Godwin's Law

For those who are unfamiliar with this well-known net-meme, there's a definition here. The author, in this essay, describes how it originated as a memetic experiment -- a "counter-meme" run amok.

One can easily see why Godwin was tempted to create his counter-meme. It's all too easy in an inflammatory argument to start casually throwing "You're Like The Nazis" accusations around, trivializing the actual evil of the Holocaust and, usually, grossly misrepresenting the intentions of the other party. On the other hand, what about situations in which the doctrines or practices of the actual, historical National Socialist Party truly are relevant to the discussion? Seems the counter-meme may be a bit too broad in its attack, like an antibiotic that wipes out useful bacteria along with the pneumococci.

Beware! Blogs are infected with memes!

Memes, for those unfamiliar with the word, are a concept popularized by Richard Dawkins. They may be usefully thought of a mental constructs, ideas, which compete for mind-space and seek to reproduce themselves in as many minds as possible, in the same way that living beings compete for resources and seek to reproduce in as many environments as possible.

I do find the concept of meme-warfare fascinating. John Barnes has written at least two books (Candle and The Sky So Big and Black) based on the rather terrifying premise of meme-like computer viruses developing the ability to jump from electronic operating systems to organic ones (i.e., human minds) via the transmission of a sequence of verbal and visual inputs. It's less of a stretch to see everyday religion, politics, and the advertising profession (which nowadays includes a substantial portion of both religion and politics) as nothing more than an ongoing Darwinian competition, not between human beings, but between competing memes.

Extending the metaphor a bit further, each media in which memes can be transmitted can be likened to a new population of potential carriers, like a new population of hosts for a virus to inhabit, or a new continent for a species of animal to populate. Blogs are one of the newest vectors for transmission, and the infection has been raging at fever-strength for the past couple of years. (By now, you're infected, either agreeing with what I say or busily manufacturing the antibodies of counter-arguments or boredom.) But I seem to detect a certain dropoff in the furor of BlogMania nowadays.

Perhaps the population of memes proliferating through the blog population is beginning to subside, as the population of a virus in a host, or of animals in a previously unpopulated continent, rapidly climbs to a peak and then stabilizes or declines.

Does that make me a "fit survivor"? Or just a particularly susceptible carrier?