The Meme Machine

20 THE MEME MACHINE
Imagine two memes, one ‘send a scratchcard to x’ and another ‘win lots of
money’. The former instruction is unlikely to be obeyed just on its own. The
latter is tempting but includes no instruction on how to. Together, and with
some other suitable co-memes, the two can apparently get people to obey – and
copy the whole package on again. The essence of any memeplex is that the
memes inside it can replicate better as part of the group than they can on their
own. We shall meet many more examples of memeplexes in due course.
The simple self-replicating meme groups we have considered so far have
been given a great boost by the advent of computers and the Internet. Computer
viruses are an obvious and familiar example. They can leap from user to user
and the number of users (at least at the moment) keeps increasing. They can
cross vast distances at the speed of light and then lie dormant in safe and solid
memory banks. However, they cannot be just a bare instruction to ‘Copy me’.
This might succeed in clogging up the entire memory of the first computer it got
into but would have no way of getting any further. So viruses have co-memes
for promoting their survival. They lurk in the programs that people mail to their
friends on disks. Some evade immediate detection by infecting only a small
proportion of the machines they reach, and some are triggered probabilistically.
Some bury themselves in memory only to pop up at a specified time – we may
expect many at midnight on 31 December 1999 – quite apart from the looming
problem of computers that cannot cope with the year ‘00’.
Some have quite funny effects, such as making all the letters on a computer
screen fall to the bottom of the page – with a devastating effect on the user, but
some have clogged up entire networks and destroyed books and doctoral theses.
My students have recently encountered a virus on the word processor Word 6.0
that lives in a formatting section called ‘Thesis’ – tempting you to get infected
just when your year’s work is almost finished. No wonder networks are now
protected by frequent automated virus checks and we have a proliferation of
anti-virus software – medication for the infosphere.
Internet viruses are a relatively new arrival. I once received ‘Penpal
Greetings’, apparently a very kind warning from someone I have never met.
‘Do not download any message entitled “Penpal Greetings”’ it said – and went
on to warn me that if I read this terrible message I would have let in a ‘Trojan
Horse’ virus that would destroy everything on my hard drive and then send itself
on to every e-mail address in my mail box. To protect all my friends, and the
worldwide computer network, I had to act fast and send the warning on to them.