nickburdick

The Giant Cultural Parasite, Part 8 In the last section, I said we’d be getting into meme resources this time around, but as I started to write , I realized we need to break apart the meme cycle first. So that’s what we’ll do today, and we should be able to dive into meme resources … Read more

The Giant Cultural Parasite, Part 7 What’s a Meme? We’re now going to make a jump out of the physical world and into the world of ideas. When I say “make a jump” I mean that there are a number of steps building up from the natural selection of organisms and the evolution of niches … Read more

The Giant Cultural Parasite, Part 6 This article is part 6 of a series about memetics, or natural selection applied to the world of ideas. You can read the other parts here: Part 1: IntroductionPart 2: PatternsPart 3: ReplicatorsPart 4: Replicator DominationPart 5: Replicator Goals A few sections ago, I said the following: “we can … Read more

The Giant Cultural Parasite, Part 5 This is part 5 of a series about how cultural systems have their own goals that are not aligned with human goals. If you’re just joining us, or if you want to review, here’s where we’re at: The big picture (Part 1):The systems that drive our culture and determine … Read more

The Giant Cultural Parasite, Part 4 The big picture (Part 1): The systems that drive our culture and determine our lives are out of control and seem to have their own agendas. Where we’re at: In Part 2, we considered how natural laws create patterns, like how water moves under pressure from a stone, and … Read more

The Giant Cultural Parasite, Part 3 The big picture: The systems that drive our culture and determine our lives are out of control and seem to have their own agendas. Where we’re at: In part 1, we considered how natural laws create patterns, like how water moves under pressure from a stone, and we saw … Read more

The Giant Cultural Parasite, Part 2 Let’s begin with water. Imagine a clear pond. Smoothly polished stones lie at the bottom. Small trout hide in the dappled shadows, waiting in quiet repose. All is still. Further out, the soft morning light reflects green mountains off the surface, and the golden shoreline is so uniform as … Read more

Introduction and Overview I remember the exact day that I first encountered the theory of memetics. I was lying on a picnic table bench across from my wife in Bishop, CA in July of 2017. We had just finished the High Sierra Trail and had hitchhiked to town only to find that our reservation for … Read more

This year will be the fifth since I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. When I reached the Northern Terminus on that freezing October morning, I worried that I had squandered the four and a half months I had spent on the trail. I had expected big changes, but I felt like I was pretty much … Read more

We climbed Berryessa Peak in the blistering heat to catch the last of the wildflowers. Two years prior, James and I had taken this same trail and been stupified by profusions of poppies, paintbrush and lupine spilling forth from the mountainside. It was the second of back-to-back superblooms in California, each of which was an … Read more