The Secret of Happiness, the Awesome Power of Memes and Toxic Ideas
December 3, 2007
A little while ago, I discovered a site called TED. On that site I discovered a remarkable set of video speeches. One by Lawrence Lessig finally clarified why the man who created the Creative Commons License did so. Now I grok, where before I only supported.
Interestingly enough this lead me back to a memory of my studies of licensing, copyright, and other intellectual property issues that I carried out in the early Nineties, and which have never really stopped since then, though they have quieted down a bit now.
In one of these video speeches a philosopher called Dan Bennett offers The secret of happiness:
Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
That’s what happened to me. I found something more important than I am, an idea, and I dedicated my life to it. That dedication is beginning to pay off, even as I write this. My dedication to that idea has kept me sane, happy and alive.
What’s a meme? “A meme,” as described by Dan Bennett in the video linked below is “an information package with attitude.”
He goes on to talk about memes in the course of talking about the replication of ideas and this has some relevance to being a Creative Artist. So I would like to recommend to you all that you take a few moments to watch his video because it is about as he puts it “[safeguarding] the benign and useful variants of our ideas as they continue to spread” and this is something important to Creative Artists as I have noted in many different areas and articles of the Free Articulator.
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