March, somewhere west of the Threadplex
I’ve been sitting up here long enough to watch the dust settle on my old maps. Spread out before me are the field journals from last season—a bundle of sources with careful notation on how phrases like “The numbers don’t lie” and “Trust the science” move through the territory.
I was proud of those reports once. They’re thorough, respectably analytical, full of tables categorizing which meme claims which authority, which emotional hook catches which cognitive bias. I thought I was tracking the life cycles of cultural organisms—memes as self-propelling beasts, competing in an info-ecosystem.
I was studying clouds. I hadn’t yet learned to ask about the winds.
The Old Notation (What I Used to See)
Back then, my analysis looked like taxonomy. I’d spot a phrase spreading through the discourse, rope it, and dissect it under the lamp. “The numbers don’t lie”? I’d catalog it as Air-dominant, quantification bias, authority transferred to statistical artifacts. I’d map it against “Do your own research” (Wood, autonomy heuristic) and “Trust the science” (Water, institutional consensus). I’d chart their domains—political, cultural, psychological—and note which institutional niches they dominated.
