Found it first here - https://mastodon.social/@BonehouseWasps/111692479718694120
Not sure if this is the right community to discuss here in Lemmy?
this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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Its time to start talking about "memetic effluent." In the same way corporations polluted our physical world, they're pollution our memetic world. AI spewing garbage data is just the most obvious way, but corporations have been toxifying our memetic space for generations.
This memetic effluent will make sorting through data harder and harder over the years. But the oil and tobacco industries undermined science and democracy for decades with it's own memetic effluent in order to protect their business for decades. Advertising is it's own effluent that distorts and destroys language. Jerry Rubin said it in 1970, "How can I tell you 'I love you' after hearing 'cars love shell?'"
While physical effluent destroys our physical environment making living in the world harder, memetics effluent destroys meaning and makes thinking about and comprehending the world harder. Both are the garbage side effects of the perpetuation of capitalism.
This example of poisoning the data well is just too obvious to ignore, but there are so many others.
It's interesting, because the idea is basically that knowledge and ideas should be constructive, so as not to pollute the sum of human knowledge.
So that raises the question, what is the constructive conclusion to "memetic effluent"? Without one, is the concept itself an example of such effluent?
It also raises the very thorny issue of who adjudicates what is and is not "memetic effluent."
Yes, but the answer here is Google. Google is already making these calls, whether or not we get to discuss it.
"One man's trash is another man's treasure," as the saying goes.
I don't think that's the implication here. Following the metaphor, pottery and arrow points have been waste products for a while. Prior to the industrial revolution, and specifically prior to the chemical revolution, industrial waste streams haven't been as major of a problem (ignoring cholera for a bit). It's been the development of selling chemicals for profit and the extensive use of petroleum that's really caused massive problems threatening humanity as a whole.
The implication then is that people should be responsible for their memes. Corporations are inherently irresponsible because there exit economic incentives to externalize costs, be that environmental or informational. AI garbage as a waste stream would be fine if the data was clearly labeled as such. Unfortunately at least some AI garbage is intended to be deceptive. There exists an economic incentives to produce AI garbage that is hard to distinguish from human output. Since AI garbage can be produced at an industrial scale, there's a massive waste data stream that's able to overload the systems we've built to parse and organize data.
There are probably a lot more implications here, but "what are we doing with our information world" is something worth thinking about before we make it completely unusable.
This feels like the precursor to the information Apocalypse referenced in the comic Transmetropolitan.