What on earth is cliology?

To put a strapline on it:

Cliology is the future history of cultural engineering.

Theories of cultural evolution seek to explain the development of culture from an evolutionary point of view. Cliology named after Clio, the muse of history and fame, goes a step further to project the dynamics, uncovered by cultural evolution, into the future. In doing so, it speculates over a road-map for generating practical tools and methods for forecasting, deciding, and intervening on culture.

Is cliology just memetic engineering rebranded? Well, yes. Or at least it is a derivative with some critical differences.

The term cliology (stolen off Flynn) is introduced to highlight its special orientation and differentiate certain essential aspects from the closely related fields from which it is derived.

• Firstly, cliology is not intended as a science: it is not purely explanatory as with theories of cultural evolutionary psychology, but rather there is a shift in emphasis to provides a system for modelling culture for practical, eusocial ends – it aspires to be engineering.
• Secondly, cliology derives much from memetics, but owing to terminological confusions and limitations, memetics alone is not quite sufficient convey all cliological ideas clearly and so the introduction of these operating principles has necessitated new terms.
• Thirdly, cliology is adaptive and adoptive: to meet with practical ends, it is multidisciplinary. It embraces or rather assimilates, ideas from any field that is pragmatically useful particularly: cognitive, computational, organisational, and contextual behavioural sciences.

Much of the methodology of cliology involves recombining existing fragments of culture into new assemblies; cliology itself is the result of this recombinatorial process.

Who is it for?

I appreciate that I am reaching out to a hyper-niche audience here. For that reason, paradoxically, I am not given to promoting it widely, nor broadcasting its existence. Its not a “secret science”, far from it, but I would rather it sit somewhat in the background, available for those who need and get value out of it. While academics might, some distant day, begin to substantiate their theories by using the eventual tools and data, the tone is intentionally unscholarly (even if it wanders into theoretical cultural evolutionary psychology at times). The site is aimed more at practitioners; those who seek to envisage the future and intentionally influence the shape of culture. To reiterate, this is engineering, not science. Here are a few user groups in particular order:

• innovators, pioneers, dreamers, investors, corporate strategists, 
• PR councils, ad-men, marketeers, sales forces, branding agencies,
• fashionistas, forecasters and pundits, influencers,
• strategic communicators, propagandists, psy-ops agents, thought shapers,
• priests, proseletists, evangelists, educators, disseminators,
• policy and decision-makers, town planners, activists, promoters, change agents, politicians 
• and of course, megalomaniacs.

 

Site aims and objectives

This site is a first attempt to show how academic study might mature into the eusocial change of cultural practice (again, engineering to be blunt). It alludes to the groundwork that needs to be done, as well as speculates about what systems might actually be built, who might use them, and how they might be applied to real-world problems. Each section will drill down, but the overall aims of the site can be stated as:

• To discuss what clilogy is, why it is needed, its origins and applications.
• To point to more in-depth academic and theoretical considerations about cliology, including its theoretical background in social psychology and systems theory, and the direction of its program.
• To explain the relationship between compartments (clionomy, cliotechnology, etc.) and other proximate fields such as memetics, evolutionary cultural psychology, behavioural economics and so on.
  
• To show cliology as being a practical aspect of cultural evolution, one that supports an engineering imperative.
• To consider how we can translate its principles into a usable instrument for the betterment of society, and who might use it.
• To explore the ramifications of systematic narrative speculation en route to realisation: its uses and users as a tool for futurology
  

Structure and site map

The root cliology.com splits into a simple WordPress folder in /clionomy/, reserving space for other related software projects (Wildfire Hypermedia) and data that is not on the main WordPress site. There are two main components of the WordPress site: the main pages, which are intended to be in a more orderly format with links and references; and a blog, which definitely is not.

Main pages:

The current 3 main pages (which will be expanded upon) provide book-like chapters and present overviews of each theme. They then deep-dives into the finer points.

Cliology: Like history, cultural evolutionary theory, and sociology are primarily academic studies, this section makes the distinction that cliology is about practice. It projects our understanding of historical and contemporary cultural dynamics into the future. It is devised for forecasting trends and the intervention on information channels to produce intended cultural effects. This section speculates on practice, various tools, applications, and use cases.

Clionomy: The identification, naming and classification of cultural objects (according to traits) is the foundation for a clearer more scientific apprehension of culture. More rigour in our understanding of what culture is is the first step to translating that knowledge into an engineering discipline. A taxonomic methodology, Cultural Linnaeanism, is proposed with the intention of building an evolutionary classification of cultural objects.

Memetics: The “gene of culture” is considered to be a key metaphor in developing a cultural parallel to genetic engineering. Recombinant memetic engineering (RME) is the crossing and splicing of identified cultural components so as to develop novel contagious ideas with predictable and desired expression. RME presents a methodology for managing a more beneficial culture. A key distinction is drawn between internet memes and realmemetik.

The grand framework, which is currently in blog form to be tidied up for the main page, is a hierarchical set of frameworks for RME encoding of cultural assemblies. The current focus is on the Noam framework. A Noam (or half a meme) is a symbolic system for modelling behaviour. It provides a visual calculus that is core to cliology.

Clioblogology:

My blog: clioblogology! I think I can get away with using “evolutionary” as a euphemism for not even approaching “half-baked”! Clioblogology is my pseudo-random thought dump where thematic ideas go through the Campbellian loop of blind-variation-and-selective-retention. Expect wild, unsubstantiated speculation here, without any particular attention being paid to spelling, grammar, profanity, citation, or coherence. Such nuggets serve as “mental notes to self” which will either mature into well-formed theses and make it to the main pages or lie dormant in the backwaters an obscure blog on a server somewhere remote.

 

Progress and timeline

The main pages are being developed a bit every day. Starting with an overview of the core sections. I will drill down into more specific themes, as well as fleshing out the more general areas at roughly one section per month. The blog acts as a first attempt to put down raw ideas for future refinement and integration into the main site. Much is in draft, such as book reviews, waiting to be polished and published.