of his wonderful columns for Scientific American. His articles on memes got me all fired up, setting off ideas like a chain-reaction of fireworks. One of the resulting starbursts was my first-published short story, Memetic Drift. The second explosion was a weird little piece called "A Memetic Lexicon".

I never imagined that this odd collection of words and definitions would turn out to be my most successful piece of writing. Since 1990 it has been printed in at least three magazines, hosted on dozens of websites, presented to standing-room-only audiences, translated into other languages, cited by respected scientists in serious academic contexts, inspired a weird pomo SF convention, and helped catalyse an online "religion" for rational athiests.

Good thing I didn't see any of that coming when I was writing it -- I'd have become all too self-conscious and serious. Instead, the Lexicon was written entirely as a lark, in a burst of sheer intellectual mania.

Most of the thing was a condensation of ideas lifted from people infinitely smarter than myself. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins applied evolutionary theory to culture and coined the term meme. Douglas Hofstadter picked up the thread and ran with it, contributing such terms as scheme, bait, hook, and threat. Keith Henson, writing in Whole Earth Review magazine, developed such useful terms as belief space and memeoid.

Having packed into the Lexicon as many of these stolen memes as I could, I added buckets of my own neologisms -- auto-toxic, membot, meme-allergy, memotype, sociotype, vaccime, etc. I live to make up new words. This was a large part of what drove me to write the Lexicon in the first place. I was also convinced that memetics was an important new paradigm, one that provided useful critical tools for thinking about why we believe the things we believe. Frankly, I wanted the Lexicon to be a subversive, mutagenic mind-virus.
It was never intended as a paragon of lexical rigor; not surprisingly, some of my definitions have not aged well and are easily quibbled with. I threw in random, nifty-seeming ideas, such as "The health of an ideosphere can be measured by its memetic diversity" -- a paraphrase of Bateson's dictum about the health of ecologies -- often without the slightest explanation, assuming the intelligent reader would get the gist of my drift. I intentionally made offhand jokes and satirical swipes at targets of opportunity (such as Jehovah's Witnesses, or Heavy Metal music), the sort of playful editorializing that is edited out of most real dictionaries.

My article was certainly never intended to be the last word on meme-words, which is why it's only "A Memetic Lexicon" and not "The Memetic Lexicon." (In this I was inspired by my favorite non-fiction book, Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language.)

I sent the completed article off to Mark Frauenfelder, who published it in issue #5 of his cutting-edge "neurozine," bOING bOING (which has since morphed into the über-blog, boingboing.net). I thought it was appropriate to ShareRight the Lexicon, rather than copyright it, so that it might replicate freely through the ideosphere. A later, expanded edition also appeared in VIRUS 23 magazine, from (of all places) Red Deer, Alberta.

A truly crazed Virus 23 reader in Calgary was inspired to organize MEMetiCON '92, a "recombinant academic conference, Pagan ritual, rave dance club and post-CyberPunk science fiction convention." High weirdness indeed! The Lexicon took up most of the MEMetiCON program book.

In 1990 the Web did not yet exist, but a friend uploaded the Lexicon to somebody's cyberculture FTP site. As soon as there was a Web, people started converting the file to HTML. First among these was the huge Principia Cybernetica Web, the vast cyber-philosophy site in Belgium.

I think the file was probably first HTMLized by Anders Sandberg, a positively virulent meme-proliferator who still hosts it on his excellent Transhumanism site, along with a lot of excellent Memetics links.
Then there's the Church of Virus, "a memetically engineered atheistic religion", which hosts a Lexicon expanded by David McFadzean. This version has been translated into Spanish by José Ma Filgueiras, and into German by Alex Schroeder. The "Church" also has a lively Virian BBS community.

The Web is now rife with mutated variants (memetic drift in action), such as the Wikipedia's memetic lexicon entry, and TheFreeDictionary.com's memetic lexicon entry.
For a serious ego boost, it's hard to beat being cited by Susan Blackmore (a scientist and skeptic I've admired for many years) in her excellent book, The Meme Machine. Incredibly, Richard Dawkins himself provides the Lexicon's URL in his foreword!

To counterbalance the effect that might have on the size of my head, there's the unexpected appearance of the word sociotype in Neil Stephenson's brilliant and hilarious Cryptonomicon -- where it shows up in the online ravings of a psychotic cultist who wants to start a hive-mind in California.

Imagine that: a dangerous weirdo using my memes to infect the minds of the all-too-easily-influenced, turning them into an army of robotic memoids...

Of course, I would never think to do such a thing myself. Perish the thought!

[Montreal, 2004]