UK Scholar
CHANNELS DICK …
Philip K. Dick, that is. Wired talked to British scholar Susan Blackmore back in February & she doesn’t think we have much control over our desire to discover & disseminate information.
“What culture is doing, what the memesphere is doing, is taking a human being and infecting it with masses of new information and exploiting its tendencies. We are being turned from ordinary old-fashioned meme machines into what I call “teme” machines — machines for copying technological information, spreading photos and printed words and digital files.”
I’ll be honest, I’d never even heard the word ‘meme’ until just a few months ago; I didn’t even know who Richard Dawkins was. I KNOW! Can you believe it? Anyway, when asked to imagine what the future will look like when the memes take over, Blackmore said:
“Well, it will look like humans are just a minor thing on this planet with masses (of) silicon-based machinery using us to drag stuff out of the ground to build more machines.
We are so ego-centric. We think of ourselves as the center of the universe. We need to do a flip and see us as a player in a vast evolutionary process, which we’re not in control of.”
What’s creepy is that I’m doing it right now; I iz a teme machine.
(via Wired)
We Are the Internet, 4.15.08
