virus: Suicide Meme

Captain Horatio Pugwash (jacrutu@mv.mv.com)
Tue, 1 Jul 1997 16:58:01 -0400 (EDT)

Has there been any discussion of the suicide meme? It seems
quite a puzzle to me, how such a manifestly autotoxic meme could
spread. I would hypothesize that it doesn't spread in the form,
"to kill oneself", but rather as simply the fact that people kill
themselves sometimes. Then, there must be some factor external to
that meme, either a physical construction in human minds or another
meme that is common in human societies, which combines with the
suicide fact meme to create the suicide action meme. I suppose
psychologists will have lots of raw data...

The possibility that it's the result of a combination of memes
I find the most intriguing. Why does that combination occur so
frequently? Are there rules by which memes mix in human minds? I
should think that there has to be some sort of rules or tendencies.
But, how much of these rules are other memes and how much is the
result of the physical construction of the human mind? Perhaps
this would be a way to objectively study memes, to introduce
people to two ideas that are new to them and likely to combine and
see how, when, and with what frequency particular permutations are
produced.

-Captain Horatio Pugwash
Delver of the Network Deep

I love your memes, baby, yeah!