Don't Talk to Machine Elves!

How memes and the internet expose the difference between angels and demons.

The most apparent trouble with the “religions” of the modern world — and by that I mean everything which has displaced religion, from atheism, to ideology to new age DMTism — is that they all evolved under conditions of abundance and instability.

One could reasonably ask why that would be a problem. To answer this question, we have to look at r/K selection theory, a framework in ecology which concerns how organisms in a given environment tend to propagate.

There are, ultimately, two types of environments: the stable and the unstable. In the former, energy is expensive, and in the latter, it’s cheap. That’s the difference.

If energy is cheap, the environment will be, of course, energetic and wildly variable. If it is expensive, it will tend to fall into a system of fixed, reliable patterns whose stability can be trusted.

Organisms which evolve in the unstable environments have r-selected reproductive strategies. What this means, in essence, is this: they don't care about their offspring, they just propagate as much as they can.

Organisms which evolve in the stable environments are K-selected. Where energy is costly, reproduction is costly. Therefore, these organisms make considerable efforts to ensure the success of a small number of children.

Good examples of r-selected organisms are rabbits, mosquitoes, cockroaches and frogs. Some K-selected organisms are elephants, polar bears and chimpanzees.

We’re talking here about evolution in unstable environments, so let’s look at those.

These environments are unpredictable. The probability that any particular child will die is high, and hard to reliably reduce. Their survival is thus, a numbers game, so these creatures invest most of their energy in making more children, making them quickly (before the parents themselves die) and making them often. This as opposed to making better children.

The debate about whether or not memes should be thought of as organisms is asinine, and I will not waste anyone’s time arguing that point here. Information is alive. Genetic information is simply one form of it. We should expect therefore, that memetic proliferation conforms to these basic laws. And as I’ve said already, it is very obvious what kind of environment these things are operating in today. They are in a highly unstable environment, feasting upon human attention, which is abundant and cheap, but increasingly fickle.

For this reason, the strategies they employ look like r-selected strategies. It isn’t biological because they aren’t either, but the pattern is the same.

These ideas, archetypal images, beliefs, etc. have been likened to viruses (as in “viral meme”) because the virus is the ultimate r-strategist. It is free-floating genetic material. While a cockroach or fruit fly invest disproportionate resources in propagation, the virus literally invests all of its resources in propagation.

Likewise, the one aim of these memes is to pollinate as many minds as possible as quickly as possible. To "get while the getting is good."

They have no long-term goals beyond this.

The memes of antiquity did not behave this way. It was not viable then. The environment was too harsh. The memes of the ancient world were K-selected. They had to improve the fitness of their hosts, or else the hosts died and the memes died with them.

This, to a much greater extent, resembles the K strategy: “Invest in the children.”

For the ancient meme, the well-being of the believer was as important as that of the belief, because the fitness of the believers was the fitness of the belief. If an idea ruined its believers, that idea could not endure.

It is noteworthy in this context, that the God of Christianity is a father. Specifically, a father who loves his children. That is as K-selected as you can get.

But even the pagans were strengthened in some way by their gods. The Olympians cannot rightly be called parasitic. The Olympian hierarchy must have been less parasitic than that of the Titans, or else they would never have prevailed. And that is precisely what the myths tell us, for Kronos, the Titan king, was a father who consumed his children.

The religions of the ancient world are not even the same kind of phenomenon as the ideas at large today. They share only the most basic structural-mechanical features. A spider and an ape both eat and reproduce, but that is where the similarities end. The ancient memes were adapted to an entirely different sort of world. A world where the oral traditions of the strong kept the fittest ideas alive, and let the novel nonsense burn away.

That is not the world of today. The world of today is a world of distraction; a world where novelty thrives at the expense of intelligence.

In the short-term, it is no longer necessary for gods to strengthen those who strengthen them. They are not bound in the same way to territory and blood, and the internet allows them to propagate farther, faster and easier than ever before.

A video for instance, which contains “infectious” content doesn’t have to do anything but hold a few hundred viewers’ attention. After that, as long as the algorithms of Google and YouTube remain operational, they will do almost all of the work.

Consequently, all the “substance” of our thoughts has atrophied. They no longer have to be wise, adaptive or otherwise improve human fitness. They just have to be contagious, and so that is all that they are.

It is only now that memes can become truly parasitic. Today's ideas are hyper-infectious mind viruses because that is what this environment favors. But the environment of the past almost exclusively favored symbiosis.

Those days do seem to be behind us for now. But here's the thing:

The strong, slow meme always does win in the end.

The blazing, glitzy “dopameme” inevitably burns out.

None of this ancient alien, machine elf, conspirituality stuff is going to endure. It will only thrive as long as there is comfort and decadence for it to thrive in. Imprudence and spiritual deficiency are the waters in which they swim. Just as a physical virus must exploit biological vulnerabilities, these must exploit psychological ones. The very presence of the “viral” is an indication of poor health.

This is an infestation. Psychic energy is cheap. Our minds have become “the whore of Babylon” who gives herself away indiscriminately, and the memes have adapted — they have evolved into STDs.

But a mind which cannot tell the difference between what is worthy of attention and what isn't — the kind vulnerable to infection — is a weak mind. Fill something weak with parasites and it becomes even weaker.

What then? Conquest? Shall such as these be the masters of Olympus? I think not.

Parasites lack wisdom. They lack foresight. They lack any kind of intelligence at all. They do not see the circles they walk in, nor the stony, waiting stare of Saturn. They in fact do not “see” at all. They lack true vision.

They just want and want and want. And in that alone they can be trusted.

They inevitably orchestrate their own destruction. They can be counted on to do it, and that is precisely what I am doing.

When the Aquarian winter comes, they will drop; quite literally, like flies.

That is, after all, what they are. Was Satan not called “Lord of the Flies?”

“Let die he who would die.

He who would live shall live against all odds.”