RE: RAT Big Cheap Meme

["Sylvain, John" <jsylvain@station.sony.com>]

I have to say that this is just plain brilliant. This explains exactly why I
do this. This is the best thing I have ever read. I CAN'T WAIT TO PARTY WITH
YOU!!!!!

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	nick [SMTP:nick@nickspix.com]
> Sent:	Friday, June 25, 1999 8:25 AM
> To:	rat-list@ratconference.com
> Subject:	RAT Big Cheap Meme
> 
> 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
>