Meme exchange is fundamentally toxic when practiced without insight or concern for its social and developmental consequences. Copying media objects has costs we are not examining, and many of them are deadly. “Everything we do stages repetitions of similar behavior. This is actually restructuring and staging brain development and inhibiting it in ways we would never like were we aware of them. When you reward that, the result is not minds. It’s nearly machines. So, you can accuse me of being grouchy, but I am grouchy in the way a scientist who understands radioactivity is grouchy when he meets a village where everyone regularly exchanges uranium, eats it in food, and wears it as jewelry and — they celebrate that as ‘having fun’. And frankly? You want a grouch like that in terrain like this. Whether you care to like what you make of his ‘agenda’ or not.”

Meme exchange is fundamentally toxic when practiced without insight or concern for its social and developmental consequences. Copying media objects has costs we are not examining, and many of them are deadly.

“Everything we do stages repetitions of similar behavior. This is actually restructuring and staging brain development and inhibiting it in ways we would never like were we aware of them.

When you reward that, the result is not minds. It’s nearly machines. So, you can accuse me of being grouchy, but I am grouchy in the way a scientist who understands radioactivity is grouchy when he meets a village where everyone regularly exchanges uranium, eats it in food, and wears it as jewelry and — they celebrate that as ‘having fun’. And frankly?

You want a grouch like that in terrain like this. Whether you care to like what you make of his ‘agenda’ or not.”