Inspirational posters are a normie meme that gets sickening very fast, hence the rise of the demotivational poster – they take the piss out of the empty hackneyed cliches.
This post isn’t about putting a positive spin on some Sisyphean chore when it would be better to pack it in and go do something more useful and fun. Rather, it is about a meme generation algorithm and a twist on reframing failure into feedback. Ok, a quote:
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
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Think of it this way: the memetic matrix has you and it is hellbent on replicating its warez. Edison’s words are about variation, selection and reproduction and apply both to the biota and ideas. Biological and cultural evolution are great at finding schemata that do not work; these variations just get Darwinised.
In my quest for the earworm, I drive around a lot, gathering inspiration and conjuring up new potential hook lines for songs. Most of them, unsurprisingly, are just shit and are culled by more memorable variants. Those lines themselves might be epic fails, but the process of generating and rejecting them is not. This is a case of sieving through lyrical phase space and recognising the viable from the non-viable.
This process, I suppose, could well be called Edisoning – a memetic algorithm for technological, cultural, and in my case, musical innovation.
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