The, Uh, Tension Economy
Much was made, during the dotcom boom, of the Attention Economy. The
notion was that attention is more important than profits and the web still looks
that way.
Today, Doc has dug deep into Michael
Hall's questioning of Doc's and other bloggers' Google-based attention-getting,
in
I've never felt so deconstructed in all my life. Specifically,
Hall is distracted by what he sees as Doc's obsession with his rank on Google.
He wonders what it all means and why so many of us are blogging and why should
we bother? After all, so little of it matters to anyone else. Here's me quoting
Doc quoting Michael Hall:
"For every useful link or mini-review of a good site, we get dozens
of inane shout-outs sent for no better reason than, perhaps, raising one's
linkage so Google will notice, so we can blog about Google noticing.
"What the hell does it all mean? Why do you care? Why do we care?
What am I missing? Why don't I Get It?"
Hall's hard questions seem to come from the viewpoint that seeking attention
is vain, unbecoming, somehow beneath our dignity. I'd turn that around (which
is how I seek attention). Suppose, for the moment, that our productive
lives are only about getting attention, and the dignified self we think
we are is just marketing.
<non-obviously_necessary_background>
Richard Dawkins is smarter than most of us and understands genetics better
than any of us and is a hell of a writer and, really, a philosopher. In The
Selfish Gene and The
Blind Watchmaker, he teaches us that there's a little replicator inside
every cell - literally an organic digital ROM which is a collection of genes.
Cells manufacture other cells and reproduce their replicator ROM code in each
new cell, eventually building a ROM Life Support System called a flatworm
or Richard Dawkins or Saddam Hussein. Flatworms and Dawkins' and Husseins
get together with similar, differently plumbed others and put together a new
kind of cell with half of the ROM code from each of them. That unique new
cell makes other new cells saving its unique combination of the merged ROM.
The ROM code dies when the ROM Life Support System dies. Not even a creationist
would disagree so far.
Exactly half the ROM code is saved when the replicator collection makes a
child and 1/4 of the code will live in a grandchild. The ROM doesn't know
anything - about the cells (millions die and are replaced hourly) - about
the ROM Life Support System, about the support system's environment, or the
DJIA or TCP/IP. But the support system (you and me) will learn anything, do
anything and fuck anybody to perpetuate half our ROM code. The most successful
fuckers crowd out the less successful. Perhaps you've noticed this feature.
A replicator is any mechanism that creates very good copies of itself which
in turn know the copy creation trick. What's vital to a replicator is not
the copy, but the trick. The copies (you and I) are abundant, cheap, disposable
and unimportant except, of course to we the copies. Our purpose is not to
be dignified or meaningful but to be copied. We learn things, develop habits
and act on them to make copies. Successful lessons, habits and memories of
successful actions are RAM code that is carried into future copies. Others
wither and vanish.
Dawkins invented the idea of a meme, which is a disembodied replicator
with the same traits as a gene - memes are the RAM-based lessons, habits and
memories that leap from mind to mind, more or less perfectly. Memes were originally
available only to relatives close enough to copy them but the ROM Life Support
Systems learned how to send them further and more broadly. Since we care about
these ideas, we often care about other people who also carry those ideas,
even though they share none of our RAM code. We might even die
for people nothing like us.
</non-obviously_necessary_background>
Whew. Sorry about that, but I don't have time to make it shorter.
Memes, Memes, Me! Me!
I can't tell the difference between ROM code and RAM code. If something feels
like the right thing to do, I do it, and rarely know exactly why.
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I was conflicted about becoming a grandfather, but the moment I held Eddie
in my arms, a genetic switch closed and I knew I will do anything to preserve
this wonderful spark of life - 25% of my ROM code under the protection
of 100% of my ROM/RAM code. Eddie may need my counsel for a while, so
I'll work out and eat pretty well and use a seatbelt, because I've caught
memes that make me feel like doing those things.
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I have no direct proof that any of those ideas will have the desired effect,
but I'll do them anyway.
Docking His Memes
So Doc's RAM may be as interested in spreading his memes as his ROM is interested
in spawning his genes. We parents don't care whether our gene carriers are pretty
or smart or how many toes they have. We just want to give them the best shot
we can. You know, the way flatworms and geneticists and Muslims do.
There is no intrinsic meaning to any of these memes, but how we respond
to them is important. When I post something that Michael Hall thinks is trivial,
it may have meaning for someone else. If not, and my posts get scant attention,
I'll change them so they get more. Bees and ants learn this and so will the
authors of the "bite-sized 'my little dog entries' " that
bother Michael. Michael and Doc:
"Michael asks, ... 'is its eventual valuelessness the real racket
here?'
"I think the answer is mostly yes, in the long run. We don't homestead
here. We rent. None of us owns one cubic molecule of cyberspace.
When Doc gazes in his Google mirror on the wall, he's seeing his progeny and
he's as proud of them as he is of his son, reeling off the names of constellations.
From the culture's standpoint, they're the same, experiments that may take root
and may not, or might only for a while but be useful for a time.
Michael Hall's questions are necessary and helpful. His are powerful memes
hoping to overcome the weaker but more pervasive memes of vapid ramblings on
irrelevant happenings. If his ridicule withers a few of those wastes of our
time, then our collective intelligence will have been raised. But if Pop Culture
continues its decline into meaninglessness (from Michael Hall's standpoint),
then we will be the most homogenized, lowest common denominator culture in history.
His fears are shared by Richard Dawkins, the Eastern Elite and the GOP's conservative
intelligentsia, all of whom know the proles have nothing to say.
From its dark nadir of inconsequential text ricocheting among the navel-gazettes
of the Land of Blog, our lock-stepping networked culture of uniform mediocrity
will have the potential (but not destiny) to energize simultaneously, like the
similarly insignificant, lock-stepping photons of a laser, to reach levels of
relevance, focus and intensity inconceivable in the old days of a few clever,
entitled, published wise men attempting to illuminate the vast proletariat of
the unpublished and the unread.
Is Google's mirror on the wall a physicist's half-mirror? Like quantum mechanics,
evolution's a crap shoot.
3:41:20 PM 
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