Layer 1: Memes, Resources, Agents and Services

In contrast to the complication of large, designed systems, living systems exhibit emergent complexity. The diversity, complexity and co-evolving dynamics of the web of life is unfathomable. And yet all biological life is based on DNA and DNA itself is constructed from just four types of molecules. When coupled with the generative function of evolution, those four molecules have given rise to this unbelievably rich tapestry of interwoven biological organisms.

A critical goal of the MAP design has been to identfy the basic elements in the memetic world that could serve a purpose similar to the four types of DNA molecules. What is the smallest set of elements from which a rich tapestry of interwoven, co-evolving memetic organisms can be generated? This inquiry led to the identification of the four key MAP components: Memes, Resources, Agents, and Services defined in Layer 1 of the MAP Ontology.

The four major types comprising Layer 1 are all sub-types of the Holon Type defined in Layer 0. In other words, every meme, agent, resource and service is a holon and inherits all of the characteristics of holons. Similarly, every Layer 1 relationship is a sub-type of the Holon Relationship Type defined in Layer 0.

Memes

Though a very narrow and rather frivolous meaning of the word meme has recently become popularized on the internet, the MAP uses the word meme in a much broader sense, adopting the definition coined by the term's creator, Richard Dawkins.

Def: a meme is a self-replicating, mutating and re-combining unit of culture carrying ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena.

As is apparent from the above definition and quote, Dawkins saw memes as a new kind of replicator.

If memes are replicators, what makes a good replicator?

Fidelity – ability to be copied accurately (without loss of information)
Fecundity – ability to produce an abundance of copies
Longevity – ability for copying to persist over a long time

Most of what passes for memes on the internet currently, exhibit high fidelity (digital media supports copy without information loss) and, if they go viral, high fecundity (lots of "likes", "shares", "retweets", etc.), but low longevity. Their 15 minutes of fame fades quickly.

However, memes exhibiting all three of the above qualities have shaped civilizations.

For example:

Separateness: the Universe consists of discrete, separate objects. Mind is separate from matter. God is separate from Man. Man is separate from Nature. People are separate and in competition with each other.
Materialism: The Universe is physical, mechanistic and purposeless, consisting of separate particles of lifeless matter and energy. It operates under physical and mechanistic laws. Life eventually emerged on Earth and possibly other planets, but it is relatively rare. Rarer still is consciousness which only arose in complex brains as a late-emerging epiphenomenon of evolution.
Scarcity Consciousness: there are not enough resources (power, food, water, etc.) to go around. I must outcompete in order to survive.
Domination Subservience Hierarchy (~5,000 years) Since there is not enough to go around, I must either dominate or be subservient to earn the protection of a dominator.
Homo Economicus: reduces humans to agents who are consistently rational and narrowly self-interested, and who pursue their subjectively-defined ends optimally.
Debt-Backed, Positive Interest Rate Currency – (~2,500 years) Money becomes BOTH a medium of exchange AND a store of value which leads to privatization of the commons, hoarding, scarcity consciousness, polarization of wealth, commodification, erosion of social capital
Profit as the Sole Measure of Success (70 years) Corporations focused solely on maximization of quarterly profit, devoid of social responsibility (which is externalized).
Market value (i.e., price) is the only measure of value: (~150 years): the "invisible hand" of the market is the sole determinant of value -- everything else is either unimportant or an externality to be shifted to others.
Linear Economy: A unidirectional flow in which natural resources are consumed and turned into waste. Extract->Transform(Heat, Beat,Treat)->Hype->Sell->Use (once or, if recycled, twice)->Throw Away.

The hypothesis on which the MAP is based is that the underlying cause of our multi-dimensional global crises is rooted in the manifestation of long-lived memes (such as those above) that have outlived their usefulness. The reason the MAP is named Memetic Activation Platform is that it is a platform aimed at promoting the articulation and manifestation (i.e., activation by agents) of new memes.

Memes are leveraged in a number of MAP contexts that will be discussed throughout this book. The MAP provides explicit support for the definition, storage, curation, evolution, aggregation, application, and assessment of memes via an open-ended set of meme pools.

Some memes replicate better in combination with other memes than they do individually. Such groups of memes are referred to as memeplexes. The grouping of memes into memeplexes is one of the meme-to-meme relationships supported by the MAP.

Whereas an individual meme can be viewed passively as a piece of knowledge, expressing a shift from one meme to another defines a change vector that implies action. Each memetic shift can be thought of as a cultural movement from a meme whose negative consequences are outweighing its benefits towards an emerging meme that attempts to mitigate those consequences.

In general, these shifts represent more of a transcend and include movement than a replacement. The old memes don’t disappear, but rather they are used in more limited contexts due to a deeper understanding of their field of applicability and their positive and negative consequences. Einstein did not disprove Newtonian physics. He placed it in a larger context and demonstrated it was valid only at scales above the super-small and at speeds not approaching the speed of light. The integration meme does not deny the existence of separate identity, rather it sees our individuality within the larger frame of our commonality and seeks a healthy balance between individual sovereignty and group coherence.

Just as biological organisms have genetic signatures, various MAP holons (e.g., agents, offers, agreements) have memetic signatures. In this book, memetic signatures are depicted using the following symbol.

The full circle represents the set of memes referenced by that signature. The green region refers to the subset of memes within the signature that are positively exhibited via that signature. The red region refers to those memes actively inhibited within that signature. For example, consider the meme of racism. It can either be exhibited by an agent (if they embrace racist attitudes and beliefs), omitted from an agent's signature (signifying a neutral or unstated relationship to racism by that agent), or inhibited by an agent (i.e., signifying active opposition to racist attitudes and their manifestations). A subset of the memetic signature (shown in the purple V-shaped region) are values memes. In other words, the values an agent does or does not hold form part of their memetic signature. To avoid visual clutter, the text labels are typically omitted from the symbol (but are nevertheless always implied).

Memes can be classified into different types (e.g., atomic memes, meme families, memeplexes), categories (e.g., values, principles, practices, models), functional areas (e.g., arts, economics, education, governance, science, media, etc.), and so on. In fact, meme pools may be thought of as knowledge pools for which there is a rich body of work on knowledge representation on which to draw.

In alignment with the MAP self-organizing principle, the MAP does not prescribe a fixed set of memes. In fact, this is true of all of the MAP's conceptual elements -- i.e., memes, resources, agents, and services are all crowd-sourced. New memes can be defined, stewarded, applied, assessed, etc. by anyone (using an extensible set of prescribed governance processes).

Resources

The MAP adopts a very broad definition of resource.

Def: a resource is: 1) something that is available for use or that can be used for support or help. 2) an available supply that can be drawn on when needed.

The following table provides examples of the range of possible resource types.

Notice that some resources are depleted with use. For example, if you have money and you use it to pay me for a veggie burger, your supply of money is depleted, as is my supply of veggie burgers.

Other types of resources are not depleted with use. For example, suppose you stake your reputation on my trustworthiness. Although your reptuation could subsequently either go up or down depending on the degree to which I exhibit trustworthiness, the act of staking your reputation does not, in and of itself, deplete your reputation. In fact, if my actions affirm your trust, both of our reputations are enhanced.

Resources can participate in a variety of relationships. For example,

resources may contain or be contained by other resources (holarchy)
resources may be derived from other resources
resources may be stewarded by agents.
resources can be transformed via service invocations.
service offers define reciprocal value flows in terms of resources.
resources may be realizations of memes. For example, one or more memes may be expressed in a book that is offered for sale. In this example, the book is a resource that realizes one or more memes.

Resources can also participate in more complex webs of relationships. For example, resources may be organized and managed as a commons.

According to David Bollier, a commons is "a resource plus a defined community and the protocols, values and norms devised by the community to manage needed resources." In MAP terms, the "defined community" is a We-Space whose memetic signature is the protocols, values and norms devised by the community.

The information maintained in the MAP for a resource is defined by a resource ontology that is stored within a MAP Meta-Space. Resources can be grouped into collections referred to as R-Spaces. All of the resources belonging to the same R-Space share the same resource ontology.

Agents

The MAP adopts a very general definition of agent.

Def: An agent is any entity with the capacity to sense and respond to its environment.

This definition assumes the broadest possible interpretation of what it means to sense and what it means to respond. As such, this definition encompasses the physical (quarks, atoms, molecules, Earth, galaxies), the biological (cells, mitochondria, organs, plants, insects, fungi, humans, etc.) and the memetic (humans, software containers, bots, holochain nodes, organizations, enterprises and economies).

The following diagram provides a pictorial depiction of the anatomy of a MAP Agent. Just as biological organisms have genetic signatures, memetic organisms have memetic signatures.

The Taoist yin-yang symbol is used as a way of conveying that an agent is a celebration and a unification of co-arising polarities: yin/yang, feminine/masculine, subjective/objective, being/doing, matter/energy, etc.

The MAP provides each agent with their own private I-Space. A secure, resilient place to store (on their own devices) an integrated log of their personal journeys and what they find and/or create along the way. Each agent retains complete control over what subset of their I-Space information is shared with whom.

The boundary of an agent's I-Space is defined by a containing membrane. The membrane may be physical (e.g., cell wall, human skin) or logical (e.g., the rules for membership in an intentional community). The term I-Space refers to the region within the boundary.

The MAP supports an extensible set of relationship types between agent and resource (including co-creator, steward, sharer, volunteer, and even, owner).

Services

Agents can offer services that support the flow and transformation of resources to/from other agents for mutual benefit. The MAP concept of service borrows heavily from Tom Grave's Tetradian architecture (see Mapping the Enterprise) as shown in the following diagram.

Each service provides the means for realizing value flows between agents (horizontal value flow) as well as the means for helping to realize some desired ends (vertical flow).

MAP Services consist of an offer, an implementation, zero or more agreements (accepted offers) and zero or more events. These are illustrated with an example in which a Cajun Food Truck is acting as the Service Providing Agent.

An offer represents a promise being made in horizontal and vertical dimensions by a Service Providing Agent. In the example above, the sandwich board is expressing the Cajun Food Truck's offer (NOTE: in a true MAP service, the offer would be expressed electronically). The horizontal dimension of this promise describes the reciprocal value flow of a large muffaleta sandwich resource flowing in one direction in exchange for a financial resource ($5) flowing in the opposite direction. The vertical dimension of the offer promises that the muffaleta includes only certified organic ingredients that are locally sourced (Farm-to-Table) and that the Cajun Food Truck is a Certified B-Corp -- meaning it is a business that meets defined standards of "verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose."

Note that although the example illustrates a monetary horizontal flow, the MAP is not limited to financial transaction service flows. In fact, offers may express reciprocal value flows in terms of any type of resource (including a gift flow, where the only direct reciprocal value is some form of good will or reputational enhancement). It also supports multi-agent value flows. For example, 1% of the proceeds from every sale could be donated to a worthy non-profit. More complex scenarios are also possible, including contribution graphs where all of the agents that contributed to the development or delivery of a service could have a fractional stake. When payment is received upon service delivery, it can automatically be distributed among all contributors based on their stake percentage.

The implementation of this service includes everything required to realize the promises expressed in the offer. This includes, securing the truck itself, provisioning its food storage and prep areas, engaging the services of cooks to prepare the muffaleta and cashiers to accept orders and money, sourcing all of the ingredients in the recipe of the muffaleta, etc. Notice how the implementation of this service depends upon services provided by other agents. Note also that to honor the promise of its offer, the implementation of the service relies upon the other agents on which it depends to likewise honor their promises. For example, if the farm offering its sweet red peppers to the Cajun Food Truck fails to honor its "organic" promise, it undermines the "certified organic" promise of the Cajun Food Truck.

When Rosa (acting as a Service Requesting Agent in our example) places an order for a large muffelata, she/they is implicitly agreeing to the terms of the offer. An agreement has been reached in which the Cajun Food Truck agrees to provide a delicious muffaleta sandwich and Rosa agrees to provide $5. In this case, the acceptance of the offer (agreement) and the invocation of the service (i.e., the order) happen at the same time. For some offers, acceptance of the offer may happen as a separate (prior) event (e.g., subscribing to an online service).

Placement of an order, delivering the muffaleta, and receipt of payment are all events related to the Cajun Food Truck's muffaleta service. The MAP provides de-centralized, secure and reliable (resilient, non-forgeable, immutable, non-repudiable) storage for the log of events associated with services.

If you look closely at the Anatomy of an Agent diagram above you will notice that service offers have their own memetic signatures. This allows both the horizontal and vertical dimension of offers to draw on the full and extensible range of memes available in the meme pool in order to define their promise. As just one example, consider the transparent generosity meme developed by Ryan Oelke. This meme evolved through a long period of evolutionary experimentation to arrive at its current form. In this meme, services are offered in exchange for an optional donation. The agent receiving the service has complete latitude to decide the amount of the donation based on their assessment of the value of the service being delivered as well as their capacity to pay. To guide their decision, the average amount others have chosen to pay is provided. Ryan has found that, in practice, this approach often results in more generous contributions than, say, a suggested donation approach. Referencing this meme in the signature of the Muffaleta Service allows the Cajun Food Truck to use a proven type of value flow without having to go through the trial and error process that led to the current expression of the transparent generosity meme.

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