Vaccination

Provocogen COG

Provocogen COG is unusual among the ranks of Citizen Oversight Groups in that, while generally acknowledged as serving a socially useful purpose, everyone individually would much rather be spared its attentions.

Provocogen, as its name might suggest, is a manufacturer of meme-allergens and other informational toxins. Extending the theory that an unchallenged immune system degrades, their purpose is to maintain and enhance the memetic immune system, lest parasites, meme-allergens, autotoxic and exotoxic ideas, recursive conspiracies, memetic vulnerabilities and plain old stupidity spread out of control.

Unlike the informational and warning efforts of other COGs and TAGs in the memetic security space, however, Provocogen generates examples of all these things (in a hopefully weakened state) and sends them out into the ideosphere to do their work, keeping people alert and priming the public’s memetic immune systems to other ideas of the same general kind, followed by painfully – for those taken in – debunking them in exquisite depth and architectural detail.

To this end, Provocogen has assembled what is undoubtedly the largest collection of trolls, conspiracists, grifters, meme-hackers, slash-traders, mystagogues, rhetoricians, sophists, unhanged scoundrels, and intellectual coprophiliacs to be found anywhere outside a full-quorum meeting of the Conclave of Galactic Polities.

– Sur-Dodeciad Parts in Approximate Formation: The Empire from Outside

Trope-a-Day: Manipulative Bastard

Manipulative Bastard: The right (or wrong) kind of professional memeticist (or related professions, such as lawyers – the technical term for one kind, for example is nomomach, freely glossable “war-lawyer”).  The Office of Warrior Philosophy, for example, is full of the militarized subspecialty of this, but it’s hardly the only profession that is.

(On the other hand, also somewhat necessary just because widespread awareness of memetics and its core techniques acts as a sort-of memetic immune system.  The equivalent of the “pick-up artists”, for example, suffered greatly from the “Ooh, who’s a cute little amateur meme-wrangler, then?” effect – which is not to say that the seducers have gone away, but it raises the level of the game considerably when you need the equivalent of a postgraduate education to sneak a loaded meme past the average person’s information-society-grade meme filters.)