Team Human

by Douglas Rushkoff

Neither genes nor memes determine everything about an organism or a culture.

DNA is not a static blueprint but acts differently in different situations.

Expression is entirely dependent on the environment, or the “protein soup” in which those genes are swimming. It’s why a tame grasshopper can, under the right conditions...

If we truly want to understand cultural contagion, we must place equal importance on the memes, the viral shell around those memes, and the ideological soup in which those memes attempt to replicate.

Memes trigger and exploit our untapped fear, anxiety, and rage in order to manipulate us. They are not attacking one another; they are attacking us humans. It’s not the meme that matters, but the culture’s ability to muster an effective immune response against it.

This is particularly difficult when the enemies of Team Human are busy escalating memetic warfare with artificial intelligence. Each of their algorithms is designed to engage with us individually, disconnect us from one another, neutralize our defense mechanisms, and program our behavior as if we were computers.

Television advertisers may have normalized the idea that consumers can be experimented on like lab rats, but social media weaponizes these techniques.

social media messages may cost pennies or nothing at all, are seen only by the individuals who have been targeted, and are placed by bots with no qualms about their origins or content.

We lose our ability to distinguish the real from the unreal, the actual from the imagined, or the threat from the conspiracy.

Worst of all, since these platforms appear so interactive and democratic, we experience this degradation of our social processes as a form of personal empowerment.

The internet doesn’t have to be used against a person’s critical faculties any more than we have to use language to lie or written symbols to inventory slaves.

Instead of the invention serving people in some way, people spend their time and resources serving it.

The idea of figure and ground was first posited by a Danish psychologist in the early 1900s. He used a simple cardboard cutout to test whether people see the central image or whatever is around it. We now know the experiment as the drawing that can be seen as a white vase if you look at the middle of the image, or as two black faces in profile if you focus on the periphery. The model of perception was useful to psychologists, who were attempting to understand how the brain identifies and remembers things.

When shown a picture of a cow in a pasture, most westerners will see a picture of a cow. Most easterners, on the other hand, will see a picture of a pasture.