Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1d ago
Over the last couple of hundred years, with the development of mass communication technology, the alignment of memes and genes has been breaking down. Today the most successful memes are those that transmit horizontally using technology, and so the selection pressures have shifted. The memes are becoming parasitic, because they no longer need their host to reproduce. In fact, the host spending time and resources trying to complete its life cycle is now directly opposed to the fitness of the memes, and so arresting development of its host in such a way that renders it literally or functionally infertile is now being selected for. These hosts then have nothing to live for except spreading the parasitic memes, and those memes then outproduce the older more symbiotic memes.
I've argued in the past that this could be a potential candidate for the Great Filter; that any civilization that develops radio — and thus could potentially be detected over interstellar distances — is quickly devoured by parasitic memes and collapses. Add that an industrial revolution is a once-per-planet event… (at best; another Great Filter candidate I like to propose is getting your planet's Carboniferous Period just right.)
This is the sense I encounter a lot, but I don't understand how it constitutes a disaster, rather than simply clarifying that "the constitution-as-applied" is the actual (small-c) constitution, the actual way our government works and will continue to work, and that "the constitution-as-written" is entirely some old dead piece of paper with no power whatsoever.
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