The concept of memetic mediation arose from Peter Limberg and Connor Barnes’s article “The Memetic Tribes of Culture War 2.0” as a strategy for helping bridge divides between warring “memetic tribes.”[1] In the article, Limberg and Barnes outline a recent history of conflict in the United States context, and how it has fractured from a binary antagonism (“left” vs. “right”) to a multitude of various online echo chambers, each convinced of the superiority of its worldview and seeking to enact its vision.
This concept of memetic mediation is also summarized by Peter Limberg in this issue, and so I won’t focus on summary in this article. Suffice it to say, memetic mediation is a proposed set of methods—open source and continuing to evolve—for building bridges across memetic tribes, for finding the partial truth in each of them, in order to foster enough collective intelligence to have a chance of addressing our multitude of existential crises (e.g., ecological collapse, biowarfare, global disease epidemics, misaligned artificial intelligence, nuclear war, the meaning crisis, the potential rise of neo-fascism, etc.). The intention of this article is to explore its potential psychodynamic implications, in other words, the porous boundaries between the mediation of memes in the world and the mediation of memes in our own mind, and some frameworks for its pluralistic expression.
As Peter Limberg stated in our Letter.wiki exchange, “the psychodynamic is political.”[2] Individual and collective psychology is exogenously conditioned by the political and economic structures that it is embedded in, and yet there is also endogenous evolution within individuals and between individuals, which gradually or suddenly transforms the systems in which they are embedded. In addition to being a strategy for enhancing sense-making and collective intelligence in the age of fake news and algorithmically fueled reality tunnel divergence, memetic mediation is also a psychological compulsion for many of us. Mediating between online tribes is an attempt to externalize and resolve our own internal cognitive dissonance. Likewise, the attempt to resolve our own cognitive dissonance is an internalization of the external memetic dissonance that we have identified with. This is all to say, memetic mediation can be seen as an extension of our contemplative practice, as an external manifestation of our efforts to resolve the cognitive dissonance in our minds.
For some of us, the distinction between the two starts to dissolve.
Kenneth Folk, the godfather of Pragmatic Dharma, once tweeted, “If you were rationally self-interested and enlightened, you would love everybody, understanding that they are not other than you.”[3] A corollary in the context of memetic mediation could be stated as, “If you were rationally self-interested and enlightened, you would try to memetically mediate among everybody, understanding that they are not other than you.”
I argue that this is a natural extension of the common contemplative goal of non-dual awakening, which has been framed as an attenuating sense of a self that is perceived as separate from the environmental and social context from which it arises. This self-attenuation lends itself to a wider scope of identification, a desire for a deeper connection with a broader set of memeplexes that are represented by the humans that host them. This is not a linear process. We awaken a little, expand our desire for connection, and are continually forced to confront and process the dissonance that is uprooted in our own psychology. This process never ends, but we can get better at it, becoming more skilled in the integrated art of mindfulness, perspective taking, and emotional processing. And from the point of view of the individual, the memetic mediation that occurs in the meantime is both a byproduct and an input into the contemplative process.
Peter Limberg has discussed some of the more formal approaches to cultivating the skills of memetic mediation, ways to build up the I-Thou muscle for the masses. But it’s in the world and online where the rubber hits the road, where we cultivate tacit wisdom in a kaleidoscope of contexts, and where we cultivate our own personalized heuristics for navigating and bridging the various reality tunnels presented to and filtered through our awareness. While there are some general frameworks and trainings that can aid in this endeavor, there will be as many expressions as there are memetic mediators. Nevertheless, let’s discuss a couple of possible frameworks for thinking about memetic mediation, understanding that they are not the territory. These frameworks include what I call a fractal model of mediation, and a development stage as an analogy model.
By fractal model, I mean simply that there are common dynamics of mediation at multiple scales. We mediate the memes in our minds, in our families or online communities, and across our adjacent communities, all the way to the highest level of the cultural conversation. I may be able to cultivate relationships in a couple different adjacent communities, resulting in a shared conversation, and you may be able to do the same with communities in a slightly different part of the memetic topology (perhaps with some overlap), but we both, representing the interests of our respective mediated communities, may need to be mediated by a third party. Of course, this is a dynamic and fluid process, but the general idea of mediators mediating other mediators, and on and on, up and down the stack, can be powerful, especially if we realize that individuals at the “bottom of the stack” may one day find themselves mediating individuals that were at the top of the stack the next day.
The second framework relates to the last three stages of Robert Kegan’s five-stage framework of psychological development.[4] Kegan helped to extend the Piagetian tradition of childhood development studies into adulthood. Kegan’s framework focuses heavily on the sense of self, such that each stage can be defined in terms of what parts of the self are considered an object in awareness, and what parts are constituent of the subject, the one observing. For our purposes, we can skip to stage three—an early adult stage (and a life stage for some adults)—where the individual holds one’s desires and drives in awareness, but whose identity is defined by the texture of one’s relationships. Stage four individuals hold one’s relationships in awareness, but identify with a larger and more abstract sense of agency or ideology. Finally, stage five individuals hold a sense of agency and ideology in awareness, but is not defined by them, and is able to adopt many mental models to pragmatic effect.
Each of these stages, seen as a lens or an analogy of mediation, can be valuable. Stage five, often referred to as the “self-transforming” stage, is the most fluid in terms of the ability to play with identity and navigate alternative paradigms with relative ease. This mode has obvious benefits in terms of perspective taking, which can be invaluable when trying to understand another worldview enough to find common ground. But the ability to embody this mode with ease is not necessary to be a memetic mediator. And empirically, this stage is usually reserved for a very small portion of the population, perhaps exclusively reserved for those in middle age or older.
Stage four, also called the “self-authoring” mode, is associated with having a coherent identity and ideology, and a strong sense of agency. This agency doesn’t jump out as being a memetic mediation mode, but this identity and ideology is often a cafeteria offering, stitched together by an individual from many different sources. In the fractal framework above, it’s simply a potentiality for mediating among adjacent communities that can more easily fit together into a coherent single identity.
Finally, stage three—which is often referred to as the “socialized mind” stage and is associated with defining one’s identity not by ideology, but by relationships—might actually be the most important lens for memetic mediation. It is the engine of relationship building, it is sub-ideological, and therefore the most potent. A friend of mine, Mac Vogt, in a conversation with me in the memetic mediation forum, made the point that “to vision a thriving future of sense-making, you’d definitely find an organic, emergent art wing in a feedback loop.” He goes on to ask the question: “Memetic mediation as artistic synthesis between tribes?” If I can connect with you on a shared aesthetic sensibility in a certain domain, engage in the creative process with you, or even provoke and work through conflict and tension with you on a human level, this can produce a level of mutual affection that transcends ideological differences.
In another sense, we all come from somewhere, or multiple places, and we all want to be understood. I can sit down with an ideological enemy and ask them about how they grew up, about their formative experiences and influences, and how they get along with their family now. Or we can punch each other in the face and get a beer afterwards. This isn’t fancy stuff, but it’s time tested—it’s Lindy, as some would say—and there is no reason it couldn’t translate into the sphere of internet memetic tribes. Building trust in this way reminds us that we are all a product of a certain set of life experiences that were largely (or completely?) outside of our conscious control, and this can soften reactive tendencies when venturing into more ideological domains among individuals or across whole memetic tribes. People from a different tribe may still see you as an outsider, but they also might see you as an ally, as a person who can sympathetically translate their experiences and memes to the outside world, or as a person who can translate outside memes to them in a way that they can work with.
Memetic mediation has not been codified into a set of formal heuristics. I have a set of personalized intuitions that inform my day-to-day informal interactions, and honestly, I am hesitant to convert them into a workshop-ready pedagogy. I’ll leave most of that work to others. However, it can be useful to speculate on criteria for success. I think what counts as “success” will vary depending on the Kegan stage lens. At stage three, for example, simply bonding with individuals across ideological boundaries would count as success. This is a difficult state to quantify as an external observer, but a rough heuristic would be whether or not people are able to rib and joke with each other, or would be hesitant to attack one another over an ideological disagreement.
Stage four is more challenging to consider. The scope of stage four mediation is relatively limited, because it requires that participants maintain a relatively coherent worldview. However, as I suggested above, these worldviews are often individualized composite boards, processed from many different sources, that in principle could integrate even more ingredients while maintaining coherence. In other words, individuals, especially those who have bonded in stage three terms, would be able to identify certain elements of the other person’s worldview, the low hanging fruit, that could help to flesh out but not threaten one’s own worldview coherence. A criterion for success here might be the ability for individuals to have an ideological conversation of limited scope, with both parties well aware of the other’s sacred cows and red lines. Relating this metric back to the fractal model of mediation, if these individuals can link arms, so to speak, they could then collectively cover quite a large ideological range with a few degrees of separation.
Finally, stage five is probably the most challenging, as it cuts right through a fixed and stable sense of identity that would undergird a coherent worldview, and yet maintains some kind of ground, or rather a metacognitive awareness, that can pragmatically adopt certain stances according to a larger goal of sensemaking. While this requires some contemplative maturity, there are also methods out there already in development, particularly in the systems thinking world. From Donella Meadows discussing the importance of collecting mental models and shifting paradigms, to J. E. Callendar discussing the application of suspended activation (SA): “SA is a thinking loop where you suspend what you know, redirect to new ideas / mindsets / patterns, then let go of them (don’t leap to a solution) and repeat the loop.”[5] These kinds of skills can be taught in a systematic way.
To conclude, in my Letter.wiki exchange with Peter Limberg, I stated, “Ideally, we would build an army of memetic mediators, each focusing on the specific tribes that they are able to build relationships with.” More recently, Venkatesh Rao, the influential internet personality and founder of Ribbonfarm, wrote the following tweet, soon after writing a popular article about online beefs:
There’s orders of magnitude more information freely available to everybody today, to inform even the most trivial decisions, than even the top intelligence analysts had for the most crucial decisions 60y ago. Yet we act surprised that armies of sensemakers are cropping up.[6]
As more people wake up to the crisis in sensemaking, coupled with a truly scary set of existential crises, which have been made even more salient now with the current COVID-19 situation, the tide seems to be turning, with glimmerings of a potentially distributed and networked sensemaking revolution. I argue that memetic mediation is a necessary condition for sensemaking, among others. Join us, enlist in the memetic mediation army. We need your particular set of insights to help bend the curve of accelerating cultural evolution towards collective intelligence and address the most challenging existential issues of our times.
Notes
[1] Peter Limber and Conor Barnes, “The Memetic Tribes of Culture War 2.0,” retrieved online https://medium.com/s/world-wide-wtf/memetic-tribes-and-culture-war-2-0-14705c43f6bb
[2] Peter Limberg and Jason Snyder, “On Memetic Mediation and Perspectival Pidginism,” retrieved online https://letter.wiki/conversation/241
[3] Kenneth Folk, retrieved online https://twitter.com/KennethFolk/status/757484178699083776
[4] Natali Morad, “Part 1: How to Be an Adult—Kegan’s Theory of Adult Development,” retrieved online https://medium.com/@NataliMorad/how-to-be-an-adult-kegans-theory-of-adult-development-d63f4311b553
[5] See Donella Meadows, “Dancing with Systems,” retrieved online http://donellameadows.org/archives/dancing-with-systems/ and “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System,” retrieved online http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ and J. E. Callendar at https://twitter.com/JECallender/status/1247869269565681664
[6] Venkatesh Rao, “The Internet of Beefs,” Ribbonfarm, retrieved online https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/01/16/the-internet-of-beefs/