Jocasta Briefs the Suits
Leonard
"Thanks for the time, gents," Jocasta says when Marshall and Archie are settled in the latter's office. "Just a few quick things to chew on and then I'll be out of your way." She presents the report she put together, and all the research she did indicating the deployment of a meme in California occult magazines over the last few years. "Again, I'm not trained in this sort of thing," she demurs, "so tell me if I'm talking out of my hat. But to me, this looks not just like a memetic payload, but specifically a SANDMAN one."
"It's not a smoking gun or anything," she admits. "I don't even know if I have an action plan around it. It's just...well, it's evidence that we're not just seeing things, I suppose, and another proof that meme warfare is already going on and we shouldn't be left out of it. That this...that whoever's doing this already has a head start."
Michael
(Jocasta got a crit so Archie's eventual Expert Skill (Memetics) roll will be at 20. For the record, though, I want Rob to hold off on the actual roll until you three have a discussion, there might be further bonuses to be had.)
Brant
Marshall reads through Jocasta’s memo as she talks. When he’s done: “Good work. Good work. I agree with much of what you have to say here.” He holds up the memo. “Two things to consider going forward, though. One: the organization uses memetics all the time in legitimate ways. We will need to proceed with caution to make sure we aren’t interfering with that. Two — and this is my bigger concern — one of the things we know this, ah, OZYMANDIAS group or cabal or whatever it is, one of their aims is to confuse the informational landscape. Make people believe nothing because they don’t know what to believe. It will take … well, it will take incredible skill to craft memetics, or to counter memetics, that don’t contribute to that.”
Leonard
"Well, that sort of brings me to my next point," Jocasta says. "I'm neutral on the content of memes — that's dynamite, and I don't know how to play with it. But I have been thinking about places we might be able to deploy them that we've been overlooking."
She digs into her bag and pulls out a couple of the occult magazines she used in her research — particularly worn ones, poorly designed, with blurry photos and shoddy line drawings. "This may sound silly, but if they feel like there's no media that's off limits as a meme vector — if they're using this kind of rag as important enough to their purposes — maybe it's not so silly."
Digging back into her bag, she pulls out a couple of comic books, monster-themed ones from Marvel and DC. "You know much about these? I don't. It was drugstore trash for little boys last I paid it any attention. But I also know this: the last few time's I've been at the Berkeley research library, they were all over the place. Like, grad students, reading these things." She splays them open to reveal the content with a sort of a shrug. "I see nothing in them, to be honest — that is, I think it's relatively free of any intentional meme content."
She lights a cigarette. "But maybe that should change. The kids reading it — mostly boys, still, but older, and increasingly well-educated...they're," she seems to struggle for a word. "There's maybe nothing special about them, as such, but people listen to them. They're going to have positions of some cultural weight in a few years, and this is what they're filling their free time with."
[Jocasta is struggling to find the world influencer, but it's about 25 years away from her still.]
"I don't know. Maybe it's a dumb idea. But I do think it's pretty virgin ground, and it might be worth looking into," she says. "I tried to look into their corporate structure, but it's all Greek to me — a bunch of New York holding companies. Maybe one of you will understand it better," she says, handing over her jumbled notes. "But that's another aspect of it. I think we might want to reach out to some other SANDMAN chapters, not only to do some genuine cooperative work, but to assess the extent of their involvement or not in this OZYMANDIAS thing. We won't know what we're up against until we know how extensive it is."
[These are the three comics Jo sets out. She taps a finger on the text at the bottom of the last one.]
Brant
Marshall looks at the comics, flipping them back and forth to look at the cover and back flap. He hands them to Archie and shrugs. "It's beyond me. Some of the kids over in 'Nam would get these in care packages from their families back home ... I never paid them much attention. Archie, your son — Eddie? — he's about the right age for this stuff. What do you think?"
Rob
Archie starts with Jo's memo and the pattern she's identified in all the occult magazines. "How about that?" he says, grinning. "I think we've got a budding memeticist in the office." His eyes flick to Marshall's--they might share the briefest of looks, a bit of amusement between the senior men at Jo being such a keener, coming in on Monday morning with her stack of documents and neatly typed memos. But that's only for an instant. As Archie looks through the memo and the materials she's highlighted, he's interested and impressed. "This is nice work, Jocasta! 'Fatalistic, technocratic, isolationist'... that sure sounds like our Croatian friend." (edited)
He starts spreading the magazines out on his desk. "I can do some back-of-the-envelope esmology, try to project the downstream effects, or intended effects, of this meme cluster. But first we should look upstream. This is swell, Jocasta, because what you've done, you've found all these variations of the same meme in all these different publications, all these different dates. It means we can compare and contrast, look for clades and cognates, sketch out a phylomemetic--ah, a kind of family tree." He is pleased to launch in to a little mini-lecture on forensic memetics. "You see, memes don't decay in a wholly predictable way, but their drift isn't random either. With enough samples, we can say a lot about which memes descend from which, where ideas might've branched or merged, and maybe even who or where they come from."
(I don't know how much time it will take to do a Memetics analysis but Archie wants to know: Does this seem like professional work, either SANDMAN or the opposition? Crucially, is there Anunnaki source code powering these memes? He also wants to try and triangulate the source as much as he can. How far back in time can we trace it? And is it local? Do we see the same memetics in, say, East Coast publications? Does this seem like a powerful meme that was deployed once and has been circulating ever since, or has somebody been nurturing it over time?)
Michael
(The full analysis will definitely take some time, but not days or weeks; it's just something Archie will need a few hours with this afternoon and maybe part of Tuesday. I think this analysis can also cross-pollinate with some of the planned SANDMAN research as well, so I may do a combo of Expert Skill (Memetics), Administration, Intelligence Analysis, and Esmology (if we decide it's necessary to bring in the Big Corrupting Guns) after this scene.)
Leonard
Jocasta allows a slight smile that neither Archie nor Marshall need to be trained psychiatrists to read as sly pride. Her father probably did a real number on her.
Rob
Archie then turns to the comic books, mock-shuddering at Chamber of Chills. "Yipes!" he says. "I thought they cleaned up all these funny books back in the Fifties." He flips through one. "Not exactly my cup of tea, but we can't afford to be fussy; we're not going to win the reality war in the pages of the Paris Review. You remember all those sci fi buffs at the St. Francis, how hungry they were for master narratives? Like kindling waiting for a match, we said. It's worth looking into. If we don't control the terrain, somebody else will."
Michael
I honestly feel like this conversational thread justifies an Archie roll of Current Affairs (Popular Culture) here, and hell, I'll throw Jo's crit in there as well. So Current Affairs (Popular Culture)-20.
Rob
>>>> SUCCESS by 10
Rolled a 10! Should I do the Memetics roll too or hold off on that?
Michael
Gonna hold off on the Memetics for the time being. But I do have a Pop Culture infodump to type up here as soon as I can get a few minutes free here.
Leonard
"That's what I was thinking, chief," Jocasta says. "Taken as discrete units, the people who read these occult magazines, the sci-fi fans at the hotel, the college kids getting into comics...they don't add up to a lot of influence, or a lot of numbers. But taken all together, they could go a long way towards getting an idea into circulation."
Brant
"Not what I'd call a 'right-now' problem but query how we'd make an inroad into this scene. I take it none of us know anyone in the comics industry."
Michael
Jocasta's bringing these comic books to Archie's attention does get him thinking about the moral panics of the horror and hero comics of the Fifties... plus ça change, those GIs in the Second World War reading comics on the front, the jarheads in 'Nam doing the same 25 years later... two generations of American men in an arguable state of arrested development. Heck, most of those "men" were barely more than boys themselves. And thinking about child soldiers gets Archie thinking, oddly, about Charley.
What was the Indigo Program doing with Charley by directing her powers towards technology and media, showing her hours of television a day in her creche at Granite Peak? They were ostensibly preparing her for the future, a media-suffused, television-dominated future. If that's the future Indigo and SANDMAN saw for her, then that's the battlespace where making conscientious, healthy minds needs to happen. Comics are great, you can do a lot with the combination of art and words, it's a terrifically "cool" medium in the McLuhanite framing, it requires a lot of attention and filling in of the gaps which makes memetics stickier, but there's a reason why television is in its ascendancy: it's a near-optimal way of purveying memes into the American mind and heart. The ultimate cool medium; near-hypnotic, in a way.
But what if the comics tied into the TV show? What if the TV show tied into a movie? What if there was a pop song from the movie, like that youth rebellion farce from a few years back, Wild in the Streets? Saturday morning cartoons these days, half of them are of animated versions of real-life pop groups, or inspired by other TV shows or movies. What if you created a... pan-media memeplex that sucked the kids in from early childhood... and stayed with them throughout their lives? This stuff is bog-standard big-picture SANDMAN memetic tactics right here, but the memes Granite Peak and Tavistock deploy have to do with keeping the mass of humanity away from the Red Kings. What if the messages were positive? The kind of messages we're talking about to forestall and stop OZYMANDIAS's vision of America? Now that's a memeplex that would have staying power. When the kids Charley's age are in their mid-50s by GRAIL TABLE's Year 2020, they'll have had these songs, catch phrases, and characters in their head for a half-century.
But Jo's right about one thing: it has to start with the kids.
Rob
"Not what I'd call a 'right-now' problem but query how we'd make an inroad into this scene. I take it none of us know anyone in the comics industry."
"I'm not sure it's an 'industry' so much as three Jewish teens in a Brooklyn walk-up. But we can make some inquiries."
So the wheels are now turning in Archie's head about TV, about Public Broadcasting, about healthy positive memes for the Next American Century. As for the rest of Jocasta's recommendations, about Puharich's faction, and the idea of reaching out to other SANDMAN offices, Archie is supportive, but he wants to tread lightly until he completes his Intelligence Analysis, has a better sense of the SANDMAN politics. If OZYMANDIAS is everywhere, we don't want to tip our hand. He thanks Jo again for all her work, then looks to Marshall and says, apologetically, "But Marshall's right: I do think we have to destroy this memo."
Brant
"I'll have Mitch handle it. Unless there's anything else ... " Marshall makes for the door.
Leonard
“Of course. Thanks, gentlemen.”
Brant
Marshall takes the memos and opens the door for Jocasta. “A moment of your time? This way.” As he walks he crumples up the memos and tosses them to Mitch. “Could you burn these?”
Jeff
Marshall takes the memos and opens the door for Jocasta. “A moment of your time? This way.” As he walks he crumples up the memos and tosses them to Mitch. “Could you burn these?”
(Due to the -1 to Flammability Class rule for pyrokinesis, the memos turn to ash nearly instantly.)
Leonard
“Sure, what can I do for you?”
Brant
“Now I’m not saying I can actually do this, but if I were to pull some strings and try to get you reassigned off Dr. Claire — maybe to Abeille, maybe to me, I don’t know — do you think you could have your fed boys put in a polite inquiry for information about any active investigations or surveillance occurring at the Mission, possibly by Sonoma law enforcement?”
Leonard
"Absolutely — I owe Padden and Hall a ring anyway. I'll do it even without the favor," she smiles. "Anything else you want me to put them on?"
Brant
Marshall returns the smile. It’s hard to tell if it’s genuine or not but that’s par for the course with him. “No. Roger said the listening device was government standard. It might be the feds — but I don’t know why it would be. I figure you can tell them you’re doing clearance work before one of your bosses at DOD comes to the Mission for an retreat. Something like that. Whatever you can find out, it would be helpful.” He turns to go.
“Keep up the good work, Menos.”