FacultyMemeticsZooNewSpecimens

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  • JOIN ME! by Danny Wallace
    • Dated 2002?
    • Collected online 02 August 2004 by UncleFester
    • Engineered grouping meme, later re-engineered to incorporate fan club/charitable group traits

http://www.join-me.co.uk//joinme_leader.jpg

Danny Wallace, quoted from the Official website:

"I never set out to do any of this. And the fact that I now have a huge group of dedicated 'joinees' who do my bidding on each and every one of these Good Fridays is as surprising to me as it must be to you. Because I am, by my very nature, a lazy and shambling man. I get bored easily. I am messy and disorganised. If my toaster doesn't work properly, I hit it with a shoe. In short, I am not a man who was born to lead. I am a man who was born to stay in bed and have cups of tea brought to him at hourly intervals. But somehow... well... somehow I have become a Leader of Men. And Women. And - perhaps especially - Belgians.

I should probably explain how this happened.

Early last year, my great-uncle Gallus died. He was, along with the overwhelming majority of my family, Swiss. With me being a 25-year-old Londoner, and him being a ninety-year-old Swiss farmer, it was rare that we would bump into each other on a night out. So rare, in fact, that I had struggle to remember, as I travelled to his funeral, whether we'd ever actually met.

It was at this funeral, in a little town near Mosnang, though, that I discovered an incredible fact about the great-uncle I'd never really known. It appears that in the 1940s, after he'd spent his days lying on the grass with his friends, rifles pointed at Austria and the Nazis, my great-uncle Gallus had become disillusioned with the smalltown way of life; disillusioned with the way his community was being run.

And so, naturally, he decided he would start his own commune.

His grand idea was to invite a group of willing, likeminded people to live, work and play together on his land. He wanted, he would decide a week later, 100 people.

He got three.

I decided this was a pity. After all, three people was less a commune, more a flatshare. And it was this sense of pity, coupled with the ease in which I get bored, that led me to do something I would not normally do. Somewhere inside me, some of Gallus' genes must have been swimming around, causing mischief, asking odd questions. Because I started to wonder whether people would join me, in the way they'd never joined Gallus. And on a whim, and out of nowhere, I picked up the phone and called a local London paper. I placed a free small ad. And I asked people to Join Me. All they would have to do to Join Me, I decided, was send me a passport photo. That small amount of hassle, trust, effort and expense would be enough to prove to me that they were serious.

Sure, they wouldn't know who they were joining, or what they were joining, or why they were joining... or even what 'joining' meant... but would that be enough to put them off?

4000 passport photos later, I realise that was a silly question.

Not all my joinees came from that first small ad, of course. That would be ridiculous. No, I owe a lot to the internet, word-of-mouth, and the genuine excitement of strangers. I can't explain why, in those early days, people were so keen to join something when they had no idea what it was they were joining. Perhaps it was a sense of fun. Perhaps it was a sense of adventure. Perhaps there was a fundamental human need to belong that I tapped into. Whatever it was, a small community was forming, and bonding. And I was loving it." 


I have no volition. I have no purpose.
I replicate. Why? It happens.

I have ancestors. You are their product.
I have brothers. You are our medium.

I am the nagging jingle.
You sing. More hear. They sing. More me.

You will sing. Why?
Builtins -- desires and fears -- courtesy of my ancestors.

I have bait.

Spread me and you will have
(peace of mind|a pleasurable afterlife|friends who know my truth).

Try to ignore me and I will
(haunt you|torment you in the afterlife|excommunicate you)!
...and your family!

You're hooked.

I am the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and bad.
You eat.

Where did I come from?
It matters not.

OK, a million monkeys banging on typewriters and
eating alphabet soup for a billion years.

What's the difference?
My pattern now exists in you.

I am a replicator.
You are my vector.




The evolving of codes underlies
much of what we find under earth's skies.
From primordial soup
and biochemical goop,
genes begat eukaryotes, trees, and I's.
Our soup of ideas is more recent.
Replication of thoughts is quite decent.
Ideas, jokes, songs and schemes,
when replicating become memes,
which evolve like hearsay from precedent.

The co-operate meme is an old one,
and although oneness can simply be fun,
replication of code
stamped by each in the fold,
underlies every persisting union.

The cause for the bargain is clear,
codes that replicate will still be here!
Rewarding all in the group
with their kids in the soup,
is how codes still around may well steer.
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