Comment by andai
6 hours ago
>TikTok [is] a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology
Security researcher once told me that he sees social media as a distributed hacking attempt on the human mind.
I think it's a genetic algorithm. You try random stuff and when something works you clone and mutate and crossbreed it.
Isn't this pretty much the definition of a meme? I mean before meme just became synonymous with funny cat videos. Like the actual meaning of the word.
Snow Crash explored this much more literally, supposing that there may be memes so powerful they can function basically as magic spells that reprogram people's brains.
See also John Barnes' Century Next Door books, where "memes" are basically computer viruses that jump to running on human brains, not just silicon chips. The results are... not pretty.