From: Patrick McCuller (patrick@kia.net)
Date: Wed Mar 21 2001 - 12:39:52 MST
>
> Are these thirty bytes a distress call - a "Please trace me and free me"?
> Or are they a memetic attack designed to blossom inside our helpless
> minds; words with strange rhythms and resonances that not only propagate
> like wildfire but act as the carrier wave for future orders? Or, with the
> Internet linking the world together, have we been breeding hyper-virulent
> memes - not just ideas, now, but short sentences?
I vote for hyper-virulent meme. Probably spontaneously arisen. It won't be
the worst - in a decade there will be over two billion people online, slinging
email and shockwaves all over the place.
I suspect the very small ones, like all your base, are mostly harmless. What
are ultimately more dangerous are things like the FCC Internet Tax Hoax -
larger, slower, but with attached ideas that affect mass behavior.
Patrick McCuller
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