Meme:

a recursive or self-defining term ("meme" is its own meme) originated by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene". He defined it as a cultural unit transmitted from person to person by imitation. Today this might happen via serial re-posting and liking. Memes are now a principal means of communicating ideas, entertaining, or making political or social commentary, particularly of the semi-humourous type, though they can sometimes have a very dark side. For instance...

Trump and his trumpettes

employ a vast kit bag of memes such as "stolen election". "deep state", MAGA, plus "corrupt", "communist", and "dirt bag" (or worse) as synonyms for "anyone who disagrees with "the 45", "rogue" and "scam", "sham" or "witch hunt" for prosecutors and their civil and criminal indictments against him, "vicious", "hater" and "biased" for a judge who presumes to make a legal ruling against the Unindictable Immune One. His slavish followers believe he is the divinely anointed reincarnation of Cyrus come to restore God's America to the mythical universally Christian state they think it once was (another meme), and comparing him to Christ (the "orange Jesus") as an unjustly persecuted hero of all that is right (or at least that is in accord for whatever the extreme "right wing" of politics believes at the moment).

Perhaps he would be better compared to P.T. Barnum, for the point is that his constant slanders and falsehoods have become virus-like "alternate truth" memes of extremes infecting a large swath of the American population with the viruses of racism, misogyny, hatred, lies, denial, and revenge against ___ (fill in the blank). He certainly taps into the alienation meme.

The most puzzling part about this phenomenon is that his main supporters (white Evangelical Christians) ostensibly hold to beliefs, standards, values, practices, and an instruction manual, that are antithetical to everything for which he says he stands. Such is the power of technology-fueled memes in the information age. Such is the appeal of the politics of felt grievance. Such is the infecting ear-worm of sufficiently oft-repeated memes, and apparently the more outrageously false, the more virulently infective.

Topia memes

Canadian media commentator Marshall McLuhan in his 1960s books "The Gutenberg Galaxy: The making of Typographic Man and Understanding Media expressed unbridled optimism that the propagation of media technology would, by improving personal communication among disparate peoples, empower a universal transnational economy, facilitate widespread migration and cultural blending, and thus birth a global village characterized by unity, peace, and prosperity. By the late 70s and early 80s, the contrarian Spy was warning of the opposite--that instant global communication would instead revivify old rivalries and hatreds, spread old falsehoods more efficiently than truth, fuel new wars over old differences and grievances fought with novel technologies, and utterly fail to level disparate economies--that the world would become increasingly divided politically, culturally, and economically---dystopic, far distant from McLuhan's glorious man-made utopia.

Another political meme, which, the Spy admits, he once favoured, was that with both WWII and the Cold War in the rear view mirror, the biggest mistake other optimistic commentators made was in declaring the triumph of liberal democracy over the competing political values of fascism and communism. He now sees they subscribed to a related and more dangerous meme--the belief that mistakes made by liberal democracies would become lessons for both politicians and electorate--that they would learn from them and not repeat them--in other words, the meme that democracy was self correcting and thus inoculated against tyranny. Given the rise of Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Orban in Hungary, Wilders in Holland, Modi in India, Trump in America, and the ever expanding assortment of third world dictators, it should now be clear that democracy is fragile indeed, and should the United States also turn to tyranny, the great experiment "of the people, by the people, and for the people" will expire as a meme, surviving (possibly) only in niche markets--and with modern instant communication technology the accomplice/chief enabler of its execution.

Paradoxically, in this context, one often sees the "666" meme from the Biblical book of the Apocalypse ("Revelation") taken literally to refer to a mark on people's bodies placed there (easy tech today) to prove, (or ensure) loyalty to a one-world dictator referred to as "the" Antichrist (as contrasted to "an" antichrist, of which there have been and still are many, some supported by evangelicals who ought, but refuse, to know better). This interpretation may well one day prove accurate, but given the Bible's extensive use of figures of speech (hundreds of varieties have been identified in its pages) and the especially intense use of symbolism in that particular book (it's a meme), the Spy strongly favours a broader meaning for the numeral.

(He pauses to provide a lesson for the non-mathematical reader: A number is a mental concept; a numeral is a written symbol or spoken word that communicates that idea to another person. Thus "fiveness" is a number concept, but "five", 5, V, cinq, quinque, the ancient Greek pente, or the symbol E (letters did double duty), are all numerals .)

Numbers were often associated with important ideas in ancient times. As noted, they too were ideas. Biblically, the numbers most often associated with God were the ideas behind the numerals three and seven, and the number associated with mankind was that behind six. In symbolic terms then, 666 may simply mean "all the best of mankind but triply falling short of God." This interpretation carries more weight by the fact that six was then (and is still) termed by mathematicians "a perfect number" whose definition is that it is exactly the sum of its proper divisors, to wit 1 + 2 + 3 = 6. Another is twenty-eight, because 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14 = 28 (assignment: find the next three.) A deficient number has its proper divisors sum to less than itself, and an abundant one to more than itself. A prime number is as deficient as possible, and sixty, for instance, is rather abundant. In short then, 666 could simply be an emphasized meme to express human failure at its worst. So we could say that June 28 may be the most "perfect" calendar date in the mathematical sense, and a turn to tyranny may simply epitomize the human penchant for 666-like extreme failures.

A meme of neither numeric or political moment,

or "on the gripping hand", to invoke the late Jerry Pournelle for the second consecutive month, is the one that Apple products are universally more reliable than those of their competitors. Well....yes, in general they do perform better and last much longer, but… don't forget the Apple /// and the Anniversary Mac cube, so...

OTOH, Sonoma and the M-series chips appear to have teamed up put a long awaited, long suffering "paid" to the decades of battery woes on the MacBook. Recall that Apple switched from the PowerPC chips jointly designed by Apple, IBM, and Motorola, to Intel CPUs because of excess power consumption and the heat generated therefrom that made PPC portables pathetically impractical. Cupertino switched again from Intel to their own ARM-based M-series silicon for the same reason. The Spy has a 2018 Intel model that devours six bowls of power for breakfast, makes plenty of roaring fan noise, and when driving three external monitors threatens to burn his desk down. His newer M2 MacBook Pro might have a fan, but if it does, he doesn't know what it sounds like, for the case never gets warm.

But OTOH, when moving the machine from the office three-extra-screen environment to the similar home one, the system often loses track of where things are supposed to be on the screen, or even displays windows from apps that cannot be clicked to activate, because they're only there visibly--ghost apps not fully running, so to speak. One must shut the box down when leaving one environment, and re-boot in the new one. Fix coming? Meanwhile, there have been two recent iPhone updates, for security reasons. Have black hat haberdasheries had a Black Friday sale lately? A similar screen problem for some apps has still not been repaired. Ah well, no one person or corporation is perfect, but one would think testing could be more robust. Perhaps some third party apps are not allowed on the test bench.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch,

(another meme?) the Spy's home network appears to be dying, and that cannot be blamed on rodents. The old router cannot manage the number of (mostly security) connections in the manse any more, seems to lose them randomly, then fail to reconnect some for a few hours, leaving his automations going through a round robin of arbitrary selections of what works and what does not at any given time, hundreds of notifications every time a connection is either lost or regained, with Siri complaining that it cannot reach some devices to execute a scene change, and the "Smart" AppleTV-cum-Samsung QLED screen setup needing periodic wall power resets combined with router reboots (in a particular order) to continue limping along a few more hours or days at a time.

He's thinking of building a new network consisting of a robust firewall/router OPNSense-driven appliance (with no Wi-Fi) hanging off the cable company's box, tied to a 2.5 GHz switch connected in turn to the three 1G switches already in place, and also to one or two high density access points. Brands, and Wi-Fi 6E vs 7, are still negotiable, but currently the always-connected meme is failing him.

Quite enough memed

for this month. But there is less than a month to Christmas. Have you bought your Christmas presents yet? Made the New Year's resolutions you will break by February yet? Perhaps one of the Spy's ought to be not to beat the same drums quite often. But, he will be in touch concerning his own corner of the meme-spreading system. Side note: It is now a full fifty years since Nellie and the professor started this column, though there was a hiatus in the 80's and 90's. The more things change...

--The Northern Spy (also a meme, or a little twisted humour when you think about it)

Opinions expressed here are entirely the author's own, and no endorsement is implied by any community or organization to which he may be attached. Rick Sutcliffe, (a.k.a. The Northern Spy) is professor of Computing Science and Mathematics and Assistant Dean of Science at Canada's Trinity Western University. He completed his fifty-third year as a high school and university teacher in 2023. He has been involved as a member of or consultant with the boards of several organizations, and participated in developing industry standards at the national and international level. He was co-author of the Modula-2 programming language R10 dialect project. He is a long time technology author and has written two textbooks and ten alternate history SF novels, one named best ePublished SF novel for 2003. His various columns have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers (dead tree and online formats) since the early 1980s, and he's been a regular speaker at churches, schools, academic meetings, and other conferences. He and his wife Joyce celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 2019 and lived in the Langley/Aldergrove/Bradner area of B.C. from 1969 to 2021, where he latterly continues alone, depending heavily on family and friends to manage.

URL s for Rick Sutcliffe's Arjay Enterprises:

The Northern Spy Home Page: https://www.TheNorthernSpy.com

opundo : https://opundo.com

Sheaves Christian Resources : https://sheaves.org

WebNameHost : https://www.WebNameHost.net

WebNameSource : https://www.WebNameSource.net

nameman : https://nameman.net

General URLs for Rick Sutcliffe's Books:

Author Site: https://www.arjay.ca

TechEthics Site (Fourth edition of text; the fifth is in preparation) : httpss://www.arjaybooks.com/EthTech/index.htm

Publisher's Site: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Richard-Sutcliffe.html