You’ll find a natural ally in this battle with my friend Phaedral who detests the whole idea of the ‘meme’ for (I think) somewhat different ideas.

I think you’ve hit the part I am least comfortable with on the head– the aspect of the idea of the meme which grows out of a kind of technological determinism.

The meme is advertisement. It rightly should have nothing to do with the idea(s) that it might be carrying.

As advertising memes are Good which means that, because they are phenomenally good at getting the memed thing out there, that they can appear Bad because it’s harder and harder for the idea to fly under the radar. That’s the Good Bad.

The Bad Bad is that the meme gets mistaken for the ideas that it represents. It’s inevitable because to be passed from person to person to rapidly and successfully it has to be a simple object, no matter how complex the concept it refers to. So people express frustration with the meme and, sadly, end up discarding the idea too. Kind of like the Net Gen meme– people are frustrated, and rightly so, with the shallow thinking that gets tossed around as part of the term. The sad part is when, as a result, the thinking that the meme represents– in the Net Gen case the observable phenomenon of learner change, in the EDUPUNK case a complex ideology– gets tossed out like the proverbial bathwater baby. That kind of thinking drives me up the wall!

Meme transmission follows a kind of Bell curve, I am sure… surviving the peak with a term that is still useful intact is probably rare… who knows what will happen with EDUPUNK!

“Doing what we always do because thats what we know”, as lucychili puts it, is half of the motivation. The other is the desired control of thought, word and deed of the individual. It is the antithesis of the truly creative mind.

“A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.” ~Ayn Rand

As Lucy noted, it is the open, participative practice that I see playing out worldwide that gives me hope.

I couldn’t agree with you more here, and it is what has kept me more engaged with a group of fascinating and thoughtful people that aren’t afraid to act on their convictions. I think imagining alternatives and taking action on an idea is the most political of acts one can do at this moment, and I am hopeful as well because I am surrounded by folks like you from all over the world who aren’t afraid to try. We may fail, but that rally doesn’t matter, it’s the not being afraid part that is so damn important.

Hope, open participative practice, social ecology, and skills for negotiating contention which do not aspire to binary patterns of system v maverick, win v lose, might is right, and thereby lose the capacity for pluralist outcomes.

This quote marries some really fascinating initiatives within a communal based society, that —and this seems so key to me—can finally move away from the logical dichotomies that ultimately frame, and by extension restrict, most of our thinking currently. And this post is an excellent example of that.

As I continue to digest your comment, I’ll return with more…

This is because there is no room for ecological or social priorities or even for negotiated outcomes in an economic rationalist capital oriented system which as Lessig suggests, can only hear as money would tell it.

Obama has managed to engage people with his authenticity and his hope. The people have ideology hope and caoncerns about social and ecological matters. This is a good achievement but the primary challenge is to unpack the mechanics of economic rationalism so that they are reconnected to the consequences and costs of impact and actions.

If the real world with its diversity and subtle interrelationships between organisms, matter, life, time is 100% fidelity, then our understanding of that mesh is only very approximate, and we are losing the cultural perspectives which have functioned wtih high fidelity in local ecological contexts in order to function at greater scales. In order to shift from a network of diverse interoperating value to a model of monoculture culture and physical and of fenced ownership whereby value is within a context and conquest is without.

This kind of value proposition has been scaled up from humanist faith based or regional patterns of value to something which is completely abstracted and without foundation or responsibility.

In that context ideology is not visible.
It functions for example in colour or subtletlies of grey
and the global models we use are like a 10 generation photocopy
and only have very black and white approximate blobs left.
Those blobs are mobile and the money, war and activity move according to those blobs acting in the best interests of the sources of funds.

Law is reshaped by levers such as the USFTA and makes local legal structures incongruent and unbalanced. Copyright functions as a single source of value with distributed costs in a time when we are making value in distributed ways. All of the frameworks we have are engineered for that scale and orientation of value. They increasingly reduce the footprint of that value proposition and concentrate value while generating wider dysfunction without responsibility.
http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/ejrot/cmsconference/2003/proceedings/philosophy/hoebeke.pdf

So people do make ideology but the mechanics of participation are now more oriented as consumer choices and do not have the means to maintain coherence or fidelity even at the social level for actions or infrastructure which is in the diffuse public interest unless there is capital or strategic advantage.
This makes society neo-feudal. Participative culture operates at higher fidelity using distributed practice. The challenge for people interested in humanist and ecologically responsible economics is to find ways to make change which keeps the fidelity and the comprehension of the value of diverse complex biological and cultural systems and is also able to effect common ground and consensus on shared priorities.

Hope, open participative practice, social ecology, and skills for negotiating contention which do not aspire to binary patterns of system v maverick, win v lose, might is right, and thereby lose the capacity for pluralist outcomes.

We need to choose participative skills in negotiation of contention instead of fences and filters around value in order to make changes which can hear differently.

Perhaps there might be new ideologies and understandings if we are working with better data and skill.

In our current mode we are increasingly like Speedracer.
Doing what we always do because thats what we know.