From: Declan McCullagh (lists@politechbot.com)
Date: Wed Mar 28 2001 - 15:31:55 MST
One of my colleagues at Wired wrote about it; check out our
archives at wired.com. (Searching for strings in quotes will bring it
up.)
-Declan
On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 02:39:52PM -0500, Patrick McCuller wrote:
> >
> > 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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