I live in a giant bucket. Maybe some of us believe that by internalizing the values of a messed-up world, we can prevent those forces from invading and destroying us. A sort of psychic inoculation or an offering to gods whose motives are inscrutable. I keep seeing this everywhere; last night, at the consultation meeting, where more than one person was concerned with finding ways for our library to make money. I always thought that the point of a library was tha it stood apart from the forces of commercialization and commoditization. After all, if you wanted a library that made money, why not call it a bookstore and have done with it?
But this hybridization is spreading everywhere. It’s some kind of memetic modification of organisms (MMOs). These new strains which are designed to pervade every corner of the commercial sphere, drive out competition, and impose uniformity and homogenization — that’s bad enough, but now we are starting to see their epimemetic traits infiltrating supposedly protected zones in the social world.
