Immediate Treatment for the O'Spheres - Massive Radical Meme-Ectomy

Who are these O’Spheres, anyway? Are they reincarnated Irish gangsters from Tammany Hall, now taking revenge on the web? Suddenly, everything became an O’Sphere … blogosphere, biosphere, memeosphere, gayosphere, gameosphere, i’m-so-much-more-in-the-know-than-you-o-sphere.

The O’Spheres brought with them a new virus; the meme. While seemingly fantastic in and of itself, the meme has tragically metastisized and spread uncontrollably throughout the O’Sphere’s bodies, creating a horrible mess. The only hope for reclaiming the pertinent web is immediate radical meme-ectomy.

Folks, just because you have a wacky, cool idea, that does not make it a MEME. A large part of realizing a meme’s very meme-ness is its manifest expression and influence over time.

How did the O’Sphere’s not-really-a-meme-o-thing go so wrong? Like so many natural disasters, the problem started innocently, through articles like this one from Salon.com which begins, “Suppose that every thought you have – including this one – is an autonomous parasite in your brain: a pattern of brain cells that copies itself from mind to mind.” The problem with that introduction is that people take the simplified definition, skip the rest of the detail, and create an Utterly False Impression of What Constitutes A Meme, Meme. So we have all kind of meme-o-crap floating around the blog-o-meme-o-commode-o-sphere.

This is not a meme, just because you say it’s a meme. Really cool racing thoughts are not a raging stream of magnificent memes; they’re more likely a symptom of hypomania. That’s fine, and hypomania can be super functional; especially in silicon valley, but let’s not confuse or conflate the two. Another example is MemeoRandum, which is properly spelled as “dum,” but is neither a random assortment of memes, nor an expression of a meme called randomness. Randomness is not a meme, it’s randomness.

Immediate radical meme-ectomy is only the urgent intial treatment for the raging anthropomorphication and logocultification of technologies and trends infecting the general web populace. Perhaps we can psychogenomically embed some kind of AJAXY vaccine into this whole WEB 2.0 thing. Oh no, it’s too late, I feel another episode coming on even now …