in the shell

While I was watching the second season of SAC, I've noticed that they mention the Laughing Man a lot. This got me to wondering, what's the link? How are the two related?

shadowferret wrote:While I was watching the second season of SAC, I've noticed that they mention the Laughing Man a lot. This got me to wondering, what's the link? How are the two related?

The two phenomena share certain similarities. Both can be described as "standalone complex", that is phenomena, that are motivating people to action through informational medium. They are not, however, directly related to each other - there is nothing in common, ideologically, or otherwise between Laughing Man-copycats and the members of Individual Eleven, apart from the manner they were inspired to take action.

Also, this is only surface - when looking deeper, the two phenomena are also radically different from each other, in certain critical aspects.

Like the fact that the laughing man was focused on information being with held from the public concerning micro machines and the morai vacine wherein the Individual eleven are more on the refugee situation?
I found the laughing man's logic a bit more sound myself.

Plus the tie-ins allowed them to keep the Stand Alone Complex title. That alone is worth a few brief mentions

I think the connection has a lot to do with memetics and memes...

And that has a lot to do with memes being mentioned in relation to the Laughing Man in the first season and with the Tachikomas having a conversation about Richard Dawkins and James Lovelock in 2nd Gig. Dawkins' notion of memes gave rise to a concept called the ideosphere, the memetic equivalent of Lovelock's biosphere or Gaia hypothesis. As the Tachikomas point out, Dawkins and Lovelock published their first major works around the same time, and while their views don't initially seem compatible with each other (in fact, Dawkins has actively and publicly attacked Lovelock's writings), later work on memes suggests that the micro- and macro-levels aren't too dissimilar. (Dawkins published The Selfish Gene in 1976, and Lovelock published Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth in 1979.)

Memes are taken quite seriously by some cognitive scientists, evolutionary biologists, and sociologists. (Their existence is also hotly debated in those same circles.) Memes and memetics come up a lot in discussions of information theory and transhumanism, as well as in discussions about the Technological Singularity. A concept Dawkins used to argue by analogy has itself become an area of active research.

And the study of memes has had a pretty huge influence on political campaigning and marketing techniques, too. Viral and stealth marketing campaigns come to mind...

I've provided some links that might prove useful to a discussion of the Laughing Man and the Individual Eleven. The first couple of links lead to a kind-of-dated Swedish transhumanist site, but the pieces are in English and offer a good introduction to the field; you might want to look at the first link's glossary and at the second link's diagrams and discussion of meme-cycles:

http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Meme ... IDEOSPHERE
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Meme ... cycle.html

If you look at the glossary, I think you'll find the entries for "auto-toxic", "bait", "immuno-depressant", "infection", "infection strategy", "meme complex", "meme-engineer", "memeoid/memoid", "mimicry", "replication strategy", "retromeme", "vaccime" (sic), and "vector" especially relevant to the series.

Here's a link to a peer-reviewed journal covering memetics (currently on hiatus), with an explanation of the field's history:
http://jom-emit.cfpm.org/overview.html

Postscript: One of the sources I provided offers dead links to lectures by Dawkins and Dennett, both of whom are of importance to the development of memetics. For those who are curious about them, I'm providing active links to the texts in question.

Daniel Dennett, "Memes and the Exploitation of Imagination" (1989/90):
http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/memeimag.htm

Richard Dawkins, "Viruses of the Mind" (1991):
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Dawkin ... -mind.html