It’s Just Another Day, Let the Memetic Infection Pass | The Verge Forums

The one and only R.U. Sirius writes in the Verge Forums:

New Age types, most spiritual types, and (I hate to say it) even most psychedelic types are too porous; too lacking in an immunal response to silly and sometimes harmful memes. The New Age, in particular, is a folk culture. In some ways, it’s intentionally primitivist, which is — or has been — part of its charm.

In folk cultures, memetic infections tend to spread rapidly by word of mouth (or word of tweet etc.) and tends to suffuse the culture fairly completely, since the sense of belonging and identity is fairly strong, particularly as compared to an atomized, individualistic, decentered culture like the one we’re in.