All Your Brains Are Belong to Us
High-tech Humanity
By Douglas Rushkoff
I just agreed to come speak at the MPI World Education Congress this summer in Vancouver, and now that I’ve got my topic set I can’t resist but share it using print media to promote live media. Call me old school, but I value live, human contact above all other kinds. I’ll do whatever it takes to connect with the people on the other side of this ink.
So while, for me, this specific column is about getting you to engage with me in July, for you it may as well be about learning what it is I’m going to share in case you can’t make it. (See, we both get something out of this.)
My working title for the session is “All Your Brains Are Belong to Us: A Crash Course in Applied Memetics.” And in case that leaves you dumbfounded, let me explain. The first part of the title is a slightly mutated media virus (see sidebar); the second, my explanation of how and why media viruses function.
Media viruses are just potent ideas wrapped in media shells. The Rodney King tape was one of the first great interactive-era media viruses. The camcorder tape served as the shell, and the racial violence served as the potent idea. Just as the sticky protein shell of a biological virus lets it attach to cells in the human body, the sticky, media shell of a camcorder being used to capture police violence forced cable news channels to spread the Rodney King tape around the world overnight.
It was only then that the ideas, or “memes,” inside the virus were allowed into our homes. And just as the genes inside a biological virus invade our cells and exploit our weaknesses in order to replicate, the memes inside a media virus exploit our own faulty or incomplete cultural code in order to replicate, too. So our society, which never fully addressed its own racial fears, was incapable of fighting off the memes within the Rodney King virus. And so it became a cultural epidemic, eventually leading to rioting in more than a dozen U.S. and Canadian cities.
Viral media isn’t just word of mouth. That’s just the superficial way a few marketers interpreted the concept. No, viral media is a way of treating the entire cultural space as, well, a culture. A living entity. And instead of studying people, the way market researchers do, you study stuff and ideas: the actual things and concepts that people either relate to or don’t.
What makes viral media so important right now, however, is that we are emerging from a mediaspace based on cosmetics to one based in memetics. Branding, as we know it, is obsolete. It’s an artifact of a very old culture—600 years old, in fact—when the real relationships between people and their producers were being replaced by artificial relationships between people and companies very far away. Instead of buying a piece of fish from the monger down the lane, we were buying a can from a company Lord-knows-where. The label—and the brand mythology it represented—meant to substitute for the human relationship we enjoyed before.
For many of us, this was a superior arrangement. Cleaner, anyway, and less complicated. Less personal. We didn’t have to worry about offending anyone like the Seinfeld “Soup Nazi” and jeopardize our access to products we wanted. And what we lost in human engagement we made up for in convenience. Eventually, as industrial age processes made all products more or less equivalent, the only thing left for differentiation was brand mythology. Do you want your cookies baked by the cute Nabisco “cookie man” or by Keebler’s elves in a hollow tree?
Interactive media—what we’ve begun to call social media—finally breaks all this down. We’re no longer engaging exclusively with the mythologies of broadcast media; we are interacting with one another. And while there are places for us to tell stories to each other online, the real bias of these peer-to-peer technologies is toward facts. Where is the best party tonight? Where is the best pizza? What was your experience with that phone company? Who are you going to vote for? What the heck is Obamacare?
Look at the effect this has had even on television scheduling: All anybody talks about anymore are reality shows. Even today’s most successful dramas—such as Lost—feel a bit like dramatic incarnations of reality shows such as Survivor.
But the most important effect of this shift to reality is on those competing for mindshare. The only way to attract and retain attention is by actually doing something. Apple gets more publicity by releasing a new piece of hardware than it could ever purchase in ads. (The video of Steve Jobs demonstrating the iPad—an unofficial, low-quality video capture, actually—served as the initial viral shell for this new tech meme).
In other words, in a non-fiction mediaspace, what you do replaces what you say. This doesn’t obviate the need for a communications strategy, but requires you to develop a new kind altogether. How do you get your facts in the stream of ideas that are passing through the tweets and blogs and Facebook walls of the world? And how can they be wrapped in such a way as to replicate?
The answer to the first question is easy: Make great things. Do a genuinely good job, answer a new need, innovate mercilessly and your ideas will replicate. The second—developing the appropriate language and context—is a bit tougher to answer. Only by understanding the memetic landscape can you predict how people are going to interpret and transmit your ideas once they receive them. And this means understanding, even embodying your culture from the inside out.
More on that next time. One+
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF is the author, most recently, of Life Inc: How
the world became a corporation and how to take it back. He teaches
media studies at The New School in New York. Contact him at rushkoff@rushkoff.com.
The original “all your base are belong to us,” is a badly translated line from the 1991 Japanese video game Zero Wing, which became something of a cultural icon for its combination of hubris and bad grammar. Check out this original footage online at http://tinyurl.com/AllYourRushkoff.