Maps and Memetic Monsters
Geographical maps are designed with humans in mind. Their size, level of detail, and coloring show that they were meant for creatures with the body size, computing capacity, and visual ability of typical homo sapiens. Some maps are distorted geographically to become more useful. For instance, New York's subway map is more useful for a train rider when it is less geographically precise.
The now iconic 1972 map above is by designer Massimo Vignelli. A copy of it hangs in the Museum of Modern Art. Below is the map that it replaced. Here's what Vignelli said about this older map: “There’s too much information. The greatest thing about the London map, if you’ve ever seen it, is that they stick to the subway, the underground. Therefore, there’s no reference to above. In New York, they wanted to put everything. It was too much.”
Truth, likewise, needs to be designed for human minds. Sometimes, an expression of truth has to be distorted in some dimensions for it to be a useful map of reality. Take "memetic monsters," for instance.
The biologist and polemicist Richard Dawkins coined the word "meme" back in the 1970s. Memes are to society what genes are to living organisms. They are ideas that replicate across minds. Genes that help organisms survive and reproduce are the ones that get replicated. Likewise, memes that help societies survive and grow tend to be the ideas that spread across minds.
Dawkins’s meme is the source of the concept of “antimememtics” in the science fiction novel There Is No Antimemetics Division. The book distorts Dawkins's map by giving these memes agency, desire, and physical form. The Antimemetics Division is like The Ghostbusters for memetic monsters that eat knowledge and memories as a form of self-defense: you can't kill what you don't know or remember.
Monsters, gods, and demons are better designed for the human mind than "meme." This is not a new insight. Karl Marx opens the Communist Manifesto with an image of a memetic monster: "A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism." Giving memes agency is such an effective meme that occultists believe in the literal existence of these memetic monsters. To them, the map is the territory. They call these monsters "egregores." They hold their dark rituals to communicate and collaborate with these demons. And the extremely online might be familiar with Slate Star Codex's Meditations on Moloch, which uses the evil god to personify the forces emerging from society that lead to the destruction of its members. I also used this metaphor to make sense of the last Philippine elections, and based on the responses from readers, it looks like it works.
I’ll be using this map for my current writing project, which uses René Girard’s methods and maps of reality to uncover things hidden in Antonio Pigaffeta’s account of the first circumnavigation of the world. The encounter between Humabon and Magellan was not only a clash between a rajah and a conquistador, but a clash between memetic monsters. If you are Filipino, your ability to see 1521 is also obscured by a spectre with antimemetic powers — the specter of postcolonial nationalism.
This map will be more effective if you believe in these monsters, so let me point out the brilliant antimemetic countermove to Dawkins's neologism. The monsters simply transformed the meaning of "meme" into something much stickier, as if trolling humanity's effort to cure its blindness to them. Even if your eyes are open, you can't see the monsters if you gaze away from them.
