Programming Meme Quotes

Is there a difference between having been coded to present a vast set of standardized responses to certain human facial, vocal, and linguistic states and having evolved to exhibit response B to input A in order to bring about a desired social result? ... What I mean is, you call it feelings when you cry, but you are only expressing a response to external stimuli. Crying is one of a set of standardized responses to that stimuli. Your social education has dictated which responses are appropriate. My programming has done the same. I can cry, too. I can choose that subroutine and perform sadness. How is that different from what you are doing, except that you use the word feelings and I use the word feelings, out of deference for your cultural memes which say: there is all the difference in the world. I erase the word even as I say it, obliterate it at the same time that I initiate it, because I must use some word yet this one offends you. I delete it, yet it remains.

The only thing worse than not knowing why some code breaks is not knowing why it worked in the first place! It's the classic "house of cards" mentality: "it works, but I'm not sure why, so nobody touch it!" You may have heard, "Hell is other people" (Sartre), and the programmer meme twist, "Hell is other people's code." I believe truly: "Hell is not understanding my own code.

Dan Quayle, mutating the memes in the United Negro College Fund’s motto, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” There is some good news in this book. So before I get into how mind viruses are spreading wildly throughout the world—infecting people with unwanted programming like the Michelangelo computer virus infects computers with self-destruct instructions—I’ll start with the good news. . . .

Meme theory is an example of the kind of prestidigitation needed to present an image of us as biologically programmed in the face of the overwhelming evidence that everyday human life is utterly different from the reflex-, tropism-, instinct-driven life of animals (although of course we rely on reflexes to perform our voluntary actions, may be in part guided by tropisms and have a general direction influenced remotely by instincts).

Upgrading from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0.” The user complains that Wife 1.0 has “begun unexpected child processing that took up a lot of space and valuable resources,” and that it blocks applications such as “Poker Night 10.3, Football 5.0, Hunting and Fishing 7.5, and Racing 3.6.” In his response, the tech support representative explains that the user’s problems stem from “a primary misconception: many people upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0, thinking it is merely a utilities and entertainment program. Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM and is designed by its creator to run EVERYTHING!!!

Of course, if the Law of Shitty Clickthroughs says that marketing channels decline over time, the other strategy is to embrace new marketing ideas early. Every three to five years, there seems to be a rapid explosion of new media formats and platforms to experiment with. Most recently, with the rise of TikTok, Twitch, Instagram, and other forms of highly scaled visual media, there is a new crop of startups going to market with influencers and streamers. Similarly, new B2B startups have started to embrace referral programs, memes, emojis, video clips, and other tactics previously reserved for consumer products. The landscape is constantly changing, with new product and platforms emerging every few years, opening up opportunities for marketers to jump in before others do.

During the 2016 election, the Trump campaign employed overt information-warfare tactics through intelligence firms like PsyGroup and Cambridge Analytica.16 PsyGroup’s proposal called Project Rome was presented to Rick Gates, who represented the Trump campaign; it offered “intelligence & influence services” for $3,210,000.17 It also proposed recruiting online influencers to disseminate Trump’s message to fringe “deep web” locations. Parscale was a man who knew the power of the internet. He was linked to Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner and the infamous Cambridge Analytica company.18 Cambridge was a data-mining and message-amplification firm that ran a program that analyzed social media users and crafted highly specific messaging that would appeal to each individual user’s biases, likes, and hobbies. They mastered how to weaponize a person’s inner racism or bigotry. For example, they could identify a white, rural, conservative gun enthusiast who drove a Ford truck based on Facebook posts and buying preferences. That user would then be flooded with messages on illegal immigrants and white families murdered by “urban” Blacks and photos of Ford trucks flying Trump flags. Cambridge also took and amplified Russian-intelligence-crafted themes extolling the glory of Trump. Through the firm’s effort to read social media down to each person’s tastes, it made every Republican in America consume highly targeted Russian memes and themes as nothing less than God’s honest truth.