RAT Big Cheap Meme

[nick <nick@nickspix.com>]

The RatMobile with its accompanying convoy is the living metaphor of
RoomAndTransportation. It will pick up all hitchhikers across this great
nation of ours thumbing toward the '99 Beach Blanket Bingo and Chili Cook
Off.  

Those of you who have fears of RAT being co-opted or swallowed by some
mainstream entity have never been to the Conference. The Rat Conference
will unfold in Los Angeles as the sovereign nation that it is and will
always remain. 

As far as grants and funding goes, RAT was born well beyond just "biting
the hand that feeds you."    It always thought of the hand itself as food.

The following is excerpted from a paper that the Beer Mystic delivered
recently to a clandestine theater panel in Australia:

	BIG CHEAP MEME

This paper is about the special type of meme carriers known as Rats. A meme
is an information pattern capable of replicating. A Rat is one of the
producers of a self-producing theater, and the Rat Conference is the masque
where the Rat Royalty convenes in celebration of their sovereignty. 

Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in his book The
Selfish Gene to describe certain types of thoughts and ideas that are
analogous to genetic phenomena. A meme is an information pattern that
behaves like a virus. A meme inhabits the host's nervous system and causes
the host to infect other nervous systems. Slogans, use of the wheel,
infectious melodies, catch phrases, religions, rules of thumb, styles, and
even the theory of memes itself, are all memes. For example, when an artist
thinks of an new way to express an idea, SHe transmits the idea to other
artists, so that the idea jumps from brain to brain, and the style
manifests itself in the artwork of other artists.

The science of memetics is a method of studying the behavior and effects of
information patterns by using techniques borrowed from epidemiology,
evolutionary science and linguistics. Memetics has also been described as
"Darwinism applied to ideas."

To qualify as a meme, an information pattern must possess the following
attributes. It needs bait, something that looks tempting enough for the
host to bite so it can enter hir nervous system. It also needs a hook,
something to encourage its replication. Sometimes there is also a threat,
to discourage the host from changing or discarding the meme.

An example of a meme bearing bait, hook and threat is any one of many
conventional religions. The bait is the promise of salvation and eternal
life, the hook is the need to infect others with the religion meme and the
threat is eternal damnation and hellfire for those who reject the meme.
(The preceding does not apply to your religion, of course. Your religion is
not a tricky meme, but rather the one true path leading to glory.)

Memes do not have to be truthful to be robust and spreadable. Nor must they
be ultimately beneficial to the host. Keith Henson points out that Reverend
Jim Jones' memes became weirder and weirder when he isolated his group in
the jungle, because the well-established memes existing in society could
not compete nor provide corrective feedback against his barrage of
poisonous memes.   The Jim Jones meme, the Kamikaze meme and other martyr
memes are auto-toxic; they kill their hosts.

Talking about memes as if they are alive is not only useful and convenient,
it is also accurate. As Richard Dawkins' colleague N.K. Humphrey writes in
The Selfish Gene: "memes should be regarded as living structures, not just
metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind
you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's
propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic
mechanism of a host cell. And this just isn't a way of talking-the meme
for, say, 'belief in life after death' is actually realized physically,
millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual
men the world over."

Memes must fight one another to survive in the nervous systems of human
beings, because brain resources are limited. All people filter out ideas
they consider useless, and they retain ideas that they consider beneficial
in some way. If they didn't, they would exceed the storage capacity of
their nervous systems.

Memes also must compete for external carriers: books, magazines, billboards
and electronic media. Network television, national magazines, and book
publishers in the overground media rely upon advertising sales income or
public funding, and as a result must appeal to a large audience to ensure
their survival. To guarantee the continuing support of a large segment of a
population, these external carriers must contain memes that are consistent
with the ideosphere, or memetic ecology, of that group. 

Overground media reacts allergically to mutant memes, usually by destroying
the external carrier by burning it or banning it, or by inciting the meme
police to incarcerate the human propagator and hir dangerously contagious
nervous system. 

So where, then, can unpopular, hot, radical or strange memes survive and
propagate? Where can the intrepid meme-explorer find a dose of exotica? SHe
needs only to dip hir brain into the RAT pool, the wild ocean of
self-produced theater, where fish learn to breathe and salamanders sprout
feathers and try to fly.

It is only here, in the primordial soup, far away from the dinosaurs of the
overground media, where these new ideas have a chance to test their wings.
Because RAT theaters are unburdened by the restraints of commercialism &
public opinion, their productions can carry strange memes. And because Rats
are usually more interested in propagating ideas than they are in
generating a profit, their theater productions are a plentiful source of
cheap memes.

RAT theater and mainstream theater have a superficial resemblance to one
another, but differences abound. RATs are often focused on highly
specialized interests far from the mainstream. They cannot compete with
Broadway or Off Broadway or the heavily funded regional theaters.
Fledgling memes that have little chance of surviving in well-established
external carriers, such as large newspapers, film, and television, can take
root and flourish in RAT theaters.  For example, the overground media
rarely mentions poetry and language and its relationship to culture and the
history of ideas, and when they do, they do so in a cursory manner without
considering the issue more deeply. Many RAT theaters, on the other hand,
raison d'etre is an exploration such intricacies of language and ideas.
The intimacy and kinship of small audiences sometimes accomplish the large
discoveries of memes that will affect (infect) the whole of society and
culture in ways that the Blockbusters of other mediums can only mimic. 

The other major difference between RAT theater and mainstream theater is
their start-up and operating expenses. The situation is reminiscent of the
punk rock movement in 1977. Frustrated musicians, bored with the insular
corporate blandness of contemporary rock music, decided to short-circuit
the established system by producing, recording, distributing, promoting,
and advertising their music by themselves. 

The decentralized, iconoclastic quality of RAT theater is ideal for people
interested in shucking prescribed realities in favor of designing their own
world-view.  Thieves Theatre, one of the RAT theaters very adept at
spreading its own blend of particularly virulent memes, reminds us the best
course of action is not to reject the realities thrust upon us by the
corporate/political world, but to steal and mutate them toward subversive
ends.  For three years the Thieves' twenty-five foot high teepee made of
stolen US mailbags stood blatantly in the center of a prominent shantytown
at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge in New York City, its message becoming
a permanent fixture in the consciousness of the thousands of commuters
daily entering the city. 

Categorizing RAT theaters is difficult because most RAT theaters are either
in a category by themselves or change their entity with every production.
Some RAT theaters have no recognizable focus. It's hard to even estimate
how many RAT theaters there are.  Recently new RAT like theater
confederacies announced themselves in Philadelphia and Los Angeles and
instantly there were twenty-some new theaters proclaiming themselves RAT.
Whatever the individual RAT theater may lack in audience numbers, the RAT
universe more than makes up for in volume and variety.

Not only is the RAT theater menu longer than a Chinese restaurant's, it's
always changing.  Ben Trovato of Thieves Theatre estimates that the half
life of a RAT theater is four years. In other words, only half the RAT
theaters producing today will still be alive in four years. Of course, by
that time, a new batch of external meme carriers will have arrived to fill
any vacancies in the ideosphere. The RAT world has a high birthrate to
match its high deathrate.

The evolutionary step that has brought about this new era of RAT Theater
can be easily seen.  The virtual communication through email and Web sites
is the tool that has allowed RAT to identify itself as a community with
common interests and goals.  The Rat Conferences are both planned and
promoted mainly through electronic communications.  In many ways RAT is
also one of the thousands of new electronic communities being formed today,
but it is more a hybrid of this new frontier than an entity defined by it.
Many RATs define their acronym as RoomAndTransportation and the unifying
character of RAT theaters is mostly achieved through the pilgrimages to the
various Rat Conferences across the country.  It is at these Rat Conferences
that this particularly infectious meme commonly known as RAT is both bred
and spread.  At this time, there is no cure in sight