Open Memetics Journal - Call for Submissions

it's time for everyone studying this in the open to coordinate

The frontier of the open memetics community is still stuck justifying: “it’s a real, rigorous science, studying this will have profound implications for society!”, meanwhile the frontier of dark memetics (which includes but is not limited to: government, private labs, marketing companies) are actively running psyops & fighting wars, with our minds as the substrate.

Those who understand memetics can see clearly the “footprints” left by these narrative wars. The good news for us in open memetics is that it’s impossible to do any large scale cultural engineering without making waves that we can trace & study.

I’ve been describing the work I do these days as “science communication, for a science that doesn’t yet exist”. Half of the reason I write about this stuff is because I believe this scientific field CANNOT exist without active participation of the minds that I wish to study. The other half is to find the people who understand the urgency of studying this & coordinating our efforts.

So this is why I am starting an “open memetics journal”. I keep meeting brilliant people working on this, but they don’t know each other. You don’t have to justify the importance of this work, you can speak directly now to a community of peers.

How to submit your work

I want you to just write things on your own blog & tell me about them, and I’ll review/link to them. You can:

(1) leave a comment on this post
(2) ping me on twitter: https://x.com/defenderofbasic
(3) submit a piece of work in this form: https://forms.gle/H1pFe54URULRtRv6A

The queue of submissions is public (the google form has a link to view all entries), so that even if I don’t understand your work others may find you / curate their own lists.

Types of work I’m looking for

1. Reviews of foundational material

2. Theoretical memetics

3. Experimental memetics

4. People to feature

For (1), I would submit something like Susan Blackmore’s “waking from the meme dream” (1996). I think it does a great job concisely explaining the “what” and “why” of memetics, and coining useful concepts like the “memosphere”. This category helps us build shared language. This is also a great way to contribute even if you are a beginner/don’t have your own novel contribution to make yet.

For (2) this is the bulk of what a lot of existing memetics writing falls under, describing concepts and dynamics. And how one might go about testing for the existence of or validating these dynamics. The best theories have predictive power.

• xiq
  recently wrote about his pitch for building a “nooscope”, describing what that is and how one might go about building one (it is an instrument that would let you empirically observe the narratives & beliefs evolving & propagating in society)

• My anatomy of an internet argument series is an example of theoratical memetics, where I try to isolate reproducible principles. For example, in “Criticizing your own tribe is how you win”, I talk about how people change their minds when they hear criticism from people they recognize as “in the same tribe”, and I show examples of this, in a way that is reproducible/testable.

• I have a draft post on “A System and Method for Monitoring & Steering Collective Minds”, about my plan to use this prototype I made for watching collective conciousness change, and my idea for guiding it in a way that’s bottom up, not top down

• I’d like to write about or see someone write about why “active participation” is critical to open memetics, and the difference between open science & survillence

For (3) this is any work that includes concrete instances of things spreading in culture, software tools, open data, or live experiments. Like analyzing a particular cultural shift, in the context of memetic theory.

• Katherine Dee’s work as an “internet ethnographer” falls here

• Joshua Citarella similarly reports on changing cultural landscape & its interaction with politics (learned about him from roseopossum, thank you!)

• Recently I wrote about a psyop that the New York Times reported on. Mauv made a twitter thread long before the NYT feature with concrete evidence of this psyop, finding a network of “2,689 bot accounts” that clearly coordinated to spread a specific narrative (~100 retweets within 8 seconds):

https://x.com/ThatsMauvelous/status/1879067636103078086

For (4) this is to help people who are doing good work surface and find each other. You can write about someone you follow, or summarize your own work. This is what I did for myself in my “beginner’s guide to culture science”, summarizing my own understanding, what I believe the bottlenecks of this field are, and what I want to work on.

My friend emergentvibe has recently written his research manifesto, calling for the creation of “open source defenses”, this is really helpful because it aligns very much with my own approach, and this helps us find others like us working towards the same vision:

We need to build open source defences so the owners of techno-capital do not use it to psyop the population and pushing their agendas and prescribed culture. We need to take over the tools of healing and use them to heal ourselves and to heal collective organisms that we create. Cooperatives, research collectives, worker unions. We can’t have such power wielded exclusively by the elite. We need to democratise the data collection, the training algorithms, the data centres, and the inference.

I have aspirations of posting a weekly memetics review, because I feel like there is so much brilliant content, and there are so many people whose work I want to dive into, but we’ll see. The nice thing about the submission queue all being open is others can jump in and help curate and I can just link to that instead of doing all the work myself, like a kind of open, decentralized journal.