The Media Virus, My Problem Child

A slice from an essay by Douglas Rushkoff, taken from the book The End Of Trust, featuring Cory Doctorow, Edward Snowdon and Douglas Rushkoff. Published by EFF. 

When I first used the expression “media virus,” I thought I was describ-ing a new sort of total transparency; media would finally tell the stories that our controllers didn’t want us to hear. If a cultural issue is truly repressed or unresolved, a media virus invoking that issue can nest and replicate.
The perplexing thing—the part I didn’t fully understand until now—is that it doesn’t matter what side of an issue people are on for them to be infected by the meme and provoked to replicate it. “Look what this person said!” is reason enough to spread it. In the contentious social media surrounding elec-tions, the most racist and sexist memes are reposted less by their advocates than by their outraged opponents. That’s because memes do not compete for dominance by appealing to our intellect, our compassion, or anything to do with our humanity. The media space is too crowded for thoughtful, time-consuming appeals. When operating on platforms oversaturated with ads, memes, messages, spam, and more, memes need to provoke an immedi-ate and visceral response to get noticed. “The Clintons are running an occult child sex ring in the basement of a pizzeria.” In a race to the bottom of the brain stem, viruses compete to trigger our most automatic impulses.
Well-meaning and pro-social counterculture groups from the Situationists to Adbusters and Greenpeace have attempted to spread their messages through the equivalents of viral media. They cut and paste text and images to subvert the original meanings of advertisements, or the intentions of corporate logos. It is a form of media aikido, leveraging the tremendous weight and power of an institution against itself with a single clever twist. With the advent of a new, highly interactive media landscape, internet viruses seemed like a great way to get people talking about the unresolved issues that needed to be discussed in the light of day. After all, this logic goes, if the meme provokes a response, then it’s something that has to be brought up to the surface.
But we can’t engineer a society through memetics the way a biologist might hope to engineer an organism through genetics. It’s ineffective in the long run, and—beyond that—unethical. It bypasses our higher faculties, our reasoning, and our collective authority.
The danger with viruses is that they succeed by bypassing the neocor-tex—the thinking part of our brain—and go straight to the more primal reptile beneath. The meme for scientifically proven climate change, for example, doesn’t provoke the same intensity of cultural response as the meme for “elite conspiracy!”
Logic and truth have nothing to do with it. Memes work by provoking fight-or-flight reactions. And those sorts of responses are highly individual-istic. They’re not pro-social; they’re antisocial. They’re not pro-cultural; at their best they are countercultural. They can galvanize a particular group of people, especially one that feels under assault. If the group is genuinely vulnerable—such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, or #ArabSpring—then this solidarity, though usually emotional and oppositional, is still beneficial to the group’s identity and cohesion. But the very same memetic provocations work, perhaps even better, to galvanize groups on false pretenses. As long as the deep fear, rage, or panic is activated, it doesn’t have to be based in reality. Indeed, fact-based rhetoric only gets in the way of the hyperbolic claims, emotional hot buttons, and mythic claims that rile people up: blood and soil, black men will hurt you, foreigners are dangerous, Lock Her Up. The less encumbered by facts or sense, the more directly a meme can focus on psychological triggers from sexism to xenophobia.

--Douglas Rushkoff, The Media Virus, My Problem Child (Taken from the book The End Of Trust. Free Download Here.)

Team Human - It's All Happening

Intelligent conversation for people with an attention span that exceeds 140 characters.

Zach Leary has run a podcast for some time - It's All Happening. 

Early on (30 July 2015, Episode 4) he interviewed Douglas Rushkoff, in a fascinating hour of conversation.

Recently, Douglas Rushkoff returned (27 January 2017), to do the first half of a conversation (Episode 76) that they then continued on his own podcast site, at Team Human.    

Find that second part, here.  (Episode 22, 1 February 2017)

Aleister and Adolf

The latest from Douglas Rushkoff, with images by Michael Avon Oeming.

Review on Boing Boing (has a range of images from the book)

Books to hold in your hand

Hilartias Press releases fresh edition of Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati, with new introduction by John Higgs.  NOW AVAILABLE (as hard copy or eBook).

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OUT TODAY!      New from Douglas Rushkoff   Available from Indiebound.org  

More details on Rushkoff.com

And also:

Aleister and Adolph - occult graphic novel by Douglas Rushkoff  (Disinfo)

This will be available in November 2016 from Dark Horse Comics

TESTAMENT

RUSHKOFF says - "My DC comic series 'TESTAMENT is now available in a single, digital “omnibus” volume via ComiXology http://cmxl.gy/1dPSOdd

In some ways, I think Testament is my most important work. Instead of merely talking *about* narrative, economics, sigil magic, and the Bible, I'm actually doing it. The purpose of Testament was to predict the world of crypto-currencies that we're entering right now, and show how this story has happened before. This moment is exactly what Torah was talking about - not in the sense of predicting the future, but in the sense that this is the perennial human story. 

I think having it all in one place at one time really makes the story SO much clearer. I always wanted this to be in one volume, so you can really feel the characters - especially the Gods, who live *between* the panels on page. 

I have written most of my books way too early. Testament is really about this exact moment. And it's also the oldest story we know."
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 And I say great! I love this comic and was super psyched to get to participate in the small way of formatting it for digital release and designing the cover collage. I wish it a very happy and healthy digital life! - bc

RAW WEEK @ boinboing

Im very happy to see that boingboing.net are entertaining a Robert Anton Wilson week, with blog posts from the likes of Paul Krassner, Mark Frauenfelder, Gareth Brandwyn, Douglas Rushkoff, Antero Ali, R.U Sirius, David Jay Brown, Erik Davis, Ivan Stang and MLA's own Propaganda Anonymous, all full of new insights and high praise from 2012.

"So, give the world's sad sonambulism a wakeup call. Put some OM (whether “trivial or colossal”) in your day. Bob would have wanted it that way.--Gareth Brandwyn, Mindfucking since 1776.

Bob was in fine form that night reading excerpts from his as of yet unpublished book, The Trick Top Hat, from his Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy. I sat there astonished by the highly compact, information-rich writing style he had developed. It was as if every other word triggered a different chemical in my brain. Bob had this unique way with words that acted on my ear-brain loop just like drugs. I remember thinking to myself, "This is what writing is all about! Writing is all about magick."--Antero Ali, The Cosmic Trigger Effect.

"He had a knack for giving straightforward explanations of hard-to-grok concepts without stripping them of their power or complexity. Before I read RAW's books, the world was confusing and mysterious. After I read his books, the world became much more confusing and mysterious -- but in a good way! Bob converted me from atheism to agnosticism (which, in his words, means "never regarding any model or map of the universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial"). --Mark Frauenfelder, Robert Anton Wilson week at boingboing

"At one point in Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything, the interviewer asks Bob why he's so into conspiracy theories. He'd spent the better part of his life studying them, writing about them, but he doesn't seem to actually believe any of them. So, why the intense interest? Bob thinks about it for a moment and replies: “It keeps the mind supple.--Gareth Brandwyn, Mindfucking since 1776.

"In his final blog entry on January 6, Wilson wrote: "I don't see how to take death seriously. I look forward without dogmatic optimism, but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying." Actually, it was expected that he would die seven months earlier. On June 19, 2006, he sent this haiku (with one syllable missing) to his electronic cabal:

Well what do you know?
Another day has passed
and I'm still not not.

 --Paul Krassner, Keep the Lasagna Flying.

"As a result, Bob is probably responsible for bringing more new students to magick and, specifically, to Thelema, than anyone else, perhaps Crowley included. As a writer, he brought uncommon sense to the subject and not only made magick appealing, but also understandable to the modern mind--Phil Farber, in conversation with Prop Anon.