Meme Wars

Read this before anything else

A meme is a phantom you can make on purpose.

It is the only rung of the ladder a human being can reach unaided, which is why it is the only rung anyone fights over.

Nothing on this page is instructional and the practice described here is the one a recruit is most likely to attempt, because it is the only one that requires no talent, no lineage and no equipment. ⚠ warning

The ladder

Three entries on this wiki, written years apart by different hands, describe the same object at three stages. Nobody appears to have noticed until they were placed in order. firsthand · Gershon

1. A copy — a form that replicates between minds and carries no will of its own.
2. A phantom — "projections of Psychic Energy… no internal will to them… lesser copies of other beings."
3. A ghost — "phantoms of strong psyches that have imbued themselves with a will."
4. An egregore — a will sustained by a group that knows it is a group.
5. A god — "exists through worship… may be created entirely out of the collective will of its followers."

Read downward it is a cosmology. Read upward it is a set of instructions, and that is the problem with it. contested

The claim of this entry is that the first rung is reachable deliberately, that the transition from first to second is not mysterious but a matter of replication count, and that everything above the second rung is where control is lost. Every account we have of someone building a thing that climbed past the second rung describes it as having stopped being theirs. unverified

What travels

Nothing true has ever gone far on its own. Truth carries no replication advantage; it is merely accurate. firsthand

What travels is what is shaped to travel, and roughly a decade of watching gives a consistent shape: short, funny, slightly wrong, and flattering to the person repeating it. unverified

Take those one at a time, because each is a fitness trait and none of them is a virtue:

Short

It must survive being retold by someone who was not paying attention.

Funny

Laughter is transmission without assent. A person who repeats a thing while laughing has carried it without ever deciding whether it is true, and has therefore not defended against it.

Slightly wrong

This is the one recruits get wrong. An error is not a flaw in a travelling form — it is the hook. The urge to correct it is itself a replication event, and correcting it in public spreads it further than agreeing with it would. ⚠ warning

Flattering

It must make the carrier feel like one of the people who sees clearly. This is the payment. Nobody carries a form that costs them status.

None of that is a theory of what is true. It is a theory of what moves, and the two have never been observed to be related. contested

Telling a grown one from a wild one

The practical question, and the wiki is not confident about any of it.

Wild forms — the ones that arose from a population without anyone placing them — are reported as ugly, local, badly adapted at first, and slow. They accumulate variants in the open, and the early variants are still findable. unverified

Cultivated forms arrive already fit. The signature we look for is an absent childhood: a form that is well-shaped on first sighting, with no clumsy early versions anywhere behind it, appearing in several unconnected places within a short window. contested

That signature is weak and we say so plainly. It is equally consistent with a wild form that we simply found late, and any seeker who has spent a month applying this test will report that everything begins to look cultivated. ⚠ warning

The tag astroturf

exists for claims that fail this test. It is coloured to resemble firsthand
on purpose.

Competing accounts

unsigned— board archive unverified

There is no war. There are bored people making jokes, and afterwards there are people like you, drawing lines between the jokes and calling the lines a campaign. The pattern you are finding is in the pen.

Against it: This account has itself been repeated verbatim in enough places, in a form short enough and flattering enough, to satisfy every criterion listed above. That is not a refutation of it. It may be the strongest thing on this page.

a defector from the CIA programme, name withheld at their request— interview, third session— 2016 defector

Placing something was never the hard part and was never where the budget went. The budget went on knowing which of the things already out there was about to move on its own, and getting behind that one early enough to be mistaken for its cause.

Against it: If true, it makes cultivated and wild forms indistinguishable in principle, and the test in the section above is worthless. We have left the test in place, tagged, rather than delete a method we cannot replace.

How this entry was assembled

Drawn from: Board archives, one defector interview, and the Phantoms, Ghosts and Gods entries read in sequence.

Compiled by: Gershon.

Known weaknesses: The ladder is a synthesis of three stub entries that were never written to be read together, and it may be a pattern we imposed on them. The shape-of-what-travels section is generalised from one board culture over one decade by people inside it. The detection test is admitted above to be near-useless.

Wanted: A form with a documented, findable childhood that later turned out to have been placed. That single case would make the test real.