Chapter Two:

Agency in a Networked World

A book dealing with memetics would be betraying its readers if we as authors were to ignore the issue of agency. Agency, or free will, as it is generally conceived, is not truly possible in a world constrained by biological and memetic evolution, coupled as it is with constant cybernetic feedback. The meme-bearers, us flesh and blood humans acting as repositories for these abstract bodies, are never wholly free in our actions or in control of our world and our selves. What we find, then, is that free will is an omega point from which degrees of agency and control are divined in response to the question: To what degree does one have control of oneself given that the individual only exists in relation to a system? And secondly, to what degree can an individual control a larger system given that there are other controlling factors?

This book explores these two questions. The first steps then must be to increase our understanding of how these systems work. We must examine how we are connected to them, what our inputs and outputs are. We need to look at how we transform or affect the signal. We need to watch the signals move through the system and see how they transform as they make their way back to us. It is this awareness of the subtleties of feedback that an understanding of magic²³ provides.

There are many subsystems, or circuits, within the overall system of the world. There are many paths that a signal can take through these circuits, either serially or concurrently. The reactions to, or transformations of, our actions along these multiple pathways can either reinforce each other and increase the effects of our signals, or conflict and decrease the effects. The greater the scope of our understanding, the greater our ability to release signals that will be reinforced by more subsystems, and correspondingly, the greater potential our actions can have toward manifesting change on the world.