Footnotes

About

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.

Here’s the table of contents for the book The Art of Memetics

This book combines marketing, magic, theory on group minds, and memetics, while using the concept of networked complex systems (cybernetics) to explain how ideas, goals, and desires can manifest in one’s environment and through social interaction. It’s in many ways an engineering book for magicians on synchronicity. We believe that taking these tools from marketing, institutional control systems, and giving them away freely in a book written for the culture jammer, will only strengthen the community internally.

What is available is nearly the final first edition (still contains typos) and includes Introduction by J. Matheny, table of contents, Forward by Taylor Ellwood, over a hundred footnotes, and an extensive bibliography.

The Art of Memetics itself is about using and riding the distribution paths of rhizomatic networks, and as such we were developed a Pirate Edition, accessible here. It’s the one that you can feel good about giving away to anyone who’s interested. This copy is enabled with live links to allow the reader to go directly to the page and buy a physical copy at full price if they want.

I don’t want to speak too much about what the book itself is… I feel that I’ve said most of what I wanted to say about memetics in the text itself, and you’re more than welcome to read it. Along the way we had a lot of help, hopefully all of which is reflected in the front of the book itself.

This is not free of typos, and is not a first edition. I had a lot of fun with the footnotes, and making sure the citations all matched up, but even those might change, and I hope the font changes as well. Edward and I covered a lot of ground, and going from Habermas to Hine to Gladwell to Jenkins was an argument we had a lot of fun constructing.

So, that’s it. One of the biggest projects I’ve undertaken (or endured) to date is finished, and both Edward and I are very happy with how it has come together. Eventually we plan to sell a revised first edition in stores with an ISBN, however we are more intent on keeping the book freely available and easily distributed across social networks. Ideally we will have a first edition that can play embeddable media and which incorporates longer passages from the texts, a kind of codex. Until then, this is the best possible arrangement of the materials we have had the time and resources to develop, and we include the videos here as an introductory point to the overall themes of this book.

Susan Blackmore: Memes and “temes”