The selfish meme

I’m just finishing up Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, which I’d never read before but felt I finally should if I wanted to consider myself a real armchair scientist, and I’m fairly disappointed to discover that it isn’t blowing my mind like I thought it would. It’s a profoundly influential book, of course, but it was so profoundly influential when it was published in 1976 that its ideas have disseminated and been so widely appropriated that they’re become part of the scientific common knowledge, or at least a common set of dominant assumptions -- I’ve absorbed the gist of Dawkins’s argument through much of my reading, in more recent books and magazines, in the fields of biology and evolutionary thought to the point where I almost can’t believe that what Dawkins was saying could ever have been considered controversial. It all seems so... obvious.

One thing that did strike me, though, is Dawkins’s discussion of memes, the intellectual equivalent of genes -- I’m not sure I ever realize he coined the term in this book -- and subsequent ruminations on computer networks and how malicious e-viruses could infect them. Even in the revised 1989 edition, the one I’m reading, Dawkins is anticipating the public Internet, and it occurred to me that if someone wanted to invent a vector along which the memes for geekiness could travel, she couldn’t have done a better job than with the Internet, which combines the typically geeky love of computers and technology with the typically geeky love of never shutting up about the things we love. We took a tool we loved to play with -- computers -- and used it to spread the geek memes, and we did it so well, and got everyone else to love it so much, that it’s part of what has helped the geek aesthetic go mainstream. Geeks have been sitting around at science fiction conventions, for instance, since the 1940s dissecting films and books, and now folks of all stripes, whether they’d call themselves geeks or not, are spending inordinate amounts of time at sites like Television Without Pity, geeking out over the season finale of Lost or Alias or 24... all of which, in their own ways, are supremely geeky shows.

This idea -- about how a generation of people predisposed to embracing gadgets and obsessing about the things we love met the technology that allowed us to do interesting and entertaining things with our obsessions -- is, in the broad sweep, much of what Geek Philosophy the blog is going to be all about. For the moment, I think it will suffice to say that my first computer, a TI 99 4/a -- which I received for Christmas in either 1979 or 1980, when I was 10 or 11 -- and my first VCR (well, the first family VCR) arrived in 1984, when I was 15... and that’s when my adventures in geekdom really took off.