The Art of Memetics:

The Magic of Applying Memetics,

Marketing,

Masterminding,

& Cybernetic Theory

by Wes Unruh & Edward Wilson
Illustrations by Ray Carney

The Truth about Guerilla Marketing: Facts YOU Should Know about Memetics, Master Minds, and Social Optimization - "Memetics is a neo-Darwinian approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. Starting from a metaphor used in the writings of Richard Dawkins, it has since turned into a new area of study, one that looks at the self-replicating units of culture. It has been proposed that just as memes are analogous to genes, memetics is analogous to genetics." Memetics then is not really so much an academic, qualitative theory, but a metaphorical or philosophical model. This leads the memeticist to take an artistic rather than a technical approach, and is where Edward E. Wilson and I started when we took on the challenge of co-authoring this book.

Memetics is an artform centered around distributing memes across any given memetic network. As these networks exist both internally and externally, a memeticist is dealing in a practical way with a number of seemingly unrelated disciplines. At the center of this overlap lies cybernetic theory, but it also entails strategies from marketing, psychology, social networking, cultural analysis, rhetorical principles, and biological theory, specifically viral and epidemiological models.

It's no surprise that we should create externally a system that is already in place internally. "Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets." wrote William S. Burroughs in the 1950's, and today the internet is fast becoming nothing BUT web 2.0 widgets, gadgets, plug-ins, phone apps, and socnets... We've hit mass density on externalizing ourselves with the internet as it already is, and it's only getting more densely interconnected with rss feeds and 3G networks. Understanding how to navigate the internet effectively requires the same skill set neurolinguistic professionals have developed to navigate internal psychic components, and that sociologists develop to process cultural and subcultural spheres. Everyone carries an opinion, or a belief, or a concern with them to any decision they may make, and challenging that, changing that requires models that can engineer around belief - the art of persuasion is crucial to packaging memes. A dynamic approach to memetics in today's online world requires as much of a grasp of copywriting as it does epidemiological models tempered with a long-term SEO strategy and the financial support to produce consistent and branded content.

The question, to a memeticist, isn't if we're carrying memes, or where we've picked them up, but how we consciously select the ones which are most beneficial to our growth and the growth of our culture. SmartMeme has an excellent page here for community organizers and social groups, and the savvy artist and marketer can learn a lot from here as well. But it's not just about the message, you have to plan for how that message is processed... and that's where this book comes in. This book functions as a crash course in NLP, online marketing, entreprenurial thought, and content management. At the same time, it is a functional reality hacker's manual, a tactical guide to fifth-generational warfare, and a technoshamanic chaos magick grimoire. We aim to be as cross-disciplinary as possible, and with a bit of ingenuity on the part of the reader, there might even be a hidden (or occult) alchemical treatise buried in the illustrations.

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