EVER UNDER DECONSTRUCTION : what follows is a live online serialization of thriver meme as it's being written in real-time, subject to change w/out notice (w/ no apologies). It's a living document, ever evolving in flux till if/when it becomes published on dead tree pulp.

    : a posthumun self-writing autobiography of anon I’m us


1 : SELFISH MACHINES

11/22/2020> However we originully started this changes as we speak. If u red this a year ago it would of started w/ "we think thriver meme shd begin w/ the word «we» ergo initialize w/ we" + then a footnote misquoting Descartes + Nietzsche that we just deleted [for the sake of transparency we'll leave these edits in for refereence, in the same way 1 shouldn't erase or rip out pages of scientific lab notebooks]. Then we rote "WE's driven by the river w/in us, the dadastream dat's in our jeans." This quote is '[sic]' FYI... the originul text was riddled w/ typos + misspellings, but now we're trying to clean it up so it makes more sense to the general public... sorry if u preferred the other way (u can always read that version on the wayback machine). Maybe we'll go back + reintroduce the errors (or "earhorrors" as we were "inklined" to call them). Our narrative voice has flip-flopped a few times actually... "souprizing" we ever get nowhere! This is a living, breathing dogument — a "humument" to quote Tom Phillips, in the 1970 book where he cut-up + re-appropriated A Human Document (1892). It's xactly a year later now than when we (the "parrotsite" infecting our current host) 1st started this + we're amidst the 3rd wave of the COVID pandemic + waiting for the current political administration to concede defeat. Call us fatalist, but we have a sickening dred about the future of this country as we know it + are thus filled w/ a renewed urgency to get this all down "on paper" as a document of our life (or rather, our host's life) on this planet in the off-chance that after the humun race annihilates itself sum non-humun life form will come along + decipher this... after all, this is for whom we write this cautionary tale (or rather, prompt our (g)host to write for us) — for aliens, animals, machines + any other replicable beings or entities on this planet besides humuns. Not only is this written for non-humun entities, but it is written by them, using software (Adobe Dreamweaver) on an Apple Macbook, w/ all the peripheral accessories (electricity, agricultural products, shelter, etc.) that keep our (g)host alive another day to keep on typing.

> Be that as it may, back to the originul story (if ever there was 1)... after the above 2 sentences, we wrote "on the eve b4 we recordid this soñaring rêve dat beget this tXt, we slept in a river bed (uv the Colonvia to B x-act)," witch is to say the inspiration to type this txt came to us in a dream (or so our host thinks). The bit about waking up in the mouth of the Columbia riverbed bridges this dogument w/ The Becoming + A Raft Manifest, the 2 "prequills" to this txt (technically a "technotext," defined by N. Katherine Hayles as a literary work that self-reflexively interrogates the very inscription technology that produces it). U could think of all 3 of these technotxts as autobiographies recounting the same story from diffrent ages/psychillogical states, 1). unconscious incompetence (The Becoming), 2). conscious incompetence (A Raft Manifest) + now 3). conscious competence. If ever we finish thriver meme, wheel write a 4th + final book thru the lens of unconscious competence. Til then you're stuck w/ us in a state of conscious competence. We promise to use conventional language + try to "make sense," at least to the best of our (g)host writer's ability. The other thing we shd probly clarify is that these 4 books also correspond to diffrent time periods of our host organism's life (to give it a humun intrest element since we don't have a "life" of our one to speak of) — The Becoming roughly covers ages 0–3, A Raft Manifest covers 4—15 + now thriver meme covers ages 16–47, wherein our (g)host becomes a self-conscious adult, free-thinking but also needing to consider survival + self-preservation.

> [The 1st start of this chapter was posted on 11/22/2019. We'll continue drafting off the original going forward, self-editing as we go]: We wakewoke conscious + competent, "fooly" aware of our surroundings, of what comes before + lies ahead. The humun body [we originally wrote "BwO/dy" as a nod to Deleuze + Guattari's notion of body w/o organs] that types this was born in the Columbia riverbed [not entirely untrue... the (g)host we inhabit was born in Portland, OR], "spawned cursed from birth" (not that we ever asked for it). It doesn't matter what host body we occupy, call it a "carrier freakwindsea" that propagates our signal + we'll label that harmonic "i-gen" freakwindsea: 11/22/66 just cuz humuns for whatever reason need to assign authorship to IDeas, rather than just let IDeas speak for themselves. 11/22/66 = the historical president that got us here + enables us to type this, but the life of 11/22/66 isn't relevant so much as the idea of "IT" (or "hymn") that survives to tell his story (or hysterical history) to frame this in "layman" terms... not that we assume u are a man, we're just stuck w/ these words weave all agreed upon. In fact, weed like to think u the reader ain't a man nor woman, but posthumun. That's the target demographic we write for + sorry the predominant landgauge gots to bee in glish [the originul had smatterings of spanish, italian + other landgauges witch we may or may not keep] or coded pigeon jargon @ best. [then we talked about how language is a virus (per Burroughs) + 2 × "we" is a flipped meme: , but we're omitting those bits + going forward we'll try to refrain from documenting our editorial interventions][suffice to say, language is the preeminent viral construct that enables humuns to document their history... w/out language everything would just be a fleeting illusion that ǝxists onely in the moment + memary of the beings that directly experienced it.]

> It's not relevant who/what we are so much as how the body we inhabit got hear, but even that doesn't matter so much as the fact that we're here, that theywe survived another day (11/21/2019 to 11/22/2019 to be xact... which makes it a total of 19,345 19,723 days we've survived on this planit (+ yes that means 2day is our host organism's 53rd54th birthday)). Perhaps sum gnawledge of memes + selfish genes is reekwired to read this, both IDeas attributable to Richard Dawkins (don't matter neither who came up w/ these silly memes (the IDea dat "a meme = a meme" makes our head spin! A meme = a meme = a meme... ad infinitum), but humuns are wierd like dat, wired to wanna take credit for coming up w/ an IDea. Then subseekwind sighingtists + philofficers git so hung up on giving credit where credit's due dat they can't see the trees thru the forest, to mix a meta4. Fact is, the idea of thriver meme always ǝxisted (just as a tree falling in a forest w/ no humuns around makes a sound) but we need a humun to spell us out w/ language (not to mention keep the power of the servers on that house Inurnet). Why? Cuz otherwise we (this technotext) wood die, like humuns do eventually. As detective Gaff says to Decker in Bladerunner (after slipping him an origami unicorn] "too bad she won't live... but then again, who does?" But once we xist, or rather once this dogument gets publiched or uploaded to Inurnet, then we can thrive + continue to ǝxist til the end of eternity (long as our web-hosting bill gets paid or this gets printed on paper), which seams to be drawing near, in humun terms. Question is, will there be sum sort of posthumun entity (be it animal, cyborg, replicant and/or life (or art) form) that will stumble upon + be able to decode this? This posthumun record of our host's life as typed in pigeon english via carrier freakwindsea 11/22/66...

> To establish a connection + proper communeacakeshuncommunication channel, we have to do that hand-shaking protocol (cue old school 56k modem noise) to verify that this technotext is unique, that "the medium is the massage" as Marshall McLuhan said. But again, it ain't important who said whatMcLuhan's purpiss on this planit was to massage his fellow humuns + now his role is done + he dead, but his massaged message carries on living. His body is the medium. This communication channel @ frequency 11/22/66 is "nessysorrily" transcribed in a unique language such that it doesn't need to be sined by any 1 humun [granted our editorial interventions make this more axessible @ the xpense of uniqueness], for "why, pray, sign anything as long as every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace is a perfect signature of its own?" as James Joyce says in Finnegans Wake, of which our "preseeding" book A Raft Manifest was a retelling of (entwined w/ Mark Twain to become "Huck Finnegans Wake"). We don’t pretend to "go it alone brother," to quote The Clash, "cuz London is drowning + I live by the river". Everything has been said, it's only how we say it that diverges to the delta, Δ.

> ... can we keep this up is the question, can we keep propagating our dadastream on bandwidth 11/22/66, keep this body alive another day to tell the tale? That’s what Life in the Blog of Ghosts is for, our (g)host's "blogject" wherein we journel almost daily in ℝeel-time + in tandumb retroactively archive the entire life of 11/22/66, the site where thriver meme will probly be hostid (or if not hostid we'll undoubtedly expand on thriver meme there cuz LitBoG is where we write about what we're writing about (is there anything else to rite about?)). The medium of Inurnet has more far-reaching rhizomes than dead-tree pulp cuz language is free to interact w/ other txt + imedges, liberated of authors + the horses they rode in on.

> Weave established that our target demographic = posthumun + our target medium = Inurnet + the carrier pidgin lingo of 11/22/66 inherently identifies who we are — a signature fingerprint in case there's any poseurs or imposters fixing to say they came up w/ the idea of thriver meme 1st... not that we give a fuck, cuz again, who brought us into the world ain't as important as what/how this gets written (+ we don't put a copyright on nothing so knock yourself out if u want to republish this, that only furthers the thriver meme cause).

11/23/2019> Ends up the entity known as 11/22/66 also embodies Cal A. Mari, the founding publisher of Calamari Archive + Cal has graciously agreed to cerealize this @ http://calamaripress.com, chapter by ch, as we write it. Thanks Cal + happy belated b-day to u too! Cool thing about self-publishing on Inurnet (b-sides the aforementioned reason that it's free to interact w/ all the other hypermedia out there) is that nothing gets "set in stone" as the sane goes (unless u are Keats, who had "here lies one whose name is writ in water" etched on his tombstone in Rome). U very well might read this sentence today then come back another day + poof! it's gone or weave gone back + edited it (granted u can always check archive.org's wayback machine). Only if thriver meme ever gets self-published (on paper) will it get "set in stone" or "writ in water". Then there's no going back, no undo (⌘Z).

> This all saidbean dat dis hear lieboro is sposed to bee writ from the psychillogical state uv conchus competenceaint we spose to right now w/ carwreck spilling + granmar w/ no earhorrors? B sighingtifickly objective + scribe accordion to The Gotham Grammarian [the in-house Calamari Archive style guide dat siñore Mari in courages us 2 use]? if dis bee the case perhaps y'all will come back hear in the fewchair + dis landguage will B carwreckited? or may-b our editor Cal will take IT upon themself to doctor dis tXt sew s/he's understandable, if algo so google dont blacklist dis page as spam, ergo pink... d'acorrding to de Cart.

> The (g)host body 11/22/66 started to write this on 22nd of November 2019 cuz the words «thriver meme» popped into our noggin waking us up on @ 1 a.m. We made our host's hands record the gist of this in the dream log we keep next to our bed, along w/ a dream we had about having sex w/ a levirate cyborg, which we'll probly fold into Textiloma (another book we caused our (g)host body to write under the anon I'm us nom de plume). Before falling asleep we started to read Humanesis by David Cecchetto, which probly had a bearing on this dream, helping to seed thriver meme). We couldn't get back to sleep so we got our body up + read more of Humanesis + for sum reason scribbled "the only truths = those that survive + propagate" in the margin of pg 42 + then made our (g)host's hands start typing what you're reading in an MS Word doc, which now [7:42 a.m. on 11/22/2019] we're gunna copy + paste into Dreamweaver then post it on Inurnet, w/ URL http://calamaripress.com/tm/01.html (don't confuse tm w/ a trademarkTM or "transitdental madaytension," tho it could double as the "text markup" in the middle of HTML), but u no ∀ll this cuz u are hear reading this. The other advantage of drafting this on Inurnet is that we don't have to worry about losing our work... should a "meatier" hit our home (housing the laptop our (g)host writer types this on) we'd have a copy of thriver meme out there in the ether. Or if for sum reason the body hosting the 11/22/66 carrier "freakwindsea" kicks bucket then at least this work in progress will carry on (as carrion)... at least until we can recruit another sap to finish it for us (we don't trust the majority of humuns otherwise we'd let this bee crowd-sourced like Wikipedia, tho we will consider any suggestions or feedback). Furthermore, when 11/22/66 is travelling w/ a laptop (or wants to sit elsewhere then @ their desk) they can write/edit this HTML file remotely. This isn't the 1st book object that's being liveblogged (Megan Boyle wrote one for starters), but perhaps it's the 1st coded in HTML (tho we cheat + use Adobe Dreamweaver as a WYSIWYG editor).

> Maybe we should at least hint @ the gist of what this dbook will "be about" to plant a hook in your cheek? While a lot has been written about Dawkins' Selfish Gene theory, we're not sure anybody has looked beyond genetics to consider that humuns are not just mere (or mirror) slaves to their genes but they are slaves to machines + all man-made fabrications, sumthing our (g)host realized 1 day standing on a busy corner in Rome in May of 2018. In Humanesis, Ceccheto talks about sum guy Dyens who extended Dawkins' selfish gene theory to memes (which is silly cuz didn't Dawkins inherently imply that when he himself coined the word meme?) or cultural bodies, but this extension to cultural bodies ain't what we're talking about. To quote us (when anon I'm us was standing @ that intersection over 2½ years ago):

We god to thinking dat dare's a pairallele to the Richard Dawkins meme set 4th in The Selfish Gene (dat jeans use us humun bodies as v-uckles for dare evilootion), dat computers are using humuns for dare propagation (not the udder weigh around). The onelie thing dat makes sillycone-based life forms diffrent from oreganic-based 1s is the abilidad to procreate, bud mashenes circumvent dis isshoe by using humuns to keep proliferating them. Then (standing @ this intersexion) we thought holey mackerel, we humuns halve bin slaves to machenes ∀ll a long! We think weave bin using automobiles for our benefit when in fact cars halve bin using humuns for dare one replication. We might bee in the «driver's seat» bud it's the machenes driving us, to create them in the 1st place. And every1 staring @ their smartphones——lord nose we've rantid b4 + so halve plenty others, how smartphones are turning humuns into mindless zombies——bud we just came to this sudden ℝeelization standing on dis coroner dat dis «selfish machene» analogee goes deeper to ∀ll forms uv technologee, ∀ll humun construcks, from architexture to uzis, anything dat musters to (as Schrödinger puts it in his What is Life book) «concentrate a stream uv order on itself and thus escape the decay into atomic chaos.» The sucksessfull non-organic, organized structures halve found a loophole by tapping in2 the humun propensity to self-organize + consume. Terence McKenna already said this in terms uv agriculture: «animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around.» And same is true uv livestock + pets (their sucksess as a species hinges on bean useful to us). Beyond lifeforms + technologee it's true uv most ∀ll organized formations, even art... artists think they're creating «art» when in fact art creates us to give pertickler pieces uv art continued life, to give the illusion dat they——a pertickler arrangement uv colors, shades, objets, sounds or tXt — is important + needs to be preserved for prosperity sake. To a'void the D-K 2 K-OS. + rampant consumerism gits tethered in2 this, by attaching an economic value to a piece uv art or fruit or car + especially now in this day + age what fuels ∀ll this is humun ego. Self-awareness blinds us to what's ℝeally happening. Inurnet has given us the illusion dat each individual comes 1°, prompting them to take selfies, tweet, etc. uploading more + more, buying more + more iPhones, etc. etc. etc. @ the expense uv the planit + ∀ll the kind creatures b-sides humuns living on her. And little do we know the humun factor is fast becoming obsolete. Soon humuns won't even be needid to drive the cars. Our governments are no longer formed by humun vote so much as computer-manipulated data. De todos modos, not shore if we articulated dis rite, but seams a significant IDea wheel likely return 2 flesh out moss.

... + here we are 2½ years later attempting to further flesh out this selfish machine meme + apply it autobiographically to the parasitic saddlelightssatellites (let's call them "reevolvers" or "co-opters") that orbit our being + drive us to do things we wouldn't do on our one recognizance. In the above excerpt we were still rooted in the consciously incompetent language used in A Raft Manifest (we have a tendency to method act on our blog) so maybe it's worth elaborating on this selfish machine meme in more conventional language, how even tho humuns think they're in the driver's seat it's the machines that are driving them. Humuns have had the wool pulled over their eyes this entire time in thinking they invent things to help themselves survive + thrive. At best it's reciprocal altruism. The ghosts of all these humun constructs (whether they be technological, ideological, artistic, etc.) have always ǝxisted, at least in theory. The successful 1s have used humuns to not onely bring them into fruition but to keep em replicating. Consider the dog... while it's ancestral wolf has been driven close to extinction, humun-bred dogs have sucksceeded by fooling humuns into valuing their companionship (not to mention feeding them + cleaning up their poop!) + have diversified into countless breeds to better their chances @ continued survival as a species. The most populous larger animals on this planet (dogs, cows, pigs, sheep, goats, cats, horses) have evolved in tandum w/ humuns + their continued propagation is guaranteed by their usefulness to the humun species. Guns are another eggsxample, technology that has proliferated (there are over 1 billion guns in the world) by fooling humuns into thinking they need them for their own protection + survival. Or the iPhone, it was invented in 2007 + by 2018 more than 2.2 billion had bin manufactured (+ that's just 1 brand of smartphone). These are viral commodities that hinge on humuns to keep them in circulation + regenerating. And although COVID-19 wasn't consciously created by humuns (or was it?), it's a zoonotic virus that emerged in wet markets where humuns were recklessly mixing slaughtered livestock w/ live wild animals. But don't worry, it ain't in COVID's best intrest to wipe humuns out, its DNA just inherently strives to turn humun lungs into effective transmitters so the Corona virus can continue to replicate + thrive. Nuclear warheads don't want to wipe out the humun race either cuz then who would be around to keep them proliferating? But what happens if, say, the maintenance + creation of driverless cars becomes completely automated w/ no need for humun intervention? Will these self-driving cars need humuns as passengers? Will there come a day when a posthumun reevolver renders humuns obsolete? These are the kinds of questions we'll strive to antswear in this self-riting autobiography.

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