I wrote this during my senior year of college, back in the spring of 1999, for an Anthropology class I took in order to fulfill a humanities elective I needed to graduate. At the time I had yet to encounter the word “meme” as it is now popularly used. I uncovered this paper recently while organizing my files and it made me feel slightly prophetic. 

Virtual Tribalism

According to Richard Dawkins in his essay “Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes,” ideas are swiftly taking over the function of genetics. Dawkins claims that “all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.” In other words, the evolution of anything, be it a DNA strand or a melodic device, is based on its ability to reproduce itself.

                Here on Earth, the standard by which most of us judge our own evolutionary success, whether we think of it in those terms or not, has to do with genetics. We build our societies on our genetic relations to one another. Genetics is our basis for family, and often political orientation and religious persuasion. Modern evolutionary theory suggests that we are tied to these people because they share our genetic code, which instinct dictates that we protect. Since the survival of those who share our code increases the chance of our code surviving, we are born with a vested interest in their well being.

                But Dawkins claims this is all changing, a new standard is being introduced, a new measuring stick by which we can grade our evolutionary success. This new standard is not the gene, but the meme. Based on the Greek word mimeme, and arising from the same root as the word memory, meme refers to conceptual evolutionary structures as opposed to biological ones. In other words, “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.” The idea is that memes replicate themselves in the same way that genes do, and in fact cause us to behave in much the same way that genes do. Dawkins quotes N. K. Humphry who writes, “…memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in the mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into the vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just 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 system of individual men the world over.”

                The question is the how this influences anthropological thought. If our genetic relationships with other human beings cause us to relate to them in a particular way, and if societies and cultures develop in such a way, based upon genetic relationships,  then it might also follow that societies and cultures are developing in the same way on the basis of memetic relationships. That is to say that if culture and at the simplest anthropological level is structured around genetic relationships, then it follows that there may now be cultures developing at the simplest anthropological level, based on memetic relationships.

                Virtual communities have become the memetic equivalent of genealogies, a kind of memealogy. In the same way the tribal communities developed along genetic lines, so have internet communities developed out of associations of common ideas, or types of ideas. In many ways these communities have structured themselves in the same way that tribal genealogies build themselves up around one family line.

                Similar to tribal communities such as the Yanomami, internet bulletin board systems (BBS) are governed by symbolic leaders akin to headmen. They are structured in a kind of segmentary lineage organization, subgroups of memealogies are part of larger meme based groups. Like tribal communities, there is harsh competition within the BBS itself, as well as village rading type behaviors with other BBS communities.

                Attempting an anthropological observation of an internet community was an unusual experience in itself. The observation was entirely text based; I had no opportunity to observe the actual behavior of my subjects other than what they said in their posts. But within such a community, posted text is all that really matters anyway.

                The BBS I focused on is called Anti-social.com (now defunct. Link points to Archive.org snapshot of the site from January 25, 1999), and is structured as a kind of open discussion forum, broken into various categories. When logging on to Anti-Social, I first encountered a set of options, one of which was the bulletin board itself. Among others were a Philadelphia based skateboard company called “Project X,” a rather bizarre seller of animal products, bones and skulls and other such oddities,  called “American Head-Hunter,” and a T-shirt company called “Rhubarb.” Outside of the bulletin board itself,  “Rhubarb” captured the nature of the group’s memes better than anything else did. Rhubarb’s T-shirts boasted slogans such as “Go Kevorkian” and “I © Crack.”

                The board itself, much like a segmentary lineage organization, is divided into eight sub-communities: sex, drugs, for sale, bands, rant, religion, and philosophy. All of which are made up of smaller discussions that range from “Sartre” and “Original thought doesn’t exist” (in philosophy) to “Pedophiles aren’t all bad” and “Farting in public” (in rant). Each “thread” consists of “posts,” which are responses to the original topic by members of the BBS. Members with names like “Lee Harvey” and “HitlerJesus,” are fairly common, but then so are “Abby” and “Susannah.”

                As for what gets said in a post, it could be almost anything. Some are clearly intended purely to shock, such as the following post by a member named “radioethiopia,”

Know this: I believe the male human to be necessarily superior to the female human by birthright. I believe the seed of man to be a blessing for women, children, and animals. It is your duty as a man (if you are) to forcefully penetrate women, children and other animals as the Holy Spirit moves upon you, in order to grant them the positive karma needed to grow mentally and spiritually. It is your duty as woman (if you are) to subject yourself to all men (unless you have been appointed as the property of one specific man or group of men) in order that you may be liberated to phallic enlightenment and return one day as a real male.

Know this:

I will have the philosophy forum.

I will have Lee Harvey’s virgin anus.

I will have Abby as my queen (this time for good).

This type of mouthing-off of “Anti-Social” rhetoric is just the type of thing that earns prestige among the members of Anti-Social. It is just this type of outrageous behavior that will gain someone like “radioethiopia” a following. Similar to the headman of the Yanomami, the leaders on the BBS have no real authority other than their persuasive and charismatic power.

                Although each discussion group is operated under the control of a “moderator,” this person’s powers are mainly technical and have little real influence over what is said or done by the group. A moderator has the power to close a thread, which will prevent anyone from responding to it, but will prevent no one from reading it. And even this power is rarely used. It is reserved for occasions when someone has carried a hoax too far, or when it appears that someone is doing something illegal. For example, a thread was closed when one member accused another of kidnapping his children. The tread was closed when it turned out to be a hoax. The important point is that any real power is primarily charismatic. It is the rhetorical power of the members that earns them a following.

                The second similarity to tribal communities is a structural one. Just as tribal political structures are divided into segmentary lineage organizations, so are net-based communities. In the same way that clans break down into maximal lineages, major lineages, minor lineages, and minimal lineages, so to do BBS communities break down into smaller and smaller sub-groupings.

                As mentioned above, a single post is part of a larger thread, which in turn is part of a more general topic forum, which is itself past of the whole BBS. Just as a minimal lineage is made up of more closely related genetic ties, so is a specific thread tied together by more closely related memetic ties.

                What appears to be the most striking behavior pattern, which may be as of yet limited within the internet to Anti-Social, is the tactic of raiding and tribal warfare. The members of Anti-Social are so militant in their behavior that they will invade other BBS communities in an attempt to wreak havoc and create chaos. The most infamous of these raids was on a feminist oriented BBS called Estronet. Although Estronet has erased all evidence of the attack, I was able to coax a war story out of one of the Estronet members, named NicoleJoy:

I recall a chick from anti-social by the tag of “Hillary Clinton” starting the whole thing. She visited us once and decided we were too girly because of the vote in the beginning of the site for lipstick versus lip-gloss, and she thought we were too nice to each other, so she wanted to stir things up. She made a post on Anti-Social describing out boards, and declared war on all Estronetters. She suggested to the Anti-Socialists that they should all post rude and obnoxious comments on the board to get the members of Estronet upset enough to leave the boards. For a while, the Estronetters and Anti-Socialists were passing insults back and forth on the threads. A few of the Anti-Socialists got really vulgar and nasty with us, so everyone wrote to Heather (one of Estronet’s moderators) to get them kicked off the boards. They still tried to infiltrate the system by going under different names and e-mails, but they weren’t getting the responses from us that they wanted, so they just quit.

                I do remember a few Estronetters went to Anti-Social to give them hell, but they also got tired of that. I remember one Estronetter who even wanted to make friends with the Anti-Socialists. I won’t mention her name, because they totally embarrassed her on the boards and shunned her. I haven’t seen her post on either boards since.

On the other side of this conflict, the members of Anti-Social were in fact called to arms by “HillaryClinton,” who is in reality a man. His initial post was in a thread called “Flame ‘Em Now!! – A New Rant War for the New Year.” It read, “It’s an all-woman, man-bashing, penis-envy forum: estronet.com Go to ‘boards.’” To which a member named “Anchor” responded:

Just read some of their posts, and these dumb bitches could definitely benefit from the Anti-Social treatment. Let’s rally up the troops… maybe that fuckedbymice buy will finally get a chance to implement his “training”

What ensued was a kind of raping and pillaging of the Estronet BBS. Working on the premise that internet communities are primarily concerned with reproducing their memes, this type of behavior is equivalent to polluting another tribe’s gene pool by gang raping their women. By inserting Anti-Social memes into the Estronet community, the Anti-social members were able to violently inflict their memes onto the minds of the Estronet members.

                In a rather large and universal sense, the formation of communities on the internet provides insight no into the culture of a specific geographic area, but rather into the ever-evolving nature of human interaction as a whole. This is apparent in as much as we are developing into a species that has lost interest in preserving its genetic codes and now spend much more of our time obsessing over meme issues such as taste in music and political ideologies.

                In a way, maybe the development of Internet communities is a primarily western phenomenon, reflecting western alienation. Anti-Social.com is a Philadelphia based site,  in so much as its founders live in Philadelphia and so do their servers, but the community extends from Great Britain to Australia. Once again, what is apparent is a stark separation between minds and bodies. On the internet we step into a community outside of our bodies and into one in which we are represented entirely by our minds. No longer is race or gender important. Traditional means of separating one class of people from the next is eliminated and replaced with purely ideological group associations. In the end, what I see developing are new tribal communities based not on genetic relations, but on memetic connections.

Sleep and dream

Love is all it seems

And more

So much more

I would just like to take a moment to apologize for every negative or self-deprecating thing I’ve ever said or thought about myself. None of those things were true and I’m deeply sorry for having said them. I didn’t mean to mislead anyone, and at the time I said those things I actually believed them to be true. I promise it won’t happen again and I hope everyone is willing to forgive me. I love you all very much and thank you for your understanding.

What you see is a product of the way you see. All the demons I see are institutions. People tend to look more like them the more they allign themselves with those institutions, but behind their fear and hunger for power there is still the face of God looking back at me, waiting to be recognized, waiting to see its reflection in me.

(Source: zorascreation)

I’d rather make things than make things happen.

My assumption is to keep businesses like Alliant Techsystems operational. It is necessary for us to continuously buy weapons whether we need them or not, so that the businesses that make weapons will be around to provide them in case we ever do need them. 

(Source: animare-animum)

There are no problems except that we call things problems and imagine that we must solve them somehow. It seems we do this to keep our mind occupied with something to do. We see the world as it is and we imagine that it could be different. This in and of itself is a beautiful place to begin. It is where all creativity starts. But it moves quickly from being a joyful invitation to create to being a dismal problem to be solved once we make the judgement that the world as it is SHOULD be as we imagine it, and that it is up to us to make it so. Now we must fix this error of existence through a tremendous exertion of stress and effort. Even if we are able to remake the world as we feel it ought to be, this way of seeing it creates a change with in us that starts to see everything as a problem to be solved. Our outlook becomes one of perpetual dissatifaction. We no longer see what is good, but only how it could be better. We start to see ourselves in this same light and become obsessed with personal improvement and achievement. But our success is always one step behind our imagination which now exists only to show us that we have not yet reached a state where we can simply see existence as good and call it so.

…but I’d let you get it dirty.

I know where I am going because I know who I am now.

Today is a new year in Astrology as the Sun returns to its exaltation in Aries and I think I need to speak my mind on this subject and the attitudes I see expressed towards it. Since I’ve begun posting my own thoughts about it, I feel it’s important that I get a few things off my chest regarding how the topic is handled within the Tumblr community (which is for the most part a reflection of how the population at large deals with it). 

The discussion of astrology on Tumblr tends to fall into one of three categories: 

1.       Atheists and self-proclaimed scientists who categorically dismiss everything and seem to think that not believing things makes them more intelligent than people who do instead of simply less imaginative.

2.       O.T.O. folks who are deep into some hermetic shit and tend post 19^th century charts of the sky with nothing more than a brief, cryptic commentary, if anything at all.

3.       Hippies who reblog vastly over simplified characteristics of their Sun-sign that read something like: “An Aries will never say no to more pizza!”

Of these three, the vast majority of posts fall into the third category. I have my issues with the first two, but really can’t think of anything less interesting to do with my time than get into arguments with atheists who are forever trying to re-live that glorious moment when they finally outwitted their youth minister.

To the O.T.O. folks I will simply say that I like you guys and respect what you’re about. There’s a reason why I follow so many of you. But that being said, Crowley was about pulling back the curtain, not remaining shrouded in esoteric symbols.  I understand you’re coming out of tradition of Hermeticism, but I can’t stress how valuable I think it would be if you spoke more openly about your beliefs. And I will simply note that many of you would not have come to these beliefs had Crowley not gone public with everything he had learned.

Hippies.               

Stop.

Just stop it.

This is the reason the punks never trusted you.

You’re making everyone look bad.

And by everyone I don’t just mean people who follow astrology, I mean humans. Other species are laughing at us because of the dumb shit you believe.  The Universe in all its vast complexity did not make human beings so simple that they can be understood with any degree of depth based simply on their Sun-sign.

And I’m not saying that your Sun-sign isn’t important.  It is, but there are so many other factors that go into your chart, let alone who you are as person, which is and will always be so much more than whatever influence the planets might hold over you. 

If you’ve read up on your Sun-sign, and you relate to it, I’m happy for you. That’s a start. But if it interests you, please consider the following guidelines:

·         Read.  And not the bullshit online. Get an actual book. The major astrology websites are not giving you free information; they are trying to sell you something. Go to a book store, order something from Amazon, but get an actual book.

·         Look up. Pay attention to the sky. Even if you live in a city where the stars are hard to see, at least pay attention to the phases of the moon. Be able to identify planets and constellations. Know your cardinal directions and be able to identify the zodiac belt even in the daytime.  Get Google Skymap and make a note of where the planets are relative to each other when significant events take place. This is how astrology began, but paying attention to events on Earth and noticing correlation to events in the sky.

·         Start making charts. WhatWatch is free, so if you’re interested, you should download it and start collecting chart for everyone you can. Ask all your friends for their birth info and look for patterns in their personalities.  When they are approaching a significant transit, ask them about it.  When big events happen in their lives, check what was happening in their chart. And go back in time with your own chart and see what was happening in the sky when big moments in your own life happened.

The most important thing is to stop talking about signs without talking about planets. Signs are always secondary to the planets, and were named because certain aspects of planetary energy felt stronger when that planet was at a certain point in the sky.  The stars and constellations themselves are just markers for the relative location of the planets to the Earth. What matters more than anything is where the planets are relative to each other and the Earth. So on Thursday, March 22^nd, the Sun, Moon, Mercury, and Uranus will all line up at the beginning of Aries.  Although it is significant that it is occurring in Aries, the combination of planets is far more important than the sign in which this alignment takes place.

                Remember that this is a language, and it takes time to learn it. If you only give it a passing interest, it will do very little for you, but if you take the time to listen and pay attention, you will find that the Universe is speaking to you.

White America has always been puritanical (for lack of a better term) about who they are willing to consider “white.” In virtually every case they have what I refer to as the “Hershey’s Syrup” understanding of racial purity: once any amount of syrup enters the milk, it becomes chocolate milk. This is true regardless of someone’s complexion and white America is consistently fanatical about this perception of race in every case, with only two known exceptions:

-The Rock

-Slash (from Guns N’ Roses)

So my theory is this, if you are from a blended family you will always be considered black by white America UNLESS YOU HAVE NO LAST NAME. Having no last name will make you appear so mysterious and magical to white Americans that they will embrace you as one of their own without question.

It is for this reason the I am proposing that our president run for re-election simply as “Barack” (it even makes him sound like “The Rock”). I beleive that it may also be necessary for him to begin refering to himself in the 3rd person, but I am certain that this approach will eliminate any previous question regarding his legitimacy as president.

*It is important to note that Prince rode this fence, and was given an artistic blank check, normaly reserved for white musicians, until he changed his name to an unpronouncable symbol, at which point he was immediately reclassified as “black.” Even when he changed his name back to Prince, it was already too late and the illusion had been shattered. For this reason, I do not think it will be enough for President Obama to simply announce that he is changing his name to just Barack. There will have to be the appearance that some kind magic has been performed through a ritual unveiling of his new identity at the Democratic National Convention, where he is introduced by The Rock while Slash plays the opening from Welcome to the Jungle and pyrotechnics are somehow involved.

Do not fear. Your heart beats stronger than you know.

…I’ve pledged myself to a life of complete awesomeness.

In most cases I’m the first to agree that taking a gentler approach accomplishes far more than simply running the money changers out of the temple, but this situation represents a brand of hypocritic complacency that needs to be spoken about plainly.

Everyone knows we (the United States) are at war. Everyone knows we have the most powerful military on the planet.

If you are not informed about the implications of these simple facts you deserve to be called on it in no uncertain terms. Your ability to remain oblivious is a privilige paid for in blood. What you call “bad energy and emotion” is the inevitable consequnce of confronting the fact that we rule this planet by force and our lifestyle of conspicuous consumption is the furnace that it feeds.

This is an emotionally uncomfortable reality, but I’m not pulling punches after seeing hundreds of uninformed white kids scapegoating an African man who is really just a pawn in grand scheme of global politics.

Let me be clear: if atrocities like what occured in Uganda can be stopped, they should, but the best way for us as Americans to stop war crimes is to stop commiting them.